{"id":163444,"date":"2025-09-01T04:23:04","date_gmt":"2025-09-01T12:23:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=163444"},"modified":"2025-09-01T07:23:13","modified_gmt":"2025-09-01T15:23:13","slug":"william-f-buckley-the-great-excommunicator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=163444","title":{"rendered":"William F. Buckley – ‘The Great Excommunicator’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Christopher Caldwell writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\nThe magazine\u2019s case against desegregation was more constitutional than tribal. This has always been true of most opposition to civil rights. Tanenhaus, with a baby boomer\u2019s tendency to use the American race problem as an all-purpose moral heuristic, calls Buckley\u2019s editorial \u201cWhy the South Must Prevail\u201d a statement that \u201chaunts his legacy and the conservative movement he led.\u201d<\/p>\n

This was a more convincing view in 1998 than it is today. To be sure, Buckley\u2019s own argument against civil rights was preposterously weak. For him, as long as there was the risk of one black vote tipping an election against \u201cthe claims of civilization,\u201d blacks on the whole must be denied the franchise, because any vote could be that vote. That\u2019s absurd: You could say the same about whites or, indeed, anyone. But stronger arguments were beginning to emerge, and in the early 1960s Barry Goldwater announced that he opposed civil rights because it would bring into being \u201ca federal police force of mammoth proportions . . . neighbors spying on neighbors, workers spying on workers, businessmen spying on businessmen.\u201d The woke era has vindicated Goldwater\u2019s view…<\/p>\n

Buckley couldn\u2019t attack the Birchers wholesale. Republicans depended on their votes. He singled out and personally denounced Welch for sins that were, in the final analysis, neither intellectual nor moral but social. \u201cOur movement has got to grow,\u201d Buckley explained to a friend. \u201cIt has got to expand by bringing into our ranks the moderate, wishy-washy conservatives: the Nixonites.\u201d And to these swing voters, Welch would make the party look like what Buckley called \u201cCrackpot Alley.\u201d Ronald Reagan, the Great Communicator just emerging into national politics, gratefully took Buckley\u2019s side. Buckley had assumed his own role as the movement\u2019s Great Excommunicator.<\/p>\n

In trying to describe what irked Buckley about Ike, Tanenhaus captures a paradox of conservative thought in a progressive world: \u201cThe New Deal had been kept intact,\u201d he writes, \u201c. . . through the stealth rhetoric of conservatism.\u201d Governing ideologies are dialectical. The more progressive and planned a society becomes, the more need it has to win over public opinion, which is generally not progressive at all. So rhetorical conservatism bubbles up even in progressive eras, perhaps especially then, because progressives require something to pit against actual conservatism. This creates considerable dissension among conservatives, not to mention a lot of bad intellectual incentives…<\/p>\n

Buckley, though a generous boss, could abuse his privileges\u2014even claiming a sort of editorial droit du seigneur by cribbing from his writers\u2019 work before it appeared. He infuriated Wills by declaiming, unattributed, whole passages of Wills\u2019s unpublished essay on James Baldwin during a debate with Baldwin himself at the Cambridge Union in 1965…<\/p>\n

He never managed to write the book he intended to be his magnum opus\u2014a conservative summum that he planned to call The Revolt Against the Masses. To look at the Ortega y Gasset\u2013derived title is to see why. Even at Yale, Buckley, when he was not speaking, writing, or otherwise performing, had a tendency to get bored with politics. He had been lukewarm about all the Republican presidential candidates in his lifetime: Eisenhower, Nixon, Goldwater, Nixon again. Buckley\u2019s youthful conservatism\u2014which really had been a conservatism\u2014was coming out of synch with the emerging populist movement that had borrowed the name. Conservatism as Buckley understood it was a preference for the noble against the crude, a defense of the \u201cbest that has been thought and said,\u201d an elitist movement. He is alleged to have quipped in 1963 that he would rather be governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty, but that was a bon mot, not a credo. He never believed any such thing. In the twenty-first century it would become a kind of conservative parlor game to ask which postwar thinkers would have backed Donald Trump\u2019s reshaping of the Republican Party and which would have opposed it. The question can be answered for Buckley more easily than for any other: He would have been a resolute opponent. And sometime after the start of the Nixon administration he snapped awake to discover, perhaps to his private horror, that he had been having a social hallucination, and that the crowd who had been rallying behind his banner for decades, whom he had taken for Optimates, were in fact Populares.<\/p>\n

That changed everything. How could you lead the masses in a Revolt Against the Masses? The Republican Party was now pursuing a \u201cSouthern Strategy\u201d that focused on suburban transients and poor whites in the sticks. Those were not Buckley\u2019s people. \u201cEven now, the only newspaper Bill read or took seriously was the Times,\u201d Tanenhaus tells us. Buckley was beginning to backpedal from his slashing assertions about civil rights. \u201cI was wrong,\u201d he eventually said of his opposition to racial integration. \u201cFederal intervention was necessary.\u201d Why break one\u2019s mind over the race problem? In the European ski resorts and yacht clubs where he spent so much of the year, it didn\u2019t really come up. Buckley was writing yachting memoirs and spy novels. He was learning to paint with David Niven, Princess Grace, Teddy Kennedy, and John Kenneth Galbraith. He came to feel a \u201csneaking affection\u201d even for his old liberal-Republican nemesis, Nelson Rockefeller. Forced to choose perfection of the life or of the work, Buckley settled on the former.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In this new biography, Buckley is consistently portrayed as the most shallow thinker in his own circle. I wonder if that gnawed at him?<\/p>\n

ChatGPT says: <\/p>\n

Tanenhaus presents Buckley as profoundly self-assured, charismatic, and sharply driven\u2014less introspective about his inner depth than confident in his rhetorical and strategic gifts. That confidence, in fact, seems to shield him from the kind of self\u2011doubt your question implies.<\/p>\n

The book portrays him as a stylist and media impresario: \u201cmore strategic than dogmatic,\u201d holding conservative factions together with charm and rhetorical flair rather than philosophical rigor.<\/p>\n

One anecdote underscores his unflappable nature: when a priest suggested everyone has doubts, Buckley reportedly replied, \u201cI never did.\u201d The biography leaves the impression that he really meant that.<\/p>\n

Overall, reviewers describe the biography as a \u201csweeping, meticulously researched account\u201d that captures both Buckley\u2019s brilliance and contradictions\u2014but doesn\u2019t show signs that he was troubled by being seen as superficial.<\/p>\n

So, no hint he was gnawed by being deemed shallow. Almost the opposite\u2014he leaned into his persona, seemed to enjoy his role as a gladiatorial thinker, and never let doubts distract him.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Christopher Caldwell writes: The magazine\u2019s case against desegregation was more constitutional than tribal. This has always been true of most opposition to civil rights. Tanenhaus, with a baby boomer\u2019s tendency to use the American race problem as an all-purpose moral … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42776],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-163444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-william-f-buckley"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t