There was a time not so long ago when the Republican right in America flirted with extinction.
Democrats won every presidential election bar two from 1932 to 1964, using their dominance to build a “New Deal” in the 1930s and 1940s and a “Great Society” in the 1960s. The party’s only two losses were to the war hero Dwight D Eisenhower, who governed as a centrist moderate happy to bed in the New Deal rather than roll it back. And when the right of the Republican Party finally got a candidate in line with their views with Barry Goldwater in 1964, he lost in a record-breaking landslide.
But it was in this era of repeated defeat that the right managed to remake itself into an election-winning force whose descendants now control the US almost completely. And there is no one man more central to that journey than journalist and activist William F Buckley, the subject of a magisterial new biography by Sam Tanenhaus. I recommend it to anyone interested in US politics.
Buckley, unlike the presidents who regularly consulted him, may not be a household name in New Zealand. Younger readers may recognise clips of him in two famous losing debates – one with James Baldwin at the Cambridge Union, and another with Gore Vidal at the Democratic National Convention in 1968, where Buckley lost his temper on live TV and threatened to “sock” the grinning Vidal in the face. Older ones may recall him as an ever-present doyen of conservative media, spy novels and the lecture circuit before his 2008 death. He actually visited New Zealand in 1967 and his books were regularly reviewed here.
He was most prominently the founder and long-time editor of National Review, a conservative magazine that took itself seriously, with far better writing than its peers at the time – Joan Didion wrote some of her first essays here. National Review for several decades essentially set the terms of the conservative debate, making clear what causes were worth fighting for and what beliefs were beyond the pale, and exactly what presidents or aspiring presidents should do. As the story goes, Buckley expelled the “Birchers” from the movement, people who believed that both the Soviet and US governments were controlled by a single internationalist conspiracy, and broke the wider movement away from any lingering pre-war anti-Semitism.
He took what might have been an “aggregation of bigotries” – in the words of one of his correspondents – and honed it into an intellectually serious action group that the big media institutions themselves had to take seriously. This movement would suffer many false starts, like the 1964 election defeat and the many betrayals from Richard Nixon, but it would eventually send Ronald Reagan to the White House and it continues to shape the debate of the world’s most important country to this day. Tanenhaus complicates this neat narrative of nipping and tucking the right, but does not quite rebuke it.
This movement organising was done not just in the pages of Reagan’s favourite magazine but through groups Buckley founded such as the Young Americans For Freedom, TV programmes he hosted such as Firing Line, his syndicated columns and dozens of books. (It is no surprise to learn that Buckley was a user of prescription Ritalin.) All this chaos of a life, one that intersected with everyone from Vladimir Nabokov to Jesse Jackson, makes for exceedingly entertaining reading.
Tanenhaus, a historian who wrote this 1000-page book over decades, with authorised access to Buckley and his files, is an able guide. This entrée to his private life does not mean that Tanenhaus goes easy on him – we hear all about Buckley arguing that HIV-positive men should be forcibly tattooed in the 1980s, or that whites as the “advanced race” were right to withhold the vote from African-Americans in the 1950s South. But this is not a facile list of Buckley’s sins, and Tanenhaus is gracious enough to give copious space to Buckley’s slowly shifting views on race, his family’s philanthropy and the “genius” Buckley had for friendship and nurturing talent.
It is natural, for a book published in 2025, that a certain spray-tanned spectre haunts the later chapters. The American right is no longer so adept at kicking the conspiracists out, and seems to thrive not in spite of this but in part because of it. The current US Health Secretary has claimed vaccines cause autism and is urging parents to “do their own research”. The President, at least publicly, believes the 2020 election was stolen from him. Donald Trump, like Buckley, cares deeply about what The New York Times thinks of him, but not enough to seriously change his behaviour or cut any potential support base off from his movement.
Is there any modern-day Buckley able to corral the right as he did? Probably not. The power is too diffuse now, spread between such figures as Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson and Rupert Murdoch. The book ends up reading not just as a biography but as an elegy to a time when politics happened in newspapers and magazines, not on social media. We are not going back there. But it is fun to read about.
BUCKLEY: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America, by Sam Tanenhaus (Random House, $70 hb), is out now.
