{"id":109979,"date":"2025-05-13T20:20:24","date_gmt":"2025-05-14T01:20:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=109979"},"modified":"2025-05-13T20:20:24","modified_gmt":"2025-05-14T01:20:24","slug":"109979","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=109979","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

The Totalitarian Impulse Buckley Knew<\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve just finished reading\u00a0Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America<\/em>,\u00a0a forthcoming biography<\/a>\u00a0of\u00a0National Review<\/em>\u00a0founder 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2014conservatives like Pat Buchanan, who turned out to be right about many issues, such as immigration. Many of today\u2019s conservative\u2019s also suggest that Buckley\u2019s errors led to the sad state of affairs at today\u2019s\u00a0National Review<\/em>, a magazine that has become practically irrelevant.<\/p>\n

For the purposes of this first part of the review, however, I\u2019d like to focus on the things Buckley got right. Namely, communism and the totalitarian nature of the American left. The most important paragraph in\u00a0Buckley<\/em>\u00a0appears in a section that takes place in the early 1960s. Buckley was debating Arthur Schlesinger Jr., an advisor to President Kennedy.\u00a0Schlesinger thought that whenever dictatorships arose in the modern era it was \u201cbecause democratic government is too weak, not because it is too strong.\u201d The best way to prevent totalitarianism was for the government to create economic prosperity and social equality, providing \u201ca minimum national standard to save individuals from intolerable handicaps.\u201d Tanenhaus explains Buckley\u2019s reaction:<\/p>\n

This might sound good, Buckley countered, but in reality, Schlesinger and others were concealing their true intentions, their \u201cintellectual desire to redirect society. Even if every citizen had a million dollars, John Kenneth Galbraith would still find a need for government action\u2026.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.\u201d<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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 na\u00efve.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Buckley founded\u00a0National Review<\/em>\u00a0in 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 \u201cliberate the United States\u201d because Taiwan\u2019s fight against communism was much braver than any resistance to the same ideology taking place in the United States.<\/p>\n

Yet, over time,\u00a0National Review<\/em>\u00a0began to resemble the liberals Buckley once condemned. \u201cNational Review<\/em>\u00a0thinks we can make peace with the liberals in debates over principles and policies,\u201d the conservative scholar James Piereson told me last year in an interview about the magazine. \u201cBut we can\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Piereson said that the conservative divide is like a scene from\u00a0The Godfather<\/em>. In that film, after a rival faction tries to assassinate the head of the family, someone offers the possibility of a peace deal.\u00a0\u201cThe two brothers reply that you can\u2019t make peace with people who are trying to kill you,\u201d Piereson said. Another conservative publisher put it to me in starker terms: \u201cNational Review<\/em>\u00a0thinks its job is to police the right. We think that our job is to defeat the left.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0National Review<\/em>\u00a0joined the liberal media in painting. Sandmann as an aggressor, when the truth was far different.\u00a0National Review<\/em>\u00a0later\u00a0issued an apology,<\/a>\u00a0but not before trashing the Trump-supporting\u00a0teenagers<\/em>\u00a0as disrespectful punks. A\u00a0National Review<\/em>\u00a0senior 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.<\/p>\n

One fascinating thing about Buckley that few people fully appreciate, but which Tanenhaus explores, is Buckley\u2019s Catholicism\u2014and how different Buckley\u2019s faith was from that of another prominent Catholic of his era: John F. Kennedy.<\/p>\n

In the early 1960s, when Kennedy and his \u201cNew Frontier\u201d were the rage, many in the press noted the similarities between Kennedy and Buckley. \u201cThe parallels were hard to miss,\u201d Tanenhaus writes.<\/p>\n

An Associated Press profile sent out over the wire to hundreds of newspapers at the beginning of Kennedy\u2019s term noted many symmetries between Kennedy and Buckley. Both were \u201cyoung, handsome, energetic, highly articulate Roman Catholics, with an Ivy League background and a high society foreground,\u201d as well as being \u201cthe sons of millionaires, the grandsons of successful politicians, and the great grandsons of impoverished Irish immigrants \u2026 bestselling authors, sailing enthusiasts, and usually in need of a haircut.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yet the theological difference between the two men was crucial. Tanenhaus writes:<\/p>\n

The Kennedy family\u2019s immigrant story melted many hearts and minds, but it was steeped in the memory of nineteenth-century prejudice, the age when \u201cno Irish need apply.\u201d Buckley treated that history with indifference.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Buckley\u2019s ancestors and parents had made their living in places like South Texas, New Orleans, and Mexico City. The Buckleys, Tanenhaus notes, were \u201cat ease with its old history and long-standing values.\u201d<\/p>\n

There was, however, one Catholic tradition Buckley \u201cdisdained\u201d\u2014the tradition of \u201csocial justice.\u201d Buckley criticized Pope John XXIII over a papal encyclical on the topic, calling it a \u201cventure in triviality.\u201d The pope had protested the inequities in capitalist economies while ignoring \u201cthe demonic successes of the Communists.\u201d As Tanenhaus, notes, \u201cBuckley\u2019s Catholicism was theological and spiritual, not ethnic or tribal.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, Buckley rejected the socialist utopianism of the left\u2014whether it was the Catholic left or the broader American left. Thus, hisapproach to conservatism in the early years of\u00a0National Review<\/em>\u00a0do not resemble the conciliatory posture of today\u2019s\u00a0National Review<\/em>, but instead remind one of a MAGA supporter like Victor Davis Hanson or Michael Anton. Anton famously argued in his \u201cFlight 93\u201d essay that Hillary Clinton, if elected, would doom America to leftist totalitarianism\u2014the left, in other words, was playing for keeps. In\u00a0After the Flight 93 Election: The Vote that Saved America and What We Still Have to Lose<\/em>, his 2018 book expanding on the original essay, Anton went further: \u201cTo 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\u2019s gotta give, and something will.\u201d<\/p>\n

Interestingly, Anton pinpoints the 2018 attack on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh as a turning point. \u201cWhat the Kavanaugh affair has made clearer to me than ever,\u201d he wrote, \u201cis 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

When that is understood, it\u2019s easy to grasp how the left could accuse Kavanaugh, without proof, of sexual assault, drugging girls and gang rape.<\/p>\n

Anton\u2019s tone is noticeably different from the one expressed by\u00a0National Review<\/em>\u00a0about the Kavanaugh attack. \u201cEveryone is taking the wrong lessons from the Kavanaugh debacle,\u201d wrote one-time\u00a0NR<\/em>\u00a0editor Jonah Goldberg. When President Trump said \u201cthere were a lot of things happening that weren\u2019t correct, they weren\u2019t true, and there were a lot of things that were left unsaid\u201d and that the lies had been \u201cvery unfair to the Judge,\u201d Goldberg disagreed. \u201cThis is mostly nonsense,\u201d Goldberg said. Kavanaugh had been saved by RINO Republicans, Goldberg insisted: \u201cOnce Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona had forced the FBI\u2019s reinvestigation of Ford\u2019s sexual-assault allegation, Kavanaugh\u2019s confirmation hinged on the FBI findings and the votes of three Republican senators: Flake, Susan Collins of Maine, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.\u201d<\/p>\n

Goldberg criticized the \u201cgloating and total war\u201d of the \u201cnew statesmanship,\u201d including what was said by Ryan Williams, the president of the Claremont Institute. Williams, Goldberg writes, \u201cargues that the Kavanaugh battle retroactively vindicates Michael Anton\u2019s famous \u2018Flight 93\u2019 argument of 2016: that the presidential election was a \u2018charge the cockpit or you die\u2019 moment for American conservatives.\u201d Goldberg couldn\u2019t see the attack on Kavanaugh itself as evil, something that is hard to imagine would have been a problem for William F. Buckley.<\/p>\n

Then there was the piece by\u00a0National Review<\/em>\u00a0editor Charles C. W. Cooke. In\u00a0\u201cOur Illiberal Moment,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0Cooke 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. \u201cSometime soon,\u201d Cooke wrote, \u201cthe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sometime soon? In fact those \u201chideous standards\u201d had already\u00a0been deployed against someone without power, money, name recognition or institutional standards.\u00a0That person was me<\/a>. The fact that Cooke missed all of that points to conservative journalism\u2019s problem with doing basic reporting as well as the elite right\u2019s tendency to wall itself off from regular people\u2014something that highlights the ways that too many conservatives are much like the elites on the left.<\/p>\n

One more thing is worthing noting. It\u2019s impressive, as the Tanenhaus biography reveals, that in the early days of\u00a0National Review<\/em>, 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\u00a0The Devil\u2019s Triangle<\/em>\u00a0about my involvement in the Brett Kavanaugh battle,\u00a0National Review<\/em>\u00a0could not be bothered even to review it\u2014something that would have been unthinkable under Buckley.<\/p>\n

I was recently contacted by a journalist who writes for a glossy, high-end magazine. She is intrigued by the fact that a\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0reporter recently\u00a0apologized to me<\/a>, as well as by some of the questions I raised in\u00a0The Devil\u2019s Triangle<\/em>, and wants to do a profile. So while\u00a0National Review<\/em>\u00a0ignores me and conservatives\u00a0tell me to stop talking\u00a0<\/a>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\u2019s silence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Totalitarian Impulse Buckley Knew I\u2019ve just finished reading\u00a0Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America,\u00a0a forthcoming biography\u00a0of\u00a0National Review\u00a0founder 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 … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-109979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial-o-the-day","category-enemies-foreign-domestic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=109979"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109979\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":109981,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109979\/revisions\/109981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=109979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=109979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=109979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}