To memorialize William F. Buckley Jr., as Sam Tanenhaus does in his recent biography and Charles King does in his review, is to celebrate the betrayal of the American conservative tradition. This betrayal was not incidental to Buckley’s career—it was its defining achievement. For all the ink spilled in celebration of Buckley’s wit, style, and institutional success, the substance of his legacy is unmistakable: he was the man most responsible for snuffing out the Old Right, and in its place erecting the managerial, warfare-welfare conservatism that still strangles American political life.
Tanenhaus presents Buckley as the “midwife” of modern conservatism. That is accurate, but not in the sense intended. He midwifed into being a movement that, under the guise of anti-communism and bourgeois respectability, jettisoned constitutionalism, non-interventionism, and genuine small-government principle. This “fusionism” of social traditionalism with militaristic internationalism was not synthesis—it was submission. And Buckley, ever the chameleon, submitted eagerly.
What makes Buckley’s betrayal especially grotesque is that he set himself up as the arbiter of respectability while presiding over a purge of the very elements in the movement that had any claim to philosophical coherence. He cast out the isolationists, the critics of empire, the defenders of the Old Republic—men like John T. Flynn, Garet Garrett, and Frank Chodorov—whose opposition to central planning and foreign entanglements had been steadfast. These men were not politically expedient enough for Buckley. He preferred the company of ex-Trotskyites, Cold War liberals, and Straussian ideologues, so long as they had Ivy League degrees and would endorse his crusade against the Soviet Union.
In Rothbard’s inimitable words, Buckley’s National Review was not the organ of a principled right, but of “a tightly disciplined power elite whose sole aim is to gain state power for the cause of global interventionism.” For Buckley, war and centralization were not bugs of postwar governance; they were features to be embraced.
Perhaps nowhere is Buckley’s contempt for liberty clearer than in his infamous 1952 essay “A Young Republican View: The Party and the Deep Blue Sea.” There, he declared that America had to “accept Big Government for the duration—for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged…except through the instrumentality of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores.” It was not merely an acceptance of Leviathan, but a celebration of it. The state had to be powerful enough to fight communism abroad, even if it meant becoming more like it at home.
This was not the language of conservatism, let alone libertarianism. It was the blueprint for the neoconservative project, long before the term entered common usage. Buckley’s legacy is the normalization of perpetual war, vast surveillance, and bureaucratic centralism—all in the name of fighting external devils, whether they be communists, Islamists, or now the Chinese. In this sense, Buckley did not so much fight the Cold War as internalize it. He made the permanent emergency a conservative virtue.
Tanenhaus, predictably, sanitizes all this. His Buckley is a dazzling conversationalist, an institutional founder, a civilizing force. But to admire Buckley’s prose and performance is to fall for the same illusion that seduced generations of movement conservatives. Wit and polish are no substitute for principle. Buckley was a master of performance, but the content of that performance was hollow. He read the room better than anyone else on the Right—but instead of standing athwart history yelling stop, he leaned into the cultural and political tide with the desperation of a man who wanted to be accepted by his enemies.
This desperate craving for respectability explains Buckley’s repeated acts of purging. Not only did he exile the Old Right; he later excommunicated the John Birch Society, which—though guilty of its own conspiratorial excesses—was at least genuinely anti-statist and anti-globalist. Buckley’s real objection to the Birchers was that they were politically inconvenient. They were not respectable enough for The New York Times, not housebroken enough for the cocktail circuit. The same impulse lay behind his rejection of Ron Paul decades later: a man too principled, too radical, too consistent.
Buckley’s conservatism was never about limiting government or restoring the republic. It was about managing the empire and maintaining the illusion of resistance. Under his guidance, the Right came to accept the national security state, the welfare state (so long as it was “efficient”), and the central bank. Foreign aid? A necessary tool of diplomacy. Overseas bases? Indispensable for containment. The CIA? A bulwark of freedom. The NSA? Best not to ask. Buckley, the great conservative, ended his career defending the Iraq War and arguing that the state could regulate drug use in the name of moral order. Small government indeed.
One cannot read King’s glowing review of Tanenhaus without being reminded of how thoroughly Buckley’s narrative has triumphed in the Beltway imagination. The old debate—between the America First Old Right and the Cold War New Right—is all but forgotten, its losers buried not only by history but by deliberate erasure. That Tanenhaus praises Buckley for building institutions and setting the terms of debate only highlights how corrupted those institutions and debates have become.
What Buckley left behind was not a revitalized conservatism, but a neutered one. National Review, once thought the flagship of the right, today reads like a neocon newsletter with delusions of Burkean grandeur. Its writers praise Ukraine aid, NATO expansion, and CIA briefings with the same vigor Buckley once showed for Chiang Kai-shek and a bevy of other favored dictators. This is not the conservatism of the Founders, nor of John C. Calhoun or Grover Cleveland, nor even Robert Taft. It is the conservatism of technocrats and war planners, of think tanks and op-eds, of a permanent class that manages decline while calling it victory.
In the end, Buckley was a counterrevolutionary only in the most literal sense: he countered the revolution of liberty that the Old Right had hoped to rekindle. His was not the voice of rebellion, but of surrender. He gave the establishment the conservative movement it could tolerate—a movement of school moms and foreign policy hacks, of moralizing elitists and central planning enthusiasts. He made peace with Leviathan and taught the right to love its chains.
What makes Buckley’s ideological trajectory especially striking is the sharp pivot he made from his teenage fervor for the America First movement to his later embrace of Cold War interventionism. As a young man, Buckley was a passionate defender of American non-interventionism, sharing the isolationist convictions that had defined the Old Right and the broader America First coalition. However, by the time the Cold War took shape, Buckley had not only abandoned his former allies but had become one of their fiercest critics. The same man who once rallied against foreign entanglements and imperial overreach now enthusiastically championed a strategy of global confrontation, even at the cost of a far-reaching expansion of the state.
In purging the non-interventionists from the ranks of conservatism, Buckley did not merely distance himself from old ideas; he effectively erased the very principles that had once defined his political identity. His betrayal of the Old Right was thus a personal one—he banished those he once agreed with completely, demonstrating a remarkable ideological transformation that went far beyond tactical shifts. It wasn’t just that he rejected isolationism; he repudiated the intellectual foundation of his youth, offering instead a vision of conservatism willing to sacrifice liberty and limited government for a seat at the table of imperial power.
As for King’s review, the only thing positive one can take from it is his observation that the National Review was “once” the preeminent conservative magazine. May it forever remain in the past tense.
