In a memorable exchange during a Republican primary debate in January 2016, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas needled the upstart candidate Donald Trump, saying he was not a true conservative and adding, “Not a lot of conservatives come out of Manhattan.”
Mr. Trump was ready with a retort. “Conservatives actually do come out of Manhattan,” he replied, “including William F. Buckley.”
It was obvious why Mr. Trump would invoke William F. Buckley Jr. — the author, columnist, magazine editor, TV debater and political candidate who died at 82 in 2008 (and who did work for decades in Manhattan). Mr. Buckley was the leading intellectual architect of the modern conservative movement — indeed, he personified it for more than 50 years.
But by what reasoning could Mr. Trump rightfully claim a connection with him? Outwardly, Mr. Buckley, with his patrician manner, salon wit and gold-plated vocabulary, his passion for Bach and connoisseur’s taste for fine writing, could not have been less like Mr. Trump. And in policy terms, Mr. Trump’s love of tariffs, defense of entitlement programs and isolationist tendencies were at odds with Mr. Buckley’s fondness for the free market, skepticism of big government and support for a muscular foreign policy.
In fact, in the winter of 2016, the editors of National Review, the venerable political journal Mr. Buckley founded in 1955, devoted an entire issue to making the case against Mr. Trump. They invited conservatives “across the spectrum” to argue that he was a “philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the G.O.P. in favor of a free-floating populism with strongman overtones.”
Since then, the ranks of anti- or “never” Trump conservatives have thinned almost to extinction, in the pages of National Review and elsewhere. Mr. Trump controls the Republican Party top to bottom and commands the loyalty of its policy minds as well as the thriving right-wing media ecosphere. His vision, it seems, has prevailed.
Yet on closer inspection that vision has a good deal in common with what went before, and in important respects Mr. Trump is heir to Mr. Buckley. A self-described “radical conservative” and “counterrevolutionary,” Mr. Buckley had an appetite for disruption quite like Mr. Trump’s. Like him, too, Mr. Buckley conceived of politics as a form of warfare waged on battlefields that did not end with policy and government. Above all, the movements each man built began with the same revolutionary aim — and both succeeded for many of the same reasons.
Mr. Buckley’s true goal, he told an interviewer in 1957, was “overturning the revised view of society” that had come to dominate thinking in his lifetime. At first few took this ambition seriously. The 1950s were a time of prosperity and calm — “consensus,” in the emerging term. But Mr. Buckley had his own word for it, “conformism,” which he said was being imposed from above by what he and his allies on the right called the “liberal establishment.”
That establishment, or elite, was composed not of the wealthy or big corporations, as some on the left said, but rather (as Mr. Buckley wrote in an early fund-raising memo for National Review) of “newspapermen, publishers, commentators, educators, ministers and members of the various professions.” Today Mr. Trump and his associates are staging a revolt against many of the same adversaries, using the playbook devised by Mr. Buckley.
In his first book, “God and Man at Yale,” published in 1951, the year after he graduated from Yale, Mr. Buckley attacked the liberal establishment at its root: higher education. He accused professors of being propagandists. The textbooks they assigned, like Paul Samuelson’s “Economics,” with its discussion of Keynesian theory, were the first step, Mr. Buckley warned, in a broader program to indoctrinate students in “the merits of the leviathan state.”
Likewise with religion. For almost the whole of its long history, Mr. Buckley pointed out, Yale had called itself a Christian college. But in 1951, even as America was locked in a Cold War with “godless Communism,” it was all but impossible to find any faculty members, even professors of religion, who “proselytize the Christian faith or, indeed, teach religion at all.”
In defense of all this, Yale administrators invoked the principle of academic freedom. But that principle was a mere “superstition,” Mr. Buckley argued, since all the “freethinking” at Yale went in a single direction, with very little room for dissent. There was a new orthodoxy, and there were limits, he wrote, within which faculty members “must keep their opinions if they wish to be ‘tolerated’” — even though the proscribed opinions were the same ones many Americans held, including the parents of Yale students.
Mr. Trump’s attack on Harvard and other educational institutions is an updated version of Mr. Buckley’s. Today the oppressive orthodoxy is a progressive ideology widely shared by educators but sharply at odds with what most of the public believes — the same public whose tax dollars help fund those schools.
Eager to mount a counteroffensive, Mr. Buckley turned to a hitherto silent constituency, Yale’s alumni and donors. He urged them to take over the hiring and firing of faculty and also boycott Yale’s fund-raising drives.
A similar solution is being deployed today, not only by wealthy funders of some Ivy League institutions, but also, on a much larger scale, by the Trump administration, with its termination of federal contracts with schools like Harvard. (Mr. Buckley would surely have opposed using federal funds to bully universities — but because he opposed federal funding for universities in the first place.)
Mr. Buckley’s counterrevolution had a second front: the administrative state and its supporters in the media. The origins of Mr. Trump’s attacks on “the deep state” and “fake news” can be found in Mr. Buckley’s second book, “McCarthy and His Enemies,” published in 1954 with a co-author, L. Brent Bozell.
At the time Senator Joseph McCarthy’s rampage — his unfounded, reckless and slanderous accusations, and the lives that were ruined — was broadly perceived to be a threat to democracy. The analysis was misguided, Mr. Buckley and Mr. Bozell maintained. While it was true that Mr. McCarthy had made more than his share of mistakes and missteps, the campaign itself was honorable and even heroic. In a speech championing Mr. McCarthy, Mr. Buckley denounced “American intellectuals and the liberal press” for their “cynical attitude of malice toward a man who has put his finger on something that should have been exposed by the press itself.”
Like Mr. Trump’s intellectual defenders today, Mr. Buckley was accused of trying to normalize a demagogue. But Mr. McCarthy’s popularity — at one point his approval ratings neared 50 percent and topped 60 percent among Republicans — strengthened Mr. Buckley’s contention that “the people” supported Mr. McCarthy and the true danger came from his “enemies,” an out-of-touch minority who elevated themselves above the public. A glance at the list of best-selling conservative books in our own time — with titles like “Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me” and “The Enemy Within” — shows how durable Mr. Buckley’s approach has been.
What set Mr. Buckley apart, then and now, was his aristocratic detachment and cerebral style. It is hard imagine a populist agitator today summoning the wit to say, as Mr. Buckley did in the 1960s, “I should sooner live in a society governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the 2,000 faculty members of Harvard University.”
But Mr. Buckley was not just making a quip. He was drawing attention to the narrow provincialism of John F. Kennedy, a charismatic young Harvard man who had stirred the country with his promise of a “new frontier” populated by problem-solving experts — some imported from the Harvard faculty — whose forward-looking ideas would lift the country to unexampled heights.
The ideas themselves, however, were untested and did not have tradition and the weight of history behind them. A dozen years later, Mr. Buckley’s skepticism of elite expertise was vindicated by books like “The Best and the Brightest,” which showed how the hubris of Kennedy-era technocrats such as Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had led the nation to defeat in Vietnam.
The theme of duplicity and presumption in high places remains a staple of conservative thinking in the Trump years — whether it is the covered-up facts of the “forever wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq, the long-ignored costs of neoliberal economic policies that hollowed out industrial areas or the unacknowledged costs of an intolerant “woke” culture that privileges some groups while reducing others to silence.
Those conditions gave us Mr. Trump and the radical conservatives of our own time, keen to complete the counterrevolution Mr. Buckley envisaged so many years ago — and poised to do it from the pinnacles of political and social power.
Sam Tanenhaus, a former editor of The New York Times Book Review, is the author of the forthcoming book “Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America,” from which this essay is adapted.
Source photographs by Win McNamee and Bachrach/Getty Images
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