Buckley at 100 – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

Where to begin? Where would modern American conservatism be without William F. Buckley Jr.? Born on Nov. 24, 1925, the precocious young man gained national attention by attacking his alma mater in his first book, God and Man at Yale. A few years later, he launched National Review, whose pages featured the likes of James Burnham, Frank Meyer, Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, M. Stanton Evans, Will Herberg, Whittaker Chambers, James Kilpatrick, and later George Will, Joseph Sobran, Brian Crozier, John O’Sullivan, and so many other interesting writers.

In the early 1960s, Buckley helped promote the Goldwater campaign, which laid the foundation for the conservative takeover of the Republican Party. In the mid-1960s, he ran for mayor of New York on the Conservative ticket (and wrote about the experience in The Unmaking of a Mayor), and launched Firing Line, where he discussed issues and debated with prominent thinkers, statesmen, religious leaders, authors, and entertainers in a substantive and frequently humorous manner. (RELATED: The Panama Canal and the Firing Line Debate)

Buckley also sailed across oceans and wrote books about those adventures. He wrote spy novels (having worked briefly for the CIA) and historical novels about such public and controversial figures as Sen. Joe McCarthy and James Jesus Angleton. His syndicated columns graced the pages of newspapers throughout the country.

He was for many years the voice of conservatism in the United States. His arguments were lucid and provocative, and usually compelling. He was courageous and gracious, but thrived on controversy. He was a deeply religious man, steeped in the Roman Catholic faith who wrote books about his relationship with God.

Buckley’s conservatism combined traditional culture with economic liberty and a strident anti-communism. He set out to organize and fuse these elements into a successful political movement, and he succeeded. The landslide elections of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s would not have happened without Buckley — he made conservatism mainstream and culturally and politically acceptable in a literary and political world dominated by liberalism.

Liberalism was his domestic foe; communism was for him the existential threat from abroad. He and National Review paved the way for successor conservative journals such as The American Spectator, the University Bookman, the Claremont Review of Books, Modern Age, the American Conservative, and others.

Today’s conservative talk radio and podcasts are, in a sense, modern versions of Buckley’s Firing Line, though not nearly as good or as informative. Buckley used Firing Line to illuminate conservative principles and apply them to the cultural and political controversies of his day.

His guests on the show included Mother Teresa, Malcom Muggeridge, Thomas Sowell, Richard Pipes, Ronald Reagan, Henry Kissinger, Steve Allen, Muhammad Ali, Jesse Jackson, John Kenneth Galbraith, Allen Ginsberg, Noam Chomsky, Margaret Thatcher, Richard Nixon, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Mark Lane, Christopher Hitchens, Billy Graham, Groucho Marx, Enoch Powell, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Barry Goldwater, Clare Booth Luce, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., Rush Limbaugh, and so many others. Episodes of Firing Line can still be viewed on YouTube courtesy of the Hoover Institution.

Though most of the specific issues discussed on the Firing Line programs are dated (though the 1978 debate on the Panama Canal has echoes in President Trump’s longing to take back the canal), the conservative principles Buckley espoused remain relevant to contemporary American politics and culture. Those principles are timeless.

There have been several Buckley biographies, including John Judis’s William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives, but the biography that many have been waiting for is due to be released this June — Sam Tanenhaus’s Buckley: The Life and the Revolution that Changed America. One hopes that Tanenhaus, a man of the left, is as fair a chronicler of Buckley as he was of Whittaker Chambers.

As Buckley retreated from the day-to-day job of editing and overseeing National Review, his magazine was transformed into a neoconservative, anti-populist establishment journal that promoted the endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, cheered on a thoughtless NATO expansion, and fell into Trump Derangement Syndrome, becoming less and less relevant to conservatism’s contemporary war with liberalism. (RELATED: National Review Sides With the War Party Again)

Though it is impossible to know what Buckley would think of the Trump phenomenon and the MAGA movement, he had a streak of populism that was consistent with Trumpism. Buckley once famously said that he would rather be governed by the first 2000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty members of Harvard University. Trump would surely agree.

Liberalism was the dominant political philosophy in the United States during most of the 20th century until Bill Buckley came along with his new magazine and yelled, “Stop.”

Buckley reached back to the ancients, understanding that we stood on the shoulders of giants who gave birth to and fueled Western civilization. He and the talent he hired in the early years of National Review refashioned the conservative wisdom of the ancients to inject life into a stagnant movement and created a conservative renaissance. The survival of Western civilization depends on a new generation of conservatives carrying on Buckley’s work.

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