Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America by Sam Tanenhaus, Random House, 2025.

Bill Buckley was one of those people I always wanted to know more about but was starved of information on. Finally, Sam Tanenhaus has filled that gap in my knowledge. I knew he had founded National Review, hosted Firing Line, insulted Gore Vidal in a debate during the 1968 presidential election, liked sailing, was Catholic, and spoke with an indiscernible mid-Atlantic drawl which had something of the King’s English mixed with Southern Plantation moonlight. But beyond this, little else.

What Tanenhaus gives us is a Buckley who sought to make American conservatism respectable through what, in modern British parlance, we call shithousery. By that, I mean he pioneered the art of high-brow trolling, using performative vocabulary, dripping irony, deliberate interruptions, and theatrical condescension to completely unravel an opponent’s composure while maintaining a smirk of innocent detachment.

He comes across as a man who was charming and droll in character, loyal to family and friends, and a kind and encouraging mentor. But I also found in him distasteful traits: an almost insatiable appetite for scandal and trashy gossip below the patrician standards he set for himself, as well as in contradiction with the humility and contrition his Catholicism demanded. He seemed too willing to play fast and loose with facts if it furthered the causes he supported, even when evidence was clearly against him; a poor judge of character, and financially reckless.

He was a creature of Whitmanite multitudes: at once a patrician and a populist, a Catholic aristocrat in a Protestant republic, both cosmopolitan and nationalist, a libertarian with respect for tradition, and an anti-elitist formed by Yale, prep schools, inherited wealth, and old-world domestic arrangements. There is also an ugly Buckley who opposed civil rights and defended segregationist arguments such as poll taxes and intelligence tests, not to mention his bizarre fealty to the odious Joseph McCarthy and convicted murderer Edgar Smith Jr.

As someone with frustrated literary ambitions, I empathised with his need to be accepted as a profound political philosopher and not merely a brilliant polemicist. For as much as he relished debate, there was no number of intellectual scalps he could claim that would ever satisfy his desire to be taken seriously as a deep thinker building on the conservative legacy first laid down by Edmund Burke. What he excelled at was bringing together anti-communists, Catholic traditionalists, free-market liberals, Southern reactionaries, anti-New Deal businessmen, social conservatives, ex-liberals, and young movement activists, and making them feel they belonged to a single cause.

His achievement was to discipline the American Right by deciding who among the swivel-eyed loons should be absorbed, expelled, or tolerated until they became embarrassing or inconvenient. Like a discerning diamond dealer, he took a raw, unpolished, and often chaotic political subculture and meticulously cut, polished, and sorted its components to create a high-value, mainstream intellectual product. Just as the antisemitism and paranoia of the John Birch Society and the atheism of the Objectivist movement were purged, so the cultural conservatism of Russell Kirk and Albert Jay Nock was integrated, along with the free-market economics of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. The cranky anti-communism of former fellow traveller Whittaker Chambers was transformed into an existential crusade for Western civilisation. Yet while harnessing the bucking-bronco energies of the grassroots conservative movement, unlike Shelley’s ideal poet, he could never quite bring it under a God-like yoke. One could argue that the current state of the Right across the pond is a testament to the need for another Buckley to come. His fusionism has become diffuse.

My one criticism is that the period from Reagan’s election in 1980 to Buckley’s death in 2008 is covered in fewer than a hundred pages, while it is insinuated that they were in some form of patron-mentor relationship, with little actual evidence of this being the case. It seems to conflate Reagan’s conservative revolution with Buckley’s fusionist one, when the latter was already on the wane, or at least had been overtaken. Reagan’s revolution appears to me like a chest-burster violently interrupting the dinner of Buckley’s John Hurt before proceeding to ravage the ship he had so meticulously constructed and captained. To paraphrase Deleuze, Reagan took Buckley from behind and gave him an uncontainable populist monster rather than the refined heir he wanted.

When reading this book, my mind turned to Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. I say this because there is something of the aesthete in Buckley that recognised the need for style, charm, and scandal if one is to survive and thrive in media-obsessed modernity. Kierkegaard’s aesthete is the man who has lost the absolute and therefore lives by the interesting: wit, irony, variation, performance, detachment — all mobilised in the war against boredom.

Buckley inverted that figure. As a Catholic, conservative, moralist, and anti-relativist, he fully possessed the absolute, yet he borrowed the aesthete’s weapons. His aestheticism was disciplined by the ethical labour of institution-building and by the religious conviction that politics answers to truth. But the fact remains, for me, that an aesthete will always answer to his own appetite, and he seemed to love scandal and the drama of conflict for its own sake. It is this temptation that haunts the American conservative movement: the temptation to confuse scandal with truth, denunciation with proof, and performance with seriousness.