Father Knows Best

An aristocrat who goes in for democracy is irresistible.

—Dostoevsky

Anyone around and alert during the Long Sixties knows the type. The scion of a wealthy family who gives his fortune to revolutionaries and for his trouble is electrocuted while planting a bomb; the salon maven who arranges a fundraiser for sullen militants sporting sunglasses under her chandeliers; the radicalized valedictorian who inadvertently blows up a townhouse and disappears naked into the streets of Greenwich Village, only to emerge a decade later to rob an armored truck and get a Brink’s guard killed. Figures like these—Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Felicia Montealegre Bernstein, Kathy Boudin—were in no way original. Their precursors can be found in any history of the major European left-wing revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and in the novels of writers who tried to plumb the psychology of economic class traitors. Their motives usually turn out to be a jumble of idealism, parricidal anger, boredom, and misplaced noblesse oblige.

We are not so accustomed to thinking about right-wing bourgeois radicals who turn against their class. Are their motives and actions just photographic negatives of those of their left-wing adversaries, or do different passions animate them? Obviously such figures were extremely important in twentieth-century history, whether in Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Vichy France, Falangist Spain, or Romania’s Iron Guard, not to mention any number of Latin American countries. Yet only a few major novelists have made it their business to probe the psychology of reactionaries. It’s puzzling that more haven’t. Perhaps the assumption is that history is moving toward greater enlightenment and justice and that those who resist it are of no interest and will eventually disappear. And so we are left with predictably cartoonish treatments of this human type, such as Bernardo Bertolucci’s film The Conformist (1970) and its many imitators.

Today, however, the right is ascendant, and in ever more places triumphant. We can no longer assume that this is an aberration, a bump on history’s upward road. This could be a return to normal, and the progressive story we have told ourselves for so long may turn out to be just a provincial tale of an era we’ll look back on as the Great Exception.^* For nearly half a century now a unified Republican Party and its ideas have dominated the political culture of Washington and our state capitals. Anti-immigration populism has spread throughout Western and Eastern European countries and brought to power right-wing parties, which have been elected in Brazil and India as well. The only new ideas emanating from the left in this period have been synthesized in cloistered, conservative-free universities and thus far have only driven less privileged citizens into the welcoming arms of the reactionary right.

The right has also radicalized a growing number of boys and young men who spend their time in the alternative reality of the far-right manosphere. The ones I have met in recent years were drawn into this online life while still in high school and were thrilled to discover that they could so easily épater their teachers and parents (and avoid the frightening prospect of talking to girls, I should add). Arriving at universities where conservative ideas are ignored or treated with contempt convinces them that they hold forbidden knowledge. Corners of the Internet create the sense of belonging to a secret society, which is why right-wing influencers habitually adopt Latinate pseudonyms before a Google search inevitably reveals their identities. The frisson these young people experience from blowing everyone’s mind with their outrageous Substack posts is probably not all that different from the thrill of blowing up buildings in the 1970s.

And then there are the counterintellectuals of the right, who have become the most influential class traitors of our time. In the past, when class distinctions depended on capital accumulation and inherited wealth, young rebels attacked the economic system. Now that those distinctions are largely determined by levels of education, it stands to reason that the young rebels of our time would focus on the centers of that power. Moving from Capitalism must be destroyed! to The universities must be destroyed! is a small psychological leap for the radically inclined.

By “counterintellectuals” I do not speak of traditional conservatives who think that universities abandoned their essential functions of advancing knowledge and nourishing our culture and who simply want them to return to that work. I mean the right-wing coterie of credentialed operators, most the products of our top colleges and law schools, who have made a profession of attacking the intellectual class as a whole and seem incapable of speaking of anything else. They are unavoidable presences on Fox and Newsmax, they chuckle along with Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson on their podcasts, and they know how to whip into a frenzy a college club eager to be canceled, a conference of Republican apparatchiks, or a Zoom meeting of the millionaires and billionaires who make this entire ideological universe turn.

The crack in the helmet of these anti-elite elites is that they are possessed by the illusion that they can conjure up the winds of anti-intellectual populism to serve their ideological ends and reemerge untouched. We have seen enough of them to know that they almost all eventually go native and cease to be intellectuals at all. The road to the gutter is not difficult to find. The Trumpian versions of the type are potted like noxious plants in virtually every corner of the administration today, and many more are waiting in reserve at plush Washington think tanks.

So what makes the elite counterintellectual tick? What makes an educated person idealize the uneducated and attribute to them powers of insight that reading a book would rob them of? What advantage is there to not knowing how reality with all its contradictions is structured? And why would beneficiaries of the greatest university system in the world—perhaps in history—want to dismantle it (while still trying to get their kids into Harvard)? When did self-styled conservatives, whose tradition used to teach respect for institutions and modesty, start cruising for rough trade?

We can get help in answering these timely questions from Sam Tanenhaus’s new biography of the original American counterintellectual, William F. Buckley. Tanenhaus, a former editor of The New York Times Book Review and the author notably of a biography of Whittaker Chambers, has for years been our premier liberal observer of the American right and its psychology. The principal achievement of Buckley is to have tightly wound together the life of the man and the life of the movement he coaxed into being almost single-handedly beginning in the 1950s. In Tanenhaus, both have found their Robert Caro. The movement story begins in the McCarthy era and proceeds to the founding of National Review in 1955, then to the presidential campaigns of Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater in the early 1960s, and finally to Buckley’s early bet on Ronald Reagan as the candidate most likely to promote policies in line with his own conservatism and still get elected—a bet he won. This detailed chronicle will be an invaluable resource for historians for decades to come.

But the book holds another interest as well. By beginning the biographical story before Buckley’s birth, Tanenhaus gives the reader a window into the development of a certain cast of mind. We discover an extremely privileged young man who very early inherited an animus against the present and kept it even as that present kept changing and began treating him rather well, actually. It is as if throughout his life the song from the Marx Brothers film Horse Feathers kept playing in the background: Whatever it is, I’m against it! Yet unlike his progeny on the American right today, Buckley attacked intellectuals as the main source of America’s problems while remaining a genuine intellectual to the end. That in itself was a kind of psychological achievement.

The story of Bill Buckley, who was born in 1925, must begin with that of his father, Will, and his outlook on the world. A militant Catholic born in the 1880s in South Texas, he became an oil speculator, making and losing several fortunes in the early decades of the twentieth century. He set up shop in Mexico, became fluent in Spanish, and got so mixed up in golpe-prone Mexican politics that he was finally expelled in 1921. Eventually he settled in Sharon, Connecticut, built himself a manse, and fathered ten children, who became the audience for his reactionary disquisitions on Protestant and Jewish bankers, on the protofascistic New Deal of FDR, and on liberal internationalist warmongers, which were debated at the dining table but inevitably approved. He also occasionally brought home well-known conservatives to join the conversation. One who made a particularly deep impression on young Bill was Albert Jay Nock, a former self-declared anarchist who had evolved into an antidemocratic aesthete recruiting young people to join what he called the saving “Remnant” of a genteel elite being wiped out by mass politics and culture. Cross Henry Adams with José Ortega y Gasset and you have the man.

Among the children, young Bill seemed the most eager to please Father, whose views he broadcast to his unprepared schoolmates and teachers from an early age. Will was an unwavering isolationist in the 1930s and had the entire family join the America First Committee (AFC), which militated against US involvement in the brewing wars in Europe and at its fringes included obsessed antisemites and Nazi sympathizers. In 1941 young Bill gave a speech at school titled “In Defense of Charles Lindbergh,” who was the star of the AFC and had been cozying up to the Nazis for a few years. A few months later Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the AFC was dissolved, and the elder Buckley boys rushed to enlist, despite their father’s skepticism. But Bill remained unrepentant, writing Lindbergh a letter of support while the United States was under heavy attack.

Tanenhaus spends a great deal of time exploring the personalities and dynamics of the Buckley family, which pays off throughout the first half of the book. Time and again the reader hears echoes of the father’s reactionary voice in Bill’s most radical pronouncements of the 1940s and 1950s. He arrived at Yale in 1946 already a well-groomed polemicist and quickly rose to the chairmanship of the Yale Daily News, which is still a launching pad for ambitious young journalists. As chance would have it, his tenure began in the middle of a political scandal perfectly suited to bring out the worst in him.

It had been revealed—by The Harvard Crimson no less—that the FBI had undertaken a secret program of surveillance of the Yale faculty, with the cooperation of the school’s administrators. It was 1948–1949, when the Cold War panic was reaching its height. Whittaker Chambers had just outed Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy, Eastern European countries were being forcibly absorbed into Moscow’s orbit, and debates over “who lost China” raged in Washington. The FBI had been given a blank check to search for hidden Communists, and it met little resistance from universities in those years. Buckley approved of its efforts and was consulting with the bureau privately. In print, though, he denied the Crimson charges in order to protect the FBI, not the Yale administration.

In fact Buckley was planning his own full-out attack on Yale. In the last months before his graduation he gave several campus speeches denouncing to their faces the administration and the faculty for having betrayed their original mission. As he later put it:

One of the most extraordinary incongruities of our time [is that] the institution that derives its moral and financial support from Christian individualists then addresses itself to the task of persuading the sons of those supporters to be atheistic socialists.

Plus ça change.

Buckley published God and Man at Yale in 1951 with little expectation of literary success. Instead it became an instant best seller and quickly went through several reprintings. Turning back to the book this past winter, I was unprepared for how mean-spirited and irresponsible it is, like a long online post by an alt-right heavy breather today. Buckley did not stop at attacking the Yale administration for lax standards; he denounced dozens of faculty members by name, including one who had recently been murdered in Borneo. He scoured the textbooks those teachers used in class for evidence of heresy and reported their comments in lectures, as alleged by anonymous informants. It was a brutal exercise in character assassination, fully congruent with the tactics of the House Un-American Activities Committee and the McCarthy hearings that were just gearing up. The twenty-five-year-old Buckley was already making himself into a counterintellectual, a protozoan ancestor of Stephen Miller and Christopher Rufo. A real stinker.

God and Man at Yale made his career. It soon brought him to the attention of disgruntled right-wing groups with roots in the pre-war AFC that had been scattered to the winds after the Allied victories. In 1949 he had been invited to speak at a right-wing confab at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City, where he was an immediate success, and he soon received invitations to speak all over the country. These lucrative gigs brought him into close contact with Americans outside his provincial social set whom he would later rely on to help fund the movement he was to lead. He flashed his famous grin at the hoi polloi and they grinned right back, which must have been a thrill for a Yale man. Media appearances followed, and then media attention about the media attention. Dwight Macdonald was the first to profile Buckley, writing memorably that “he has the outward and visible signs of the campus radical, and the inward and spiritual qualities of the radical’s wealthy grandfather.”

One can’t help but wonder how differently Buckley’s career and character might have turned out had he not come of age during the worst years of the Red Scare. His adolescent bravado might have passed in time; he might have become a musician (he was an accomplished harpsichordist) or joined a conventional profession; he might have developed into a family oracle like his father, his table talk passed on to generations of little Buckleys. Instead he found himself sharing the national stage with Joseph McCarthy. And it was love at first sight.

The senator from Wisconsin was anything but a member of the genteel Remnant that Albert Jay Nock had had in mind; he was an unprincipled, alcoholic lout. Yet through some perverse upstairs-downstairs transference Buckley was drawn to him. (The bow tie set does have a thing for the brass knuckles set.) For a good part of 1953–1954 he shuttled between New York and Washington to help prepare McCarthy for the infamous hearings into Communist infiltration of the US Army that would immolate his career. Buckley cowrote a book in the senator’s defense, McCarthy and His Enemies (1954), wrote speeches for him, and even gave a speech supporting him. He was all in and remained so even after McCarthy’s death in 1957.

But why? Tanenhaus writes, “No informed observer thought McCarthy’s sensational charges were true. Possibly, McCarthy himself didn’t believe it either.” During the first Trump administration Tanenhaus posed the question to George Will, who had briefly worked for National Review in the 1970s and whose response rings true: “I think it’s grounded in the oppositional mentality. The feeling that we are a church militant in an unconverted world and we have to watch our back.”

Tanenhaus’s treatment of these years is masterful, and he shrewdly suggests that it was less McCarthy the man who came to interest Buckley than McCarthyism as a potential social movement channeling less educated voters’ distrust of professional politicians, Ivy-adorned diplomats, specialist experts, reality-based teachers, and squishy ministers. In this disgruntled class he began to see the possibility of a new kind of American movement labeled “conservatism” that would not be a passive Remnant nostalgic for the age of gentility or a platoon of bourbon-soaked weepers for a thousand Lost Causes. In God and Man at Yale Buckley had attacked educated elites from above; in McCarthy’s followers he discovered a populist class itching to attack them from below. Though McCarthyism was soon a spent force, he saw an orthodoxy waiting to be born in a populist anti-anti-McCarthyism focused on intellectuals.

What gets a little lost in the absorbing five-hundred-page political chronicle that follows this episode is the psychological thread Tanenhaus teases out so well in Buckley’s early years. Developments in his later personal life are more often recorded than probed. Tanenhaus’s profile of Buckley in his twenties and thirties is hard to distinguish from that of the bile-spewing cadets of the MAGA movement today. But from the mid-1950s on he became a genial fixture on the New York and Washington scenes. He developed a taste for racing sailboats in international competitions and wrote jolly books about his journeys in order to pay for this extravagance. He also spent nearly every winter skiing in Gstaad, Switzerland, where he and his wife, Pat, gave lavish parties with friends like David Niven and John Kenneth Galbraith. (Most of his friends were liberals.) In 1965 he ran a half-serious campaign for mayor of New York City; when asked what he would do if elected, he famously replied, “Demand a recount.” And amid all this fun, he still managed to edit National Review, write thrice-weekly newspaper columns, and crisscross the country lecturing.

And then he created the most intellectually serious political talk show American television has ever seen: Firing Line, which ran from 1966 until 1999. It was nothing like the robotic revenant one can see on PBS today. Debates between Buckley and his guests, who were almost always imposing adversaries, could be sharp but were always polite. He was a great listener, and he let his opponents develop an argument before going in for the kill by asking for examples or offering counterexamples or questioning their inferences. He also often invited young journalists such as Jeff Greenfield, Michael Kinsley, and Frances FitzGerald to sit in and pose challenges to both him and the guest. Occasionally he devoted his entire show to fielding sharp questions from them, helping to launch their careers.

Buckley didn’t make things easy on himself. Among his guests were Noam Chomsky, Paul Goodman, Dwight Macdonald, Saul Alinsky, Allen Ginsberg, Eldridge Cleaver, Betty Friedan, and Huey Newton. (Contrast them with celebrities at Trump’s events, who have included Ted Nugent, Hulk Hogan, Kid Rock, Lee Greenwood, Herschel Walker, Dr. Oz, Roseanne Barr, and Mike Lindell.) To have encountered the public Bill Buckley for the first time back in the 1970s, as I did, was to discover a high-Tory swashbuckler stranded in the New World, a free spirit, a happy warrior, a gadfly, an original. Not a thug.

Yet his decades-long engagement in politics, which tilted the Republican Party ever more to the right and purged it of liberals, had the effect of making the world safer for thugs, especially educated ones. By focusing so single-mindedly on liberal and radical intellectuals as the precipitators of American decline—as opposed to, just for a change of tune, political and economic forces—he forged a bond between elite and nonelite right-wingers that has held firm until now. Complaining about the university is still an excellent way to break the ice at cocktail parties with right-wing professors and foundation heads and small-town millionaires who otherwise don’t have a thing in common.

And so we end the book still puzzling over how Buckley lived with the dissonance between his intellectual and aesthetic refinement and his encouragement of those who now idolize, or feign to idolize, the barstool sage. It cannot be chalked up to negative capability. However far he traveled from his youthful dogmatism, his ruthless tactics, and his thoughtless prejudices; however comfortable he became with the powerful in Washington and the international social elite; however skilled and successful he became as a writer and broadcaster; however much his own life experience showed that history cannot be stopped, only redirected, and that social change need not be catastrophic—however much he experienced over the decades, one gets the impression of a man with some inherited inner mission to stave off a nameless apocalypse. A soldier for a church militant he remained. But in the name of what pope? And aiming for what paradise? As one puts down Buckley, the picture that comes to mind is of a man who insists on walking down an up escalator, which is, psychologically speaking, a very comfortable way to travel. One always catches up with the times eventually, while holding to the true conviction that one has always been resisting their pull.

But now that our historical narrative has reversed itself and the escalator we are descending on is in Trump Tower, one wonders: Would a resurrected Buckley take a principled stand against Trump for having betrayed conservative norms? Would he chastise the educated flatterers of the masses and lead a saving remnant out of the toxic political-intellectual Egypt we find ourselves in? Or would he start walking up this down escalator very slowly, his brow held high, while knowing that he and America would end up at the bottom all the same? What would Father do?