If, as Carlyle believed, "The history of the world is but the biography of great men," then William F Buckley—80 in November—rates a place in the history of our time. Fifty years ago, Buckley, the New York city-born heir to a Texas oil fortune, started a magazine with the express purpose of making his historical mark. In the first issue of National Review, dated 19th November 1955, he declared that his new publication "stands athwart history, yelling Stop." Today, at a time when the left extols the virtues of competition and even privatisation, it's a challenge to think back to a different era, when a genuine left believed, with good reason, that it was driving an unstoppable locomotive destined for the Finland station.
In 1955, Buckley was already famous in the US. Four years earlier, at age 25, he had published God and Man at Yale, an account of his undergraduate years, in which he cited in detail the secularist and Fabian tendencies of his professors. The book provoked a storm, which propelled it to bestsellerdom, as well as Buckley to enfant terrible-dom—it's still in print today.
As John Judis, a man of the left, observed in his admiring 1988 biography, "During the 1950s and 1960s, Bill Buckley was American conservatism… He created the style and the politics that have come to be identified as conservatism." Noting Buckley's 80th birthday, columnist George F Will cited his 4,000 columns, 47 books and 34-year stint as host of the public broadcasting show Firing Line and concluded, "Buckley's country is significantly different, and better, because of him. Of how many journalists, ever, can that be said? One."
Not everyone agrees that Buckley made America better. If he had got his way, for example, the American south might never have undone its apartheid system. In 1957, at a time when few black people could vote, National Review took its stand with the Dixiecrats, arguing that the idea of universal suffrage was "demagogy." The magazine explained, "The problem in the south is not how to get the vote for the Negro, but how to equip the Negro—and a great many whites—to cast an enlightened and responsible vote."
What emerged from such editorialising was the "southern strategy," the effort by conservatives to transform the Republican party, shifting it away from its Yankee roots towards a new base in the old confederacy. The strategy was working as early as 1964, when Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina quit his ancestral Democratic party and joined what was once known as the party of Lincoln. And in nine out of ten elections since, the south has given the majority of its electoral votes to the GOP; in five of those elections, Republicans won Dixie's entire electoral vote.
So without a doubt, America is different because of Buckley. Although not as different as it would have been if various suggestions of his—bombing Chinese nuclear sites, legalising marijuana, enacting national service, tattooing HIV-positive individuals—had ever been carried out.
In that same inaugural issue, half a century ago, Buckley asserted, "The profound crisis of our era is, in essence, the conflict between the social engineers, who seek to adjust mankind to conform with scientific utopias, and the disciples of truth, who defend the organic moral order." In other words, the science of politics must yield to tradition. Yet all those Republican victories notwithstanding, the welfare state, the great work of the social engineers, hasn't gone away. George W Bush campaigned on privatising social security, and ended up signing into law a huge new drugs programme for pensioners.
National Review has changed, too. Under pressure from the Rupert Murdoch-financed Weekly Standard, which came on to the scene in 1995, Buckley's magazine shed its Burkean "paleoconservatism," embracing instead the modernist "neoconservatism" of its brash new rival. Which is to say, NR embraced what would soon become known as the Bush doctrine—the social engineering of the middle east on an epochal scale. For his part, after going notably quiet during the Iraq war, Buckley finally allowed in June, "If I knew then what I know now about what kind of situation we would be in, I would have opposed the war."
Yet while Buckley was sensitive to shifts in public opinion, he was never bitten by the political bug. Running for mayor of New York city in 1965 to gain a platform for his views, he was asked what he would do if he won. "I'd demand a recount," he replied. And Buckley never accepted an appointment from his friend Ronald Reagan.
Perhaps that's because Buckley always knew one huge truth: the essence of conservatism is cultural, not political. During his life, Buckley has devoted more than equal time to such non-political pursuits as sailing, skiing, harpsichording, and spy-novel writing. And his personal mien—the posh lockjaw accent, the supercilious eyebrows, the polysyllabic vocabulary, combined with an aristocratically decadent slouch—served as the paradigm for many conservatives, especially on college campuses. (Only once they graduated did WFB-wannabes realise that if they wanted to win votes, and not just arguments, they would have to speak in simple sentences and stand up straight; in so changing, these Buckleyites morphed into Republicans and right-wingers, who are both very different species. All of which shows that true conservatism and effective political activism don't mix.)
Late in his life, Buckley has become more reflective; witness his 1997 work, Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of Faith, in which the Catholic Buckley vindicated his church yet again. Indeed, the continuing strength of Catholicism in the US provides further proof that culture trumps politics. In recent years, such important public figures as the columnist Robert Novak and the economist Lawrence Kudlow (both born Jewish) and the Kansas senator Sam Brownback (born Protestant) have converted to Catholicism. That might not be a groundswell, but in the US, at least, the sea of faith is a slow but inexorable tide.
So what's the final impact of Buckley's life? It is too soon to tell. But as Carlyle observed, "All great Peoples are conservative; slow to believe in novelties; patient of much error in actualities; deeply and forever certain of the greatness that is in law, in Custom once solemnly established, and now long recognised as just and final."
Buckley, at his best, recognised—and epitomised—all of those things.
