I’ve just finished reading Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America, a forthcoming biography of National Review founder William F. Buckley by Sam Tanenhaus. It is a magnificent, absorbing work about a man known as the father of postwar American conservatism, and one that will lead to a lot of debate when it is published early next month.

That debate will be good, as there is much to consider when thinking about a figure like Buckley today. The book itself is over 1,000 pages, and it’s best to break it down into parts. Naturally, Buckley was disliked by the left, and he was right about the nature of communism. Yet Buckley also has critics on the right. Many consider that over time Buckley kicked out too many real conservatives from of the movement he helped to found—conservatives like Pat Buchanan, who turned out to be right about many issues, such as immigration. Many of today’s conservative’s also suggest that Buckley’s errors led to the sad state of affairs at today’s National Review, a magazine that has become practically irrelevant.

For the purposes of this first part of the review, however, I’d like to focus on the things Buckley got right. Namely, communism and the totalitarian nature of the American left. The most important paragraph in Buckley appears in a section that takes place in the early 1960s. Buckley was debating Arthur Schlesinger Jr., an advisor to President Kennedy. Schlesinger thought that whenever dictatorships arose in the modern era it was “because democratic government is too weak, not because it is too strong.” The best way to prevent totalitarianism was for the government to create economic prosperity and social equality, providing “a minimum national standard to save individuals from intolerable handicaps.” Tanenhaus explains Buckley’s reaction:

This might sound good, Buckley countered, but in reality, Schlesinger and others were concealing their true intentions, their “intellectual desire to redirect society. Even if every citizen had a million dollars, John Kenneth Galbraith would still find a need for government action….There are in motion today forces that want to drain our power into a reservoir. I hope someday Mr. Schlesinger will turn in horror on the system he has abetted.”

Here Buckley gets to the heart of the matter. The left wants revolution and totalitarian control. Period. If every house had a full refrigerator and every American had a job, they would still be calling for revolution. To think otherwise is naïve. 

Buckley founded National Review in 1955. Tanenhaus reveals his bravery in those early years in his fight against totalitarianism. Buckley sent a reporter to Cuba to honestly report on Castro, and he openly called liberals who appealed to the Soviet Union cowards. He once proposed that Taiwan could “liberate the United States” because Taiwan’s fight against communism was much braver than any resistance to the same ideology taking place in the United States.

Yet, over time, National Review began to resemble the liberals Buckley once condemned. “National Review thinks we can make peace with the liberals in debates over principles and policies,” the conservative scholar James Piereson told me last year in an interview about the magazine. “But we can’t go too far lest they call us radicals. The other side thinks we are in a wartime situation: the left wants to destroy us. That is a large difference.”

Piereson said that the conservative divide is like a scene from The Godfather. In that film, after a rival faction tries to assassinate the head of the family, someone offers the possibility of a peace deal. “The two brothers reply that you can’t make peace with people who are trying to kill you,” Piereson said. Another conservative publisher put it to me in starker terms: “National Review thinks its job is to police the right. We think that our job is to defeat the left.” 

Piereson offered examples. There was the case of the Covington Catholic kids. In 2019, high school student Nicholas Sandmann was recorded on video wearing a Trump hat while smiling in the face of a drumming activist, Nathan Phillips, who accosted him at the Lincoln Memorial. National Review joined the liberal media in painting. Sandmann as an aggressor, when the truth was far different. National Review later issued an apology, but not before trashing the Trump-supporting teenagers as disrespectful punks. A National Review senior writer, Dan McLaughlin, likewise happily tweeted out his support for the long prison sentence given to one of the Jan. 6 protestors who entered the Capitol.

One fascinating thing about Buckley that few people fully appreciate, but which Tanenhaus explores, is Buckley’s Catholicism—and how different Buckley’s faith was from that of another prominent Catholic of his era: John F. Kennedy.

In the early 1960s, when Kennedy and his “New Frontier” were the rage, many in the press noted the similarities between Kennedy and Buckley. “The parallels were hard to miss,” Tanenhaus writes.

An Associated Press profile sent out over the wire to hundreds of newspapers at the beginning of Kennedy’s term noted many symmetries between Kennedy and Buckley. Both were “young, handsome, energetic, highly articulate Roman Catholics, with an Ivy League background and a high society foreground,” as well as being “the sons of millionaires, the grandsons of successful politicians, and the great grandsons of impoverished Irish immigrants … bestselling authors, sailing enthusiasts, and usually in need of a haircut.”

Yet the theological difference between the two men was crucial. Tanenhaus writes:

The Kennedy family’s immigrant story melted many hearts and minds, but it was steeped in the memory of nineteenth-century prejudice, the age when “no Irish need apply.” Buckley treated that history with indifference.

Buckley’s ancestors and parents had made their living in places like South Texas, New Orleans, and Mexico City. The Buckleys, Tanenhaus notes, were “at ease with its old history and long-standing values.” 

There was, however, one Catholic tradition Buckley “disdained”—the tradition of “social justice.” Buckley criticized Pope John XXIII over a papal encyclical on the topic, calling it a “venture in triviality.” The pope had protested the inequities in capitalist economies while ignoring “the demonic successes of the Communists.” As Tanenhaus, notes, “Buckley’s Catholicism was theological and spiritual, not ethnic or tribal.”

In other words, Buckley rejected the socialist utopianism of the left—whether it was the Catholic left or the broader American left. Thus, hisapproach to conservatism in the early years of National Review do not resemble the conciliatory posture of today’s National Review, but instead remind one of a MAGA supporter like Victor Davis Hanson or Michael Anton. Anton famously argued in his “Flight 93” essay that Hillary Clinton, if elected, would doom America to leftist totalitarianism—the left, in other words, was playing for keeps. In After the Flight 93 Election: The Vote that Saved America and What We Still Have to Lose, his 2018 book expanding on the original essay, Anton went further: “To stand up for truth, morality, the good, the West, America, constitutionalism and decency is to summon the furies. America cannot long go on like this. Something’s gotta give, and something will.”

Interestingly, Anton pinpoints the 2018 attack on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh as a turning point. “What the Kavanaugh affair has made clearer to me than ever,” he wrote, “is that the Left will not stop until all opposition is totally destroyed. The harm they do to people, institutions, mores and traditions is, in their view, not regrettable though unavoidable collateral damage; it is rather an essential element of the project.”

When that is understood, it’s easy to grasp how the left could accuse Kavanaugh, without proof, of sexual assault, drugging girls and gang rape.

Anton’s tone is noticeably different from the one expressed by National Review about the Kavanaugh attack. “Everyone is taking the wrong lessons from the Kavanaugh debacle,” wrote one-time NR editor Jonah Goldberg. When President Trump said “there were a lot of things happening that weren’t correct, they weren’t true, and there were a lot of things that were left unsaid” and that the lies had been “very unfair to the Judge,” Goldberg disagreed. “This is mostly nonsense,” Goldberg said. Kavanaugh had been saved by RINO Republicans, Goldberg insisted: “Once Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona had forced the FBI’s reinvestigation of Ford’s sexual-assault allegation, Kavanaugh’s confirmation hinged on the FBI findings and the votes of three Republican senators: Flake, Susan Collins of Maine, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.”

Goldberg criticized the “gloating and total war” of the “new statesmanship,” including what was said by Ryan Williams, the president of the Claremont Institute. Williams, Goldberg writes, “argues that the Kavanaugh battle retroactively vindicates Michael Anton’s famous ‘Flight 93’ argument of 2016: that the presidential election was a ‘charge the cockpit or you die’ moment for American conservatives.” Goldberg couldn’t see the attack on Kavanaugh itself as evil, something that is hard to imagine would have been a problem for William F. Buckley.

Then there was the piece by National Review editor Charles C. W. Cooke. In “Our Illiberal Moment,” Cooke argued that Americans are losing the virtues that are necessary to sustain a democratic republic. Cooke recounts the attack on Kavanaugh, when a mob formed and attempted to disregard due process and the presumption of innocence. “Sometime soon,” Cooke wrote, “the hideous standards that were crafted and reinforced by those attempting to bring down Kavanaugh will be used against someone with no power, money, name recognition, or institutional backing.”

Sometime soon? In fact those “hideous standards” had already been deployed against someone without power, money, name recognition or institutional standards. That person was me. The fact that Cooke missed all of that points to conservative journalism’s problem with doing basic reporting as well as the elite right’s tendency to wall itself off from regular people—something that highlights the ways that too many conservatives are much like the elites on the left.

One more thing is worthing noting. It’s impressive, as the Tanenhaus biography reveals, that in the early days of National Review, Buckley was so strongly focused on producing good-quality journalism. He sent reporters to communist countries, college campuses, and clandestine locations to get good stories from the source. In 2022, when I published by book The Devil’s Triangle about my involvement in the Brett Kavanaugh battle, National Review could not be bothered even to review it—something that would have been unthinkable under Buckley.

I was recently contacted by a journalist who writes for a glossy, high-end magazine. She is intrigued by the fact that a New York Times reporter recently apologized to me, as well as by some of the questions I raised in The Devil’s Triangle, and wants to do a profile. So while National Review ignores me and conservatives tell me to stop talking about the Kavanaugh experience, a liberal journalist is asking the questions that need to be answered about the lies told and who set the whole thing up. She will probably win an award when the piece is published. William F. Buckley would have been embarrassed by his magazine’s silence.