William F. Buckley Stood Athwart History and Then Built a Movement

Standing in front of a speeding train and shouting "Stop!" is a gesture, not a plan. Anybody who has ever watched a train knows how that ends.

So why has one of the most famous sentences in American conservatism been, for seventy years, a picture of a man doing precisely that? Because the man who wrote it knew perfectly well it was a gesture, and meant it as a joke with a point. William F. Buckley Jr. said in 1955 that his new magazine "stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no other is inclined to do so." The line is funny, grand and a little desperate all at once. And then, here is the part that matters, he did not stand there yelling. He got to work building the apparatus that would make the shouting count: a magazine, a youth organization, a political party, a television program and a set of rules about who was welcome.

I want to tell that story fairly, because Buckley is both the best argument for organizing a movement and the best case study of what organizing costs. This is a profile, so let me lay out the career first and then the lesson.

The young man from Yale

Buckley was born in 1925 and died in 2008. In 1951, when he was twenty-five and just out of Yale, he published God and Man at Yale. The book charged that the university's teaching had drifted from the principles its alumni and donors believed it stood for: Christianity, individualism and free enterprise. Its argument was about who controls a school, the trustees and alumni who pay for it, or the faculty who staff it. You may agree or not, but notice the shape of the claim. It treated a famous institution as accountable to the people who funded it, and it said so in public. The book made him famous overnight, and the fight over it earned him enemies in high places.

Remember the time. In the early 1950s, American intellectual life was dominated by liberal assumptions, and the right was scattered. There were free-market economists in one corner, traditionalists in another, and veterans of anti-communism in a third. They did not read the same books or belong to the same clubs. There was no common home.

The magazine

National Review was founded in 1955, and its first issue appeared in November of that year. The publisher's statement in that issue is where the athwart line comes from. The statement also said, in effect, that the magazine would not be merely a complaint. It would offer a point of view, give the right a place to argue with itself in public, and compete in the marketplace of ideas for readers. He recruited a staff of writers who had come from different corners of the right, among them former Communists, Catholic thinkers, and free-market economists. That was the founding act of what historians now call the modern conservative movement. For more on that history, see From National Review to the Sharon Statement and How the Movement Took the GOP and From a Small Magazine in 1955 to a Movement Press That Reshaped the Debate.

Pause on how unusual this was. He did not found a party. He founded a place where people who disagreed about a great deal could argue, and then agree to work together on the big things. That is the idea behind Fusionism Was the Deal That Made the Modern Right Possible: the movement was a coalition, and a coalition needs a room to meet in.

The gatekeeper

Here is where the story gets interesting and where the argument starts. Building a movement means deciding who is in it. Buckley took that job on himself, and he was not shy.

Three episodes show how he did it.

1. The Birch Society. The John Birch Society was founded in 1958 by Robert Welch, and it grew quickly in the early 1960s. Welch had circulated a private manuscript that accused President Eisenhower of being a dedicated agent of the Communist conspiracy. Buckley thought that was absurd, and worse, that it would make the whole right look absurd. He criticised Welch in National Review in the early 1960s and again, more forcefully, in 1965, arguing that the movement had to separate itself from conspiracy theories if it wanted to be taken seriously. Not everyone on the right agreed with him. Some members and some friends were angry. He did it anyway.
2. The novelist and the review. In December 1957 National Review ran Whittaker Chambers's review of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, and it was brutal. Chambers, a former Communist who had testified against Alger Hiss, saw in Rand's materialist philosophy a hard, godless streak that he could not square with his own convictions. The review made a lasting point: the magazine would not simply hand its endorsement to anyone who liked markets. It had a view of what a conservative movement was for.
3. Other lines. Over the years he used the magazine to argue against extremism and prejudice on the right, including, late in life, a book about antisemitism among conservatives. Whatever you think of any single judgment, he plainly believed that a movement that wanted to govern had to police its edges.

Here is the question a working family would ask, so I will ask it bluntly. Was he right to do it? I think the answer is yes in the main. The Birch decision, in particular, protected the movement's credibility at a moment when it needed to be taken seriously by people outside the converted. A tent with no walls is a field.

The young people and the party

A magazine reaches readers. A movement needs organizers, and organizers are usually young. In September 1960 a few dozen young conservatives gathered at the Buckley family estate in Sharon, Connecticut, and adopted a short statement of principles that came to be called the Sharon Statement. It was the founding document of Young Americans for Freedom. Its themes were liberty, limited government, free markets and a firm stand against communism, and it was brief enough to fit on a single page. Within a few years YAF chapters on campuses were supplying the volunteers, the letter writers and eventually the candidates of the conservative cause.

The pattern is worth noticing. The idea came first, in the magazine. The home for the idea, in the form of a youth organization, came second. The candidate came third: the young organizers who joined YAF were among those who worked to draft Barry Goldwater in 1964, which is a story I take up in A Slim Paperback From 1960 Gave Conservatives a Platform to Stand On. Buckley's magazine backed Goldwater, and the Conservative Party he helped launch in New York in 1962 gave the cause a ballot line. Ideas, institutions, candidates: the sequence is the whole method.

The campaign for mayor

In 1965 Buckley ran for Mayor of New York on the ticket of the Conservative Party of New York, founded in 1962. The race was against the Democrat, Abraham Beame, and the liberal Republican John Lindsay, who won. Buckley did not expect to win. The point was to put conservative ideas in front of the voters of the biggest city in America and to deny the Republican nominee the easy road. He is said to have answered a reporter's question about what he would do if he won by joking that he would demand a recount. Do not bet your house on the precise wording, but the joke is true to the man: he treated politics as a serious argument conducted with a straight face and a wink.

He received a little over 13 percent of the vote, and Lindsay was elected. Look at that outcome and ask what it taught. A conservative third party on the ballot in New York could not win citywide, but it could show that the right had an organized, loyal constituency, and it could force the major parties to compete for it. The Conservative Party of New York went on to be a force in the state's politics for decades.

Firing Line

From 1966 to 1999 Buckley hosted Firing Line, a television program in which he interviewed and debated guests across the ideological spectrum, including many liberals. The format mattered. It was an hour of unhurried argument, a man with a large vocabulary arguing with other men and women who could answer back, and it ran for more than thirty years.

What did Firing Line teach? That you can disagree with people strongly and still treat them as adults who deserve a hearing. That a movement is persuasive when it is confident enough to take on the best arguments of the other side. And that ordinary Americans will watch a serious debate if it is good. Civil Discourse Is Not Surrender, and Lincoln and Scalia Prove It makes the same point from a different direction.

What a movement gains, and what it loses

Now to the part I promised. Policing the boundaries is a power, and powers have costs. So here is the strongest case against Buckley's gatekeeping, stated as fairly as I can, followed by an answer.

"Every time the movement's leaders decided who was respectable, someone was left outside, and sometimes those who were left outside had a point. The conservative establishment's enforcement of respectability can turn into a habit of its own, one that protects the leadership from challenge, excludes working-class and populist voices as 'unserious', and makes the movement look like a club of well-spoken men who dine together. And the same editor who drew lines against conspiracy theories got other things badly wrong."

Buckley's own record gives the critics ammunition, and an honest profile has to say so. In August 1957 National Review ran an editorial titled "Why the South Must Prevail," which defended the white South's resistance to federal intervention on voting rights. Buckley later said he had been wrong. He acknowledged that his generation of conservatives had been mistaken to believe that Jim Crow could be left to fade by itself, and that federal action had been necessary. I give him credit for the admission, and I give the critics credit for the point: a movement that polices itself harshly on some questions can be dangerously lax on others.

The best answer to the criticism, I think, comes in four parts.

1. Boundaries are not optional. A movement with no standards will be defined by its worst members. The question is never whether to draw lines but where.
2. The lines should be argued in the open. Buckley made his case in print, over his name, where it could be answered. That is better than quiet purges.
3. Mistakes should be admitted. The test of a gatekeeper is whether he corrects the record. Buckley's later reflections on civil rights did that.
4. The gate must stay open to the voters. A movement exists to persuade ordinary people. If its elders start enjoying the exclusion more than the persuasion, they have forgotten the job.

You can watch the same tension replay in Seventy Years of GOP Insurgents Versus the Establishment, in Order. Every insurgent generation has asked whether the gatekeepers were protecting the cause or themselves, and the honest answer has been "some of each".

What to take from him

If you are a reader who wants to do something with this history, here is what I would draw from Buckley.

• Build the room before you win the vote. The magazine, the youth groups and the party came before the election victories. The organization is what lasts. A Slim Paperback From 1960 Gave Conservatives a Platform to Stand On tells how Goldwater's book fed the same pipeline a few years later.
• Disagree in public, with your name on it, and in good humour. It works better than whispering.
• Draw lines on conduct and conspiracy, and be slow to draw them on honest disagreement. The first protects credibility. The second shrinks the tent.
• Be willing to say you were wrong. It costs less than you think and earns more.

The verdict

Buckley stood athwart history and yelled "Stop," and history did not stop. But the movement he helped assemble changed what history was going to do. That is how it usually works. The shouting is for show, and the building is for keeps.

My own verdict is simple. He was right to build, right to set standards, and wrong on a few big questions he later had the grace to admit. The next generation inherits the lesson in both directions: a movement needs walls and doors, and the people who keep the doors have to remember that the walls are there to protect the house, not to shrink it.

The bottom line

• A movement is an organization first. Magazines, clubs and county parties come before landslides. Find the one that is missing in your town and start it.
• Standards protect the cause. Refusing to share a platform with conspiracy theorists was not weakness. It was what made the movement credible.
• Policing the edges has a price. Ask who is being kept out and whether they have a point before you shut the door.
• Admitting mistakes strengthens an argument. Buckley's later reflections on civil rights make him easier to trust.
• Watch a debate, not just a clip. Find a full-length interview with someone you disagree with, and see how it feels to hear the best version of the other side.