As 1954 ended, the future of the “American Right” looked bleak.
Sen. Robert Taft, “Mr. Republican,” was dead of cancer; Joe McCarthy had been censured by the U.S. Senate; the Democrats had retaken Congress after a brief Republican interregnum; President Dwight Eisenhower had morphed into a modern Republican; and Barry Goldwater was an unknown junior senator from Arizona. When Russell Kirk published his intellectual history of Anglo-American conservatism in 1953, he considered titling it The Conservatives’ Rout.
Liberal Lionel Trilling’s caustic comment that conservatism expressed itself only in “irritable mental gestures” seemed all too apt.
It was at this pivotal moment that William F. Buckley Jr. began the most far-reaching adventure of his life—the creation of a conservative journal that would challenge the liberal zeitgeist and materially mold a national movement that dominated American politics in the 1980s and beyond.
The objective of the new magazine, Buckley wrote in early 1955 to a prospective supporter, was “to revitalize the conservative position” and “influence the opinion-makers” of the nation. The challenge facing the new conservative magazine was enormous: the liberals had eight weekly journals of opinion, conservatives none (except for the Human Events newsletter). Liberals “know the power of ideas,” Buckley said, “and it is largely for this reason that socialist-liberal forces have made such a great headway in the past thirty years.”
The young editor (not yet 30) called his publication “a formative journal” that would “change the nation’s intellectual and political climate” just as The Nation and the New Republic helped usher in “the New Deal Revolution.”
He conceded that it was a bold objective, but he argued that the time was right for a magazine (and by implication a movement) that would oppose the growth of government, social engineers, and those who counseled coexistence with Communism, intellectual conformity, the elimination of the market economy, and world government.
Unrealistic? Hubristic? Liberals asked, who did this infant terrible think he was? He was in fact a worker of political miracles, an indefatigable champion of liberty, a principled conservative who would not bow to conventional wisdom, a master fusionist who brought together and kept together conservatives, libertarians, and anti-communists to form an intellectual movement, then a political movement.
He was the prime mover in the formation of Young Americans for Freedom and the Conservative Party of New York as well as a candidate for mayor of New York City and almost a candidate for U.S. senator from New York.
By reason of his wealth and social standing, Bill Buckley could have been the playboy of the Western world. He chose instead to be the St. Paul of the American conservative movement, proselytizing for conservative ideas for nearly sixty years.
Today, on Nov. 24, we mark Buckley’s 90th birthday and celebrate his life.
To borrow from George Will, before there was Ronald Reagan, there was Barry Goldwater, and before there was Barry Goldwater, there was National Review, and before there was National Review, there was William B. Buckley Jr., author, editor, columnist, public affairs host, lecturer, debater, harpsichordist, sailor, skier, and spy.
His vision of ordered liberty shaped and molded and guided American conservatism from its infancy to its maturity, from a cramped suite of editorial offices in New York City to Ronald Reagan’s White House, from a set of “irritable mental gestures” to an ideological force that transformed American politics.
