William F. Buckley, Jr. not only appeared on the top liberal and political talk shows of his time with devastating wit and effectiveness, he debated the top liberal and leftist minds of our time and with remarkable skill helped reshape the issues of his time.

Part I: Introduction to Crossing Swords
Part II: James Baldwin and the Civil Rights Movement
Part III: Dwight Macdonald and Journalism as Style over Substance
Part IV: Gore Vidal: Politics as Personality
Part V: Michael Harrington and the War on Poverty
Part VI: Norman Mailer and the Culture Wars
Part VII: Noam Chomsky and the New Left
Part VIII: John Kenneth Galbraith and Free Enterprise
Part IX: The Environmental Movement
Part X: Buckley in Perspective

As the loss of William F. Buckley, Jr. sinks in, leaving so many of us on the conservative side increasingly bereft, we are buoyed by these considerations. First, Buckley refused to embrace despair. He called it a mortal sin, and so we resist it on grounds of optimistic living if not religious faith. It is also true that Buckley wrote through his own losses and pain. In fact, it has been reported that he was contemplating gathering his more than 400 appreciations and obituaries into a book, a testimony to his love of friends, his graceful writing and his realization that in this tough life, in which nature will sooner or later castigate us (Bill's phrase), all one can do is celebrate those we lose and continue to work and learn.
 
There were few people from whom I learned more than Bill Buckley. Though I was not a part of his inner circle, I certainly embraced his work and life in a way that only the most studious friend or biographer might have. I was deeply moved just before his death when my uncle sent me a note Bill had written to him saying that he was honored to know me and to have me as a friend. That was Bill, a man of unceasing generosity.
 
But let us, in the spirit Mr. Buckley would encourage, turn from tears to learning. Bill Buckley was a formidable intellectual and political force. For all the criticism of him by those who lamented that he never wrote some great philosophical tract on politics, theology or philosophy, one must concede, I would argue, that Buckley, doing it his way, became one of the most influential writers and journalists of the past century – in the august company of Walter Lippmann, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and George Orwell. The latter two came to symbolize what was at stake in the spiritual and moral struggle against the totalitarian mentality. But Buckley spearheaded the counterrevolution in the West that emboldened Reagan, Thatcher and John Paul II to confront and defeat the Soviet Empire. George Will's formulation is by now the most quoted line on Buckley's importance – before Reagan, Goldwater, before Goldwater, National Review, before National Review, Bill Buckley with a spark in his mind.
 
It is the spark that has launched this series of articles, because even Buckley's biographers have failed to fully appreciate, in my view, just how impressive he was as he took on the assumptions of the liberal establishment, particularly from the 1950s through the 1970s, before his cause became ascendant. As I wrote last fall in a review of Strictly Right, an able biography on Buckley written by Linda Bridges and John Coyne:

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.

I lamented in that review that no writer or biographer had taken the time to delve into the exchanges between Buckley and the top leftists and liberals with whom he almost single-handedly battled for over two decades. This series of articles will attempt to do so.
 
Buckley's impact is simply hard to overstate. He not only appeared on the top liberal and political talk shows of his time with devastating wit and effectiveness, he debated the top liberal and leftist minds of our time and with remarkable skill helped reshape the issues of his time. Two of the men on whom Buckley spent a great deal of time also passed away recently – Norman Mailer and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Others, we lost a long ago – Michael Harrington, Dwight Macdonald, James Baldwin – and still others, Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal, are still with us. (Vidal, with his usual venom, upon hearing of Buckley's death could only repeat his accusation that Buckley was a fascist and a liar. We look forward to exploring that question at Vidal's expense in an essay that will appear as part of this series of articles.)
 
When Lionel Trilling, the great critic, wrote in The Liberal Imagination that conservatism did not exist as an intellectual force in American society, he could not have imagined that Buckley was about to burst upon the scene and challenge the liberal consensus with such aplomb and joy. I will not recount the history of Buckley's emergence as a defining force on conservatism because it can be found in a lengthy essay written for this site only a few years ago. I do want to illustrate for a moment his methodology. A single column on the renowned historian, Richard Hofstader, goes a long way toward explaining why Buckley was such a force in American politics. Written in 1966, at a time when liberalism still reigned and Goldwater, of course, had just been harshly repudiated at the voting booth, Buckley nevertheless set out to put the entire academic community on notice, once again, that lazy thought about conservative ideas would not suffice or impress any longer.

The sociologist is deeply in thrall to certain words and concepts which are found in great concentration in Professor Richard Hofstader's works. For instance, we learn that "the entire right-wing movement is infused at the mass level with the fundamentalist style of mind." Fundamentalist is a bad word, bad enough in religion, of course, but also very bad in politics, and we are to understand that the conservative's opposition to deficit financing and certain welfarist programs relates not to any rational objection to deficit financing (on the ground that it will cause great social pain if carried to extremes) or to state welfarism (on the ground that it is in many ways a highly sophisticated means of hurting poor people for the benefit of the lower middle classes) . . .
 
No, Professor Hofstader glumly concludes, the survival of conservatism doesn't have to do with a rational approach to modern problems, but to a whole lot of other things. The conservative, he says, doesn't merely set out to vote for his own economic best interests. Indeed, says the professor, most conservatives are not even qualified to know what it is that inures to their best interests; the fact of the matter is that they are dominated by extra-rational prejudices – "among them the sheer weight of habit and party loyalty, ethnic origins and traditions, religious affiliations and religious styles, racial and ethnic prejudices, attitudes toward liberty and censorship, feelings about foreign policy unrelated to commercial goals of dubious relationship to the national interest."
 
It is a pity that such as Professor Hofstader cannot bring themselves to meditate on the conservative critique without lapsing into the sociological doodles which are the substitute for the hard thought necessary to understand why so much of America continues to resist liberal orthodoxy.
 
It isn't a matter of stupidity – Professor Hofstader is a manifestly intelligent man.
 
It is a matter of years and years of conviction that that which is not espoused by Professor Hofstader and his ideological colleagues is not worth analyzing, but rather diagnosing.
– The Jeweler's Eye, pages 27-29.

Now, this column is simply remarkable. It turns the tables on the liberal establishment first by demonstrating how reductionist their own thinking is. (And if you think this has changed, simply find the book, What's the Matter with Kansas or read any of Paul Krugman's work to discover that even today, this liberal condescension is still in full force.) Moreover, it underscores how Buckley himself does not patronize. He presents the other position and then undercuts it effectively with a simple, memorable phrase that has the force of illuminating truth and devastating critique – in this column the words "sociological doodle," which reduces the entire edifice of Mr. Hofstader's views on conservative thought to a cartoon.

Hofstader, of course, is one of the great icons of liberal academia even today, and his work continues to influence historiography and liberal thinkers both within and outside the academy. He himself would begin to associate with those who would emerge as the neoconservatives. But no one could be quite as impressed with his views on conservatives after reading Buckley's column. He had presented with intelligence and grace an obvious truth: liberals consider conservatism a disease whose primary cause is ignorance, yet, Buckley demonstrated without having to say it directly: Dear reader, you can see I am right because I am a thoughtful, intelligent man who thinks through issues and I will not let Professor Hofstader or any other unthinking person define what I believe or why.
 
And so we embark. In the coming weeks, Crossing Swords will explore, in depth, the running dialogue that Buckley sustained with the great intellectuals of the left/liberal position. However, do not presume that this will be an exercise in sanctifying Buckley. While I admit a bias in his favor, these essays will also explore where he might have been or was – by his own admission — wrong. Martin Luther King's civil rights movement and environmentalism as an essential concern around which conservatives should be mobilized are two such issues in my view. Let the author concede that his own biases will dictate the way this content is treated, but I am confident that Buckley would have approved of any effort to explore these ideas critically, provided it is done in good faith and with reasonable intellectual rigor.
 
Before we begin, a couple of observations. These treatments are limited in scope because the resources at my disposal are limited. I would love to comb the Buckley archives at Yale, or spend hours reviewing dozens more Firing Line episodes at the Hoover Institute, where Buckley's shows are archived. For now, time and opportunity do not allow this. The good news is that Buckley and those he debated left a healthy published record that still enables me to pursue this project. Critical debates and exchanges have been published. Commentary is available in various biographies or essays. And Firing Line episodes in which Buckley directly confronted many of these thinkers are in my possession or cited in Buckley's own book On the Firing Line.
 
This is a collection of essays, not a biography, and so I beg the indulgence of readers who want a more extensive treatment of Buckley's life. For that I would point them to various published biographies, many of which are cited in essays I have written on Buckley on this site. No doubt the most definitive work, yet to be published, will come from San Tanenhaus (whose biography of Whittaker Chambers Buckley lauded) at some future date. These essays are – I would argue nevertheless – truly in the spirit of Buckley, who was not the sort to bury himself in archives looking for some nugget or fact that might add one more nuance to a particular analysis or issue. He liked to move fast, and he made up for his lack of interest in deep diving research with a quick mind, an entertaining wit, and penetrating logic and intelligence. Given that these essays will explore his superior thought and style, I am confident readers will enjoy what is offered without presuming that these essays – by any stretch – tell the full story of the issues or thinkers being discussed.
 
Of course, it is my hope that some publisher might come along and suggest that this series become a book in honor of Buckley, but even if that does not happen, I want to thank the editors of this website for joining me in this great enterprise – great because the men and women whose ideas are explored are among the great icons of our culture and politics of the past half-century. Buckley, no question about it, as the counterpoint to leftist thought, helped shape intellectual and political thought as few have. Crossing Swords, Bill Buckley and the American Left, is the kind of tribute Mr. Buckley and his opponents deserve, for it will underscore an ongoing intellectual combat that (most of the time) raised political debate in this nation to an art form. Their collective work, with a couple of exceptions, challenges future generations to raise the level of their own discourse. If we believe as Buckley did that sustaining a free society depends on citizens who are informed critical thinkers, then this effort might be instructive and even a little fun.  Buckley would have liked that.