Remembering the radical right authoritarian elite Bill Buckley

In 2008, FAIR published a remembrance about the politics of the influential radical Bill Buckley (1925-2008), a mainstream media creature who held the mainstream media in open contempt:

William F. Buckley, Rest in Praise

Glowing obits obscure an ugly record

Over the course of his career, William F. Buckley routinely reproached the “liberal media” from his perch high atop it. By his death on February 27, he’d published dozens of books, written decades of syndicated columns that appeared in hundreds of newspapers, and made thousands of television and radio appearances, among them some 1,500 on his own PBS show, Firing Line, the longest-running public affairs show in public television history.

Unsurprisingly, that same “liberal” media treated Buckley’s passing as the loss of a great intellectual and upstanding human being, with admiring obituaries that largely ignored a massive body of unfavorable material.

Buckley’s career began in 1951 with the publication of God and Man at Yale, an attack on his alma mater that urged the firing of professors whom he felt were insufficiently hostile to socialism and atheism. Despite this early assault on academic freedom, Buckley in later years routinely took offense at what he saw as liberal “political correctness” (e.g., National Review, 10/24/05; Post and Courier, 2/18/99).

During the Civil Rights Era, Buckley made a name for himself as a promoter of white supremacy. National Review, which he founded in 1955, championed violent racist regimes in the American South and South Africa.

A 1957 editorial written by Buckley, “Why the South Must Prevail” (National Review, 8/24/57), cited the “cultural superiority of white over Negro” in explaining why whites were “entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where [they do] not predominate numerically.” Appearing on NPR’s Fresh Air in 1989 (rebroadcast 2/28/08), he stood by the passage. “Well, I think that’s absolutely correct,” Buckley told host Terry Gross when she read it back to him.

A 1960 National Review editorial supported South Africa’s white minority rule (4/23/60): “The whites are entitled, we believe, to preeminence in South Africa.” In a 1961 National Review column about colonialism—which the magazine once called “that brilliantly conceived structure” (William F. Buckley, John Judis)–Buckley explained that “black Africans” left alone “tend to revert to savagery.” The same year, in a speech to the group Young Americans for Freedom, Buckley called citizens of the Congo “semi-savages” (National Review, 9/9/61).

National Review editors condemned the 1963 bombing of a black Birmingham Church that killed four children, but because it “set back the cause of the white people there so dramatically,” the editors wondered “whether in fact the explosion was the act of a provocateur—of a Communist, or of a crazed Negro” (Chicago Reader, 8/26/05).

Just months before the 1965 Voting Rights Act was passed, Buckley warned in his syndicated column (2/18/65) that “chaos” and “mobocratic rule” might follow if “the entire Negro population in the South were suddenly given the vote.” In his 1969 column “On Negro Inferiority” (4/8/69), Buckley heralded as “massive” and “apparently authoritative” academic racist Arthur Jensen’s findings that blacks are less intelligent than whites and Asians.

The ugliness of Buckley’s public advocacy was not restricted to race. McCarthy and His Enemies, published in 1954 and coauthored by Buckley with Brent Bozell Sr., called Sen. Joseph McCarthy “a prophet,” and described McCarthyism as “a movement around which men of good will and stern morality can close ranks.”

Buckley’s disdain for what he called “liberals’ fetishistic commitment to democracy” (William F. Buckley, John Judis) was evident in his admiration for dictators, including Spain’s Francisco Franco and Chile’s Augusto Pinochet. “General Franco is an authentic national hero,” wrote Buckley (National Review, 10/ 26/57), lauding the fascist for wresting Spain from its democracy and “the visionaries, ideologues, Marxists and nihilists” in charge. Pinochet was defended (National Review, 11/23/98) for deposing the democratically elected Salvador Allende, “a president who was defiling the Chilean constitution and waving proudly the banner of his friend and idol, Fidel Castro.”

The remembrance continues at length in that vein, but concludes with this blast at the mainstream media:

With such a wealth of unbecoming material—long-term support for racism, fascism, militarism and harshly intrusive policies into the private lives of individuals—one might have expected obituaries to present at least a mixed portrait of Buckley’s influential life. Considering the generosity Buckley received from a media he disdained, one shudders to think about the orgy of praise his death would have occasioned in a media more to his liking.  

Is it just me, or do the more radical pillars of what used to be called conservatism, now MAGA or radical right authoritarianism, look amazingly alike? Their distorted visions of reality, biases and their thinking all seem quite alike. They are all openly hostile to democracy and civil liberties. They all seem to apply about the same reasoning that leads to about the same beliefs and policy preferences. 

To me, Buckley spewing his bigoted authoritarian brand of politics in the 1950s and 1960s sounds very much like DJT and the Republican Party sounds in 2024. With more nuanced language about racism as a possible exception, the attitudes of Buckley are basically the same as the attitudes of MAGA. This is a reminder. The roots of MAGA go back a long ways in time. How far back? Arguably at least back to the 1800s, if not a century or two earlier than that.

This article raised the question: Was “true” conservatism always more like what Buckley and now MAGA espouse than what the now extinct moderates and liberals in the pre-MAGA Republican Party briefly represented? I wonder.