Walking the tightrope - How William F. Buckley balanced himself along the cosmo-provo divide
Sean Scallon
March 12, 2008
In my last article, I wrote about the cosmopolitan vs. provincial (or cosmo vs. provo) divide that transcended all political parties and ideologies. There truly is a divide between policy makers and the elites found in metropolitan areas, especially on the east and west coasts where the bulk of the U.S´. population lives, and those who live with the effects of those policies every place else.
This is not a new phenomenon. The divide between areas of wealth and power and areas that do not have such advantages has been a current in U.S. politics, government and culture since the founding of the country. Perhaps today, given our empire status, the divide is more pronounced as the Washington-New York-Boston corridor and its ally Hollywood truly lives and stands apart from the Heartland of the country.
However, there was one fellow who tried to walk this line that divides cosmos and provos and succeeded in some ways. But he often fell on the side he was more comfortable with and wound up playing a role in wrecking his own creation. He simply could not maintain that balance. It will be up to his successors (most of them would-be´s) to try again to walk the tightrope between "provos" and "cosmos."
William F. Buckley was described by Joseph Scotchie in his book Revolt from the Heartland as "articulate, witty and telegenic. Here was a learned conservative made for the television age." His obituaries, after recently passing away at the age of 82, made this point again and again. Buckley, they said, rescued conservatism from the "anti-Semites and racists". He changed the perception of conservatives as being dour old men from the Midwest and infused what was then just reflexive way of thinking with a healthy dose of intellectual flair gained from a dynamic background of Catholic traditionalism, Ivy League education, derring-do physicality and a wealthy family´s sense of oblige. One could arguably call him a metrosexual before the term was even created. He was the epitome of cosmopolitanism. He made conservatism happy and fun as if he were clown trying to enliven a child's birthday party. In short, he saved conservatism from Robert Taft.
Taft, who was no one´s idea of happy and fun, has become the favorite whipping boy of the ancient régime, an age when no one could comprehend conservatism as an ideology in the style of Marxism. Back then it really was a reactionary stance against socialism. But Taft was Republican politician from Ohio and voted and acted the way such Republican politicians from Ohio had done in the past from the days of William McKinley and his father William Howard Taft to Warren Harding. Perhaps a better villain would be the character of Henry F. Potter from the movie It´s a Wonderful Life. He´s the hard hearted town moneybags who clings to the old patriarchy. The town´s working class, its Catholic immigrants who are represented by the New Dealer, Irish Democrat Bailey family fight against the paternal capitalism of the upstate New York Republican, Protestant industrialist Potter by building their own, modern homes to contrast with the rundown slums Potter built to house such workers who toiled at his factories. Potter is not just conservative, but he´s also libertarian as well. To dull the pain of their backbreaking toil and squalid living conditions, he allows the town to become a cesspool of vice, liquor, gambling and loose women in the fantasy sequence of the movie that shows what life would be like had George Bailey not been born. Only Bailey, with his Irish fight and determination, kept Bedford Falls from this fate had the Bailey Building and Loan gone under. Bedford Falls stayed in its Norman Rockwell existence, Catholic values were upheld and its first and second generation immigrant citizens lived the American Dream.
(In fact Bailey would have eventually won anyway over Potter, all the money he received at the end of the movie notwithstanding. Pretty soon, the Building and Loan would be rolling in Federal dough to build more Bailey Parks for the citizens of Bedford Falls and for returning veterans from the war like his brother Harry Bailey. Of course, the irony is in due time, the Baileys and other Catholics would be joining sides with Potter. Both would be outraged at the Communist enslavement of fellow Catholics in Eastern Europe. But I digress.)
Of course this image of Buckley as the savior of conservatism is wrought with the same double standards, inconsistencies and hypocrisies that have tainted the so-called "conservative movement" from the very first issue of the National Review.
If it wasn´t for dour, old factory people like Potter and his real-life contemporaries like textile-maker Roger Milliken of South Carolina, bathroom fixture maker Walter Kohler of Wisconsin, Harry Lynd Bradley of the Allen-Bradley foundries of Milwaukee (and the generous conservative donor of the modern-day Bradley Foundation), the money that funded much of the conservative activism in the 1950s through the 1970s would not have existed. Even with the oil money coming in from Texans and Californians like H.L. Hunt and Henry Salvatori respectively, much what fueled the rise of candidates like Barry Goldwater still came from the owners of old factories and foundries found in the industrial heartland. It certainly didn´t come from the Buckley family fortune that´s for sure. The National Review barely eked out an existence for the first 10 years of its publication (as one wag put it, "Buckley isn´t as rich as he likes to think he is.") and was reportedly subsidized by the CIA, which was intent on creating an interventionist conservatism for its former employee.
And how in the Lord´s name did pre-Vatican II Catholic traditionalists (not exactly the happy and fun religion) and apocalyptic former Communists like James Burnham and Whittaker Chambers (who thought the West was doomed in its long, twilight struggle against Marxism) somehow managed to convince history that they had brighter smiles and sunnier dispositions than the dour Taft and the Midwestern industrialists? Because as Buckley realized when he published his first book, God and Man at Yale, the energy and rebelliousness of youth attracts people regardless of ideology, belief or politics. Long before the Left discovered the youth movement, it was Buckley and his Young Americans for Freedom who made the 1960s happen with their protests, antics and issuance of non-negotiable demands to college presidents like California´s Clark Kerr, Yale´s Kingman Brewster and Wisconsin´s Fred Harvey Harrington, who were all part of the liberal establishment, long before the New Left did.
And while Buckley may have very well presented a new image of a young, vibrant post-war conservatism on the nation´s TV sets, what made the "conservative movement" were the shock troops who read Ayn Rand´s The Fountainhead or were members of the John Birch Society (who's founder, Massachusetts candy maker Robert Welch, contributed thousands of dollars to keep the National Review afloat.) It was they, out in the provinces away from Buckley´s apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan or his Sharon, Connecticut estate, who attended the state GOP conventions and won delegates for Goldwater, not the writers for National Review and that was the conundrum that Buckley always faced. While could he impress his New York intellectual friends with the highbrow content of the National Review and draw in fellow intellectuals like the former Trotskyites Sidney Hook, Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, which he had always planned to do, he could not control the provincials who were providing the political muscle that would turn NR´s intellectual nostrums into concrete policies in the White House and Congress. And what he could not control, Buckley attacked and purged from the "movement" to keep his respectability and that of his cosmopolitan acolytes. In the provinces (the internet being the biggest province of all), one can find any number of writers and editors who used to write or work for the National Review. When the party line changed and you didn´t toe it, you were cast out like the fallen angels of heaven onto the Earth and a neocon or a College Republican flunky came in and took your place whether he was old enough to shave or not.
"We have to refine the Wallace voter", Buckley once said. The George Wallace voter could not stand alone on his own, nor could Wallace for that matter, to give their own definition of conservatism. Such provos were too uncouth to let into the cocktail party. They might get everything dirty. But in 12 years time they became the "Reagan Democrats," and thus became respectable enough to win power for the "movement". It´s an amazing transformation of thinking from a man who once praised and defended Joseph McCarthy, the ultimate provo conservative. Indeed, one good way to get provos on your side is to flatter them, to make them feel like they´re a part of the club, part of the cosmo retinue. Status anxieties will do that to a provo and Buckley oozed such upper class it was hard not to be attracted to it. That´s why Rush Limbaugh appeared on the cover of the NR as the "Leader of the Opposition". Buckley once distained Ronald Reagan, then became his biggest supporter because the "provos" liked him and, more importantly, voted for him. Of course, once you get inside, that´s when the dagger goes right into your back as M. Stanton Evans sadly found out. NR employed neocon Ronald Radosh to trash Stanton´s latest book that defended McCarthy just as robustly today as Buckley´s Sen. McCarthy and his Enemies did back when Buckley wrote it in the mid-1950s. Of course, then again, there´s a lot that once appeared in the pages of NR that wouldn´t so much as even be thought up today.
And thus the fatal flaw of the "conservative movement": It was a movement based on others´ perceptions of it. Buckley and his writers and editors had to adjust and change and contort themselves to fit the prevailing attitudes of the cosmopolitans that set the nation´s cultural tone which in turn sets its political and ideological tone. National Review once supported segregation laws, then they accepted in the Civil Rights movement. NR was once critical of unlimited immigration, then they dropped the subject. NR was once for balanced budgets and fiscal conservatism, then they became full-throated supporters of supply side economics and deficit spending. Indeed, Buckley may have set the tone for the postwar "conservative movement" but only after his fellow cosmopolitans wrote the music. Buckley, as Peter Brimelow pointed out in his recent obit of him on VDARE.com, was really a weak man always trying to look respectable to his fellow cosmos. Attacks on the provos like "In Search of Anti-Semitism" or "Unpatriotic Conservatives" or his nasty obituary of Murray Rothbard, were reflections of this, especially after the ranks of the cosmopolitans began to fill up with the new establishment "conservatives" of politicos, White House and Congressional staffers, radio talk show hosts, Beltway based think tanks, opinion magazine writers and editors and of course, the neoconservatives, who quickly began to surpass Buckley as the new "tone setters" once he went into his sunset years.
There are those former colleagues of Buckley like Brimelow who are still steamed at their treatment by him. But there are others who have every right to be ticked off yet still hold him in affection. Buckley has his dark side just like most other people do, but his better nature is also attractive. Considering what passes for "conservative" discourse in this day and age, Buckley´s style and grace is sorely missed. I´ll take "Firing Line" over the "No Spin Zone" any day of the week. A right wing that is as directionless and pathetic as one finds could use a man of Buckley´s letters to reinvigorate it. I´ll take the old NR over the "EIB Network´s Advanced Institute of Conservative Studies" as well. Indeed, the whole "crunchy cons" movement first espoused by former NR writer (there´s another one) Rod Dreher, tries to combine Buckley´s traditionalism and cosmo sense of culture with provincial mores and agrarianism. If modern elite culture in this day and age rejects Buckley´s cultural tastes as "elitist" in some twisted sense egalitarianism and populism (which describes George Bush II, Mike Huckabee and most young Republicans in a nutshell), perhaps it will be autodidacts and the gentlemen farmers in the provinces who will be the one who set the tone for a change instead of the barbarians who try to pass themselves off as cosmos.
Sean Scallon is a writer and journalist living in Arkansaw, Wisconsin
This is not a new phenomenon. The divide between areas of wealth and power and areas that do not have such advantages has been a current in U.S. politics, government and culture since the founding of the country. Perhaps today, given our empire status, the divide is more pronounced as the Washington-New York-Boston corridor and its ally Hollywood truly lives and stands apart from the Heartland of the country.
However, there was one fellow who tried to walk this line that divides cosmos and provos and succeeded in some ways. But he often fell on the side he was more comfortable with and wound up playing a role in wrecking his own creation. He simply could not maintain that balance. It will be up to his successors (most of them would-be´s) to try again to walk the tightrope between "provos" and "cosmos."
William F. Buckley was described by Joseph Scotchie in his book Revolt from the Heartland as "articulate, witty and telegenic. Here was a learned conservative made for the television age." His obituaries, after recently passing away at the age of 82, made this point again and again. Buckley, they said, rescued conservatism from the "anti-Semites and racists". He changed the perception of conservatives as being dour old men from the Midwest and infused what was then just reflexive way of thinking with a healthy dose of intellectual flair gained from a dynamic background of Catholic traditionalism, Ivy League education, derring-do physicality and a wealthy family´s sense of oblige. One could arguably call him a metrosexual before the term was even created. He was the epitome of cosmopolitanism. He made conservatism happy and fun as if he were clown trying to enliven a child's birthday party. In short, he saved conservatism from Robert Taft.
Taft, who was no one´s idea of happy and fun, has become the favorite whipping boy of the ancient régime, an age when no one could comprehend conservatism as an ideology in the style of Marxism. Back then it really was a reactionary stance against socialism. But Taft was Republican politician from Ohio and voted and acted the way such Republican politicians from Ohio had done in the past from the days of William McKinley and his father William Howard Taft to Warren Harding. Perhaps a better villain would be the character of Henry F. Potter from the movie It´s a Wonderful Life. He´s the hard hearted town moneybags who clings to the old patriarchy. The town´s working class, its Catholic immigrants who are represented by the New Dealer, Irish Democrat Bailey family fight against the paternal capitalism of the upstate New York Republican, Protestant industrialist Potter by building their own, modern homes to contrast with the rundown slums Potter built to house such workers who toiled at his factories. Potter is not just conservative, but he´s also libertarian as well. To dull the pain of their backbreaking toil and squalid living conditions, he allows the town to become a cesspool of vice, liquor, gambling and loose women in the fantasy sequence of the movie that shows what life would be like had George Bailey not been born. Only Bailey, with his Irish fight and determination, kept Bedford Falls from this fate had the Bailey Building and Loan gone under. Bedford Falls stayed in its Norman Rockwell existence, Catholic values were upheld and its first and second generation immigrant citizens lived the American Dream.
(In fact Bailey would have eventually won anyway over Potter, all the money he received at the end of the movie notwithstanding. Pretty soon, the Building and Loan would be rolling in Federal dough to build more Bailey Parks for the citizens of Bedford Falls and for returning veterans from the war like his brother Harry Bailey. Of course, the irony is in due time, the Baileys and other Catholics would be joining sides with Potter. Both would be outraged at the Communist enslavement of fellow Catholics in Eastern Europe. But I digress.)
Of course this image of Buckley as the savior of conservatism is wrought with the same double standards, inconsistencies and hypocrisies that have tainted the so-called "conservative movement" from the very first issue of the National Review.
If it wasn´t for dour, old factory people like Potter and his real-life contemporaries like textile-maker Roger Milliken of South Carolina, bathroom fixture maker Walter Kohler of Wisconsin, Harry Lynd Bradley of the Allen-Bradley foundries of Milwaukee (and the generous conservative donor of the modern-day Bradley Foundation), the money that funded much of the conservative activism in the 1950s through the 1970s would not have existed. Even with the oil money coming in from Texans and Californians like H.L. Hunt and Henry Salvatori respectively, much what fueled the rise of candidates like Barry Goldwater still came from the owners of old factories and foundries found in the industrial heartland. It certainly didn´t come from the Buckley family fortune that´s for sure. The National Review barely eked out an existence for the first 10 years of its publication (as one wag put it, "Buckley isn´t as rich as he likes to think he is.") and was reportedly subsidized by the CIA, which was intent on creating an interventionist conservatism for its former employee.
And how in the Lord´s name did pre-Vatican II Catholic traditionalists (not exactly the happy and fun religion) and apocalyptic former Communists like James Burnham and Whittaker Chambers (who thought the West was doomed in its long, twilight struggle against Marxism) somehow managed to convince history that they had brighter smiles and sunnier dispositions than the dour Taft and the Midwestern industrialists? Because as Buckley realized when he published his first book, God and Man at Yale, the energy and rebelliousness of youth attracts people regardless of ideology, belief or politics. Long before the Left discovered the youth movement, it was Buckley and his Young Americans for Freedom who made the 1960s happen with their protests, antics and issuance of non-negotiable demands to college presidents like California´s Clark Kerr, Yale´s Kingman Brewster and Wisconsin´s Fred Harvey Harrington, who were all part of the liberal establishment, long before the New Left did.
And while Buckley may have very well presented a new image of a young, vibrant post-war conservatism on the nation´s TV sets, what made the "conservative movement" were the shock troops who read Ayn Rand´s The Fountainhead or were members of the John Birch Society (who's founder, Massachusetts candy maker Robert Welch, contributed thousands of dollars to keep the National Review afloat.) It was they, out in the provinces away from Buckley´s apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan or his Sharon, Connecticut estate, who attended the state GOP conventions and won delegates for Goldwater, not the writers for National Review and that was the conundrum that Buckley always faced. While could he impress his New York intellectual friends with the highbrow content of the National Review and draw in fellow intellectuals like the former Trotskyites Sidney Hook, Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, which he had always planned to do, he could not control the provincials who were providing the political muscle that would turn NR´s intellectual nostrums into concrete policies in the White House and Congress. And what he could not control, Buckley attacked and purged from the "movement" to keep his respectability and that of his cosmopolitan acolytes. In the provinces (the internet being the biggest province of all), one can find any number of writers and editors who used to write or work for the National Review. When the party line changed and you didn´t toe it, you were cast out like the fallen angels of heaven onto the Earth and a neocon or a College Republican flunky came in and took your place whether he was old enough to shave or not.
"We have to refine the Wallace voter", Buckley once said. The George Wallace voter could not stand alone on his own, nor could Wallace for that matter, to give their own definition of conservatism. Such provos were too uncouth to let into the cocktail party. They might get everything dirty. But in 12 years time they became the "Reagan Democrats," and thus became respectable enough to win power for the "movement". It´s an amazing transformation of thinking from a man who once praised and defended Joseph McCarthy, the ultimate provo conservative. Indeed, one good way to get provos on your side is to flatter them, to make them feel like they´re a part of the club, part of the cosmo retinue. Status anxieties will do that to a provo and Buckley oozed such upper class it was hard not to be attracted to it. That´s why Rush Limbaugh appeared on the cover of the NR as the "Leader of the Opposition". Buckley once distained Ronald Reagan, then became his biggest supporter because the "provos" liked him and, more importantly, voted for him. Of course, once you get inside, that´s when the dagger goes right into your back as M. Stanton Evans sadly found out. NR employed neocon Ronald Radosh to trash Stanton´s latest book that defended McCarthy just as robustly today as Buckley´s Sen. McCarthy and his Enemies did back when Buckley wrote it in the mid-1950s. Of course, then again, there´s a lot that once appeared in the pages of NR that wouldn´t so much as even be thought up today.
And thus the fatal flaw of the "conservative movement": It was a movement based on others´ perceptions of it. Buckley and his writers and editors had to adjust and change and contort themselves to fit the prevailing attitudes of the cosmopolitans that set the nation´s cultural tone which in turn sets its political and ideological tone. National Review once supported segregation laws, then they accepted in the Civil Rights movement. NR was once critical of unlimited immigration, then they dropped the subject. NR was once for balanced budgets and fiscal conservatism, then they became full-throated supporters of supply side economics and deficit spending. Indeed, Buckley may have set the tone for the postwar "conservative movement" but only after his fellow cosmopolitans wrote the music. Buckley, as Peter Brimelow pointed out in his recent obit of him on VDARE.com, was really a weak man always trying to look respectable to his fellow cosmos. Attacks on the provos like "In Search of Anti-Semitism" or "Unpatriotic Conservatives" or his nasty obituary of Murray Rothbard, were reflections of this, especially after the ranks of the cosmopolitans began to fill up with the new establishment "conservatives" of politicos, White House and Congressional staffers, radio talk show hosts, Beltway based think tanks, opinion magazine writers and editors and of course, the neoconservatives, who quickly began to surpass Buckley as the new "tone setters" once he went into his sunset years.
There are those former colleagues of Buckley like Brimelow who are still steamed at their treatment by him. But there are others who have every right to be ticked off yet still hold him in affection. Buckley has his dark side just like most other people do, but his better nature is also attractive. Considering what passes for "conservative" discourse in this day and age, Buckley´s style and grace is sorely missed. I´ll take "Firing Line" over the "No Spin Zone" any day of the week. A right wing that is as directionless and pathetic as one finds could use a man of Buckley´s letters to reinvigorate it. I´ll take the old NR over the "EIB Network´s Advanced Institute of Conservative Studies" as well. Indeed, the whole "crunchy cons" movement first espoused by former NR writer (there´s another one) Rod Dreher, tries to combine Buckley´s traditionalism and cosmo sense of culture with provincial mores and agrarianism. If modern elite culture in this day and age rejects Buckley´s cultural tastes as "elitist" in some twisted sense egalitarianism and populism (which describes George Bush II, Mike Huckabee and most young Republicans in a nutshell), perhaps it will be autodidacts and the gentlemen farmers in the provinces who will be the one who set the tone for a change instead of the barbarians who try to pass themselves off as cosmos.
Sean Scallon is a writer and journalist living in Arkansaw, Wisconsin
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