WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.,
FUSIONISM, AND THE
THREE-LEGGED STOOL OF
CONSERVATISM

David A. Keene

William F. Buckley edited National Review for nearly four decades and churned out an estimated 350,000 published words a year during that period. He traveled the country giving speeches and debating liberals on more than 500 American campuses. He published more than fifty books and hosted nearly 1,500 episodes of his public television show, Firing Line. George Nash, author of the most thorough history of the post–World War II conservative movement, said Buckley was “arguably the most important public intellectual in the United States in the past half century. . . . [F]or an entire generation, he was the preeminent voice of conservatism.” And, perhaps his greatest achievement, Buckley brought the disparate wings of an emerging new conservatism together to create a politically viable movement where none had existed.

HOW I BECAME A CONSERVATIVE

Like many who joined the conservative movement early, I began life as a Democrat. My story is worth the telling because it is so much like what was happening to many others just like me in the late 1950s and early 1960s. At fifteen, I stood in the snows of Wisconsin during the 1960 Democratic primary passing out literature for John F. Kennedy. I would later learn that the early conservative movement included many disillusioned former Democrats or the sons and daughters of former Democrats, liberals, dissidents, and worse.

Not only was I from a Democrat family, but I was from a working-class labor family. My father was a workingman and a union activist. He spent ten years as the president of the Labor Council of Rockford, Illinois. My mother was elected president of the Women’s Auxiliary of the United Auto Workers.

My parents were what many called “yellow dog” Democrats in those days, except that my father had actually once run for office in Rockford as a Republican. He did it for tactical reasons, but when a reporter for the local newspaper asked the famous labor union leader and socialist Walter Reuther as he passed through Rockford whether he realized that my father was a Republican, he said, “A Republican? I always thought he was a communist.”

Despite his strategic switch of party, my father lost his race and returned to being a staunch Democrat. For many of my generation, however, loyalty to the Democratic Party and the policies it represented began to change for good—thanks in large measure to Bill Buckley and National Review. Buckley’s magazine began popularizing ideas that just seemed to make sense to us and drew us away from the Democratic Party.

My own conversion came about while I was still in high school, only a year after I had stood on that street corner passing out Kennedy campaign literature. I was interested in politics and, more important, in ideas. Our high school librarian, perhaps a closet conservative herself, called me over to her desk one day and told me that she had ordered a copy of a book published in 1944 in Britain, by an economist named Friedrich Hayek, which she had been told could not be put on the library shelves.

In April 1945, Reader’s Digest released a condensed version of The Road to Serfdom by Hayek, an Austrian economist in residence at the University of Chicago. Daniel Yergin, in his book Commanding Heights, which chronicles the development of conservative free market thinking after World War II, has suggested that the Digest’s decision to popularize Hayek may have been the most important single publishing decision of the mid-twentieth century.

The book that had been banned from our school, however, was not The Road to Serfdom, but Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty. Our high school librarian wasn’t about to throw it out, so she told me I could have it if I wanted it. I took it home and read it, and it remains on my bookshelf to this day.

From Hayek to Buckley was an easy and natural step. I started to read National Review, and like thousands of budding young conservatives, I began eagerly devouring each new issue as it came out.

THE POWER OF BUCKLEY’S IDEAS

Political power and influence come ultimately from the power of ideas. Back in 1936, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote that ideas “are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribblers of a few years back. . . . Sooner or later it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.” Galbraith was referring to the scribblings of Marx and other philosophers who together produced the monsters of the twentieth century: Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao. But he could have been talking about William F. Buckley.

Buckley was all about ideas. In today’s world, he would be described as a public intellectual. He gave voice to the ideas that were to culminate in the modern political movement that he more than anyone called into being.

He burst onto the scene at the age of twenty-six with God and Man at Yale. This book was a powerful critique of the educational homogenization to which he was subjected as an undergraduate at that esteemed university. Four years later he founded National Review, a journal of opinion that would change the world.

To grasp the enormity of all this, one has to remember just what the political and intellectual landscape looked like in the years following World War II. Yergin describes the postwar period as a time in which collectivist faith in government dominated the world. Britain had become socialist and nationalized its industry. Country after country developed five- and ten-year plans under which the state would direct the national economy. History seemed to be not just on the side of collectivism and socialism, but on the side of communism. One has to remember that when Whittaker Chambers abandoned communism and penned Witness, he was convinced that he was leaving the winning side for the losing side. In this country, establishment intellectuals like Lionel Trilling dismissed the very idea of an American conservative tradition as silly at best and pathological at worst.

This was the world that young Bill Buckley set out in 1955 to challenge and to change with his magazine, National Review. The mission statement for its November 1955 maiden issue stated that National Review “stands athwart history, yelling stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.” Buckley didn’t know if he, or ultimately we, would prevail, but he knew that we had to give it a try, against formidable odds.

Buckley was the catalyst for popularizing and shaping the intellectual landscape and bringing about political change. As Buckley and his colleagues set about building the new movement, they spent a great deal of time recruiting and mentoring young conservative intellectuals, writers, and activists around the country. Buckley himself was always available to young people with advice, encouragement, and assistance. The same was true of many of those around him.

Frank Meyer, then the highest-ranking U.S. communist to defect, became both book review editor of National Review and the conscience of the growing movement. He also became my mentor and friend. Frank lived on top of a mountain in Woodstock, New York, wrote at night, and slept during the day. Young people like me made pilgrimages to see Frank, drink his whiskey, argue issues with him, and open ourselves to harassment from the great man when he didn’t think we were doing enough to advance the cause.

Like Buckley, Meyer was striving to turn the intellectual movement of the late 1950s into a political movement that might turn their ideas into reality. But to do this, different strains of conservatism would need to come together, and the movement would need to be purged of its fringe elements.

THE ORIGINS OF FUSIONISM

Buckley was determined to streamline the tiny but growing movement. Like most nascent intellectual movements, conservatism consisted mainly of academics, students, and writers. These intellectuals spent inordinate amounts of time and energy arguing about minor, as well as major, doctrinal differences. Included among them were the remnants of the old anti-Roosevelt coalition, isolationists, states’ rightists, a smattering of racists, the objectivist followers of the newly famous Ayn Rand, religious extremists, conspiracy theorists, and even a few monarchists. The mix was very interesting, but it was hard to imagine it as a viable political movement.

Buckley and his band of merry men and women at National Review decided that their immediate mission was to get rid of the crazies, the racists, and those who couldn’t get along with others. At the same time, they wanted to mold the remaining conservatives into a coalition that could give voice to a new intellectually vibrant conservatism capable of influencing the nation’s culture and politics. Through National Review, Buckley began knitting together the different strains of thought that he and his followers believed legitimate and capable of working together to form a viable conservative movement.

In those days, there were three main camps that had overlapping but occasionally conflicting views. These were: (1) the anti-communists who, like Buckley, Chambers, Burnham, and Frank Meyer, saw Marxism-Leninism as an existential threat to everything they held dear; (2) the libertarians, animated by a commitment to limited government, free markets, and individual liberty; and (3) the traditionalists who believed that free men must act morally to preserve those rights they cherished.

Buckley and Meyer were persuaded that these camps faced the very same threats and could be united in a larger movement. Free markets, individual autonomy, and religious freedom were all threatened by communism and its American agents and sympathizers. The United States was a fortress of freedom in a dangerous world and all who valued freedom and tradition were in the same boat. What’s more, none could afford to push the others overboard lest they all perish.

A coalition of these groups, Buckley and Meyer believed, could form the basis of a viable and long-lasting political conservatism that just might change the world. The emerging coalition was the product of what Meyer termed fusionism.

Before that movement could grow and attract others to their cause, though, they would first have to jettison those who made it difficult, if not impossible, for others to join. Some who were considered by outsiders at least to be part of this movement were unacceptable to the rest and had to be excised if the coalition was to hold together and grow.

I once told Frank Meyer that what they were doing was in fact following advice that my father had once given me. He had bought a tavern in the small Wisconsin town in which we lived and spent the first few weeks not attracting new customers, but throwing out some who seemed to have come with the place. “When you buy a tavern,” he told me, “you have to throw out those who’ve been tossed out of every other tavern in town or you will never attract any new customers.” It remains sound advice.

Buckley purged the mainstream conservative movement of what he considered fringe philosophies. The first to go were the Birchers. The John Birch Society was the brainchild of Belmont, Massachusetts, businessman Robert Welch and was named for a soldier killed in Korea by communist Chinese soldiers shortly after World War II ended. Welch considered John Birch the first casualty of the Cold War. The John Birch Society attracted tens of thousands of followers, but it quickly became apparent that Welch was a conspiracy theorist of the first order. Welch had suggested that President Eisenhower was a conscious agent of the communist conspiracy—to which Russell Kirk (a Buckleyite if there ever was one) responded, “Ike isn’t a communist; he’s a golfer.” John Birch Society’s bizarre theories were easily caricatured by a hostile establishment and used to tar conservatives like Buckley as part of what the press liked to call “the lunatic fringe.”

Buckley famously read the Birchers out of the movement. I was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin by then and a board member of Young Americans for Freedom, a national group founded by some young conservatives at Buckley’s Sharon, Connecticut, estate. Later, I would chair the organization. Soon after Buckley’s decision, the YAF board passed a resolution at our national convention denouncing the Birchers. It wasn’t easy at the time, but political necessity demanded it.

Next to go were the followers of Ayn Rand, the objectivists, who Buckley saw as too doctrinaire and whose militant atheism offended him and many other conservatives. According to Buckley, Rand’s atheistic philosophy of anti-altruism “risked, in fact, giving to capitalism that bad name that its enemies have done so well in giving it.”

Finally, Buckley could find no room in the movement for the racists and for the extreme libertarians who seemed most interested at the time in selling off the public highways and legalizing drugs. This group of libertarians agreed with the so-called new left that the United States rather than the communist world was mainly responsible for the Cold War.

Buckley ejected these groups from the movement, but not simply because he found their beliefs objectionable. Rather, he was carefully and deliberately attempting to assemble a conservative coalition that could present an appealing and consistent philosophical message to those fed up with the direction in which the United States seemed to be heading in the 1950s.

After the cleansing of these fringe elements, what remained was the traditional three-legged stool of conservatism: traditional conservatives, libertarians, and social conservatives united by a common hatred of communism and a fear that our nation might be sliding into socialism.

Buckley didn’t oppose diversity nor would he countenance future “purges” just to force ideological homogeneity. He believed conservatives needed to distance themselves from elements he saw were making it impossible to forge a politically effective movement from the philosophical and ideological jumble of the time. His stance in the context of the times was practical in that he believed strongly (and correctly) that if conservatives were ever to win the political power to achieve their policy ends, they would have to appeal to a broader sector of the electorate than they would be able to reach absent some retooling.

GOLDWATER TO REAGAN

Buckley and his followers succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. By 1964, the new conservatives would nominate Barry Goldwater as the Republican candidate for president, send the Eastern establishment packing, and effectively seize control of one of the nation’s major political parties.

After Goldwater was defeated in the general election, Buckley urged conservatives to begin putting together the infrastructure needed to train men and women not just to run for office but to win and govern. Buckley was instrumental in the formation of the American Conservative Union (ACU) in late 1964. The ACU is now best known for its main conference, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), started before PAC meant political action committee, a fund-raising vehicle created by campaign finance reforms in the seventies. He was deeply involved in the launching of the Philadelphia Society, which was also founded in 1964 “to sponsor the interchange of ideas through discussion and writing, in the interest of deepening the intellectual foundation of a free and ordered society, and of broadening the understanding of its basic principles and traditions.”

In 1965, Buckley decided to run for mayor of New York. He ran to show conservatives that it was possible to mount an offensive against the liberal establishment, but he didn’t expect to win. Asked at the time what he would do if by some miracle he did win, Buckley replied famously, “Demand a recount.”

During those turbulent 1960s, conservatives around the country paid attention to Buckley’s campaign. If Bill Buckley could run for mayor in the very belly of the liberal beast, many believed, they could get into politics themselves. They came out of the closet, stood up for their ideas, and ran for office. They even began to win.

Buckley quickly became the face of the emerging conservatism. He seemed to be everywhere. He was on television, in the bookstores, and in newspapers, and his magazine was becoming more and more influential. He was not just bright but engaging and entertaining. He was an implacable but happy warrior who fought on the battlefield of ideas rather than personalities. His friends included liberals as well as conservatives; he and John Kenneth Galbraith seemed to meet up every year in Switzerland to ski, and one was as likely to find him in the company of actor David Niven as conservative politician Barry Goldwater.

When Goldwater ran and captured the Republican presidential nomination in 1964, Buckley and his colleagues at National Review were torn. The “practical” Buckley wondered if Goldwater was the candidate most capable of vanquishing the Democrats, but the “ideological” Buckley saw the need for a conservative standard-bearer and eventually he and his magazine opted to strongly support the Arizona senator.

The Goldwater campaign gave Buckley what he’d been seeking. Just as he had called a philosophical movement into being and worked mightily to give it a political voice, Goldwater and his followers seized control of one of the nation’s major parties in answer to Buckley’s call.

Four years earlier, the senator from Arizona had been nominated for the vice presidency and in withdrawing his name from consideration had famously challenged conservatives to “grow up.” In nominating him, they did just that.

That campaign also produced Ronald Reagan, who, after delivering a nationwide address considered one of the high points of the 1964 campaign, went on to be elected governor of California in 1966. As governor, he was preparing for the day when a movement conservative in the Buckley mold would actually win the presidency. He made a last-minute attempt at securing the GOP nomination in 1968, but though the conservatives who nominated Goldwater four years before were in the ascendancy, that year’s nomination went to Richard Nixon as the candidate most thought had the best chance of winning.

I came to Washington two years later to work for President Nixon’s first vice president, Spiro Agnew. I had just graduated from law school, packed everything I owned into a U-Haul trailer, hooked it up to the bumper of my ten-year-old station wagon, and headed east at twenty-four years old.

In D.C. I was given a very nice office in what was then called the Executive Office Building next to the White House. I rearranged the furniture, hung my pictures, shelved my books, and began working.

A few days later, the vice president wandered into my office and observed that I had done a bang-up job of decorating. He then asked if I knew who had my office when Hubert Humphrey was vice president just a couple of years before. I said I had no idea, and he remarked, “No one else does, either.”

I’ve often thought that everyone who arrives in Washington would benefit from a similar bit of advice because, sadly, too many who come here to change the world conclude that the key is being here rather than the mission that brought them to Washington in the first place. The perks and apparent power that come with a job in the executive or legislative branch of the federal government are heady stuff for a young conservative, and the allure is hard to resist.

The problem is that those who allow their ambition to trump principle eventually become a part of the very problems they came to Washington to solve. Before I took the job with Vice President Agnew, I had been warned of this danger by one of the men I admired most. Dr. Walter Judd had been a Minnesota congressman and a champion of the early conservative movement. He was a mentor who advised me on politics and counseled me on personal decisions. In his view, people should not come to Washington “unless they were independently wealthy or had a profession or business to which they could return.” Otherwise, there was a good chance of being compromised, seduced, and forced to abandon principle to get ahead. I was neither wealthy nor established, so the one major decision I was to make I made without consulting Dr. Judd. I knew he would urge me to wait, make a life for myself, and jump in when I could walk away if I had to. He was upset by my decision, but although I didn’t consult him, I always kept his warning in mind.

The early movement was small, and those who joined were socialized and educated by the Buckley family and other leading conservatives. By the time we entered the fray, we knew why we were conservatives and what that meant. It made a real difference. Buckley and those of us who made up that early band witnessed what happened when conservatives actually took up the reins of power. But no one has come up with a real solution to the socialization problem, other than counseling people to pay attention to what my wife calls “your personal gyroscope” that knows where your truth lies.

Frank Meyer warned back in the 1960s that different constituencies within the movement might want very different things if they ever managed to come to power. Meyer even acknowledged that some conservatives might be willing to use the power of the state in ways others would find less than appealing. He urged, however, that rather than dealing with hypothetical situations, conservatives dedicate themselves to winning elections. Then they could “fight out their differences in the basement of the White House.”

When conservatives did end up in the White House, first in small numbers under Nixon and Ford, then in a theoretical majority in the Reagan days, those differences began to emerge—in part because many of the generation that inherited a movement in triumph had not been sufficiently socialized into the ethos of the movement Buckley had formed.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan delivered the triumph that had begun as a gleam in the eye of young Bill Buckley. The Reagan years changed the way in which people looked at government programs. After Roosevelt, there was an assumption that if there was a problem, the solution was to spend taxpayer money on it. Anyone who questioned that assumption obviously didn’t want to solve the problem. Reagan changed all that. After Reagan, there was a presumption—a still-dominant presumption—that if you have a problem and you want to spend money on it, you first need evidence that government is the solution, and that it won’t actually make the problem worse.

THE DISINTEGRATION OF THE FUSIONIST IDEAL

By the end of the Reagan administration, Buckley was convinced that the balance among the movement’s various constituencies was off-kilter. It seemed to him that some, including people in powerful positions, just did not grasp the nature and spirit of the movement. Many conservatives who had come to Washington to do good had stayed to do well; sectarianism and hubris were leading the movement down the road to foreseeable disaster.

This tendency was exemplified shortly after George H. W. Bush was elected president in 1988. Asked by a reporter if he considered himself a conservative, candidate Bush had said, “I am a conservative, but I’m not a nut about it.” His brother Prescott Bush called me around that time and said that he was thinking of running against Senator Lowell Weicker in the Connecticut primary. Weicker was still a Republican, but acted as an Independent. Prescott told me, “I need your help because we conservatives have to stick together.” I replied, “Prescott, you have never been a conservative, and you will never be one. If you want my help because I don’t like Lowell Weicker, that’s one thing, but don’t try that one.” He responded, “No, you don’t understand. Now that Reagan’s been elected, we’re all conservatives.” To Prescott and many others, “conservatism” was more of a party moniker than an idea-based philosophy.

In 1991, when President George H. W. Bush presented Bill Buckley with the Medal of Freedom at a White House ceremony honoring his life and work, it might have seemed that the movement he founded had triumphed. By that time, however, Buckley sensed that the movement was fraying around the edges.

Buckley had never been doctrinaire in his conservatism and opposed those who wanted to fit the movement with an ideological straitjacket. Over the years, he had differed with fellow conservatives on all manner of important issues. For example, he favored the legalization of marijuana for both libertarian and empirical reasons. The war on drugs, he was persuaded, would never be won and was far too costly to continue. He also favored a National Service mandate. He looked back at how earlier generations had been socialized through military service and believed young people had benefited greatly from the experience of service to their country.

Buckley had never been a follower, and he spoke up when he sensed that a new generation of conservatives was leading the movement in directions he considered politically and philosophically unsound. Like all movements that become popular, the fusionist achievement was threatening to come apart at the seams.

One can tell that an idea-driven movement is on the verge of great political success when the rats begin to board the ship. The new recruits that streamed into the conservative movement added to our numbers and were certainly well intentioned. There were too many, however, to be individually socialized into the core mission and spirit of the movement. Before long, they were becoming conservatives not because of Hayek or Buckley or Kirk, but because of Reagan, Bush, and Gingrich.

The tendency to attract new members who may not share or understand a movement’s core principles happens in many different settings. Think of the communists. At the end of the Soviet era, philosophical communists were hard to find. Instead, the Communist Party was like the Rotary Club—albeit a dangerous Rotary Club. People joined the party because that was how you got a patronage job. Membership was the key to professional success. Whereas Marx and Lenin had wanted to change the world, the communists of the late 1980s wanted job security, good salaries, and pensions. They were a bunch of thugs, but they weren’t Marxists or Leninists anymore.

A classic example of this trend occurred in Romania. As his regime began to collapse in 1989, the dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu ordered troops to fire on his citizens, and they did. In order to perpetrate this type of inhumanity, the troops had to believe that they were doing it for a purpose. They had to believe they weren’t just killing people; they were called to a higher good, much like today’s suicide bombers. The general who ordered the shooting later committed suicide, showing that communism had by that time lost the quasi-religious appeal that motivated true believers. The general couldn’t live with himself because he didn’t believe in the principles anymore. It was a sign that communism in Europe was on the verge of total collapse.

When I was a young conservative, you did not join the movement because it was the road to success. It was just as likely to be the road to political and professional oblivion. If you joined the movement, you did so because you believed in its core principles. By the 1980s, many people were joining the movement in hopes of getting a job in Washington. And for conservatives of this stripe, it seemed reasonable to compromise on principles a little here and there to remain in a position of influence and to achieve larger goals down the road.

Shortly after being elected Speaker of the House in 1995, Newt Gingrich brought his Republican colleagues together for a meeting. He told them that the single most important thing to remember was that it was vital that they be reelected. He told them the House Appropriations Committee was willing to give them whatever they might need to enhance their reelection chances, including supporting earmarks to bring pork spending to their districts. By that time, doing well had replaced doing good as a primary objective for many who had been elected as outspoken conservatives.

While many new conservatives managed to grasp the core values of the movement, fewer and fewer studied or read the philosophical texts. The result was a superficial brand of conservatism that was more political and situational than philosophical. This has led in recent years to a simplified conservatism whose adherents sound as if they’re reading from a sheet of “talking points” rather than reflecting the values that animated Buckley, Hayek, and the Founders.

The distinction is important, as Buckley’s description of President George W. Bush attests: “He is conservative,” Buckley told an interviewer, “but he is not a conservative.” In other words, he didn’t fully embrace the movement’s core principles. George W. Bush had neither devoured National Review nor understood the philosophical underpinnings of the movement that made it possible for him to become president.

The challenge for conservatism today, in which many conservatives are engaged, is to reeducate and resocialize the core of the movement, and remind new recruits of just what it means to be a conservative rather than simply “conservative.”

A few years ago, a CPAC banquet honored former conservative senator James Buckley—Bill’s brother—and former liberal senator Eugene McCarthy for their 1974 challenge to that era’s campaign finance reforms. At the banquet, McCarthy remarked, “You conservatives have had a good run, but you are in trouble because I keep hearing talk of hyphenated conservatives. That’s what happened to liberals in the 1960s, and when it happens you are headed for a crack-up.” In recent years there have emerged paleoconservatives, national defense conservatives, social and religious conservatives, constitutional conservatives, Tea Party conservatives, and neoconservatives—all vying for the right to redefine and lead the movement Buckley had called into being. It reminds one of the time Al Gore in Milwaukee mistranslated E pluribus unum as “out of one, many.”

As Bill looks down on conservatives today, he is no doubt hoping that we will be wiser than McCarthy’s liberals and will work as hard to preserve the conservative movement as he did to build it.