Strictly Right adds texture to the Buckley/National Review story, which is, after all, the story of modern conservatism.

Strictly Right: William F. Buckley Jr. and the American Conservative Movement
by Linda Bridges & John R. Coyne, Jr.
published by Wiley (April 13, 2007)
Hdbk., 368 pgs.
ISBN-10: 0471758175
ISBN-13: 978-0471758174 

Having read or reviewed several other histories of modern American conservatism, I was excited recently to pick up Strictly Right, a tidy biographical sketch of William F. Buckley Jr. and the American Conservative Movement.
 
The authors played important roles in National Review's history. Linda Bridges served as managing editor for 10 years and John Coyne, Jr. as the magazine's Washington correspondent. Their first-hand accounts of the magazine’s many characters add texture to the Buckley/NR story, which is, after all, the story of modern conservatism and how it interlaced with virtually all the major Republican statesmen and most of the political debates that have absorbed our nation since Eisenhower.
 
It is not, strictly speaking, however, a biography of Buckley as much as it is a gloss on conservatism as seen from the perch at NR. All the requisite history is there — the Willi Schlamm break with Buckley, Willmore Kendall’s escapades and conflicts, the Whittaker Chambers era, the Garry Wills/Joe Sobran rifts, the tributes to Jim Burnham, Priscilla Buckley and other key editors.
 
The book blends a lot of familiar information in a competent way with mentions here and there of issues not much explored in other treatments, including an account of a dispute between WFB and son Christopher, who has emerged as one of America's top political satirists. This ground is covered in Buckley’s sailing memoir, Windfall, but I had forgotten it and Bridges and Coyne remind us that even good-humored fathers and sons who are deeply fond of one another have their moments of severity and disagreement.
 
The history of Buckley and the movement he inspired is getting fleshed out, and a good thing now that Mr. Buckley is into his 80s. John Judis wrote a competent but uninspired biography 20 years ago (William F. Buckley, Jr., Patron Saint of the Conservatives), and prior to that Charles Lam Markmann wrote a critical but interesting portrait (The Buckleys: A Family Examined), which focused, mostly, on the two famous brothers. Garry Wills’ memoir, Confessions of a Conservative, also provided insights into the Buckley phenomenon, as did John Diggins’ Up from Communism and George Nash’s intellectual history of modern conservatism. More recently, Jeffrey Hart and Priscilla Buckley have contributed memoirs/histories that add texture to the movement Buckley led for many years.
 
Each of the studies, in its own way, provides useful insights into modern conservatism, but none of them offer a sustained analysis of the intellectual discourse between Buckley and the liberal establishment he almost single-handedly took on (for mass consumption, at least) from the late 1950s through the 1970s.  Markmann comes closest to exploring seriously the ideas Buckley espoused and how it played on the Left, but his treatment is dated and distorts, in my view, many of the underlying principles that guided Buckley’s political approach.
 
Buckley would be the first to acknowledge the important role other conservative thinkers played in the movement’s success. A review of National Review’s contributors over the years would satisfy all but the most cynical leftist that Buckley’s enterprise leveraged significant intellectual firepower. But Buckley alone took conservatism into mainstream popular culture. His able performances on major talk shows (Jack Paar, Johnny Carson, David Susskind, Mike Wallace, Phil Donahue, etc.) created an intellectual foundation on which conservative debate could lean.
 
Equally important, and here even the friendliest biographers don’t give Buckley his full due, he bested the liberal establishment not only on style, but on substance, and it is this dimension of his contribution that, in my view, has not been given the attention it deserves.
 
There might be reasons for this. First, Buckley’s corpus of work is intimidating. He has written over 50 books, hosted over 1,500 Firing Lines, written countless columns and articles not collected in his books and granted many interviews. Because he has declined to update and encapsulate his views in a single volume, tracing his intellectual excursions with the Left would require a fair amount of textual review. In addition, Buckley has spent a lifetime giving us his take on many of these exchanges. Why try to improve on the exegesis that Buckley himself has so ably set down at length in his many essays, books and interviews?
 
Well, because Buckley’s accounts, while riveting and seemingly fair, are still only one side of a multi-faceted discussion that rocked our political culture for a generation. On a host of major policy and cultural issues – foreign policy, economics, religion, education, poverty, cultural mores, etc. – Buckley crossed swords with superstars like Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, John Kenneth Galbraith, Dwight MacDonald, Sidney Hook, Noam Chomsky, Norman Thomas, and Michael Harrington. He not only held his own, but more often than not put them, figuratively speaking, on trial before American public opinion. In the process, Buckley helped facilitate the movement right of many important leftists, not only former communists who helped him in NR’s early days but people like Norman Podhoretz, David Horowitz, Nathan Glazer, Irving Kristol and Patrick Moynihan, et. al. — what became known as the neoconservative movement.
 
Virtually all of the biographic accounts mentioned above credit Buckley for his humor, wit and decency, but even friendly biographers do not give him adequate credit in deconstructing liberalism with such efficiency and effectiveness. In short, it was not a question of style over substance, but rather of substance over counter-substance. Buckley did not elevate conservatism to a major political force simply because he was a charming guy, though that didn’t hurt; but because he laid bare with a penetrating logic the inconsistencies of liberal and leftist thought.
 
Today, the conservative movement finds itself on the defensive, and not only because of the mistakes of George W. Bush. Bush takes his share of the blame, and understandably, but the truth is that conservatism has been running out of intellectual steam. Neoconservatives and traditional conservatives differ on a host of domestic and foreign policy issues – from immigration to the war in Iraq. Conservative thinkers sprinkle the landscape but there is a noticeable drop both in the depth and coherence of the conservative position.
 
There is no discourse with the Left because both sides have withdrawn from substantive dialogue as they appeal to loyal and well-defined constituencies. Limbaugh, Hannity and Coulter are gifted at feeding red meat to the faithful, but they are not going to convert the vital middle that will likely determine the next couple of elections. They do not formulate arguments in a way that effectively persuades what Limbaugh so derisively refers to as the moderates. George Will and Bill Kristol are better in this regard, but they, too, have faded as thought leaders and they certainly have never inspired young intellectuals the way Buckley did for two generations.
 
Buckley was effective (Richard Posner calls him one of the three most influential public intellectuals of the past half-century) because he took seriously the assumptions of liberalism and leftist ideology. As he rigorously deconstructed and discredited these assumptions, something interesting began to occur. A new crop of conservative intellectuals and public personalities began to emerge, think tanks were founded, and Reagan and to a lesser extent the Bushes – often crediting Buckley – brought conservatism and conservatives to power.
 
Let’s not underestimate the impact of this achievement. Throughout his career and in a brilliant interview with Robert Scheer (published in Playboy and then republished in Buckley’s collection, Inveighing We will Go), Buckley rejected the notion of co-existence with communism. Co-existence was the fundamental position of both Republican and Democratic administrations through most of the Cold War, but while Buckley accepted co-existence as a practical matter he rejected it as a moral imperative. With the help of reformed leftists like Chambers, Burnham, Eastman and Muggeridge, Buckley reshaped the debate by rejecting co-existence as a viable moral position. Out of this ferment emerged Reagan, Thatcher, Pope John Paul and critical dissidents such as Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov. The rest even the New York Times covered.
 
Buckley likewise played a vital role in stimulating debate about the cultural challenges posed by the leftist agenda. For example, in his many Firing Line interviews with Malcolm Muggeridge and again in his writings, Buckley discusses critical issues of education, culture and science. Before postmodernism had a name, Buckley had echoed Chesterton in resisting a scientific relativism that today threatens more than ever to fragment human beings into ethnic, sexual and biological parts.
 
Finally, Buckley (and those he inspired and popularized) effectively countered the apostles of socialism. Today, even post-modern leftists like Richard Rorty find it difficult to argue against a market-driven economy.  Despite its excesses, capitalism and the free market have done more good for more people than any other economic system in world history.  It might surprise some that this was not always accepted wisdom.
 
Today, there are vital issues around which intelligent discourse is essential, and if conservatives do not engage these issues seriously they will only weaken their capacity to govern effectively in the future. Conservatives are struggling, for example, to articulate and sustain a coherent and responsible position on a host of critical issues: energy, environment, medical research, the war on terror and entitlements, to name a few.
 
In his day, Buckley did not ignore such issues. He fostered aggressive and sustained debate with the Left, adapted his own position when circumstances required reevaluation, and won grudging respect from all quarters for conducting debate in a civilized and serious way. A new study that explored in depth Buckley’s engagements with the Left would be a welcomed chapter in the history not only of conservative thought but of political discourse as it unfolded in the United States over the past half-century.

Strictly Right is available on Amazon.com.