The Conservative Mind

...The first of these was anti-Semitism, which was a running theme of the conservative magazines and organizations of the day...

...he felt an almost physical revulsion for the coarse, mass-appeal standardbearers of white working-class conservatism, like George Wallace and Spiro Agnew...

...Buckley shared the intellectuals' distaste for Dwight Eisenhower and the ethos of the fifties...

...It was governance as a form of scoring...

...If they hadn't been around, if Reagan had been surrounded instead by either moderate Washington lifers or Ed Meese-style provincial conservatives, surely the major changes of 1981—the defense increase, the tax cut, and the budget cuts—would not have been possible...

...Nicholas Lemann, national correspondent for The Atlantic, is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...

...The attractiveness of Buckley as a role model for young conservatives is inextricably bound up with not thinking things through—with seeming learned rather than actually learning about something, with winning the debate through a sarcastic put-down, basking in the ensuing applause, and then dashing to the airport...

...If Judis thought Buckley were a pernicious influence on American life, presumably he would feel that the more Buckley books about his trans-Atlantic sailing trips, the better...

...For its part, the populist New Right came to loathe Buckley for the airy condescension he showed them...

...Nobody was making a persuasive case for conservatism based on the national interest or higher morality...

...His dream was a country run by thinkers, not businessmen...

...and Babbitt-like local automobile dealers drinking scotches at the country club...

...Judis must have decided at the outset that he was going to refrain from making overt value judgments about Buckley's political views...

...But he never wrote it...

...Buckley's father was an ardent anti-Semite, and several of his siblings once burned a cross on the lawn of a Jewish resort, but Buckley's own record is completely free of anti-Semitism...

...Long after the fifties, the right was still full of kooks...

...But he was onto something in saying that liberal universities were hostile to religion, and, perhaps for this reason, the criticism of him had a defensive quality (McGeorge Bundy, then the dean of the faculty at Harvard, was not above working a barely veiled gibe at Buckley's Catholicism into an article on "God and Man" in The Atlantic Monthly...

...Buckley reacted to the raw anger of Brooklyn and Queens by recoiling in horror...

...Whoever Reagan's successor is, he will be spending his first term digging out from under a lot of rubble that Reagan has left for him, most of it created during Reagan's first year in office...

...In 1961, with National Review on its feet, he signed a contract to write a serious book of ideas that was supposed to be his lasting achievement...

...The great conservative political causes of the preceding two decades—opposition to the New Deal and to American entry into World War II— seemed patently venal and wrong...

...Buckley's idea, adapted from Albert Jay Nock, that only a tiny elite was truly equipped to understand the world, was surely one that by the end of the fifties most liberal intellectuals shared, even if, unlike Buckley, they didn't dare voice it publicly...

...As early as 1951, he dropped a book idea because it would require too much research...

...They renamed him—"mass man"—and saw him as dull-witted, culturally backward, conformist, materialistic, and even proto-fascist...

...By 1981 this had changed dramatically...

...Certainly, though, Buckley's public personality has been more important than his positions on the issues in legitimizing conservatism...

...The accent, the tendollar words, the languor, the dinner-party mannerisms— all these play to most people's idea of what a member of the upper class is like...

...Buckley himself is a devout Catholic who has always taken pains to distance himself from the Irish Catholic ethnic tradition...

...Had there been no Buckley, there would be no George Will, no American Spectator, no Policy Review, no National Conservative Political Action Committee, no ringing Reagan speeches written by Tony Dolan...

...Buckley himself is never going to become even a little more earnest, because it would somehow chip his veneer...

...The figure of the elegant, cultivated, slightly sneering, cuttingly witty conservative—the joyful crusader against the drones who guard the political orthodoxy—was invented by Buckley, and it has been endlessly copied...

...Reagan himself, though certainly no intellectual, is apparently a faithful reader of National Review and a longstanding social friend of Buckley's, not least because Buckley's New York high society side is immensely appealing to Nancy Reagan...

...It may have been just vanity on Buckley's part (the urge to be the subject of a book is a powerful one), but, judging from the result, Buckley made a smart decision...

...Even as he was being vilified, Buckley as a figure made an immense impact...

...Buckley has consistently tried to create that rare entity in American politics, an -ism that does not seem threatening or weird...

...Most conservatives see Manhattan as an evil foreign power grafted onto our wholesome land...

...This ethic suffused the early Reagan administration, when the conservatives, in raising defense spending and cutting taxes by more than Reagan had promised to in his campaign, seemed motivated mostly by a desire to deliver a humiliating put-down to the liberals...

...No less than liberalism, conservatism was torn apart by the class hatreds that began to become obvious in the sixties...

...The emergence of conservative populism, beginning with the Goldwater presidential campaign, only strengthened Buckley's bonds with the liberals, since he stood apart from the hardhats and ward-heelers who were starting to go Republican...

...While most conservatives directed their arguments to an audience of well-to-do, middle-aged men, Buckley appealed to rebellious, idealistic young people...

...As Reagan took office, it was conservative ideas that seemed to be on the march, not because of the election results so much as because there was now a critical mass of articulate conservatives in Washington...

...Reagan's ceaseless campaigning against any and all tax increases has created a widespread conviction among members of Congress that it is suicidal to cast any vote for new taxes...

...There were certainly a lot of conservatives, but their public voices belonged to midwestern isolationists who might as well have been invented by liberal parodists (Senator Bourke Hickenlooper, Colonel Robert R. McCormick...

...Another reason is that, ever since the days when he used to dazzle his father at the family dinner table, he has been hopelessly addicted to immediate intellectual gratification...

...All the encomiums he got early on for having restored "elegance" to the White House are proof that he did not ignore the plummy Buckley side of conservatism either...

...Upwardly mobile urban Catholics may admire Buckley for the classy expression he gives to their concerns, but he doesn't admire them...

...Reagan redux Judis succumbs somewhat to the temptation to say that Buckley, because of his rift with the New Right, had become irrelevant to conservatism by the time of the Reagan administration...

...The place that Buckley occupies in the universe of people who appear regularly on television, the part he is playing, is not The Conservative, it's The Aristocrat...

...Viscerally, most conservatives wouldn't have been comfortable with these people...

...Like Buckley, he was able to put his less mainstream ideas far into the background when it counted...

...his closest political colleagues were not America Firsters but ex-leftists whose main concern was a forceful American role in the world...

...Buckley's friends were always intellectuals, and as he dropped his more extreme views, he also widened his social circle to include liberal writers like Norman Mailer and John Kenneth Galbraith...

...He not only had read Edmund Burke but even sounded a little like Edmund Burke, thanks to a year he spent at a prep school in England...

...Nor was he ever an isolationist...

...Everybody wants to increase spending on education and job training, but where's the money going to come from...

...Buckley may be witty, erudite, and charming, but he would not have made it this far without having snob appeal too...

...Buckley pushes the button...

...Buckley came along at a time when these intellectuals had just about let go of the last shred of the love for the common man they had proclaimed throughout the Depression and the war...

...Most conservatives regarded the sixties as a hellish time...

...Here we need to call a spade a spade...

...Here, too, the influence of Buckley has been central, and unfortunate...

...The clumsy way that Reagan first raised the possibility of reining in Social Security, in May of 1981, has added entitlements to the list of issues that strike abject fear into the hearts of congressmen...

...Especially after the founding of National Review in 1955, Buckley worked hard to prune from conservatism its most unattractive aspects...

...When Richard Nixon took office in 1969, Washington was still a completely liberal culture in which the administration and its allies were right to feel like aliens...

...According to family legend, the first Buckley to emigrate from Ireland was a Protestant ("a contention important not for its religious but its social meaning," Judis says), and William F. Buckley Sr., a rich, self-made independent oilman, raised his children on a secluded estate in Protestant rural Connecticut, in an atmosphere that encouraged a feeling of separation from, and superiority to, the general run of American society...

...Washington was awash in bright, neat, well-educated young people who worked in the middle levels of the administration, on the staffs of conservative members of Congress, and for the dozens of conservative think tanks and publications that had sprung up during the preceding few years...

...When Buckley ran for mayor of New York in 1965, his pose of disdain for the greasy daily life of the politician won him a chorus of praise from writers—in fact it represents the moment when intellectuals began to give him their full trust and affection...

...It was more complicated than that...

...He certainly struck the populist note, but he did so without seeming to be a gutter politician, as Wallace did...

...One reason, Judis argues convincingly, is that he had trouble forming "a deeper rationale for his own politics," perhaps in part because he was unwilling publicly to work through to its conclusions his natural mistrust of democracy...

...Buckley loved them...

...If his legions of offspring continue to echo this choice of the master's, conservatism is never going to be able to run the country...

...Buckley was...

...This is a thorough, fair, insightful, and even affectionate book;* if it turns out to be the only Buckley biography, there's no need for anyone to feel short-changed...

...During the same period, he broke decisively with the John Birch Society...

...purely economic conservatives like Ayn Rand repelled him...

...To the extent that Judis has any evident bias, it's a radical's preference for movement politics over the compromised center, and there he and Buckley are on common ground...

...All through the fifties Buckley defended segregation, but by the early sixties he had moved to a position in favor of legal civil rights for blacks...

...Murray Kempton, making it perfectly clear what chord Buckley had struck, wrote after his first press conference, "We have already had candidates for mayor various enough to satisfy every taste except the most refined, and the apparition of William E Buckley may complete the scale...

...He was handsome, funny, and bright, three qualities that were sorely lacking even in tolerable conservatives like Robert Taft and Russell Kirk...

...He reports what Buckley thinks with a kind of eerie objectivity—you'd never know from this book what Judis's own opinions are...

...His writing has almost never shown really careful thought, and, since the publication of Four Reforms in the early 1970s, it has not addressed in any sustained way the question of what an American government should do...

...Everybody now wants to cut defense—except the armed services, which are guaranteed to be uncooperative in the extreme about all attempts to bring down their budgets...

...The question of whether there is really any such thing as an American aristocrat, and whether the grandson of a south Texas county sheriff could qualify, is thorny but immaterial...

...Though he began his career as an unyielding reactionary, he moved steadily toward Chambers's and James Burnham's view that conservatives should make accommodations to the real world of politics in order to have more influence...

...When Buckley burst on the scene with the publication of God and Man at Yale in 1951, he seemed at first glance to be the epitome of conservative nonrespectability—a nut attacking one of the bulwark institutions of the Establishment and being attacked almost universally in return...

...Reaganism has clearly failed to achieve its dream of creating a smoothly operating conservative mirror image of the New Deal...

...To think before acting, to build an edifice carefully so that it wouldn't have to be torn down only a few years later, would have seemed dull and ponderous, like a return to the kind of conservatism that Buckley taught conservatives to despise...

...Buckley moved there from Connecticut in the early sixties, and located National Review there from the very start...

...All through the Nixon and Ford administrations, the mood of Republican Washington was one of holding the line against the onward march of liberal ideas...

...Some of these people had been personally groomed by Buckley, and most of the rest saw him as a role model...

...southern segregationists...

...It is difficult to reconstruct today (thanks, in part, to the success of Buckley's career) how utterly discredited, how embarrassing, conservatism seemed in the early fifties...

...It is one of the ironies of Buckley's life that he got a much bigger vote in the 1965 election than anyone (including Buckley) expected, because he turned out to be quite popular among the white, blue-collar voters of the outer boroughs, most of them Catholic...

...In any kind of movement, political craziness and sectarianism are constant threats...

...The thinking class had been almost entirely liberal for at least two generations, if not since the Gilded Age...

...Reagan was able to run as the embodiment of several different kinds of conservatism at once—he appealed to Main Street and Wall Street, Lynchburg and Palm Beach...

...Bonding with liberals The group most disarmed by Buckley's upperclass aura was liberal intellectuals, whose deep and enduring disfavor could have kept him out of the mainstream of American life...

...In other words, even in good times the deficit will inevitably dominate the running of the government, and it could turn the next recession into a major disaster...

...Whittaker Chambers, who now appears to have been the great conservative intellectual of the time, was a man who looked like a mental-hospital escapee and was best known for rooting around in a pumpkin patch in the middle of the night...

...The Reagan government, especially at first, was strongly (if indirectly) influenced by Buckley...

...The reason that Buckley deserves all this attention, so much more than is usually accorded to people who write syndicated columns and run political magazines, is simple: he is the man who made conservatism—not electoral Republicanism, but conservatism as a system of ideas— respectable in post-World War II America...

...Judis's great complaint about Buckley—that he hasn't lived up to his potential for political seriousness because he has become so involved in being a celebrity—is one born out of admiration for the fire Buckley used to have...

...Also, it's now clear that the bluecollar people whose crossover votes gave Reagan his landslides are beginning to feel, with some justice, that they got tricked, so a new Republican president is going to have very soft support...

...The Conservative Mind by Nicholas Lemann William Buckley He could be a great thinker, but he's too busy running to the airport No doubt William F. Buckley's friends will wonder why he allowed John Judis, a member of the staff of the socialist weekly In These Times, to have access to his papers and thus to become at least his quasi-official biographer...

...today he maintains a schedule (his column, a weekly television show, National Review, and 70 lectures and a book a year) that makes the production of work that has lasting value simply impossible...

...throughout Buckley's career, close friends peeled off into third-party politics, Christian politics, and even violent anti-abortion politics...

...If you already know that Judis is a man of the left, though, you can see that he takes pleasure in quoting Buckley, especially the McCarthyite young Buckley, taking non-respectable stands on issues like segregation, academic freedom, universal suffrage, and loyalty oaths—See, Judis seems to be saying to liberals and moderates who feel unthreatened by Reaganism, this is what conservatives really want...

...It was these people—the 5,000 middle-level officials, journalists, and policy intellectuals that it takes to run a government— who were deeply influenced in their opinions, their style, and their career choices by Buckley's example...

...Buckley began his career wanting to be, among other things, a philosopher...