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William F. Buckley’s Heirs Reap What He Sewed — Plus: New Reads from Mary Dixie Carter, Darrow Farr, Robert Macfarlane, and More…

Letter from Sharon, Conn.

Dear Wags,

What would William F. Buckley make of us now? He styled himself a man of refinement and erudition—and what a creation he was. That preposterous accent: lockjawed, “high church,” with a dollop of Southern molasses—a dash of Thurston Howell III, more than a hint of the evil fraternity brothers from Animal House. He tossed his head back as he spoke, as if admiring all the five-dollar words trotting out of his mouth. The performance turned a twentieth-century American into an effete figure out of Waugh—and was, at least in the eyes of his archenemy Gore Vidal, a bit fruity. (It takes one to know one.)

All of which is vividly on display in Sam Tanenhaus’s biography, Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America—a capacious, exhaustively researched portrait of a man whose self-invention helped shape the modern American right. Buckley has been dead since 2008, but his nicotine-stained fingerprints are everywhere.

Buckley wasn’t coarse—his slur against Vidal during their 1968 televised debate was an ungentlemanly lapse—but he is a progenitor of our spectacularly coarse political age. He might have quibbled with its unmannerly excesses, but the broader tilt—away from the suffocating administrative state, back toward the swashbuckling rough-and-tumble that preceded that fiend, Roosevelt—was always the plan. Wasn’t it?

For all his polish, W.F.B. was less a serious thinker than a performer. He understood the power of television early and became an entertaining avatar of politics, both reactionary and radical. A terminal cosmopolitan with a flair for unlikely friendships—ideological and otherwise—Buckley reassured traditionalists, mellifluously, that they were neither bigoted nor backward. His moral and political rigidity was softened by a florid vocabulary and a lust for life straight out of Ian Fleming.

To most Americans, he read as a creature of the very establishment he skewered—the consummate insider storming the castle even though he had keys to the front door. It worked because, above all, he committed fully to the role.

Donald Trump is another showman—if nothing like Buckley (his son Christopher had a few thoughts on that). And yet he, J.D. Vance, and the roiling cauldron of conservative ideologues around them appear to be his heirs. The impulses are familiar: against bureaucratic liberalism, globalism, and the welfare state; for the idealized entrepreneur, unfettered by regulation and girded by traditional values. For strongmen, in service of right-wing realpolitik. Against creeping permissiveness and secularism. For Western Civilization and the ancient Christian Church. Against social tinkering. For a restoration of order, imagined to have thrived in some halcyon age.

Buckley would have instantly clocked the canny resonance of “Make America Great Again.” He kicked off that project in 1951. Imagine if he’d hung on long enough to launch a podcast.

Tanenhaus stitches these threads together, but his book is more than an archaeology of conservatism. Buckley was an American original—perhaps one of our last great public intellectuals—and more flexible than he let on. During a quixotic 1965 run for mayor of New York, he backed congestion pricing and bike lanes. For better and worse, he also innovated the art of rhetorical combat. That began with the first of more than 50 books, God and Man at Yale, a broadside against the professoriate that may be the earliest full-throated attack on what would later be called political correctness—the primal scream of conservative grievance against elite institutions.

That cri de cœur powered Buckley’s career—from the founding of National Review to his PBS series Firing Line, to debates with James Baldwin, Betty Friedan, and radical historian Howard Zinn. (He didn’t always win, but he was always watchable.) A pioneering culture warrior, he opposed Eisenhower, the Kennedys, and—most unflatteringly—the civil rights movement (a position he later softened). He helped steer Republicanism away from the Northeastern establishment and into a more durable Silent Majority frame: Southern, evangelical, white ethnic, and Catholic.

He rejected the social liberalism of what might have seemed his natural cohort—Rockefeller Republicans—and became an early champion of Sunbelt conservatism, first with Barry Goldwater and, more successfully, Ronald Reagan. He pushed fringe elements like the John Birchers and antisemites to the margins, yet remained allergic to moderation—not by temperament (he was, by most accounts, disarmingly likable), but as a matter of politics. There was marketing in this. Buckley understood the ratings value of a cartoon struggle against the limousine liberals he knew intimately. As a political tactic, it endures.

Not a few of Buckley’s early critics saw God and Man at Yale as an expression of pernicious Roman Catholicism. He wasn’t quite the WASP insider he appeared to be. Buckley was a Big Man on Campus—editor of the Yale Daily News, last man tapped for Skull and Bones—at a time when the university still enforced quotas on Catholics and Jews. His lifelong devotion to Yale coexisted with public contempt for the campus left; he called for the dismissal of professors he’d had to dinner. That paradox—elite membership paired with elite resentment—remains the fuel of the right’s long war on higher education.

From where did these infernal ideas spring? Tanenhaus delves into a strange and remarkable childhood. Buckley’s father, William F. Sr., was a Texan who made an oil fortune in Mexico—but picked the wrong side in a revolution and was expelled, hardening him into a reactionary. He made another fortune as an oil speculator in Venezuela and elsewhere, and married Aloise Josephine Antonia Steiner of New Orleans, with whom he had ten children. The Buckleys were devout Catholics, but not shaped by the immigrant experience that produced the Kennedys. They came from a world closer to Brideshead Revisited than the wards of Boston.

Nor were they American in a conventional sense. William F. Buckley Sr.’s parents, children of Irish immigrants, came to the U.S. from Canada. The younger Buckleys spent much of their early lives in Mexico, France, and Britain. In the States, they divided their time between Great Elm, the family estate in Connecticut’s Litchfield Hills, and Kamchatka, a retreat in Camden, South Carolina. Bill, fifth in the birth order, learned Spanish and French before he spoke English. Homeschooled until eighth grade, he later attended a boys’ academy in Baltimore and a Jesuit boarding school in England. His curious accent was less an affectation than the result of a polyglot upbringing.

The other Buckley inheritance was their father’s paleoconservatism. Globetrotting had no liberalizing effect: the family was steeped in America First isolationism, opposed U.S. involvement in both world wars, and vehemently anti-Bolshevik. Buckley Sr. championed libertarian theorist Albert J. Nock, whose Our Enemy, the State left a lasting impression on his middle son. In the run-up to World War II, the Buckleys praised Charles Lindbergh as a standard-bearer for peace, and their views were predictably antisemitic. Even during his Army service as a second lieutenant, Bill remained a vocal critic of America’s temporary communist allies.

After the war, he entered Yale and, following graduation, did a brief stint at the CIA. But his true vocation was conservative media. National Review, launched in 1955, was conceived to rattle the postwar consensus of the placid Eisenhower years. “Middle-of-the-road, qua middle of the road, is politically, intellectually, and morally repugnant,” the magazine declared in its founding statement of purpose.

Given today’s glut of conservative media and its outsized impact on politics, it’s easy to forget how different the landscape looked in the wake of the New Deal. Buckley, more than anyone, willed a raucous new discourse into being. He made other innovations, too—most notably, cultivating friendships with Jewish writers and intellectuals. (Still, there were limits: Tanenhaus recounts how, at his father’s urging, he helped break off his sister’s engagement to one of his Jewish friends.)

His anticommunism eventually eclipsed the family’s America First instincts during the Cold War. Buckley reliably defended repression in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia if it served that larger struggle. Like many of his media heirs, he cast himself as a contrarian resisting liberal overreach. As he most famously put it: “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”

But what happens when conservatives hold all the power? How do they pilot the ship of state rather than just rock the boat? Buckley, a passionate sailor, might have grasped the predicament. It’s an existential dilemma for his successors, who so often look backward to his father’s unenlightened era for inspiration rather than forward with any coherent vision. There’s a manic energy on the right today—a fevered push to unwind eighty years of history, without a compass to chart what comes next.

Buckley’s orthodoxy was tempered by charisma. He was more a voracious skimmer than a careful reader—a social animal, driven by curiosity and armed with a wicked sense of humor. Official ideology rarely disrupted his personal tolerance. If he fancied himself a warrior in a great battle of ideas, he was a happy one. One suspects he never wanted a decisive victory. That might have triggered the thing he most abhorred: a revolution from the other side.

Yours Ever,

Thomas Stockmann

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Marguerite by the Lake by Mary Dixie Carter

We’re trained to watch the butler—but sometimes it’s the gardener you need to worry about. The second thriller from Mary Dixie Carter (The Photographer) unfolds at Rosecliff, the Connecticut estate of Marguerite Gray, who uses its lush grounds as a backdrop for her lifestyle empire. Tending the plantings is Phoenix, a woman from a hardscrabble background who shares Marguerite’s passion for the landscape. When a storm topples a spruce, Phoenix shoves Marguerite’s husband Geoffrey out of its lethal path—and before long, she’s got her hands on more than the rhododendrons.

Then Marguerite plunges off a cliff, and Phoenix steps into her role as lady of the manor. But the staff turn against her, and she’s haunted by guilt—and a dark secret. Meanwhile, Marguerite’s sharp-eyed daughter, very much her mother’s heir, isn’t buying Phoenix’s act. The result: a sharply plotted, thoroughly entertaining horror story. Think Rebecca with composting.

— Eleanor Vance

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