I was so excited about the new WFB biography that I had to wait a couple of weeks before reading it. I haven't read Sam Tanenhaus' other books, but I was impressed with his article "When Pat Buchanan Tried to Make America Great Again", from around January 2017. It turns out that his interviews with PJB were probably in preparation for this long-awaited book. Tanenhaus has had fine conversations this month with Elisabeth Bumiller at a book signing, Charlie Rose, Oren Cass of American Compass, and Jacob Heilbrunn. Another Trump/PJB article in Politico was "The Ideas Made It, But I Didn't", by Tim Alberta, later the author of American Carnage.
As a movement conservative, I have to take seriously the criticisms of Rich Lowry, another longtime editor of National
Review. These included the fact that the book was cut short around the 1980s, while WFB was 1925-2008. Lowry also found insufficient emphasis on WFB's profound Catholic faith, and a lack of appreciation for his true intellectual depth.
First, the question of faith, which is my own area of knowledge. It was often found odd, for instance by Christopher Hitchens in Blood, Class and Nostalgia (a book I haven't read!), that Bill was viewed as the quintessential WASP while in fact Irish and Catholic in provenance. The brilliant William F. Buckley, Sr., was an oilman, and the family spent time in Mexico as well as Camden, South Carolina. In Spanish culture, the establishment was Catholic. As a result, young Bill approached Yale as both an insider and an outsider, confidently secure and yet itching to provoke. He didn't expect Yale to teach the doctrine of transsubstantiation, but the problem was that the great university wasn't Protestant either, but often atheistic and socialist. On the question of faith, Buckley's most important books were God and Man at Yale (1951), In Search of Anti-Semitism (1991-1993), and Nearer My God (1997). At certain points, Tanenhaus does emphasize the profundity of WFB's faith, as when during Watergate, he couldn't reveal his knowledge explicitly because of his friend Howard Hunt (from the CIA), but let it out covertly as if confessing before his omniscient God. The Spanish background is also important for understanding Bill's affinity for polysyllabic vocabulary. Besides his preppy education in classical antiquity, his first language was Spanish, so he gravitated toward Latinate constructions. The whole Buckley family was fascinating, including Will Buckley, Aloise Steiner Buckley, Trish Bozell, Pat, Priscilla, Jim, Christopher, et al.
Regarding Buckley's intellectual importance, I have to disagree with Lowry's assessment of the book. WFB is the most consequential public intellectual since WWII (along with, perhaps, Kissinger and Moynihan). But his importance was in being an intellectual who could communicate with the public, not in systematic treatises but in quick exchanges of wits. In the 60s and 70s, these debates engaged such as Arthur Schlessinger Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith, James Baldwin, and Gore Vidal, perhaps the only opponent who actually disliked Bill. Apparently, Buckley didn't complete his project of "Revolt Against the Masses", an homage to Jose Ortega y Gasset's Revolt of the Masses. But the theoretical work had already been done by Russell Kirk (The Conservative Mind), James Burnham (The Machiavellians), and others. The founding generation included Willi Schlamm, Willmoore Kendall, Whittaker Chambers, Frank Meyer, and many others. Among these, Buckley was outstanding as a wordsmith. Frank Meyer perhaps came up with the concept of fusionism, the linking of anti-Communism, free markets, and social conservatism, but it was Bill who gave us the word for it. He wrote many books and columns but was even better as an editor and a debater. It was taking the ideas into the arena of public life that changed America. Tanenhaus emphasizes the mentoring of writers such as Garry Wills,
who eventually moved to the left, and Joan Didion, who also left the conservative movement, as well as George Will. While Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan clearly were WFB's political allies, the relationships were more complex than one might imagine.
The book was apparently cut short (at 860 pages!) because more detail was necessary for all the years up to the election of Reagan and the mainstreaming of ideas that had long been marginalized in elite society and politics. The
WFB of the 80s, 90s and 2000s is available from many sources. In 1998, my freshman year of college, my "higher education" truly began with recreational reading in the library of "Happy Days Were Here Again", "Overdrive", "Up From Liberalism", and "McCarthy and His Enemies". In the late 80s and 90s, great episodes of Firing Line included those with Christopher Hitchens, John O'Sullivan, Joe Sobran, Alan Keyes and Ron Paul. In 2000, WFB was a guest on Hardball, where Chris Matthews asked him about George W. Bush. I was relaxing after college dinner when WFB replied "he is conservative, but he is not a conservative. Ronald Reagan is a conservative. Jack Kemp is a conservative". Matthews went on to ask if an adjectival relationship to the movement was sufficient. Most movingly, Chris Matthews concluded "William F. Buckley, the patron saint of American conservatism, I've said it before and I'll say it again, you make life on this planet all the greater".
Although WFB eventually expressed opposition to the 2003 Iraq war, by then National Review was aligned more
with the neocon side of the debate, with writers such as David Frum. Buchanan's American Conservative (2002)
and Chronicles (with paleoconservatives such as Thomas Fleming, Paul Gottfried and Sam Francis) were distinct
from the neocon Weekly Standard of Bill Kristol and others. The thrust of Tanenhaus' book is that Buckley's
career as a whole is more "paleocon" than it appeared from the vantage point of the 2000s. He began with an
apologia for Charles Lindbergh and the America First movement, and took a traditional southern and libertarian
(Goldwaterite) view on states' rights.
In the American Compass interview with Oren Cass, Tanenhaus made an interesting connection with J.D. Vance.
In 2017, the Politico article made the connection between MAGA and the Buchanan Brigades. The latter, however,
from the early 90s were "paleos" marginalized from movement conservatism itself. As a side note, it has always
fascinated me how PJB was for Nixon in 1968, not the populist George Wallace or the movement conservative
Ronald Reagan. When four delegates from Michigan pledged for Nixon, Pat publicly exclaimed "We got the
Birchers"! (The Greatest Comeback, 2014).
Did movement conservatism end in 2008 with the election of Obama and the financial crisis? Everybody
remembers the 2016 GOP primaries, where Trump defeated Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and many
others. The 2012 primaries were also interesting, where Romney and Jon Huntsman were challenged by
the wild crew of Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Ron Paul, and Rick Perry (who later on seemed mild!)
Vance is perhaps the one who will make the "fusion" of MAGA with the longer history of postwar conservatism.
He began with Hillbilly Elegy, a bestseller that captured Trump Country, but not in an explicit endorsement
of MAGA. This conversion came later, along with an interesting conversion to Catholicism and some aspects
of integralism and postliberalism. This may also be able to incorporate the "paleo" efforts of Chronicles
magazine and the American Conservative. If Trump is the one with populist appeal, like Joe McCarthy,
Vance may give the more theoretical foundations. There's a parallel between anti-anti-McCarthy and
anti-anti-Trump. Vance was good on Ross Douthat's Interesting Times.
P.S. Nearer, My God shows the literary theological influence on WFB of Arnold Lunn and Frs. Ronald Knox, Richard John Neuhaus and George Rutler. Also Clare Boothe Luce.
Final note: Vance appears to replace Paul Ryan as intellectual leader. Because the movement changed so much after 2010,
Ryan was unable to do what Newt Gingrich did in the late 80s and 90s.
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