William Buckley Jr: The American right-wing's original influencer

Business Standard

05-06-2025

As the Trump era dawned, many felt Buckley would have stopped it. He had kept out the crazies, the conspiracy theorists, the antisemites-and perhaps even created the respectable right
NYT
BUCKLEY: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America
by Sam Tanenhaus
Published by Random House
1,018 pages $40 By Jennifer Burns
In the age of Steve Bannon and Bronze Age Pervert — the pseudonymous author acclaimed by young Trumpists — a biography of William F Buckley Jr seems almost quaint. Since his death in 2008, the aristocratic founder of the flagship conservative magazine National Review has been wreathed in nostalgia.
Especially as the Trump era dawned, there was a sense that somehow Buckley would have stopped it, even as National Review's iconic 2016 'Against Trump' issue proved no match for the MAGA insurgency. At a moment without gatekeepers or even gates, it was said, Buckley showed how much we had lost: It was he who had kept out the crazies, the conspiracy theorists, the antisemites; it was he who had defined, even created, the respectable right.
Sam Tanenhaus's immersive authorised biography partakes of this nostalgia, even as his portrait of Buckley dispels it. The Buckley that emerges from his exhaustive, 1,000-page portrait is not so much a stranger to our times as a precursor to them. After all, Buckley made his name with God and Man at Yale, his slashing 1951 attack on his alma mater as a hotbed of leftism, complete with the suggestion that alumni withhold donations as a means of pressuring the university to remedy the issue.
In his precocious youth, not only did Buckley realise that politics was becoming entertainment, but he helped make it so, branching off from magazines into television, spy novels and a stunt run for New York City mayor, all while befriending and advising the most powerful politicians of his day. More than a political journalist, Buckley was an unabashed activist who intuitively grasped the centrality of the media and the power of attention, and wielded both on behalf of his cause. American politics has never been the same since.
As Mr Tanenhaus lavishly elaborates in the book's early chapters, Buckley was to the manner born. His oil speculator father had spent years in Mexico — where he was involved in various counterrevolutionary intrigues until he was expelled in 1920 — and he recreated the country's colonial aesthetic meticulously at Great Elm, his Connecticut estate.
Drawing on family papers, Mr Tanenhaus provides a rich chronicle of this unusual family, a strange outpost of Spanish Catholicism uneasily nested amid a town of New England Protestants. He shows how the family's Southernisation went far beyond bringing Black staff members north to Great Elm. Buckley's 1957 article on the civil rights movement in National Review has become notorious for its assertion that the 'advanced race' should prevail in the South.
A somewhat lackadaisical student early on, Buckley became a standout debater at Yale, stumbling into what would be his central innovation: Politics as entertainment rather than as policy or profession. After graduation, he stirred up controversy with two books — the first his attack on Yale, the second a defence of Senator Joe McCarthy — and then founded National Review, relying on family money and his already formidable reputation.
From the start, Buckley understood the media as the primary battleground. In America, he wrote in a key memo, the 'ruling class' was the ''opinion makers' — newspapermen, publishers, commentators, educators, ministers and members of the various professions.' It was this group that the magazine would target, intending to shape the views of those who ultimately 'control the elected.' National Review conservatives would be serious, they would be smart, they would force the opinion makers to answer, if only to disagree. And the disagreement itself, Buckley realised, could be news.
Mr Tanenhaus ably covers Buckley's central role in the emergence of postwar conservative politics. Less an intellectual than a convener, Mr Buckley helped weld together a conservatism historians call 'fusionism': A blend of aggressive anti-communism, traditional values and libertarian economics.
Engaging if unsurprising as political history, as biography the book raises more questions than it answers. Mr Tanenhaus strives to distinguish between Buckley the ideologue and Buckley the friend, but neither persona is fully rendered. Positioning himself as the leader of an intellectual movement, Buckley produced no original thought, despite a lifelong effort to complete a serious book of ideas. (It never materialised.)
In the end, less important than Buckley's particular views is the style in which he expressed them and the infrastructure he created for their propagation. Politics has always been a form of entertainment, of course; what Buckley did was to update the torchlight parades of industrialising America for a literate and white-collar world. Yet he did more than add conservatism to a pre-existing media establishment. He helped change the way that establishment operated. Mr Tanenhaus calls Buckley the 'intellectual leader' of American conservatism, but we might remember him more accurately as its original influencer.