‘Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America’
By Sam Tanenhaus
Random House, 1,040 pages

What would William F. Buckley Jr. have made of the presidencies of Donald J. Trump? That’s the inevitable question after poring over Sam Tanenhaus’s forthcoming biography of the man who did so much to forge modern American conservatism. Yet “Buckley” concludes with its subject’s death in 2008 and the movement he nursed has in the intervening years been transformed by Mr. Trump and his campaign to Make America Great Again.

Marking the continuities and disruptions within conservatism is among the pleasures afforded by Mr. Tanenhaus’s doorstop of a book, clocking in at more than 1,000 pages. Considering the book’s long gestation, one can forgive its length, with the first 458 pages taking the story up only to 1960, five years after National Review’s launch and as Buckley’s political activism is just hitting its stride.

Mr. Tanenhaus is sparing on sweeping analysis of the larger trends in favor of granular detail of Buckley’s activities and interests — which were famously wide-ranging. This in a sense echoes Buckley’s own tendency to avoid abstractions and philosophical rhapsodizing in favor of focusing on the disputes of the day. “He was a controversialist, not a thinker and still less a theorist,” is how Mr. Tanenhaus puts it.

Embedded within a chronicle of a life lived well — with a glittering cast of bold-faced-named friends, palatial residences, and swift yachts — is the tale of how Buckley salvaged a conservative movement that in the aftermath of World War II seemed like a “thankless persuasion,” as Mr. Tanenhaus puts it. Lionel Trilling at the time famously mocked conservatism’s intellectual pretensions as a series of “irritable mental gestures that seek to resemble ideas.”

Buckley, from his youth, zeroed in on this problem, using his own talents and marshaling those of others to shape an intellectual conservatism that eventually came to power. Key to the success of that effort was Buckley’s talent in weeding out from the mainstream of the movement fringe features, like antisemitism, racism, and John Birch Society-style conspiratorialism. While Goldwater’s campaign in 1964 was a setback, Buckley’s cause bore fruit.

Reagan’s election, in Mr. Tanenhaus’s telling, amounted to a triumph for Buckley, a culminating moment for conservatism, and yet at once an anticlimax. Even before the 1980 election, “the prospect of a new era was coming into view,” Mr. Tanenhaus says, as Buckley’s “disparate worlds at last were coming into full and satisfying alignment.” The “radical conservative was now the conservative colossus, without the slightest impulse to yell ‘Stop!’”

Reagan’s Cold War victory over communism served to loosen the bonds that held together the disparate strands of American conservatism — even if it was the political right’s finest hour. The logic of a Republican party combining neoconservatives, globalist free traders, proponents of low taxes and laissez-faire economics, evangelicals, and a hard-right faction seemed to lose salience, with implications that are still in the process of being sorted out. 

Which brings us back to Mr. Trump and his MAGA movement. Would Buckley have donned a red hat, as it were? One imagines that Buckley would appreciate the energy Mr. Trump has injected into the conservative cause, even if his enthusiasm has occasionally run up against the boundaries of what passed for propriety in Buckley’s day. It is hard to envision Buckley cheering on the January 6 rioters.

Yet Buckley, too, was one of the most vocal backers of Senator McCarthy, even when his anti-communist zeal crossed the line into demagoguery. Per Mr. Tanenhaus’s chronicle, it’s not a stretch, at least for this reviewer, to see Buckley taking Mr. Trump’s excesses in stride while chronicling with his trademark wit the larger crusade of smaller government, lower taxes, and constitutional government as the conservative movement the scribe built plunges into the future.

Buckley, I’d like to think, would have found today a place for his own conservatism. I didn’t know him, but he moved his column to the Sun when it launched. One imagines he would have been proud of and generous toward his intellectual heirs who publish the magazine he founded and have “come about” — to use a sailing metaphor — adroitly amid the tempests of Trump, even those when Buckley might have stood athwart the news and cried “stop.”