William F Buckley and the Politics of Kicks

"Now listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered…"

Everyone agreed that William F Buckley was good television. When the American Broadcasting Company were looking for a conservative commentator for the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago they knew they wanted Buckley. The only question was who to play him off against. In the end they chose Gore Vidal and in the midst of a heated debate about anti-war protests, Vidal called Buckley a "pro crypto Nazi" and Buckley suggested he stop.

William F Buckley came as a shock to the American left. When he wasn’t being baited by the author of Myra Breckinridge, he could be charming, witty and erudite. Clearly he was intelligent and well-read but — and this was the shocking part — he was a conservative. He despised activists who protested against the war in Vietnam, wanted to make welfare recipients work for their dole, and didn’t seem to like people who weren’t heterosexual.

Michael Harrington described him as "an urbane front man for the most primitive and vicious emotions in the land." "Buckley spoke the inside language of hatred" wrote Dissent‘s Irving Howe. For left wing intellectuals like Howe, the Buckley phenomenon was a mystery that needed to be explained. According to Time Magazine, MIT Professor of Political Science, Lincoln Bloomfield, once remarked that Buckley "is an exceedingly witty, attractive and rather insidious spokesman for a point of view for which I have few sympathies. But if we don’t want to die of sheer boredom, the Buckleys should be encouraged." Howe wanted to know how boredom could justify encouraging Buckley to promote his "reactionary" opinions. And why was Buckley taken seriously?:

Perhaps one reason is that we have no tradition in the U.S. of right-wing intellectuals. Think of the archetypal American reactionary and you summon an image of a stumbling primitive who wants the U.S. to quit the UN, drop the bomb, bust the unions, clean up the reds, abolish the income tax. But that someone wanting a good many of these same things could also write a paragraph of lucid prose and make a clever wisecrack was not really within the bounds of our experience (Dissent Jan-Feb 1966).

Like many of those on the left, Howe could never accept there might be serious intellectual arguments for conservative policies. Joseph Epstein reacted the same way. In a 1972 article for Dissent, Epstein wondered whether:

… there has ever really been strong strain of conservative thought in America.At various time there have been large pools of conservative feeling, but feeling is not the same as thought (Dissent Fall 1972).

Like Howe, Epstein regarded Buckley’s rise to fame as a sign that style had finally triumphed over substance. Like Vidal, Buckley was a product of the media — a celebrity intellectual. Howe argued that Buckley’s rise was a sign of "decadence" — intellectuals no longer cared about political content, what they responded to was personal style.

America’s left wing intelligentsia had badly misunderestimated their opponents. Buckley was the merely the first of growing movement of conservative activists who would combine style, intellect and evidence in an effort to demolish everything liberals had achieved since the New Deal. By the 1980s there would be a vast intellectual infrastructure of magazines, journals, think tanks and student groups. But even then intellectuals would blame the conservative ascendancy on wealthy donors and Ronald Reagan’s personal charm.

In the end, Buckley outlived the controversies that made him famous. His magazine, the National Review, drew together a coalition of traditional conservatives, libertarians and anti-communists. But with the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was no longer anything they could all oppose together. But even if the old conservative movement is disintegrating, the American left still needs to learn the lesson it failed to learn in the 1960s. Much of the left’s appeal in the early 20th century was a matter of style and emotion. The left seemed so much more sophisticated and compassionate than the right. And much of the right’s success at the end of the century was a matter of evidence and argument. By the 1990s, it was no longer plausible to imagine that government planning could replace the market. Buckley and his successors were about more than what Howe derided as the ‘politics of kicks’.

William F Buckley died on Wednesday February 27. He was 82. As always, there’s a lively discussion over at Jason Soon’s place.