As a teenager, I would devour the right-wing periodicals at my school library: National Review, the American Spectator, Chronicles, and The New American. (It was a conservative private school in Houston, Texas, which my siblings and I attended tuition-free thanks to our mother’s teaching job there.)
That was my introduction to Bill Buckley’s writing and ideas. I enjoyed NR, but my go-to read became The New American — the official magazine of the John Birch Society — whose radical rejection of “globalism” and the New Deal state seemed, in today’s online lingo, “based.” I can date the transfer of my loyalties to sometime in 1991, because I recall shifting from pro-Gulf War to anti-Gulf War under the influence of the more radical publication.
Early-90s National Review was lively and interesting, but it could also seem prudish, notwithstanding my evangelical Protestant upbringing. I recall one triumphal editorial comment on a new study finding a negative correlation between orgasm frequency and lifespan in mice. “Are conservatives against orgasms?” I wondered.
Buckley’s influence on mainstream conservatism only seemed to grow during the 1990s and 2000s, despite his declining output and his death in 2008. To be authentically conservative was to be conservative as Buckley and his compatriots at National Review defined it. The more populist conservative bomb-throwers of the era, most notably Rush Limbaugh, seemed to work and flourish under the aegis and, in some sense, authorization of the conservative intellectual elite, unquestionably defined by the NR editorial line. They defined the boundaries of what counted as authentic conservatism.
Today, that intellectual authority structure is gone. Indeed, the old Bircher conspiracy theories about the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission now seem downright erudite next to our shifting kaleidoscope of Internet-spawned right-wing paranoias and obsessions. Even the venerable Human Events, which I remember swiping from my grandfather’s desk as a teenager, has fallen under the sway of a crude insult flinger who got his start flogging the “Pizzagate” hoax. Conservatives no longer read, claims commentator Richard Hanania, with some reason. The older ones watch Fox News and Newsmax, and the younger ones listen to podcasts. Not just conservatives, but all of us have lost our attention spans. The zeitgeist augurs ill for any would-be Buckleys of today.
Yet conservatism in the age of Trump still betrays origins in the old Buckleyite article. National Review’s skepticism of legal immigration, for instance, was once a minority viewpoint on the right; now it is not just ascendant, but dominant. Their support for legal marijuana was once considered an odd quirk; now it is shared by the plurality of both Democrats and Republicans. Even the various hard-right nationalisms propagated by right-wing influencers hearken back to the early days of Buckley’s magazine, when it endorsed segregation and South African apartheid, collaborated with White Citizens Councils, and featured the writing of antisemitic conspiracy theorist Revilo P. Oliver. You see, kids, WFB was once “based” too.
Yet it was not Bill Buckley who created the ideology of postwar conservatism. Two new biographies—Buckley by Sam Tanenhaus and The Man Who Invented Conservatism by Daniel Flynn—make that clear. Buckley was a controversialist, what we would now call an influencer, and a movement builder, but he was no theorist. Buckley’s NR colleague Frank Meyer can claim a greater share of the credit than anyone else for the development of a conservative credo that goes beyond mere standing athwart history,yelling Stop.
Buckley’s and Meyer’s intellectual origins could not have been more different. Both came from wealthy families—Buckley’s was wealthier—but young Meyer gleefully rejected conventional religion and morality as a teenager and became a Communist organizer in the 1930s, while Buckley, 16 years younger than Meyer, was a carbon copy of his Old Right, Catholic, Texas-native father as a teenager.
Yet what they shared was a rebellious streak. In the context of late 1930s and 1940s Connecticut, the Buckleys were outliers, and they relished the fact. Tanenhaus documents some of the pranks that the family pulled on their neighbors, at least one of them landing one of Bill’s sisters in legal hot water. Bill himself ardently defended America First at his Anglophile prep school during the febrile years just before America joined the war. His first book, God and Man at Yale, took direct aim at the institution he loved. Buckley seems always to have preferred to be among the minority fighting the majority.
The “mischief maker” Meyer comes off as an insufferable campus activist at Oxford and LSE in Flynn’s recounting. He was typically juggling several young women at a time, some of them married, while doing just enough academic work to get by and spending the rest of his time on campus communist activism, disrupting and shouting down speakers, distributing caustic propaganda, and even taking the student union presidency by means of ballot-stuffing.
With his penchant for trouble, it’s difficult to understand how Meyer could have sublimated that part of his personality to become a doctrinaire Stalinist, parroting the party line on all matters, but that’s what he became. After returning to the U.S., he married a fellow communist and eked out a living teaching in Communist Party front schools. He had a senior role in the party.
What ultimately forced Meyer to rethink was two things: first, his study of the American Founding and political tradition, which he initially undertook to forge a specifically American rhetoric of communism, and second, his reading of F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, which apparently broke upon his consciousness for the very first time the terrible price in freedom that any planned economy must pay.
When Buckley started National Review in 1955, he recruited Meyer away from The Freeman and gave him a political theory column called “Principles and Heresies.” Meyer ultimately became book review editor as well. The magazine was successful and quickly became the leading journal of ideas on the right, not just advancing conservative political thought but also helping shape the modern conservative movement.
Tanenhaus is more sympathetic to his subject than to his ideas. Buckley’s personal charisma and his talent for friendship and kindness to many people he barely knew come through strongly. He was quick to forgive and generous almost to a fault.
But Tanenhaus also spends a lot of time on his racial views. One big scoop he reveals in the book is that William F. Buckley, Sr. financed an ultra-segregationist newspaper in their second home of Camden, South Carolina. At one point, Bill’s sister Priscilla Buckley served as editor-in-chief of the Camden News and managing editor of National Review simultaneously. There is no doubt that Bill was a product not just of his time, but of his upbringing—his parents had racial views typical of southern whites. Yet Tanenhaus acknowledges that black ex-employees and beneficiaries of the Buckleys in South Carolina praised their kindness and beneficence. William, Sr. supported a local black school, gave land to one of its teachers, and assisted his family. As is so often the case, there was a gap between their political views and their personal character.
While Buckley thoroughly revised his racial views in the 1960s, by all accounts sincerely, Tanenhaus sees a through-line from his former defenses of segregation and apartheid to his criticisms of men he considered “race hustlers” in the late 1960s and 1970s. To be sure, Buckley remained to the right of the left on race issues his whole life—what that fact means for the validity of his views is in the eye of the beholder.
Tanenhaus also speculates about Buckley’s sexuality in a borderline reckless fashion. The slender reeds on which this speculation is based comprise the following: 1) other people’s “gay-dar” (Tanenhaus doesn’t use the term but it sums up the reports he relies on), which might have been set off more by Buckley’s flamboyant vocabulary than anything else, and 2) the fact that Buckley drew a distinction between homosexual orientation and homosexual acts in his analysis of sexual ethics, a distinction familiar to Christians.
Trumpy conservatives today associate Buckley with “respectability politics,” yet he defined himself as a “radical conservative,” coauthored a vigorous defense of Joe McCarthy, bent over backwards not to offend rank-and-file John Birch Society members, and hired paleoconservative writers, some of whom he eventually had to purge when they crossed the line. Late in life, he took to describing himself as “libertarian,” which at the time I took to be more of a trendy branding than an accurate label, but when his views on the drug war and the Iraq War are taken into account, might not have been far off. Tanenhaus treads fleetingly over the last two decades of his life and doesn’t deeply explore this aspect of his later-life views.
It’s impossible not to notice parallels between Bill Buckley and Donald Trump, too, as much as partisans of either man might resist the comparison.
Buckley relished controversy and used it to entertain. He was at his best when attacking the left, rather than working through new ideas. He was also a master of television. More Americans knew him through Firing Line and his televised debates than through his magazine. Where Trump uses hyperbole and blunt put-downs, Buckley used embroidered language with classical and poetic allusions to amuse his own side and intimidate the other side.
Buckley’s approach was a product of his education and predilections, but also of the era. His intellectual peacocking was a strategy to make conservatism relevant at a time when liberals recognized no legitimate opposition and saw conservatives as expressing nothing more than “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”
“We need today a brigade of intellectuals,” Buckley said in an undergraduate speech in 1949. “They must preach American principles and natural rights and divine sanction.”
It worked. Conservatism became a strong enough intellectual force that liberals at least felt they needed to contend with it.
Today, no one would propose that the way to make conservatism stronger is to appeal to intellectuals. For one thing, intellectuals are much weaker now than they were then. For another, the audience on the right for high-level intellectual discourse has shrunk.
For all his provocations, Buckley came to recognize, first when he attacked Robert Welch’s conspiracy theories in the early 1960s and later when he fired Joe Sobran and criticized Pat Buchanan for “contextual antisemitism,” that mainstream influence requires gatekeeping. Every new political movement faces this choice eventually: whether to push aside “disreputable” voices to preserve status and influence, or to keep those voices in the fold, thereby pushing out pragmatists and allowing the movement to cater to a diehard base.
Buckley’s turning on Richard Nixon after his Watergate crimes became undeniable was another example. The political strategist Kevin Phillips, then a populist conservative who foresaw the appeal of a Trump-like agenda for Middle America, harshly attacked Buckley as having turned away from his “anti-establishment” roots as an “Irish nouveau-riche cheerleader for Joe McCarthy” in order to appeal to “cast-off Hapsburg royalty, Englishmen who part their names in the middle, and others calculated to put real lace on Buckley’s Celtic curtains.”
Buckley enjoyed the elite status he acquired. But he was less a moderate than a pragmatist. When he could get away with it, he still supported radical conservatives, like those at the Dartmouth Review in the 1980s who had repeated run-ins with the administration and were frequently accused of racism. To the end, Buckley remained an elitist populist—a paradox but not a contradiction.
The Flynn book might not be quite the page-turner that the Tanenhaus book is, but in a sense the research feat is greater. After a fruitless search of official repositories, Flynn finally found Meyer’s papers moldering in a warehouse in Pennsylvania. They form the basis of most of this book.
With any luck, Flynn’s book will raise Meyer’s profile. While Buckley’s role in founding Young Americans for Freedom is well known, Meyer’s role in founding the American Conservative Union is much less well known. Meyer was also a master prognosticator, as Flynn notes. He noted rising economic conservatism in the South and foresaw the realignment of parties along ideological and geographic lines as early as 1954. In 1960, he predicted that it would take about 20 years to elect a conservative as President. He was one of Ronald Reagan’s most stalwart supporters from 1966 on, and Reagan repaid the loyalty with a lengthy tribute to Meyer in his first speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference after being sworn in as President, crediting him with developing “a vigorous new synthesis of traditional and libertarian thought–a synthesis that is today recognized by many as modern conservatism.”
I’ve never read any of Buckley’s books, but Meyer’s In Defense of Freedom was an important early influence for me, perhaps less for its persuasive impact than for its expression and summation of what I had already by that time come to believe.
“Fusionism,” the doctrine Meyer developed, is often misunderstood. It has nothing to do with political strategy or any kind of “modus vivendi” between economic and social conservatives. In policy terms, Meyer was a libertarian, as Murray Rothbard discerned. For Meyer, there is an objective natural law, which engenders our duties to ourselves and to others. Some of our duties to others include duties of noninterference, which we can interpret as “natural rights.” Thus, freedom—respecting our duties of noninterference—and virtue—respecting all our other duties—are not just compatible, but elements of a seamless whole. It is not Meyer’s fault that many subsequent conservatives, especially of the practical political variety, have failed to see the logical implications of the intellectual framework to which they claim to subscribe.
One way in which Meyer differed from other libertarians toward the end of his life was on foreign policy. Meyer was a staunch anticommunist who supported the Vietnam War. But he also foresaw the end of communism as a threat to the free world and advocated a drawdown of U.S. commitments abroad in the wake of that much-hoped-for event. For Meyer, the Cold War was a mere interlude, a viewpoint that seems natural today but must have been difficult to arrive at in those days. In today’s environment, in the absence of a transcendent threat to the free world from outside it, it is reasonable to think Meyer would have been a “restrainer.”
Unlike Buckley, Meyer always opposed Southern segregation. But he also opposed federal civil rights interventions in the states, a position that puts him at odds with the libertarian legal movement today, which champions the 14th Amendment, and even with some of his contemporaries, like Rose Wilder Lane. But Meyer’s position allowed him to fit comfortably within the National Review milieu of the 1950s and 1960s.
Yet Meyer also cultivated relationships outside politics. He dated the youngest daughter of Labour Prime Minister Ramsay Macdonald in the 1930s. His best friend was Eugene O’Neill, Jr., son of the famous playwright. In the 1970s, Bob Dylan moved next door to the Meyer manse in Woodstock, New York. Meyer’s bohemianism, however, tended more to all-night smoking, drinking, poetry recitation, and classical music listening sessions with other writers than anything countercultural by ‘60s standards.
The chain-smoking Meyer died of lung cancer in 1972 at age 62. We might well wonder what his influence could have been had he lived longer. His influence in any case has spread far beyond his recognition, a fact that Flynn’s book helps us see, but that it may also help remedy.
Reading these two biographies put me in a nostalgic frame of mind. I never met Buckley, and Meyer died before I was born, but as a graduate student I did participate briefly in the Yale Conservative Party, a reincarnation of the party of the Yale Political Union that Buckley joined. Today, the Buckley Institute, founded by Conservative Party alumni, carries on free-speech and conservative programming on the Yale campus.
The Buckleyite strain of conservatism was influential in the early 2000s, evidenced in part by a particular kind of humanistic erudition commonly found among campus conservatives. I meet characters of that sort much less frequently than I used to. You may know the type: in the ninth year of their PhD program, working on a dissertation that somehow brings together Plato, Schmitt, and Voegelin, with strong opinions about single-malt whiskies and complaints about the piles of books in their crowded apartment that fall over during the night. They didn’t find me, a quantitative political economist with orthodox libertarian opinions, all that interesting, except perhaps when the discussion turned from political philosophy to literature or music, but I always found them interesting.
Are there Gen Z conservatives like this now? Or with the growing closure of academic humanities to the right and the growing subliteracy of American right-wingers, are today’s twentysomethings who would have formerly become bibliophile conservatives now something else entirely?
Buckley and Meyer serve as a reminder to young American populists that it’s possible to be radical, provocative, and influential without being stupid. They spoke to the left as well as the right, and both sides were better off for it. The right no longer feels any need to justify itself to intellectuals, who command far less influence today. The populist right has expanded its political coalition, but there is a cost, too: the less responsibility the American right feels for justifying itself to anyone outside the right, the less vigorous and hardy their ideas may become – the less likely those ideas will be to measure up to that quaintest of standards: truth.
I picked up a copy of National Review at the airport the other day. It felt like an act of reactionary rebellion – not against any ideology, but against the way we argue now. Perhaps I should subscribe.
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