From the archive
The Late Mr. Buckley
William F. Buckley Jr. helped build the modern American conservative movement. Yet, as Henry George argues, Buckley’s great tragedy was not the content of his ideas but that he sought to defend a social order whose foundations had already crumbled.
As debates continue about the direction the American Right should take after the conclusion of President Donald Trump's second term in January of 2029, it is an appropriate time to reflect on the legacy of William F. Buckley Jr., the man who in many ways defined the conservative movement of the second half of the twentieth century. Last year marked the centenary of Buckley's birth and saw a new biography of his life by the historian Sam Tanenhaus.
Although the biography polarized critics, Tanenhaus richly detailed Buckley's early life and the rise of the conservative movement. However, it skated over the Reagan years, as well as Buckley's later life. There was also the mostly excellent recent PBS American Masters documentary, The Incomparable Mr. Buckley.
For me, Buckley is a tragic figure, and the biography and documentary reinforce this. He represented the last echo of a vanishing social order, stripped of its particularity and rendered abstract in service to an ideological war Buckley had sadly already lost. Buckley’s greatest misfortune was not the content of his vision of conservatism but, instead, being forced to build a movement on eroded and degraded social foundations.
Offering Due Credit
Before looking at these problems in greater detail, it must be acknowledged that Buckley and the conservative movement that he created had significant achievements. In a direct sense, Buckley organized American conservatism, conciliated its different factions, and mediated between it and the wider American public through National Review, as well as his PBS television show Firing Line. Moreover, the intellectual energy behind President Ronald Reagan directly came from this small group of people, and we must never forget that in 1984 President Reagan won forty-nine states during his re-election campaign. Yet, crucially, President Reagan's electoral triumphs did not reverse the managerial transformation of American institutions or restore the bourgeois social order that Buckley's movement had sought to preserve.
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