This article was originally published in Vol. 5 No. 3 of our print edition.

Prior to reading all 860 pages of Sam Tanenhaus’s Buckley: The Life and the Revolution that Changed America,¹ my only knowledge of William F Buckley, Jr, came from a dog-eared copy of Overdrive, a breezy account of his adventures as a man about town in early 1980s New York.² Amazingly, it was a sequel to another book, Cruising Speed, that followed the same week-in-the-life format.³ The premise of both raises the same question as Tanenhaus’s massive biography. Who reads this stuff? And should anyone care?

Allow me, an American, to explain Buckley’s significance to you, a European who is presumably familiar with our politics but may not be aware of Buckley’s place in it (if you are an American political junkie, well, I would look elsewhere for reading material). William F Buckley, Jr, occupies a unique position in the pantheon of American conservatism. He was not an epoch-making president, like Ronald Reagan, or even an important standard-bearer who fell short of the White House, like Barry Goldwater. Although Buckley wrote dozens of books, thousands of columns, and gave countless speeches, he never held office or wrote a major work of political philosophy. Yet he has a plausible claim to be the founder of the modern conservative movement. That alone makes him worthy of a hefty biography.

After first coming to prominence in 1951 with the publication of God and Man at Yale,⁴ an acerbic attack on his alma mater’s liberal pieties, in 1955 Buckley founded National Review, a magazine that would become the intellectual headquarters for the post-war American right. Buckley and National Review shaped the direction of the fledgling conservative movement through editorials, reporting, and the cultivation of up-and-coming writers, thinkers, and politicians. As the magazine gained prominence, its editor-in-chief became a cultural fixture, hosting a popular political talk show, providing quotable witticisms to beat reporters, and reliably churning out columns, editorials, and books. Tanenhaus calls Buckley ‘the right’s first intellectual entertainer’ and ‘a performing ideologue’—apt descriptors for a man who effortlessly combined the roles of society wit, pundit, and political organizer.

To appreciate the significance of Buckley and the National Review, it helps to understand mid-twentieth-century American politics. When Buckley founded his magazine, American liberalism was not just ascendant; it was dominant. Through the New Deal expansion of the welfare state and the subsequent growth of federal power during the Second World War, state intervention had become embedded at all levels of American life. Liberals might deplore the Soviet Union’s ideological excesses, but the idea it represented—increasingly centralized control over society and the economy—was widely assumed to be directionally correct.

The American right, meanwhile, was a spent force. Conservative thinking was dismissed, in Lionel Trilling’s memorable formulation, as ‘irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas’.⁵ On foreign policy, conservatives had been tarnished by their pre-war isolationism (Buckley, incidentally, got his start in politics as a teenage anti-interventionist in the years leading up to the Second World War). At home, the success of the New Deal discredited free market purists and sceptics of Keynesian economics. Rather than challenge the welfare state, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower positioned himself as a responsible steward of a system he had inherited from his Democratic predecessors. His right flank was occupied by cranks, marginal intellectuals, and forgotten magazines like The Freeman and The American Mercury.

National Review filled this ideological void. Buckley, a witty, prolific columnist, lent an air of respectability to the proceedings. His ability to recruit talented writers helped the new magazine inject conservative ideas into the American mainstream. But National Review never strayed too far from its base. For all its intellectual pretensions, the magazine was unapologetically anti-communist, anti-welfare state, and anti-liberal. This combative approach would sometimes get it into trouble, as was the case with Buckley’s forthright defence of racial segregation in the 1950s and 1960s.

Although he often courted controversy, Buckley was an appealing figure for the same reason he could get away with writing two books about his weekly adventures: namely, his exploits as a man about town. Some of the best bits of Tanenhaus’s new biography have nothing to do with conservatism: skiing in Gstaad with actor David Niven, accompanying his wife to dinner with Princess Grace of Monaco, ‘liberating’ fresh lobsters for dinner from a deep-sea lobster trap on a yacht excursion (and leaving, by way of compensation, two bottles of Johnny Walker Black).

These are not the antics of your typical columnist. Donald Trump’s lifestyle, an outlandish combination of garish luxury and lowbrow taste, is often described as a kind of wish-fulfilment on the part of his supporters. Buckley, in his prime, fulfilled a similar role for conservative intellectuals, who thrilled at his ability to combine the life of a wealthy Manhattan socialite with real political and intellectual heft.

Buckley’s extravagant life also points to certain tensions within the conservative movement that persist even today. Despite his posh accent, privileged upbringing, and Yale education, Buckley was not much of a snob (indeed, his open-handed generosity is one quality that shines through Tanenhaus’s book). But he was unabashedly elitist. He disdained rock music, played the piano and the harpsichord, hobnobbed with celebrities and society figures, and married a Vancouver heiress. This lifestyle would be a natural fit for a certain type of aristocratic European conservative, but it is an altogether rarer thing in the United States. It is also a natural outgrowth of one of Buckley’s earliest political influences, the libertarian philosopher Albert Jay Nock, who coined the term ‘remnant’ to describe a small cadre of sophisticates charged with keeping the ideals of liberty alive.

Conservative elitism runs into trouble in the United States because our highbrow institutions lean left and the ideas that animate the American right—patriotism, social traditionalism, and a bone-deep suspicion of government and expert rule—thrive in the hinterland. Buckley, the patrician sophisticate, found himself articulating the grievances and concerns of Middle America, which these days tends more towards RVs than harpsichords. The demotic, populist, and often incoherent impulses that underpin modern conservatism go back to the early days of the American Revolution, when British tax collectors were tarred and feathered by colonial mobs. It is summed up in a line Tanenhaus quotes from Willmoore Kendall, a Yale professor and another one of Buckley’s intellectual mentors: ‘The true American tradition is less that of Fourth of July orations and our constitutional law textbooks, with their cluck-clucking over the so-called preferred freedoms, than quite simply, that of riding somebody out of town on a rail.’⁶

The tension between elitism and populism is connected to another enduring fault line within Buckley’s movement. At the height of the Cold War, National Review pioneered the idea of ‘fusionism’, a three-way alliance between economic libertarians, social conservatives, and anti-communists. For decades, this arrangement helped paper over differences within conservatism. Anti-abortion activists made common cause with Wall Street investors. Middle American traditionalists found themselves rubbing shoulders with anti-tax libertarians. When the Soviet Union disappeared, the foreign policy glue holding the coalition together went with it, and disagreements between economic libertarians and cultural conservatives re-emerged with a vengeance. The Trump administration’s awkward pivot to populism and trade protectionism is one consequence of this coalitional shift.

Buckley’s life embodied his movement’s contradictions. He was a devout Catholic whose faith never wavered, but his opposition to abortion was less strident than that of many of his political allies. When he ran for mayor of New York in 1965 (his only attempt at higher office), Buckley played on voters’ fears of rising crime, but also argued in favour of legalizing drugs. Later in life, he experimented with LSD. As his career progressed, Buckley’s views on certain issues changed, most notably on segregation and Jim Crow. But he never disavowed his ambition to roll back the welfare state. Few voters in the modern Republican coalition share this fixation.

Tanenhaus deftly explores the tensions between elitism and populism, as well as libertarianism and traditionalism, throughout Buckley’s career. But these tensions are most apparent when conservatives hold power, which is what happened when Reagan, a Buckley protégé and National Review subscriber, ascended to the presidency in 1980. Curiously, this is where Tanenhaus’s biography trails off. The period from 1974 to Buckley’s death in 2008 is given less than 100 pages in an 860-page biography. It is a strange oversight in an otherwise exhaustively researched book.

There are other facets of Buckley’s life that Tanenhaus seems uninterested in. The figure of William F Buckley, Sr, a self-made oil speculator who made and lost fortunes in Mexico and Venezuela, looms over the book’s early chapters. Indeed, Tanenhaus’s account of the elder Buckley’s colourful and often precarious career is so compelling that I found myself longing for a biography of the family patriarch. Other major figures in Buckley’s personal life get comparatively short shrift. Patricia Buckley basically disappears from the narrative after Buckley marries her. Christopher, the couple’s only child, is almost entirely absent.

Although the final section of the book feels rushed and incomplete, there is an elegiac quality to Tanenhaus’s account of the last few years of Buckley’s life, as the great man grapples with his declining faculties, diminished influence, and age-old questions of faith and mortality. As these final pages unfold, readers will naturally wonder at the relevance of this patrician figure to modern movement conservatism, which today would greet a figure with Buckley’s accent, tastes, and background with suspicion and perhaps contempt.

The notes in the conservative hymnal may have changed, but acute listeners will detect a certain tone that has persisted from Buckley’s era to today. For all his wealth and sophistication, Buckley was an outsider to the American establishment. He grew up Catholic at a time when mainline Protestantism was the country’s dominant religious force. His father was a self-made man who owed more to his connections in Mexico and Venezuela than to the corridors of power in the Northeastern United States. And Buckley made his reputation as a conservative attack dog, berating his storied alma mater and allying himself with Senator Joe McCarthy, the notorious anti-communist firebrand who never much cared for accuracy or precision.

This is the through-line from Buckley to Trump. In the 1950s, Buckley and his allies were ideological insurgents who teamed up with angry voters to challenge establishment sensibilities on a range of issues, from communism and racial integration to crime and welfare. Sometimes they were right, and sometimes they were wrong, but this coalition of outsiders toppled mid-century liberalism from its comfortable perch and ushered in a period of conservative dominance that lasted from Reagan’s election in 1980 to Obama’s in 2008.

Today’s conservatives have a new set of targets. In Buckley’s youth, New Deal liberalism was the enemy at home and communism the enemy abroad. In the Trump era, a new generation of right-wingers has trained its fire on the post-Cold War consensus in favour of free trade, mass immigration, and an expansive global role for the United States. Despite a shifting constellation of issues and personalities, the movement still feeds on insurgent, anti-establishment energy, from vaccine sceptics to free trade opponents to a few rogue businessmen who have broken from their industries’ left-wing orthodoxies.

Modern conservatism will never produce another Buckley. The current climate is too hostile to showy intellectualism and the media too fractured for any one man (much less a verbose, erudite columnist) to dominate the conversation. Buckley would surely deplore this state of affairs, but he would recognize his successors’ anti-establishment instincts. In an earlier era, he built his career on the same sentiments.

NOTES

1 Sam Tanenhaus, Buckley: The Life and the Revolution that Changed America (Random House, 2025).

2 William F Buckley, Jr, Overdrive: A Personal Documentary (Doubleday, 1983).

3 William F Buckley, Jr, Cruising Speed: A Documentary (Putnam, 1971).

4 William F Buckley, Jr, God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of ‘Academic Freedom’ (Regnery, 1951).

5 Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (Viking Press, 1950), x.

6 Tanenhaus, Buckley, 177.

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