Not only was Buckley’s conservatism weak, but so was his Catholicism. Rather than standing for anything, Buckley was primarily about posing and styling. <\/p>\n
Sam Tanenhaus writes in his new Bill Buckley biography<\/a>:<\/p>\n * Even now, the only newspaper Bill read or took seriously was the Times. When not waging war on Dick Rovere, he avidly read his \u201cLetters from Washington\u201d in The New Yorker. Buckley\u2019s 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 \u201chipster\u201d Norman Mailer. [23] Buckley read him closely for two reasons. One was that \u201che makes the most beautiful metaphors in the business.\u201d The second, just as important, \u201cis that to many who read him hungrily (and perhaps too seriously) he represents present – day America.\u201d\u2009 [24] NR \u2019s ideological gatekeepers were dismayed. \u201cI always said it was a good thing The Communist Manifesto wasn\u2019t well written,\u201d Bill Rusher later said. \u201cOr we would have lost Buckley.\u201d<\/p>\n * 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\u2019s coupling of laissez – faire economics and biblical revelation had in common with Catholic teaching \u2014 and how faithfully it restated the tenets of the \u201cProtestant ethic.\u201d ChatGPT says: 1. His intellectual affinities leaned left-bohemian, not right-traditional. 2. His Catholicism was ornamental, not grounding. 3. He cared about presentation more than coherence. 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.<\/p>\n Buckley\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2014a 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\u2019s metaphors and Times columns than to Catholic social teaching or conservative principle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Continue reading
\n Buckley\u2019s Catholicism was theological and spiritual, not ethnic or tribal.<\/p>\n
\nFor all his posturing as the tribune of conservatism, Buckley\u2019s 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\u2019s quip about the Communist Manifesto makes the point: Buckley could be seduced by the shimmer of prose more than the solidity of doctrine.<\/p>\n
\nThe 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\u2019t carrying forward the intellectual lineage of Leo XIII\u2019s Rerum Novarum or Pius XI\u2019s Quadragesimo Anno\u2014he was importing Adam Smith into the chapel.<\/p>\n
\nBuckley\u2019s Catholicism, like his conservatism, was above all a matter of self-fashioning. Tanenhaus notes it was \u201ctheological and spiritual, not ethnic or tribal,\u201d but it also wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n