Even with
no realistic chance to win the race for New York City mayor in the fall, William F. Buckley, Jr. announced that he would campaign as the candidate of the
Conservative Party 60 years ago this week.
The National
Review editor and newspaper columnist entered the race hoping to deny
victory in November to the Republican nominee, John Lindsay. He didn’t
achieve that goal, but the 13% he did pull indicated a strong rightward drift
in the New York GOP that eventually forced Lindsay to seek reelection as the
Liberal Party candidate four years later—and, eventually, to leave the
Republican Party altogether.
Buckley
also hopped his run would be “fun,” and so it proved, especially for reporters
delighted by the copy provided by a candidate never at a loss for
words—especially big ones.
It all
started with his initial press conference, when his response to a question on
what he would do if elected became an instant classic in the annals of
campaigning: “Demand a recount.”
A
self-styled “radical conservative,” Buckley disagreed with virtually every
major liberal initiative of the prior three decades, from the New Deal’s
economic measures to civil-rights legislation, and regarded with horror
Republican efforts to move to the center to accommodate these.
A
prominent campaign of his read, “He has the guts to tell the truth: WILL YOU
LISTEN?”
At the end
of three terms under Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr., not to mention three
decades under the increasing control of urban planner and neighbor destroyer Robert Moses, New
York was entering a spiral of urban decay that would climax in its bankruptcy
crisis in the autumn of 1975. Crime, inner-city unrest, and busing proposals were
fueling a white backlash against civil rights.
An
initial, positive response from cops encouraged Buckley to run. But his support
widened after that to the outer New York boroughs, where residents felt their
concerns were ignored. He could be coy in how he exploited such appeals. Though
he refused to grant that racial superiority had a biological basis, he had
written National Review editorials criticizing federal attempts to end
segregation.
During his
mayoral campaign, he said whites supporting the candidacy of segregationist
Governor George Wallace were not motivated by racism but by dislike of
African-American figures like author James Baldwin and activist Bayard Rustin who
“despise the American way of life and our civilization,” and “challenge root
and branch the American approach to free civil order.”
His
brilliance lay in how he could press hot-button issues in the coolest possible
manner: with polysyllabic vocabulary delivered with a posh, mid-Atlantic
pronunciation and coruscating wit, concluding with a sly grin and a flick of
his reptilian tongue.
In spite
of the liberal leanings of many reporters, even they couldn’t help but chuckle
at his best sound bites (e.g., on his two rivals, the tall Republican Lindsay
and the short Democrat Abraham Beame: “The differences between Mr. Beame
and Mr. Lindsay are biological, not political”).
Not having
compiled a record in public office that needed to be defended, Buckley found
himself on ground ideally suited to a skill he had cultivated since his Yale
days, particularly after a newspaper strike left a print information vacuum for
many voters: debates.
Buckley
was free to stake out unusual positions on issues. As future biographer Sam Tanenhaus
discussed in an October 2000 New York Times Magazine article on “The
Buckley Effect,” one of these turned out to be nearly four decades ahead of its
time: bicycle paths as an alternative means of transportation throughout the
city, similar to what he had seen in major European cities.
Other positions
turned out to be a good deal less mainstream—certainly in the context of his
time, and even more so now:
* “either
lock up teenage felons or make their parents legally responsible for them”;
* cut off welfare
for everyone but invalids and mothers "looking after children 14 years or
younger"’
*“relocating
chronic welfare cases outside the city limits”;
*legalize
drugs for adults—but have…
*“great
and humane rehabilitation centers” for drug addicts;
*encourage
emigration;
Tanenhaus
says that Buckley was an arguer rather than a thinker—never able to finish what
he hoped would be his magnum opus, The Revolt of the Masses. But
arguing, in the form of forensic skills, was indisputably what he had developed
as far back as his undergraduate days at Yale.
Just as
his much-publicized two faceoffs with African-American novelist and activist
James Baldwin served as an appetizer to his mayoral campaign, the latter race
led in the following year to the start of a three-decade stint hosting his
public television show, Firing Line.
During the
campaign, Buckley increasingly absorbed the lesson that he could blunt
opponents’ threats better through genial wit than with harsh rhetoric. More
than a decade later, he would back a Republican candidate for President with
even greater skills of this kind: Ronald Reagan.
In his new biography of Buckley, Tanenhaus notes that, for all their differences in style,
it would be a mistake to think that Donald Trump has little in common with the conservative
movement that Buckley helped coordinate in the postwar period. In an article
last year for The American Prospect, Rick Perlstein seconds that idea,
noting that “new scholarship suggests that Trump’s rise was not a reversal of
what Buckley was up to, but in many ways, its apotheosis.”
I believe
it is more appropriate to believe that the nature of Buckley’s forays into the
public arena will never be seen again. He belonged to a group that Mitchell
Ross, in a provocative 1978 book, called The Literary Politicians—figures
who “practice politics by writing books” rather than continually running for
public office.
Whether in
newspaper columns, extended television interviews, and especially entire books,
Buckley and other figures in the book such as John Kenneth Galbraith, Arthur
Schlesinger, and Gore Vidal preferred to advocate positions at length.
They did
not always fit comfortably into the party orthodoxy of their time and, though
they could toss out epigrams with the best of them, their arguments rested on
logical propositions rather than 30-second soundbites. The nature of American
political discourse is poorer for the absence of the forums where they could
appear to best advantage.
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