Not only was Buckley’s conservatism weak, but so was his Catholicism. Rather than standing for anything, Buckley was primarily about posing and styling.
Sam Tanenhaus writes in his new Bill Buckley biography:
* Even now, the only newspaper Bill read or took seriously was the Times. When not waging war on Dick Rovere, he avidly read his “Letters from Washington” in The New Yorker. Buckley’s favorite columnist and now good friend was Murray Kempton, whose work he pushed on all the young writers who came into his orbit. And the prose writer he esteemed above all others was the self – styled existentialist and “hipster” Norman Mailer. [23] Buckley read him closely for two reasons. One was that “he makes the most beautiful metaphors in the business.” The second, just as important, “is that to many who read him hungrily (and perhaps too seriously) he represents present – day America.” [24] NR ’s ideological gatekeepers were dismayed. “I always said it was a good thing The Communist Manifesto wasn’t well written,” Bill Rusher later said. “Or we would have lost Buckley.”
* God and Man at Yale had been denounced as a crypto – papist text and that it was Catholics who had pointed out how little Buckley’s coupling of laissez – faire economics and biblical revelation had in common with Catholic teaching — and how faithfully it restated the tenets of the “Protestant ethic.”
Buckley’s Catholicism was theological and spiritual, not ethnic or tribal.
ChatGPT says: 1. His intellectual affinities leaned left-bohemian, not right-traditional.
For all his posturing as the tribune of conservatism, Buckley’s tastes ran to Murray Kempton, Norman Mailer, and The New Yorker. That suggests he was more enthralled by style, wit, and cultural cachet than by the substance of the conservative canon. Rusher’s quip about the Communist Manifesto makes the point: Buckley could be seduced by the shimmer of prose more than the solidity of doctrine.
2. His Catholicism was ornamental, not grounding.
The critique of God and Man at Yale shows how shallowly Buckley reconciled his faith with his politics. Catholic critics themselves noted that his blend of laissez-faire economics and scripture was Protestant-ethic capitalism dressed up in religious language, not genuine Catholic social thought. He wasn’t carrying forward the intellectual lineage of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum or Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno—he was importing Adam Smith into the chapel.
3. He cared about presentation more than coherence.
Buckley’s Catholicism, like his conservatism, was above all a matter of self-fashioning. Tanenhaus notes it was “theological and spiritual, not ethnic or tribal,” but it also wasn’t deeply integrated into his politics. It gave him gravitas and distinction in a largely Protestant elite culture, but his actual program was about pose and effect: the cadences of Mailer, the polish of Kempton, the respectability of The Times.
If you want to press the argument: Buckley was less a Catholic conservative than a cultural impresario who curated aesthetics of seriousness, irony, and intellectual exclusivity. His movement-building came not from a rooted Catholic or conservative worldview, but from the performance of one.
Buckley’s conservatism was as thin as his Catholicism. What he really sold was a performance. As Sam Tanenhaus shows, his intellectual heroes were not Aquinas or Burke but Murray Kempton and Norman Mailer. He prized their metaphors, their style, their aura of cultural currency. Even Buckley’s Catholic critics saw through him, pointing out that his fusion of laissez-faire capitalism and biblical revelation was simply a Protestant ethic in drag, with little relation to Catholic teaching. His faith, like his politics, was less creed than costume—a way of differentiating himself in an elite world that measured seriousness by polish and pose. In the end, Buckley was not the philosopher of a movement but the impresario of a style, a man more devoted to Mailer’s metaphors and Times columns than to Catholic social teaching or conservative principle.
