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Lexington
The Buckley effect
From The Economist print edition
The grand old man of American conservatism died on February 27th
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FEW intellectuals change the political weather. Even the most successful—an Arthur Schlesinger, say, or a J.K. Galbraith—usually tilt into the prevailing wind and enjoy the sail. William F. Buckley, who died in his study this week, aged 82, was a weather-changer.
When Mr Buckley decided to make his name as a conservative intellectual the phrase was an oxymoron. Dwight Eisenhower's Republican Party was as adamantly middle-of-the-road as it was middle-brow. Ike did not take it as an insult when people said of him that “his smile was his philosophy”.
At that time, America's tiny band of right-wing activists included a remarkable number of crackpots. Kent Courtney, the founder of the Conservative Society of America, accused Barry Goldwater of being “tainted by socialism”. The John Birch Society worried that Eisenhower was an agent of international communism. Lionel Trilling was right when he pronounced, in 1950, that “liberalism is not only the dominant, but even the sole, intellectual tradition” in the United States.
Mr Buckley devoted his life to changing this. He founded the National Review for the conservative intelligentsia at the tender age of 29. And he turned himself into a one-man opinion machine—tossing off articles and books with ease. All in all he wrote about 55. They included sailing memoirs and spy novels.
Mr Buckley famously said that the purpose of the National Review was to stand “athwart history, yelling ‘Stop’”. But in fact he did more than just stand athwart. He helped to drive the crazies out of the movement. He persuaded a disparate band of enthusiasts—free-marketers and social conservatives, anti-communists and American traditionalists—to band together against the liberal-collectivist foe. And he attracted a brilliant group of intellectuals to the conservative cause, including, for a while, such unlikely people as Garry Wills and Joan Didion, both (now) liberal writers.
What made Mr Buckley such a weather-changer? Money helped: his father was a multimillionaire and the young Buckley tapped both his personal wealth and his family's connections to finance his new magazine. But the young man also brought a rare collection of qualities to his self-appointed task.
The first was an appetite for bomb throwing. Just as radical artists like nothing better than baiting the bourgeoisie, Mr Buckley was at his happiest baiting the liberal establishment. His first book, “God and Man at Yale”, which he published shortly after graduating, took aim not just at his alma mater but at the academic elite in general.
The book turned him into a national sensation, with students queuing around the block to buy it and grandees such as McGeorge Bundy denouncing its author as a “twisted and ignorant young man”. It also linked two of the themes that were to drive forward the rise of the conservative movement—opposition to Keynesian economics (the man part of the book's title) and dislike of secular intellectuals (the God part).
Mr Buckley's second quality was his patrician style. He was a leading adornment of the establishment he liked to excoriate. He sailed his own boat and holidayed in St Tropez and St Moritz. He liked to hang out with such liberal luminaries as J.K. Galbraith (in the local book store in Gstaad, where they both went skiing, they would battle to get their books the best spot in the window). His wife, Patricia, was one of New York's leading socialites. Mr Buckley managed to be every liberal's favourite conservative as well as every conservative's favourite conservative.
Mr Buckley put both qualities on display in his television appearances. As the host of “Firing Line” from 1966 to 1999 he pioneered a type of televised political mud-wrestling that has since become tedious but was once regarded as ground-breaking. His style was all his own—he spoke in languid sentences, adorned with erudite allusions and polysyllabic flourishes, in an accent that had a touch of English-aristo. But he was not above raw populism. He was infamous for using the word “queer” on television (during a debate with Gore Vidal).
This belies the third thing that made him important—an inner core of seriousness. Mr Buckley was in it for more than the champagne. He was a committed Catholic, as were many of those around him at the Review. He felt that modern liberalism was corroding the foundation of Western civilisation, no less. For him, first things always came first.
Mr Buckley lived long enough to see the movement that he founded not just flourishing but ascendant. He saw two avowedly conservative presidents in the White House: Ronald Reagan, who was a close friend, and George W. Bush, who describes today's conservatives as “Bill's children”. He saw his fellow conservatives create a network of institutions from think-tanks to rival conservative magazines such as the Weekly Standard. The lone prophet became the father of a new establishment.
But it was not clear that he was entirely happy with the direction of the movement. He grew disillusioned with the Bush administration and even said publicly that, if America were a parliamentary system, Mr Bush would have resigned. He was uncomfortable with the Iraq war. He engaged in a fierce public debate with Norman Podhoretz over whether Iraq is, as Mr Podhoretz claims, “an amazing success”.
Indeed, Mr Buckley's death comes at a time when the movement he created is at one of its lowest points in decades. Conservatives are uncertain where to go after the Bush-Cheney years. They are showing signs of intellectual exhaustion. And the crackpots, once exiled, are beginning to define conservatism once again. The movement has never needed a new William F. Buckley more than it does today.
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