America First
Just how significant was Bill Buckley?
I’ve just finished the Tanenhaus Buckley biography. It engaged me on a number of levels, not the least because his life, 1925-2008, mapped to the lives of my parents, and reading the story of his big life helps me to understand their smaller ones. Like most good biographies, the story told is not just about the individual but about the times and the changing cultural milieu. Buckley didn’t live long enough to see Obama move into the White House, but my father, who was three years older but lived ten years longer, lived long enough to see Trump move in. My father voted for Trump. I’m not sure whether Buckley would have. In 2000 he wrote the following about him—
What about the aspirant who has a private vision to offer to the public and has the means, personal or contrived, to finance a campaign? In some cases, the vision isn’t merely a program to be adopted. It is a program that includes the visionary’s serving as President. Look for the narcissist. The most obvious target in today’s lineup is, of course, Donald Trump. When he looks at a glass, he is mesmerized by its reflection. If Donald Trump were shaped a little differently, he would compete for Miss America. But whatever the depths of self-enchantment, the demagogue has to say something.
But so many “principled” conservatives said similar things about Trump before 2016 and then recanted. And the story that Tanenhaus tells about Buckley is not of a principled conservative, but of a culture warrior and polemicist. If for tribal conservatives, loyalty is the most important, maybe the only principle, Buckley had that in spades. That made him a famously good friend, but also an ally and defender of some truly awful human beings like Roy Cohn and Edgar Smith. 1
Buckley was probably the most famous American Catholic of his generation, but he was a Catholic in the mold of a Latin American oligarch.2 I think this is the key to understanding everything that was proto-fascist about him. The Kennedys, whose family trajectory runs a parallel course to the Buckleys, were very Irish Catholic. Their patriarch had more in common with rough-and-tumble Boston Southies than the WASP Ivy Leaguers who were his kids’ clasmates. The Buckleys were more Ivy than the Ivies—except of course in their Catholicism.
The point is that he was a cultural Catholic first, a tribal Catholic, and that tribalism was key to his behavior and attitudes. His patrician style was always a way for him to say that we Catholics are the creators and stewards of Western Civilization. Everything that is great about its intellectual and artistic achievements comes through a Catholic prism. Even the Protestant Bach, whom Buckley adored, wrote Catholics masses. How dare you boring, pasty-souled WASPs look down on me and the rich tradition I love! That anti-WASP/Liberal Establishment animus drove him since his high school days in the WASPy prep school he attended. He honed his debating skills there in the 1930s, and though he was a rhetorical prodigy, he always lost in debate. His defense of outré “America-First” positions didn’t go down well with his classmates and the faculty, no matter how brilliantly he espoused them.
And so what any of this had to do with the spirit of the gospels and his Christian commitments was secondary. He knew very little theology,3 and couldn’t care less about any Catholic social teaching that contradicted his father’s laissez-faire capitalist commitments or his mother’s Southern segregationist commitments.4 Buckley was not the kind of person who was interested in the truth, only in defending his familial legacy. The picture that emerges from Tanenhaus’s biography is of a man who was a moral adolescent—intellectually sophisticated and verbally adroit, but not particularly thoughtful or curious. The only ideas that interested him were those he could enlist in his assault of the Liberal establishment.
So why should I find him so interesting? It’s hard for me to put my finger on it. Perhaps because I see an adolescent part of myself in him and in his loyalties that I came to reject—but nevertheless still haunts me. As a sixteen-year-old I wanted to be him. And so perhaps for that reason I understand why so many young people drifting toward the Right find in him an attractive model providing an alternative to the cultural Left they find so emotionally and spiritually bleak.
Buckley was right about the richness, texture, and complexity of his, and my, tradition that very few Americans knew about then or know about now. And he was right in his disdain for the moralistic, flat-souled, spiritual poverty of American Calvinism. But his reactionary Catholicism offers no healthy alternative. These young people attracted to that brand of Catholicism are being seduced by something that, like Buckley, is all style and, in the end, very little substance.
And that style, though more sophisticated and charming than anything we see today coming from the MAGA Right, it was born of a resentment then that is the same animating spirit of the MAGA Right now. The fact is that the assault on the Liberal establishment, and even his America-First positions that he defended in prep school are triumphant in 2024. Leonard Leo and his supreme court picks, and the fanaticism of Russell Vought, JD Vance, and Kevin Roberts are all Bill Buckley spawn. If he were alive today, would he embrace them as his? Probably.
See also “Heroes of the Fourth Turning” and “Bill Buckley: Romantic Reactionary”.
And he was a vigorous defender of Joe McCarthy, and never came to think he was wrong in that.
Despite Buckley’s association with the New England/New York elite society, his father was a Texas-born oil man with interests in Mexico, and Buckley Jr lived in Mexico for the better part of his first six years, and learned English as a second language. His mother was born in Louisiana, and the family owned estates both in Sharon, Connecticut, and Camden, South Carolina.
He relied on Garry Wills to fill him in. Wills had been a Jesuit seminarian, and he was someone for whom his Christian commitments mattered. He left National Review because of it stance on segregation. Buckley was deeply wounded by Wills’ ‘disloyalty’.
Later in life he recanted his segregationism, and acknowledged that federal intervention in the South was necessary.