I was a fan of William F. Buckley, Jr. decades ago. And of Gore Vidal. The opposites of the Right and Left political thinking in their day, respectively. I still watch Buckley's Firing Line, now in the competent hands of Margaret Hoover. I came across the documentary Best of Enemies - Buckley vs Vidal (2015) on Netflix, that I highly recommend, and it got me thinking. It was about their 10-night ABC network airing during the Republican Convention in 1968 in Miami, Florida which I would love to get a chance to view...all 10 episodes. Even though each segment was only 15 minutes druing each night's 90-minute news show.
What would Buckley make of Pres. #47 Donald J Trump today? Not much I thought. So who is Buckley?
William F. Buckley Jr. was the most influential intellectual architect of modern American conservatism. He founded National Review in 1955 as the movement's flagship journal, hosted Firing Line for 33 years as the longest-running public affairs show in television history, and was widely regarded as the most skilled conservative debater of his generation. Erudite, witty, and relentlessly disciplined, he believed conservatism had to be intellectually serious to be politically durable. He was not a populist. He was the man who defined what the American right was supposed to be.
One of his most consequential acts was purging the John Birch Society from the conservative movement in the early 1960s, on the grounds that conspiratorial, anti-intellectual populism would destroy conservatism's credibility and marginalize it from mainstream American life. That decision shaped the Republican Party's intellectual identity for decades.
What He Actually Said About Trump
Around 2000, when Trump briefly pursued the Reform Party nomination, William F. Buckley wrote critically about him, in National Review, characterizing him as a demagogue whose essential appeal was flattering crowds while offering no substantive ideology beyond self-promotion. He identified Trump's narcissism as the core of his political identity. This was not a passing dismissal. Buckley chose his words with precision, and he used them deliberately.
It was in part reprinted in 2016, again in the National Review.
On MaGA and Populism
The Birch Society purge is the key lens here. MaGA, with its election denialism, conspiracy adjacency, contempt for institutional expertise, and grievance-driven mass politics, would look to Buckley like the Birchers' revenge. He spent decades trying to prevent exactly this kind of movement from capturing the Republican Party. Watching it succeed would have been, for him, a historic failure of conservative nerve.
On Institutions
Buckley was a deeply institutional man. Yale, the CIA, the Church, the Senate, the press. He believed civilization was built on inherited structures that required active defense against both left-wing leveling and right-wing wrecking. Trump's sustained assault on the Justice Department, the electoral system, NATO, and the independent press would not read to Buckley as disruption or strength. It would read as vandalism.
On Trade and Foreign Policy
Buckley was a free trader and a Cold War internationalist who saw the liberal international order as a necessary defense against totalitarianism. Tariff nationalism, America First isolationism, and hostility to alliances would be nearly incomprehensible to him as conservative positions. He would see them as strategic recklessness dressed up as patriotism.
On Style
This matters more than people credit. Buckley believed conservatism should project civilizational confidence, wit, and seriousness. He cared about what the movement looked like to educated people. Trump's rally aesthetic, the vulgarity, the grievance saturation, the contempt for precision and argument, would strike Buckley as not just politically wrong but as an embarrassment to everything he built.
Where It Gets Complicated
Buckley had his own contradictions. His civil rights record was late and troubled. He had an aristocratic streak that could shade into romanticizing hierarchy. And his loathing of the left was bone-deep, which might have made a clean break from the Republican Party psychologically difficult even as he watched it transform into something he didn't recognize.
His most likely posture would have been to call for a conservative reformation from within, probably to diminishing audiences, probably futilely.
The Bottom Line
Buckley would almost certainly argue that MaGA is not conservatism at all. It is a personality cult that has occupied conservatism's institutional infrastructure while gutting its intellectual content. He would place himself, however uncomfortably, alongside people like George Will and David Frum who chose principle over party. And he would reserve his sharpest contempt not for Trump, whom he had already diagnosed clearly in 2000, but for the conservative intellectuals and Republican officials who knew better and said nothing.
The movement he built was taken over by the kind of man he spent his career warning about.
He saw it coming a quarter century ago.
Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!
JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington.
He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.
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