(SUMMARY) One of the most influential names in American politics after World War II, William F. Buckley Jr., who would have turned one hundred years old this month, is the subject of a monumental biography. A public intellectual with a prominent role in the media, creator of the National Review magazine and a famous TV debate program, he is considered the creator of the modern conservative movement. A pioneer in criticism that pointed out left-wing ideological indoctrination in universities, he made culture his battle arena and shaped the actions of conservatives around the world, such as Olavo de Carvalho in Brazil.

At the beginning of last year, federal deputy Nikolas Ferreira (PL-MG) was elected president of the Education Committee of the Chamber of Deputies, which left the MEC (Ministry of Education) concerned.

The election was another chapter in the Bolsonaro offensive in this area, which has as one of its pillars the attack on public universities. Olavo de Carvalho (1947-2022), main ideologist of the conservative movement in Brazil in recent decades, was one of the precursors of this trend here.

Before Olavo and Nikolas, there was William F. Buckley Jr.. A former student at Yale University, in the USA, he created in the early 1950s the conservative theme par excellence: the characterization of universities as a Babylon, a source of spiritual corruption and moral degradation of society, to be fought with holy anger, in a kind of Christian crusade.

“Buckley: The Life and The Revolution that Changed America” (Buckley: The Life and Revolution that Changed America, still unpublished in Brazil), a book of more than a thousand pages, describes much more than the rich trajectory of his biographer (1925-2008), who would have turned one hundred years old on 11/24.

Sam Tanenhaus, historian of the conservative movement and author of two other praised titles on the subject, It also presents a detailed x-ray of right-wing action in the USA since the middle of the last century and offers clues about contemporary phenomena, such as Trumpism and Bolsonarism.

The simplest summary is the following: William Buckley Jr. was the main creator of the modern conservative movement, and by “modern” we mean it emerged after the Second World War. Or, as they once said, he was the guy responsible for transforming the party of Dwight D. Eisenhower, in the 1950s, into the party of Ronald Reagan, in the 1980s.

It’s not that there weren’t conservatives until then — they existed, of course, and participated in the public debate. But the person who established a historical genealogy, grouped principles, created an intellectual and political articulation and inaugurated a sense of movement was Buckley. This is an established consensus in historiography, and it is from this point that the book starts.

Creating a precedent

Bill, as he was known by his close friends, was first and foremost a bon vivant. He enjoyed traveling, good food and was passionate about sailing. It was still in early childhood, when he was studying at St. John’s Beaumont, a Catholic boarding school in England, which was enchanted by the “mysterious power of liturgy and ritual”: especially the Latin Mass and the aesthetic and mystical power of the Eucharistic ceremony of the traditional Catholic Church.

For Tanenhaus, Buckley saw himself almost as a “Spanish Catholic aristocrat”, spiritual son of Ortega y Gasset, one of his intellectual heroes. The problem is that he had the misfortune of being born on the other side of the Atlantic and at the wrong time.

If today the Trump administration attacks universities in the USA, the precedent for the maneuver came in 1951, when Buckley, then 25 years old, published “God and Man at Yale”his most famous book, of the 50 he released throughout his career as a public intellectual and as the most famous face of North American conservatism.

The main argument of the work? Yale was corrupting the Christian values ​​of its students and donors as it embraced a secularist ideology that contaminated U.S. culture as a whole. The preface to “God and Man at Yale” summarizes its author’s vision: “The duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world. And I believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle, just reproduced on another level.”

At the height of his journalistic production, Buckley wrote three weekly columns, published in at least 360 outlets. He was also the creator and presenter of “Firing Line” for 33 years, from 1966 to 1999, on North American TV.

The program popularized the format of political debates that we know, with guests from various political spectrums, such as Jesse Jackson, one of the leaders of the black civil rights movement in the USA, and Carlos Lacerda, the legendary conservative politician from Brazil. Interestingly, given Buckley’s anti-government ideology, “Firing Line” aired most of its time on PBS, the US public broadcaster.

He also gained popular dimension for his confrontations with writer Gore Vidal, over 10 televised debates during the 1968 elections, which became historic and almost ended in physical aggression. This story is told in the documentary “Best Enemies”, by Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville, released in 2015.

Someone who stands in front of History and shouts “Stop!”

Buckley’s most important creation, however, occurred in 1955, when he founded the National Review, magazine that for many decades was the main intellectual center of the conservative movement in the USA. He made the media his battlefield, in which intellectual elites were the main enemy. This group included journalists, academics, editors, political commentators, public servants, people involved in the arts and the cultural sector, as well as several members of the most varied liberal professions.

The idea was that the National Review was a serious, intelligent, witty magazine, which “forced opinion makers to respond, even if it was to disagree”. And the disagreement, of course, in itself would be news.

In the first issue, an editorial that is still widely cited today was published, written by Buckley himself, which functioned as a letter of intent. The text defined a conservative as “someone who stands in front of history and shouts ‘Stop!’”.

The magazine adopted a tactic that worked for many years as the glue responsible for bringing the movement together, the strategy called “fusionism”: the combination of conservatism with radical defense of the free market, with anti-communism as the combustion element.

Trumpism: rupture or continuity?

Many today wonder if Buckley would have opposed Donald Trump, or if he would have sworn loyalty to the king. This is perhaps a futile exercise, and undoubtedly anachronistic, although intellectually entertaining. As it is always difficult to work with this type of hypothesis, we can at least state what he actually did, that is, his positions in relation to the context of his own time.

It is naive to argue that Buckley’s sophistication would repel him from the vulgarity and bellicosity of Trumpism. When faced with McCarthyism, a political and cultural phenomenon with similar traits, Buckley not only did not move away, he swam with his arm: he made a point of becoming its main intellectual and enthusiastic guarantor in the most prestigious social and political circles, which at first had some resistance to the populism of the political repression movement against people on the left led by Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Throughout the eight years of the Reagan administration, despite all the presidential rhetoric hostile to government action, no relevant program of the federal bureaucracy was eliminated, to Buckley’s regret. So it’s difficult, very difficult, to think that he wouldn’t approve of Trump’s offensive against universities, with aggressive cuts in funding and persecution of “leftists and traitors”, measures openly defended in “God and Man at Yale” before they became fashionable, it’s worth remembering.

To put it in other terms: is Trumpism a continuation and unfolding of the movement created in the 1950s by Buckley, or a rupture and radicalization of this process?

There are at least two schools of interpretation on this matter. There are those who prefer to see a rupture, because Buckley would have acted as a guardian, preventing the conservative movement from being contaminated by its most toxic, anti-Semitic, racist and conspiracist currents of all kinds.

On the other hand, there are more critical historiographical interpretations, such as that of David Austin Walsh, for example, which point out how the movement led by National Review never stopped maintaining contact with the extreme right, even if discreetly and behind the scenes.

More important than Buckley’s political views, some argue, was the way in which he expressed them, including the political and media structures he built to that end.

Ronald Reagan once offered him the post of US ambassador to the UN, something similar to the Ministry of Culture or Education’s offer to Olavo de Carvalho, made by Jair Bolsonaro as soon as he assumed the presidency, in 2019. Both Buckley and Olavo refused the positions. The prestigious position as a court intellectual seemed much more interesting to both of them, something that gives food for thought, in fact.

For Sam Tanenhaus, Buckley was largely responsible for transforming contemporary politics into an arena in which an eternal cultural war is fought. It was the guy who said that it was “preferable to live in a society governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the 2,000 faculty members of Harvard University.”

His idea was that the National Review make his arguments, until then limited to conservative groups, finally pierce these bubbles and reach progressives first and, subsequently, the rest of society. According to this metric, we can say that he has come much further than he ever dreamed of.

It’s likely that Nikolas Ferreira doesn’t know who Buckley was, but if it weren’t for the American, Olavism would never have existed in Brazilian culture — much less its main political consequence here, Bolsonarism. As another conservative from the last century said, “ideas have consequences”.