William F. Buckley

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“”The central question that emerges—and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalog of the rights of American citizens, born Equal—is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.

—Buckley, behind a veil of prose and euphemisms, says, "yes, whitey shooty the blacky"

“”It should tell you something about conservative intellectualism that the most memorable thing William F. Buckley ever said involved a homophobic slur and a threat of violence.

—Nathan Robinson, Current Affairs

William F. Buckley Jr. (1925–2008) was an American political commentator from the mid-20^th century who was highly prone to sesquipedalianism. Buckley was a founder of "Movement Conservativism" (or New Right conservativism) in the early 1950s, a reactionary form of conservativism opposed to the then dominant "go-slow" and compromise approach. He was also a libertarian, believing that government's only duties are protecting life, liberty and property (sotto voce, similar to the proponents of slavery). Buckley is sometimes seen as an ancestor of the modern American right-wing, although in many ways he differs radically from the modern right. Most especially, his was an intellectual conservatism; he matriculated at Yale and became well known for his erudition and powerful argumentative skills. Of course, his ideas behind the prose and big words were just as rancid and evil as his contemporaries at the time, worse in some areas, and some were scarily similar to the rhetoric of the right wing after the rise of sub-literate Donald Trump in 2016. If you care, the vaunted "F." as his middle initial stood for "Frank".

Buckley's prominent works included God and Man at Yale, a critique of secularism in academia; Firing Line, a political debate TV show in which he displayed both the aforementioned erudition and a willingness to actually listen to his opponents; and most importantly, the conservative paper National Review. (You can see how well the National Review has turned out without him, although we doubt it'd be much better with him.)

Buckley ran for Mayor of New York City in 1965 as the candidate of the Conservative Party, against liberal Republican John Lindsay (who won) and Democrat Abe Beame (who succeeded Lindsay). Buckley came a distant third, scoring 13.4% of the vote. Buckley's brother, James Buckley, fared better in politics, serving as New York Senator from 1971-1977.

Résumé

Fame

“”If we have reached the point where rank-and-file conservatives see nothing amiss with giving Hannity an award named for Buckley, then surely there’s a Milton Friedman Prize awaiting Steve Bannon for his insights on free trade.

—Bret Stephens

• Chased some anti-Semites out of the New Right, along with other fringe lunatics such as the John Birch Society and Ayn Rand. Objectivists still hate him for that. The New Right is still filled with bigots and overall dumbassery, however.

  "However mythologized by movement conservatives since, Buckley’s halting project of excommunication was more notable for its ineffectuality and tardiness than its impact in drawing a cordon sanitaire." — Daniel Schlozman & Sam Rosenfeld

• In 1957, he paid Southern journalist James J. Kilpatrick to write a piece for the National Review defending segregation. Buckley's own defense of white supremacy preceded this by a month in National Review. As late as 1962, Buckley found it easy to flip from defending to attacking segregationists. Eventually, he ensured that segregationists, such as George Wallace, were marginalized in 1968.
• Managed to convince people across the spectrum that merging Tory-style high culture with the GOP's low culture was a Good Thing, and Buckley was one of those Respected Conservatives™ that just don't exist anymore in spite of the vehement racism, praise of far-right dictators, willingness to deploy nukes, and more. Buckley may have hated Gore Vidal, Chomsky, et al., but the vocabulary and tenor of these guys just blows you away by distracting you from their abhorrent ideas. There is no modern Buckley and Vidal and we don't want another.
• His son, Christopher Buckley, is a fairly pleasant, self-aware, and arguably sane conservative.
• Criticized Donald Trump. This is not a high bar to cross. Buckley characterized Trump as a "demagogue" who'd pose danger to conservatism and "trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones" (as if the GOP was ever coherent in their ideology). This is in spite of his own efforts that threw Republicans further right (see next section)
• Wrote a bunch of mediocre spy novels.
• Wanted to outlaw tobacco use in America (though in pleas for the free market or something), and being a smoker probably helped him on this viewpoint.

Infamy

• He championed the release of convicted murderer Edgar H. Smith, establishing a defense fund with top-notch lawyers. After Smith's eventual release, Smith was convicted of the brutal assault and stabbing of another woman, and he finally confessed to the first murder.
• Republican drug policy is a legacy of the 1960s, when marijuana was associated with hippies and the unrest that came with them. When Richard Nixon ran for President saying he spoke for the "Silent Majority" and Ronald Reagan ran for governor saying he would "clean up the mess in Berkeley", both of those platforms involved hard-line stances against drug users. William Buckley Jr. (himself a pill-popper who admitted to smoking pot on his yacht in international waters) was the ideological driving force behind those policies. He believed that with the new research on addiction being an illness meant that drug users were carriers and would introduce drugs to others. By incarcerating them, the idea was that drug use would be contained within a generation (self excepted). By 1988 he admitted that he was wrong and that the policy was a failure and harmful. Too bad, by then interests were vested in the continuation.
• Helped inadvertently radicalize the Republican Party, probably more than anyone else. Along with throwing out the loonies, he then started to purify the GOP of those who he thought weren't true conservatives. This meant the fairly respectable Rockefeller/Eisenhower/Lincoln Republicans who had formerly dominated the party. He mainly did this by throwing his support behind Barry Goldwater and on at least one occasion he went so far as to endorse a certain Democrat for senator just so a liberal Republican would lose. He admitted his mayoral campaign was mainly designed to sabotage John Lindsay, whom he considered too liberal a Republican.
• Brought laissez-faire to the New Right, which was at odds with the more traditional stance of not touching regulation one way or the other so long as it wasn't needlessly damaging to the economy. This would encourage the GOP to deregulate nearly everything they could get their hands on, and this is what we got.
• Set the "groundwork" that would get Saint Ronnie elected president.
• Brought Dinesh D'Souza to prominence (caveat emptor).
• Supported apartheid in South Africa.
• He wrote a column arguing for tattooing people with AIDS, saying it would help stop the spread of HIV.

Racism

William F. Buckley, when starting the National Review, was an ardent supporter of segregation. He later renounced his support for segregation in the mid-1960s, but his racism would only morph into another issue. In addition, he even wrote an article in support of white supremacy, only falling short of racialists of the time, and he never really apologized for the article. In response to Coretta Scott King's failed negotiations to get a statue for Martin Luther King Jr., Buckley said the equivalent of this: "No, she's the real racist! If Martin Luther King Jr. was white he wouldn't get a statue either! Andrew Jackson has no statues after all! She should be told to stop being such a racist and so antagonistic."

Despite having status of a "respected" conservative "intellectual", some of Buckley's views on hot issues for his time were on par with other vehement racists, with some shockingly similar to some of today's Trump supporters of late 2010s. Similar to many conservative pundits suggesting conspiracy to stem sympathy for victims concerning attacks on Democratic politicians (see conservative pundit reactions of the aftermath of the failed 2018 United States mail bombing attempts), Buckley and other National Review editors offered the idea that the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing was carried out by antifa a provocateur or a "crazed" African American for setting "back the cause of the white people there so dramatically". After Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, Buckley also suggested that this could be carried out by a "leftist" because a Klan member wouldn't do this to arouse anger against their group. In addition, Buckley, while trying to condemn the violence, tried to use the now common "look at what you made me do" excuse for the assassin by claiming that "the cretin who leveled his rifle at the head of Martin Luther King, may have absorbed the talk[…] about the supremacy of the individual conscience, such talk as Martin Luther King… had so widely, and so indiscriminately, indulged in."

He also praised The Camp of the Saints, a book so racist praising pretty much instantly outs you as a racist.

Authoritarianism

See the main article on this topic: Authoritarianism

William F. Buckley was unabashedly in support of authoritarian regimes as well as supporting bombing several countries he didn't like. He spoke very favorably of fascist dictators such as Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet because they opposed communism and despite the fact that the left-wing governments their coup d'etats toppled were democratically elected. He even praised Franco after Franco's death. Buckley was co-leader of the American-Chilean Council, a propaganda front group that was partly-funded by Pinochet.

Buckley really didn't like viewpoints that were opposed to him. Really. While he walked back a bit on many of his views or at least morphed them when they were no longer politically acceptable, McCarthyism was one he never really changed. He even wrote an entire book on the topic of McCarthy, called McCarthy and His Enemies: The Record and Its Meaning where he defended the Senator against his critics. However, for a defense of the man, it is actually rather weak. Edward Cain, paraphrasing the criticisms of Elmer Davis, noted:

The is nothing in the book about the exploits that took up most of McCarthy's time: the long, futile, and devastating investigations at Fort Monmouth, the shattering attack on the Overseas Information Agency, or the strange ethics underling Cohn and Schine. Nor is anything said of the censure hearings and Joseph Welch of Boston, or the campaign against the Voice of America.

Instead, large chunks of the book are spent pointing out how dangerous communists are and how we need to be willing to be careful in order to defeat them. As Chris Orlet put it in an article for Counterpunch:

In McCarthy and His Enemies, Buckley suggested the ruined lives of these so-called “security risks” and “policy misfits” was a small price to pay for the increased “security” which resulted from the witch hunts (this despite the fact that no evidence of subversion was ever discovered). Besides, Buckley maintained, employment in the civil service was a privilege, not a right, therefore the burden of proof of innocence rested, not with the government, but with the accused. When it came to the noble cause of eradicating the cancer of communism, a few thousand innocent victims, and the trampling of due process, was a small price to pay.

Additionally, Buckley’s career began in 1951 with the publication of God and Man at Yale, an attack on his alma mater that urged the firing of professors whom he felt were insufficiently hostile to socialism and atheism. Despite this early assault on academic freedom, Buckley in later years routinely took offense at what he saw as liberal "political correctness".

Freedom if it's only your freedom, right?

Bombs, bombs, and bombs

William F. Buckley really loved bombs. During the Cold War, Buckley advocated preemptive strikes against disfavored nations. In 1965, four years after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, he continued to call for an invasion of Cuba. The same year, he called for a nuclear attack on China's nuclear production facilities. In a syndicated column, he urged a nuclear attack on North Vietnam.

In a debate with Carl Sagan, he argued strongly in support of stockpiling nuclear weapons as a means to keep the USSR in check, even though both sides already had enough nukes to destroy each other multiple times over.

Paradoxically, he was an outspoken critic of Dubya and neoconservatism in general after the Iraq War.

See also

• Gore Vidal, with whom he debated

Videos

• "I'll sock you in the goddamn face!"
• Transcript: James Baldwin debates William F. Buckley (1965) — noteworthy because of Baldwin's forcefully eloquent introductory statement, and for Buckley resoundingly losing the debate