A Church Without a Creed

One of the great difficulties future historians must face when studying American conservatism is differentiating between all of the Old and New Rights which stud its history. Following the end of the Second World War, an Old Christian Right gave way to a fusionist New Right assembled out of anti-communism; decades later, the New Christian Right Reaganites arrive on the historical stage to proclaim themselves the corrective to the “Old New Right” fusionism that had grown exhausted; and since then, various new creeds have emerged—neo-conservative and paleo-conservative factions—that have each, in turn, declared their predecessors a disappointment, sellouts, or imposters, each rewriting the movement's history with themselves at the center; and finally with the Trump presidency there arrives yet another right, organized around immigration restriction and re-industrialization, which presents itself as the antagonist of every compromising right that preceded it. The pattern is not merely factional succession. It is a recurring act of forgetting, in which each new right establishes its legitimacy by declaring the previous one to have been no right at all. The peculiar result is a movement with an extraordinarily rich history and a near-total institutional amnesia about itself.

Those on the newest of new rights who wish to see their movement written into history would do well to begin with Sam Tanenhaus's biography of the man who first performed the operation successfully, William F. Buckley. The Buckley whom the newest right inherits as a cautionary byword—a wimpish consensus-seeker, a genial gatekeeper who policed the movement's boundaries on behalf of the liberal establishment he only nominally opposed—is not quite the figure Tanenhaus recovers from the archives. What emerges is a complicated picture of a man at perpetual war with liberal society yet unable to acquire freedom of maneuver against it.

Tanenhaus began work on the biography in 1998, after Buckley personally chose him for the project and fresh from his celebrated biography of ex-communist and conservative intellectual Whittaker Chambers. Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America marvelously charts the course of Buckley’s life along with the conservative movement he marshaled into such a potent political force. The access Tanenhaus secured was extraordinary: Buckley's personal papers, his correspondence, and nearly two decades of direct interviews with the subject himself. The result is the most comprehensive account we have of Buckley's life, his journalistic career, and his forays into politics. Despite his intimate proximity, Tanenhaus’s work never veers away from honestly highlighting the man’s flaws.

Buckley's father, a conservative Texas oilman who had bankrolled anti-socialist forces in Mexico, raised his son on a heady mixture of Catholicism, isolationism, and contempt for the New Deal—an education conducted largely outside conventional American schooling, partly in Paris, and partly in the English boarding school to which the sudden onset of war dispatched the young Buckley. It was not an upbringing designed to produce a man at ease with his country's direction of travel; indeed, as we shall see, it solidified in him an intellectual contrarianism towards liberal mores that would remain permanent.

At Yale, where Buckley took over the Daily News in the late 1940s, the contrarian formation crystallized into something that took on a life of its own. He abolished the gentleman's agreement by which editors declined to criticize named faculty and began an unyielding attack upon liberalism on the campus. While barely in the editorship Buckley published an attack upon Professor Raymond Kennedy and others for “the tendency...to utilize the classroom as a soapbox from which to impose upon their students not the great ideas of great scholars, but their own.” Buckley and his close friend Brent Bozell Jr. proceeded to denounce supporters of the Progressive candidate Henry Wallace for communist sympathies. When evidence was uncovered showing that the FBI was monitoring pro-Wallace groups on campus, he stage-managed—with a flair for the theatrical that would never leave him—a public interview with an FBI officer to rebut charges that the bureau was surveilling them. The book he wrote from this experience, God and Man at Yale (1951), scandalized the university and made Buckley famous. Tanenhaus renders this period with particular vividness: here is a young man who does not yet know what he is for but has a prodigious gift for knowing what he is against, and for relentlessly making that opposition felt.

The founding of National Review in 1955—inspired partly by Willi Schlamm, an Austrian ex-communist whose passage through ideology had left him with an admirably clear-eyed view of its mechanics—is the pivot on which Tanenhaus's narrative turns. The conventional account, still operative in much popular history, presents Buckley as the slayer of an existing Old Right in its cradle. Tanenhaus argues for something more creative: National Review produced, for the first time since the New Deal had scattered the right, a coherent conservative impulse where none had previously existed in organized form. Whittaker Chambers, Willmoore Kendall, and James Burnham are dragged from retirements and unproductive slumps in their careers towards a common cause, that of rolling back Soviet influence from Washington, then Europe. Combined with the mass popular appeal of the Second Red Scare campaign and the McCarthy hearings, Buckley as ruthless moderator of an original pure conservatism is replaced with an image of Buckley the shepherd, concentrating together into a single point of focus varied dormant ideological strands towards the defining issues of the era.

The coalition Buckley assembled was implausible on its face. That Buckley held them together, for as long as he did, through the sheer force of his editorial personality and his conviction that anti-communism was an issue pernicious enough to contain their differences, is an achievement that Tanenhaus most persuasively immortalizes. It is also an achievement with a structural flaw built into it from the start. The common enemy held the coalition together; what would hold it together once the enemy retreated was a question Buckley never quite answered. His own anti-communism was a negative program, defined by what it opposed. The absence of a positive vision was not accidental; it was, in some sense, the price of the coalition's existence. Buckley knew this, which is perhaps why The Revolt Against the Masses, his projected systematic statement of conservatism as a philosophy of life, remained unfinished at his death.

As the fear of foreign subversives receded, and American politics moved on to seeing the domestic battle for African-American civil rights as the primary issue of the age, rather than retreat into political quietism Buckley forced National Review to maintain the Southern line even after the battle was completely lost. After an initial period of studied indifference, James Burnham began making the affirmative case for preserving Southern segregation. Strom Thurmond purchased two subscriptions to National Review (one for his office and one for his home) after a recommendation from Buckley Sr. that his son “is for segregation and backs it in every issue.” Only once the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act forced Southern Democrats to admit defeat and the issue faced popular backlash did National Review moderate its position on civil rights. The magazine's retreat from this position is presented by Tanenhaus not as a principled revision but as a tactical acknowledgment of changed political circumstances. Buckley was, above all, a Cold Warrior; the domestic politics of race mattered to him only insofar as they bore on the larger international struggle of rolling back communism. This transition becomes less a heartless betrayal of the Dixiecrat movement and more a pragmatic sacrifice for a victory on a front that was perceived to be more crucial to the international conservative struggle.

Tanenhaus also avoids painting Buckley as a simply passive fellow traveler moving along with the trends of American conservatism as he saw them. National Review did endorse Nixon in 1968, but it did so reluctantly only after much urging from James Burnham. Afterwards it remained the conservative organ that devoted the most time to critiquing them, relentlessly seeking out the flaws in the Eastern Establishment conservatism from which both drew their support. When Goldwater emerged on the national scene, and once his campaign achieved a critical mass of public support and youth enthusiasm, Buckley and Bozell pushed forwards in supporting their candidate, all in the hope of crippling the future of a soft, accommodationist Rockefeller Republicanism.

The 1965 New York City mayoral campaign belongs to this same strategic logic. Buckley's declaration, when asked what he would do if he won, that he would "demand a recount," remains one of the more iconic one-liners in American political history. But the campaign was not merely a performance. Buckley’s enigmatic and strange campaign for mayor of New York City, which Tanenhaus so richly and humorously details, is part of a long series of Buckley’s attacks on the remaining liberal Rockefeller-Javits axis that controlled New York, and it was followed by Jim Buckley's genuine Senate victory in 1970—proof that the strategic bet, whatever the tactical absurdities, had not been entirely miscalculated.

Tanenhaus admirably avoids producing a hagiography of Buckley and thoughtfully dwells on his weaknesses and imperfections, both as a thinker and as a man. Ironically the best explanation of these failures comes from Tanenhaus’s earlier book, The Death of Conservatism. There Buckley is praised as a consensus-seeking Republican deftly capable of pushing liberalism towards anti-communism and, consequently, never systematically produced an argument for conservatism as a way of life. All the other strands of the right that Buckley shepherded— libertarians, segregationists, free-marketeers—were similarly oppositional movements. In mastering the ability to maneuver against elements of liberalism from an oppositional view, Buckley produced a movement undecided on what the movement was for.

A closely related flaw that Tanenhaus carefully draws out from Buckley’s career is his inability to whole-heartedly make the case for the individuals he saw as emblematic of his ideology. The two books that were supposedly meant to embody a positive case for conservatives’ own exemplary figures, McCarthy and His Enemies (co-written with Bozell) and The Conscience of a Conservative (credited to Barry Goldwater but substantially Bozell's work), abandon their subjects at critical moments. McCarthy and His Enemies devotes enormous energy to caveats about procedural prudence and legal technicalities rather than the urgency of McCarthy’s mission. The Conscience of a Conservative barely mentions Goldwater. It is as though Buckley and Bozell, having decided that a given individual was the conservative moment’s necessary champion, immediately became embarrassed by the decision.

This embarrassment had consequences. The figure who ultimately cast American conservatism in a popular image—Ronald Reagan—did so independently of Buckley's patronage, and on his own terms. Buckley's attempt to change Reagan’s mind on the Panama Canal Treaties was met with a civil but firm rebuff. Reagan did not need National Review; National Review needed Reagan, and knew it. The populist-personalist energies that made Reagan's career—and, a generation later, Trump's—were never within Buckley's gift. He could assemble a coalition of intellectuals but he could not deliver them the hearts of a people. A movement built on opposition, on the negation of liberalism's premises rather than the affirmation of its own, naturally tends to produce critics rather than champions, diagnosticians rather than visionaries.

National Review has not been the animating center of conservative intellectual life for two decades; for much of the right today, Buckley's name functions less as an inspiration than as a rebuke—a symbol of everything timid and institutionally captured about the conservatism that preceded the present rupture. Tanenhaus's biography does not exactly overturn this judgment, but it considerably complicates it. The Buckley who emerges from these pages is a man who crusaded against what seemed like the overwhelmingly powerful liberal consensus of his day and, on important issues, won under circumstances that were far less favorable to his project than his later celebrity made them appear. He brought together a ragtag band of seemingly futureless thinkers and appointed them as the intellectual vanguard of the world’s most successful right-wing movement. That the building had certain structural defects is a judgment that the current inheritors of Buckley's project might find useful to sit with. The church he built was large, and for a time magnificent. It simply never agreed on a creed.