“All the movements which are characteristic of this moment are historically false and headed for terrible failure. There was a time when the refusal of any form of extremism carried with it the inevitable assumption that one was a conservative…. It is becoming obvious that this is not so, because people have seen that extremism may be either radical or reactionary. My own refusal of extremism was due not to the fact that I am a conservative, which I am not; but to the fact that I discovered in it a vital and substantive fraud.”
— José Ortega y Gasset1
Like Ortega y Gasset, William F. Buckley Jr. discovered in all the proliferating modern pieties—and not only the explicitly political ones—“a vital and substantial fraud.” Buckley therefore showed himself, most especially in his first public decade, not only a stalwart opponent of totalitarianism in its Marxist-Leninist forms, but also an inveterate critic of the milquetoast intellectual dullness that so encourages every kind of accommodation to and compromise with totalitarianism. Yet Buckley never adopted the methods of a doomsayer or an alarmist; he never himself, by any stretch of the imagination, agitated for anything. Agitation belonged to the gesture-vocabulary of liberty’s enemies, and was among those symptoms of intellectual dullness that always enervate a free society. A dull collective mentality compensates for its low-grade spiritual metabolism with passing fits of meaningless frenzy, faddism, and hysteria; it experiences difficulties in concentrating its psychic energy but, on slight provocation, can also fly into inchoate rage.
Whereas the threatening ideology conforms to a model of stiffened coherence and implacable determination, the free communities which ideology threatens conform philosophically less to a model of anything than to a shapeless lack of one. Indeed, the free society that Buckley sought to defend is entirely capable of resenting and rejecting its champions as mere irritants, while failing to resist its actual enemy. Only a genuinely intellectual reaction could stave off a pseudo-intellectual, ideologically motivated assault. But in postwar America, there were few who could distinguish between wisdom and fraud, or between argument and demagoguery.
Up from Liberalism (1959) summarized these dilemmas and explored the frustrations of the keen-sighted in relation to them. The frustrations ran deep. Arguably Buckley’s best non-fiction book, this study of “the folklore of American liberalism”2 is probably also his best anti-totalitarian book because it evokes, more resolutely than had God and Man at Yale, Buckley’s rigorously gentleman-like politics, where rigor, not averse to pugnacity, bears as much weight as gentility. As the Marquis of Queensbury’s boxing rules allowed gentlemen to spar, so Buckley’s decorum allowed him to step into the ring when necessary. He had the clairvoyance to notice and the temerity to announce that the left-socialist strain of modern liberalism is more deserving of the label “reactionary” than all the so-labeled targets of liberal animosity and socialist denunciation.
And the man could certainly land a punch. Describing the readership of the Nation, Buckley observed that, “Many people are not satisfied to be unique merely in the eyes of God, and spend considerable time in flight from any orthodoxy”; and some, he continued, “make a profession of it, and end up, as for instance the critic Dwight Macdonald has, with an intellectual and political career that might have been painted by Jackson Pollock.”3 In a few words, Buckley has roundly implicated both Macdonald and Pollock in his charge of liberal-modernist intellectual fraudulence. One of Pollock’s canvasses or Macdonald’s collection of essays, Against the American Grain (1962), might stand equally as evidence for what Buckley called, in an essay on Friedrich Hayek, the “elasticity of standards”4 necessary to sustain the illogical but rigid farrago of left-wing dialectics.
Buckley comments later in the same essay on the “culturally conditioned indifference to principle” and the “stubborn moral nescience”5 that have undermined the middle-class majority’s resistance to the deliberate assault on integrity and values. It was axiomatic to Buckley that, “the social success of freedom requires something of an extra-ideological devotion to analytical rigor and to the integrity of language.”6 Buckley was himself a craftsman of words. The comedic parodies of him—one, by David Frye, is accessible on the Internet—always mocked him for his philosophically precise vocabulary and recognizable vocal hesitations before alighting on le mot juste. Of course, the latter was a trait of the man’s extemporaneous oratorical style rather than his literate presentation. While Buckley certainly offered material for parody and imitation, the vulgar resentment of the stand-up routines, and Frye’s is typical, always made them hard to watch.
II
In Up from Liberalism, fifteen years before the Hayek essay, Buckley had examined the perverse relation of the flaccidly free society to its radical detractors with their ceaseless rhetoric of oppression and rectification. The flaccidly free society, unclear about its historical, moral, and philosophical foundations, retreats all too readily, because it cannot formulate a counterargument to liberalism’s advocacy of utopian perfection as the solution for the disappointments intrinsic to existence. Words must find their anchorage in reality, or else their users must elide their relation with reality so as conveniently to circumvent inconvenient logic. One cannot escape the implication of the Logos—of intellectual order—in the contest between the curators of truth and the purveyors of false but alluring visions. And liberals have always had their parallel Logos, e.g. Ludwig Feuerbach’s thesis that God is merely a figure for man’s alienation from his own true state, or the Mephistophelean claim that by the efforts of the illuminated, Heaven will manifest itself on earth and men shall be as gods.
Buckley never doubted that liberalism took its quasi-religious life from the twin goals of earthly redemption and human divinization—or that it played shenanigans with language. That is how he defined people of liberal conviction in the opening chapter of Up from Liberalism:
They are men and women who tend to believe that the human being is perfectible and social progress predictable, and that the instrument for effecting the two is reason; that truths are transitory and empirically determined; that equality is desirable and attainable through the action of state power; that social and individual differences, if they are not rational, are objectionable, and should be scientifically eliminated; that all peoples and societies should strive to organize themselves upon a rationalist and scientific paradigm.7
Despite their professions of tolerance, Buckley wrote, “it is fair to generalize that American liberals are reluctant to coexist with anyone on their Right”; and he posed the necessary question whether “in the history of controversy, there has ever been such consistent intemperance, insularity, and irascibility as the custodians of liberal orthodoxy have shown toward conservatives who question some of the orthodoxy’s premises?”8 Buckley argued that liberalism’s readiness to anathematize opponents is inseparable from its intention to marshal instrumental forces, in a so-called “rational” struggle, to realize the utopia of the saints, an earthly New Jerusalem. An assumption about the demonic status of dissenters thus is at the heart of liberal folklore, a Gnostic sub-religiosity with its own repertory of creeds and dogmas.
One need only think of the latest version of this-worldly redemption, the project of salvaging the planet from the sinful taint of humanity itself under the guise of forestalling global warming, to test the rightness of the interpretation. The teleological image of a pristine earth projected by the devotees of carbon-purity, as Buckley would doubtless have told us, conforms to a Rousseauvian fantasy, and that fantasy would remain incomplete without the gallery of industrialist-trespassers who have profaned the ecological sanctum sanctorum. In the global warming cult, one witnesses the fierceness and intransigency of the True Believer, whose cause has become a crusade of the illuminated against the unwashed, who themselves register only the mildest dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy.
Buckley noticed that, in addition to responding to dissenters by labeling them with stock pejoratives (nowadays the inevitable fascist, fundamentalist, or racist), liberalism exhibits an allergic reaction to facts and their incorporation in arguments. When doctrine reigns, then the facts, as Buckley observed, can be “ideologically dislocative.”9 In Buckley’s aperçu, “Many liberals accept their opinions, ideas, and evaluations as others accept revealed truths, and the facts are presumed to conform to the doctrines as any dutiful fact will; so why discuss the fact?”10
The liberal rhetorical style, Buckley duly recorded, reflexively substitutes abstractions for concretions and speculative desiderata for items in the catalogue of the actually existing situation. The liberal rhetorical style presumably correlates with a parallel and equally defective epistemology. Buckley gave the example, poignant and rankling in 1959 and a topic to this day, of court-ordered desegregation in Southern public educational institutions. The Warren Court, in the language of Up from Liberalism, had committed the essential liberal gesture, which also amounts to a “legal sophistry of a clearly totalitarian strain,” of arbitrarily subordinating long-standing custom to abstraction, or in this case more specifically to various “ideological abstractions about equality.”11 The debate over the integration of public schools in Mississippi and Alabama threw into relief the high-handedness that accompanies a type of magical thinking bound up in venerating a hieratic nomenclature:
What the liberal ideologist in debate generally refuses to reckon with is the political and social problems. In his eyes the problems dissipate at the mere statement of the truism that all men, regardless of color or creed, should be dealt with equally. That abstraction, fiercely loyal though one should be to it, is not, as an abstraction, easily imposed on an unwilling community, any more than an ordinance to keep holy the Sabbath is easily imposed on a secular and raucous community.12
Buckley detected “Orwellian” proclivities in the liberal modus operandi; he assessed a late-1950s publicity campaign, recognizably the precursor of modern propagandizing and aimed against then-senators Herman Welker and Everett Dirksen, as “a primitive assault.”13 Buckley thus found himself compelled to comment on “the manners of liberals,” and he posed the question whether “these manners are intrinsic to liberalism.”14
III
The term “manners,” perhaps unexpected in the context, nevertheless belongs in the category of those unjustly marginalized locutions that used to fulfill a central function in culture. In identifying the deliquescent trend in free and decent society, Buckley hewed closely to a coherent twentieth-century critique, for which “conservative” must serve as the only word available, with exemplars not only in Ortega (who disliked the label) but also in Oswald Spengler and Eric Voegelin, each one of whom, like Buckley, was an undoubtedly mannerly man—in other words, a champion of old customs and values in the face of the assault on them by the forces of leveling and resentment. While Up from Liberalism focused rather narrowly, but with complete justification, on post-war American politics, it nevertheless shared many traits with broader discussions of the crisis of Western society such as Ortega’s Revolt of the Masses and Man and Crisis, Spengler’s Hour of Decision, and various essays and monographs by Voegelin.
When Buckley criticized judicial intervention in regional institutions as an authoritarian, if not indeed a totalitarian, imposition of the abstract on the actual, he was observing a larger aggressive and disintegrative trend identified by Spengler twenty-five years before, in The Hour of Decision. Surveying the havoc wrought on established social forms since the French Revolution, Spengler formulated an axiom of existence: “It is a piece of intellectual stupidity to want to substitute something else for the social structure that has grown up through the centuries and is fortified by tradition.”15 Spengler preserved the conviction, however, that the principled resistance to disintegrative leveling in the name of sloganeering pseudo-ideas would fail, because a sufficient will to preserve the inherited forms no longer existed. Tradition would find precious few champions. Western society was a sick society that “offers no defense”16 against its enemies, especially internal ones. To be sure, Spengler characterized politics since the demise of the ancien régime as a polarization “into Liberal and Conservative circles,” but he grasped this emergent division as structurally fulfilling liberalism’s aims, because the conservative faction tends to signify a merely formal “opposition,” which the other side of the aisle invariably gulls into witless cooperation by an appeal to procedure and compromise.17
Spengler nominated for admirable foresight and courage “Burke, Pitt, Wellington, and Disraeli in England, Metternich, Hegel, and Bismarck in Germany, and Tocqueville in France,” but followed up by noting that, while these men “sought to defend the conserving forces of the old Culture,” the prevailing folklore portrays them pejoratively as “reactionary,”18 an indispensable entry in the liberal lexicon. Liberal sentiment had subdued conservative judgment in the dominant language so that no one any longer appreciated that liberals, not conservatives, were the true reactionaries. For Spengler to praise his heroes in this way was for him also to divulge implicitly what he took to be their ultimate ineffectiveness.
Ortega, like Spengler, saw in modernity a sustained crisis of massive spiritual exhaustion. Ortega also, again like Spengler, remarked on the vulnerability of modern people to slogans and crusades: “As men lose confidence in and enthusiasm for their culture, they are, so to speak, left hanging in midair and incapable of opposing anyone who affirms anything…. Hence there are periods in which it is enough only to give a shout…for everyone to surrender themselves to it.”19 As for Voegelin, his notion of the essentially Gnostic character of modernity paints the picture of an agitating minority’s vehement desire to alter reality for the sake of perversions of soul and body that are finally incompatible with reality. Universal absolute equality offers a case in point, but any other liberal eschatology will serve. Voegelin judged that the majority of modern men and women had contracted the infection of unreal expectations, and he too foresaw a prolonged deepening of the crisis and its many attendant crises.
In Up from Liberalism, what Buckley labeled, in a chapter-subtitle, “Our Age of Modulation” corresponds to what Ortega, Spengler, and Voegelin saw as the pernicious depletion of cultural marrow in post-Christian times. Identifying a “taboo…on strong opinions” as having paralyzed the majority of citizens from robustly interposing their intransigence between the radical agenda and the institutions that radicalism endangers, Buckley placed American society under an indictment as chastening as it is broad: “During the Eisenhower years, ours became a land of lotus-eaters.”20 Against liberalism’s passionately espoused core ideas such as democracy’s absolute desirability (“the commitment by the liberals to democracy has proved obsessive, fetishistic”21), “distrust of the marketplace,”22 and the paradoxical certainty that “other truths than scientific and methodological ones have no existence”23—against these, the targeted society, committed to a false courtesy rather than to any genuine principles, can muster no compelling reasons for preserving its status quo.
The hapless majority modulates its position on every issue until a flabbily exaggerated “human impulse to be tactful” transforms itself “into a tendency to refuse to acknowledge facts.”24 The majority decides by default to endorse the liberal aversion to reality. Ultimately, wrote Buckley, “an indiscriminate gentility can induce relativism.”25 Education, especially higher education, must bear part of the blame for this moral indolence. Here Buckley drew on Randall Jarrell’s satire of the university, Pictures from an Institution (1954), for diagnostic illustrations of professorial fatuousness and youthful narcissism. But stultified education appeared to the founding genius of National Review to be more a reflection of the modulated age than the driving force in the evacuation of steadfastness and belief from American society.
Up from Liberalism never named that driving force, but the book’s references to Ortega and Weaver hint at it. As long as life went smoothly and appliances and groceries sold cheaply, who wanted to trouble himself with disquieting moral analyses or the ensuing prescriptive conclusions that beckon men to unpleasant resolution or action? “The conscious philosophical relativism of the academy,” or anyway its rhetoric, “filtering down past the scholars and intelligentsia to the masses, becomes less a Weltanschauung, more an attitude of mind.”26 However, material contentedness never amounts to a position; it never even provides the proper basis for a position. From this philosophical inadequacy, a political sequel swiftly follows. “It is the prevalence of this attitude of mind,” this aversion to judgments, Buckley wrote, “that made it possible for Modern Republicanism to pause, triumphant, on its way to Limbo; that attitude made it possible for Dwight Eisenhower to attain a level of personal popularity no president had known since James Madison.”27 The majority’s dedication to blandness abets a minority’s dedication to obnoxious agendas, the likely effect of which will be to replace material contentedness with centrally managed scarcity and misery and to restrict freedom. The True Believers continue to act while the jelly-spined polity responds by concessions for an illusory amity’s sake, or responds not at all.
Up from Liberalism is a surprising book. Nowadays one associates the claim that a pervasive refusal of moral issues justly summarizes the Eisenhower 1950s with orthodox left-academic accounts of American cultural history, where they participate in a general condemnation of “bourgeois” society. One discovers the prototype of such descriptions in Buckley, the archconservative, with no little surprise, but there it is, under the rubric of “the Eisenhower Program”:
Essentially it was an attitude, which went by the name of a program, undirected by principle, unchained to any coherent idea as to the nature of man and society, uncommitted to any sustained estimate of the nature or potential of the enemy. Yet because of the sincerity of its leader and the ingenuity and devotion of its publicists, it was a Program, which, whatever it was up to at any given moment, took on the air of moral justification and intellectual tightness.28
Buckley’s purpose, it goes without saying, was very different from the Marxist critique of middle-class values. He believed—at the time of Up from Liberalism—as had Ortega and Spengler in their days, that liberalism amounted not only to “creeping socialism” but finally also to nihilism, if one were to take Buckley’s phrase “nihilist tidal wave” at its lexical value.29 The stark dichotomy that Buckley drew in Up from Liberalism, just as severe in its polarity as any scheme out of Ortega and Spengler, is: nihilism on one side and nescient pseudo-decorum on the other. “Etiquette,” Buckley reminded his readers, “is the first value only of the society that has no values.”30 As a taboo governing what is mentionable, etiquette, in the form of political correctness, stifles the most essential attribute of a free society: the liberty of its people, as individuals, to speak their conscience based on the truth as they see it. The institution of free speech functions only in correlation with the courage that prompts a conscience to speak.
IV
Buckley differed from Ortega and Spengler in that, in 1959 at any rate, he held out considerable hope for a revival of domestic moral resilience. “The direction we must travel,” he wrote, “requires a broadmindedness that, in the modulated age, strikes us as antiquarian and callous.”31 He nevertheless thought then that its advent could come to pass. That the American majority remains today as mired in timidity and as fully “modulated” as it was under Eisenhower does not invalidate the hope of a fifty-year-old prospect. It does suggest that Buckley’s style of conservatism could never have transformed itself into a widely current ethos. The reason for this impossibility of Buckleyism’s modulation in the direction of popularity, as one might say, is precisely the inherency in it of broadmindedness and a certain callosity. Buckley’s use of the first of those two notions requires a gloss. To gloss it, one must link it with the not so obviously related statement about the significance of etiquette in a social context where unchecked radicalism has dissolved the old meanings. Social rules, like those of decorum, place a limit on behavior, but the rules themselves have limits in their application.
Broadmindedness refers, then, to knowing when politesse has become otiose, and a measure of pugilism is necessary. Callosity is a corollary of broadmindedness so defined. Just as there is a moment when one must come out swinging in defense of a principle, so also is there a moment when one must let the social chain of cause and effect take its course without interference. Buckley wrote, for example, of unemployment in Harlan County, Kentucky, where the coal seams had lately and predictably given out. His response, were he Caesar, would have been to let the market sort out the difficulties, which it swiftly would; the predictable liberal response was “immediate and sustained federal subsidies.”32 Such subsidies only sustain the miserable status quo, whereas callosity, properly exercised, permits the eventual melioration of misery.
Buckley’s 1969 television interview with Professor Noam Chomsky on the Vietnam War provides an example of broadmindedness defined as knowing when an offense against order has surpassed the limit of tolerability. Chomsky had just published American Power and the New Mandarins (1969) and made himself an intellectual spokesman for the Left and for the anti-war movement. The interview, available on the Internet, commands considerable fascination, as Chomsky pedantically squirms and evades in order not to answer Buckley’s rapier-like questions directly. Buckley remains courteous, although one can detect his growing conviction, as the interview unfolds, that his interlocutor is perfectly willing to use terms with self-serving ambiguity and to reject any facts that contravene his position. Or rather, Buckley keeps his cool—except for a passing yet telling instant. Chomsky has been engaged in verbal auto-louange of the “passion” animating his positions, and he tells Buckley that he might well become passionate in the course of their discussion. “Sometimes I lose my temper,” he says. Buckley’s retort to Chomsky is, “I hope not because, if you do, I’ll smash you in the goddamned face.” It is not a threat but merely a promise, one uttered through Buckley’s patented forensic smile.
Has the gentleman betrayed himself? Hardly. The threat, in context, is Chomsky’s casually uttered phrase, “Sometimes I lose my temper,” meant by the deponent to intimidate his questioner. Buckley’s retort produces a noticeable chastening effect on the professor, who suddenly grasps that his audience is not a classroom full of intimidated undergraduates, nor a meeting of like-minded anti-war enthusiasts, nor a cocktail party for affluent Manhattan know-nothings. His audience is William F. Buckley, a man neither bland nor obliging where the point at issue concerns an ongoing conflict of existential urgency to millions of people. Buckley does not find any equivalency that would assimilate morally fallible and incompetent but non-homicidal governments with ideological and inhuman ones that perpetrate mass murder for the realization of abstract and impossible goals. Chomsky’s style is apologetic relativism. As in the Cold-War missile standoff, one preserves the peace by responding to the threat clearly and vigorously with the appropriate counter-gesture. Chomsky appeared in a brief interview after Buckley’s passing (also accessible on the Internet), ostensibly to reminisce about the deceased. It is a rambling three minutes in which, as the MIT linguist avoids talking about the one and only time he came face to face with Buckley, it becomes clear that the rebuke still stings.
In History as a System, Ortega defines a gentleman as a fellow who determines, above all, to play by the rules, to avoid anything that is not cricket. As Buckley said in Up from Liberalism, the conservative position distinguishes itself from the left-wing agenda precisely by not being a schedule of fiats for ordering people around against their consciences. Liberalism puts its faith in a hypostatic Reason, while the conservative trusts in the multiplicity of freely negotiating individuals in the market. This does not mean that the conservative stands for nothing; rather, he stands for cricket. “I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth.”33 In a supine era, William F. Buckley modeled, for those who might imitate him, the baptized figure of the upright man.
Notes
- José Ortega y Gasset, Man and Crisis, M. Adams, trans. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1958), 152.
- William F. Buckley, Up from Liberalism (New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1959), 35.
- Ibid., 36.
- Fritz Machlup (editor), Essays on Hayek (New York: New York University Press, 1976), 105.
- Ibid., 102.
- Ibid., 99.
- Up from Liberalism, 37.
- Ibid., 55.
- Ibid., 61.
- Ibid., 61–62.
- Ibid., 70.
- Ibid., 71.
- Ibid., 74.
- Ibid., 81.
- Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision, C.F. Atkinson, trans. (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1934), 92–93.
- Up from Liberalism, 118.
- Op. cit.
- Op. cit.
- Man and Crisis, 146–47.
- Up from Liberalism, 117.
- Ibid., 148.
- Ibid., 166.
- Ibid., 181.
- Ibid., 118.
- Ibid., 118.
- Ibid., 125.
- Ibid., 125.
- Ibid., 127.
- Ibid., 128.
- Ibid., 129.
- Ibid., 224.
- Ibid., 225.