William F. Buckley, Jr.

BA, Yale University

Bill Buckley! “Patron saint” of conservatism, polysyllabic sesquipedalianist, and role model for every insufferable twit, genteel racist, and snot-nosed reactionary douchebag of the past sixty years!

Buckley graduated an Eli (with honors) in 1950. A year later the whole world learned, in God and Man at Yale, just how mad he was at his socialistic, atheistic professors (in the Religious Studies Department!). The book caused a stir. Some said Buckley’s fervent Catholicism made him a less-than-ideal critic of the treatment of religion at the essentially Protestant university. But others were thrilled to discover a smart, young conservative voice, a voice that brought conservatism into the twentieth century by combining traditionalism with libertarianism (good luck with that) and anticommunism.

Presumably they were similarly thrilled when, in the August 24, 1957, issue of National Review, Buckley published the editorial “Why the South Must Prevail.” In it, he wrote that until “long term equality could be achieved,” segregation was necessary. “The central question that emerges… is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.”

Sure, this came barely twelve years after the Allied defeat of Nazi Germany, whose doctrine of the “master race” had become (and remains) the very definition of evil. But look at the fancy language! Buckley’s editorial is not even a denial of southern racism, but a defense of it:

It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural superiority of White over Negro but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists. The question, as far as the White community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage.

But is it “unpleasant”? To disagree with those ever-so-busy egalitarians? Not really. There’s more:

NATIONAL REVIEW believes that the South’s premises are correct. If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened. It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority. Sometimes it becomes impossible to assert the will of a minority, in which case it must give way, and the society will regress; sometimes the numerical minority cannot prevail except by violence: then it must determine whether the prevalence of its will is worth the terrible price of violence.

(Tr.: If the Negroes are federally guaranteed the vote, they’ll destroy civilization. The South must prevent this—by violence, if necessary, after first deciding whether it’s worth it.)

To be sure, the South “must not exploit the fact of Negro backwardness to preserve the Negro as a servile class.” Glad we got that straight. And, therefore,

So long as it is merely asserting the right to impose superior mores for whatever period it takes to effect a genuine cultural equality between the races, and so long as it does so by humane and charitable means, the South is in step with civilization.

In other words, keep segregation, Jim Crow, “colored only” drinking fountains and swimming pools and lunch counters and neighborhoods and schools, and wait patiently as the white South gradually brings the Negroes and their “mores” up to speed. The beatings will continue until morale improves.

Buckley mitigated these views—or thought he did; or claimed he did—over time. He later said it was a mistake for National Review to have opposed the civil rights legislation of 1964–65, and that he grew to admire Martin Luther King, Jr. Still, as late as 2004 he was pleased to play footsie with vocabulary. “The point I made about white cultural supremacy was sociological,” he told the New York Times Magazine. “The call for the ‘advancement’ of colored people presupposes they are behind,” he said, perhaps never having heard of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “Which they were, in 1958, by any standards of measurement.” (Tr.: See? Even the NAACP thought Negroes were backward. And look at their name! They still do!)

Speaking of the advanced race, Buckley visited South Africa in 1962, courted and brought there by the Information Ministry, making Buckley what Ta-Nehisi Coates calls “a press agent for apartheid.” Buckley wrote that apartheid “has evolved into a serious program designed to cope with a melodramatic dilemma on whose solution hangs, quite literally, the question of life or death for the white man in South Africa.” As with desegregation in the South, so with apartheid: Buckley presents the problem as the solution.

But it would be a mistake to think of Buckley as merely the thinking man’s racist. To his credit, he denounced Robert Welch and the John Birch Society, condemned anti-Semitism, and ran Whittaker Chambers’s scathing takedown of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

Then again, he was also the thinking man’s defender of right-wing thugs and dictators. He supported the vile Spanish strongman (and SNL punch line) Francisco Franco, calling him “an authentic national hero.” He cheered the coup that overthrew the democratically elected Chilean (Marxist) president Salvador Allende and brought to power central-casting dictator Augusto Pinochet. The Chilean government later revealed that during Pinochet’s rule more than 3,000 people had been killed or “disappeared,” as many as 40,000 political enemies were tortured, and 80,000 were imprisoned. But when Buckley interviewed Pinochet while it was happening and the supremo denied any involvement with all that, Buckley “was inclined to believe him.” “Inclined” is right.

Is that all? Yes, except for when Orlando Letelier, a Chilean activist and exile in Washington, DC, was blown up by a car bomb, and Buckley and National Review conducted an ongoing campaign hinting or stating—falsely—that Letelier had been a Cuban or Soviet agent.

Oh, and there was that terribly unfortunate AIDS business in the 1980s, when Buckley recommended that “everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals.”

As for the rest—his self-parodying languor; his snobbery disguised as discrimination; his clotted, show-offy prose style that’s influenced two generations of unreadably arch, nitwit “conservatives”; his enthusiastic support for right-wing kook Barry Goldwater and dithering actor-in-chief Reagan; his fondness for peanut butter and Bach and sailing—why bother? One of Yale’s most famous graduates proclaimed he was “standing athwart History yelling Stop,” when he was in fact obstructing progress, murmuring tautologies, and cosseting villains.