This year is the centennial of the birth of William F. Buckley, Jr., the best-known American conservative intellectual of the second half of the 20th century, and February 27 is the anniversary of his death in 2008 at the age of 82. To most Americans, he was a media celebrity, the erudite and witty host of the PBS program “Firing Line,” while to so-called movement conservatives, he was the leader of a faction that crystallized around his magazine National Review, founded in 1955. Having met him when I was at graduate school at Yale, for a decade, from the early 1980s to the early 1990s, I was privileged to know Bill Buckley as a mentor and friend. He has been the subject of a number of biographies, including John Judis’s William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives (1988) and the definitive forthcoming biography by Sam Tanenhaus, Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America (June 2025).
That Bill Buckley was a central figure in American conservatism in the second half of the twentieth century is indisputable. But conventional histories of the American right and Bill’s long career get a lot wrong.
That Bill Buckley was a central figure in American conservatism in the second half of the twentieth century is indisputable. But conventional histories of the American right and Bill’s long career get a lot wrong.
In National Review’s celebration of the centennial of its founder, Neal Freeman asks: “What individual was most responsible for America’s victory in the Cold War?”
Some might say that it had been George Kennan, the architect of the West’s strategy of containment…Some might say that it had been Giovanni Paolo Secondo, the implacably anti-Communist leader of the Roman church…Some might say that it had been Ronald Reagan…In Reagan’s judgment, it had been Bill Buckley who, year after year, decade after decade, had reified the hard spiritual case against Communism.
As it happens, in August 1991, when Soviet hardliners carried out a failed coup against Gorbachev, I was aboard Bill’s yacht with Bill and two others on a week-long sailing trip in Long Island Sound. In the days following August 19, we listened to news reports about the coup and its aftermath on a small, white battery-powered radio on the seventy-foot boat. Bill was interested but not elated or obsessed, perhaps because the coup and the dissolution of the Communist Party and the USSR that followed were anticlimactic, as the Cold War had already effectively ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and German reunification in 1990. Had Bill been told that he was responsible for the demise of communism, he would have smiled his crooked smile and come up with a clever and memorable quip.
A more common interpretation of Bill’s role in political history draws a direct line between his founding of National Review in 1955 to the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater in 1964 and the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. According to this interpretation, a single ideology, “fusionist conservatism,” which synthesized anticommunism, free market economics, and social conservatism, displaced its philosophical rivals on the right, and provided a template for victory against communism abroad and liberalism at home.
This narrative fails to acknowledge the radical discontinuity between the views of the Buckley circle in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and subsequent mainstream conservatism as well as Bill’s own evolving views. Early movement conservatism was strident, pessimistic, and apocalyptic. In the first issue of National Review, Bill famously wrote: “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop…” No, that is the definition of a reactionary. As Edmund Burke wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France: “A state without the means of some change, is without the means of its own conservation.”
In foreign policy, Bill and his circle in the 1950s and early 1960s attacked the mainstream U.S. strategy of containment of the Soviet Union in favor of an ill-defined alternative, “rollback.” In economic policy, they wanted to repeal the New Deal, which they feared would lead to totalitarian collectivism. And they denounced desegregation as federal tyranny, sometimes in terms of states’ rights, but sometimes in blatantly racist language. Early contributors to National Review included antisemites, and the magazine was generally hostile to the State of Israel. In the January 5, 1957 issue, a contributor with the remarkable name of Guy Ponce de Leon defended Southern segregation by comparing it to Zionism: “Even the Jews, themselves the victims of the most notorious racial discrimination of modern times, did not hesitate to createthe first racist statein history.”
Far from being a temporary setback on the road to triumph, the defeat of Goldwater in the presidential election a few years later coincided with the defeat of early movement conservatism.
Far from being a temporary setback on the road to triumph, the defeat of Goldwater in the presidential election a few years later coincided with the defeat of early movement conservatism. While conservatives later supported U.S. efforts in Indochina and elsewhere to prevent Marxist-Leninists from coming to power, the fantasy of a rollback of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was abandoned, and until the end of the Cold War the movement conservatives supported variants of Harry Truman’s containment strategy.
The landslide victory in 1964 of LBJ, a New Dealer and protégé of FDR, proved the irrelevance of those who had called on the American people to repeal the New Deal. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, conservative resistance to desegregation was as dead as the Confederacy. In 1968, the Republican Party won the White House by nominating former vice-president Richard Nixon—an ardent anticommunist, to be sure, but a moderate on economic issues and a supporter of federal civil rights legislation, notwithstanding his own biases.
A letter from President Dwight Eisenhower to his brother Edgar in 1954, notes the acceptance by most Americans of the major reforms of the New Deal:
Now it is true that I believe this country is following a dangerous trend when it permits too great a degree of centralization of governmental functions. I oppose this–in some instances the fight is a rather desperate one. But to attain any success it is quite clear that the Federal government cannot avoid or escape responsibilities which the mass of the people firmly believe should be undertaken by it. The political processes of our country are such that if a rule of reason is not applied in this effort, we will lose everything–even to a possible and drastic change in the Constitution. This is what I mean by my constant insistence upon “moderation” in government. Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.
Among the reactionary “Texas oil millionaires” mentioned by Eisenhower was William Frank Buckley, Sr., a Texas oil man who helped pay for the founding of National Review in 1955.
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Unmentioned in the Buckley narrative is that, as National Review was getting its start, the Republican Party continued moving in the opposite direction.
In the 1950s, conservatives were found in both parties. The “conservative coalition” of right-wing Southern Democrats and right-wing Northern Republicans was powerful in Congress, while the presidential wing of both parties tended to be more moderate and internationalist.Then, in 1961, William Rusher, the publisher of National Review, and others formed the Draft Goldwater Committee, leading to the nomination in 1964 as the Republican candidate for president of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater.
At the Republican convention in 1964, Barry Goldwater declared: “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”
But in the years that followed Goldwater and Reagan, whose speech at the 1964 convention launched his political career as governor of California and later president of the United States, moved from extremism to moderation.
By the 1990s, Senator Goldwater supported gay rights and said of the leader of the Moral Majority: “I think every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the ass.” As governor of California in 1967, Reagan reluctantly signed the bill that legalized abortion in the state, and as president, he refused to try to repeal Social Security and Medicare, and called for the complete federalization of Medicaid spending and a universal catastrophic health insurance program. After presiding over an arms build-up and funding proxies fighting Soviet clients in Afghanistan and Central America and Africa in his first term, Reagan upset some hardline anticommunists by negotiating with Gorbachev in his second term. Reagan relied on the expertise and experience, in dealing with the Soviet Union, of Paul Nitze. As the principal author of NSC-68, the Truman administration study that formed the basis of the four-decade containment strategy, and a key player in the diplomatic end game in the 1980s, Nitze has a greater claim than anyone else to have been the architect of America’s victory in the Cold War.
Like Goldwater and Reagan, Bill Buckley distanced himself from his earlier extremism. In 2004, he reflected, “I once believed that we could evolve our way up from Jim Crow. I was wrong. Federal intervention was necessary.”
By the 1980s and 1990s, when I knew him in his 60s, in foreign policy Bill tended to defer to his friend the realist Henry Kissinger, with whom he co-hosted annual dinners that I attended a few times. In economic policy, he deferred to Milton Friedman, a pragmatic rather than utopian libertarian, to whom Bill introduced me. During the Reagan years, Bill told me proudly that he had protested that his friend’s administration was cutting welfare too much. And he hired me to research and revise his book on national service, Gratitude: Reflections on What We Owe Our Country (1990). I persuaded Bill to make his compulsory national service proposal less statist, intrusive, and centralized—in other words, more conservative.
As Bill distanced himself from the positions of early movement conservatism, those who would not join the journey to the political center were left behind. Having purged antisemites from National Review, Bill excommunicated the crackpot anticommunist John Birch Society—reluctantly, to be sure—and with a considerable loss of subscribers.
Bill and the rest of National Review’s editors excommunicated libertarian extremists like Murray Rothbard, writing that they “declined to inhabit, along with Mr. Rothbard, the overcrowded quarters of Freak House.”
By the Reagan years, Bill was close to Irving Kristol, my publisher and employer when I was executive editor at The National Interest, as well as New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Kristol, a former leftist, and Moynihan, a Cold War liberal, embraced the New Deal and the civil rights revolution, but opposed the cultural revolution of the Sixties at home and communism abroad. As I like to put it: they were for 1932 and 1964 but against 1968 and 1917.
Buckley’s deriders on both Left and Right attributed his policing of the right to social climbing and respectability politics. I am inclined to think it involved a sincere reorientation of his view of the relationship of ideas to politics.
Buckley’s deriders on both Left and Right attributed his policing of the right to social climbing and respectability politics. I am inclined to think it involved a sincere reorientation of his view of the relationship of ideas to politics.
On a number of occasions, Bill told me the same thing: “Ken Galbraith (John Kenneth Galbraith) always says: I want to see the leftmost viable candidate run against the rightmost viable candidate.” Conservatives sometimes call this “the Buckley rule,” but Bill attributed it to his friend Ken Galbraith, with whom he went on regular skiing vacations in Gstaad beginning in the 1970s (I joined them on one in 1990). Galbraith’s statement had made a great impression on him, to judge by hisrepetition of it in several of our conversations. Bill told me that he had met Ken and Kitty Galbraith at Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan on November 28, 1966, making that date (to use a Buckleyish Latinism) the terminus a quo when Bill could have heard Galbraith’s formulation from his friend’s lips.
Up until the mid-60s, Bill and his circle, including Whittaker Chambers, had viewed themselves as a saving remnant in a West that was probably doomed to succumb to totalitarianism. Inspired by the aloof elitism of the libertarian philosopher Albert Jay Nock, his father’s friend, and Jose Ortega y Gasset, Bill labored on a never-finished book, the typescript of which I read, in which he warned of the threat of mass democracy. But Goldwater’s run for the presidency, and Bill’s own campaign for mayor of New York in 1965 as the candidate of the Conservative Party, marked a shift toward political engagement, concurrent with Reagan’s two terms as governor in California. The fulminating exile trying to stand athwart history shouting stop had become an intellectuel engagé.
For politicians and policy experts alike, the Galbraith Rule, or Galbraith-Buckley Rule, if you prefer, is wonderfully clarifying and liberating: the leftmost viable candidate should run against the rightmost viable candidate. Political ideas should be subjected to a viability test. A lot of clutter can be swept away at once. “Why, sometimes I’ve believed in as many as six impossible things before breakfast,” the Red Queen told Alice. The Galbraith Rule allows you to be a political intellectual without needing to believe in any impossible things at all. Michael Harrington, the democratic socialist contemporary of the liberal Galbraith and the conservative Buckley, made a similar point when he described his politics as “the left wing of the possible.”
One implication of the political viability test is that promoting policies which lack any significant popular support, and which are unlikely to gain it in the foreseeable future, is not “doing politics,” in any meaningful sense. To be sure, today’s crackpot heresy may become tomorrow’s conventional wisdom or moral imperative. But in the meantime, while the prophets are preaching a new faith or reviving an old one, the princes must defend the borders, collect taxes, and see to it that the population does not starve. And the shared purpose of the public intellectual, the public policy expert, and the public affairs commentator is to advise the current prince about current issues; the prophets do not need their help and tomorrow is not today.
In hindsight, Bill’s greatest gift to the American Right may well have been his service as the conservative club bouncer, admitting the viable Right and excluding the non-viable Right. Movement conservatism flunked the viability test with Goldwater’s electoral defeat in 1964, while “new politics liberalism” flunked with the defeat of George McGovern in 1972.
In hindsight, Bill’s greatest gift to the American Right may well have been his service as the conservative club bouncer, admitting the viable Right and excluding the non-viable Right. Movement conservatism flunked the viability test with Goldwater’s electoral defeat in 1964, while “new politics liberalism” flunked with the defeat of George McGovern in 1972. Having passed the viability test, Nixon Republicans who had turned their back on the extreme Right could do business with viable Democrats who had turned their backs on the countercultural left. In his two terms as president, Reagan talked like Goldwater but governed like Nixon and Eisenhower. Daniel Patrick Moynihan went from being an aide to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, to being a Nixon aide, and then became a four-term Democratic Senator from New York. What Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. called “the vital center” really did exist in American politics in the 1970s and 1980s.
In the 1990s, however, gatekeeping on the right broke down.
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On a brief yacht trip in 1991, Bill Buckley asked for my opinion of his draft of a 40,000 word essay, “In Search of Anti-Semitism,” which was eventually published in the December 30, 1991 issue of National Review, and later in book form. Describing his own family’s history of anti-Semitism, Bill examined four cases in which individuals or publications had been accused of anti-Semitism: Gore Vidal, the Dartmouth Review, long-time National Review columnist Joe Sobran, and Patrick J. Buchanan. Bill exonerated the Dartmouth Review, convicted Vidal and Sobran, and expressed a nuanced but damning judgment of Buchanan: “I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism, whatever it was that drove him to say and do it; most probably an iconoclastic temperament.”
I don’t recall making any editorial suggestions when I read the draft of Bill’s essay during our sailing trip. I was pleased, however, to see that Bill was returning to his role as gatekeeper of intellectual conservatism, keeping out the kooks and cranks.
A year or so later, at the 1992 Republican presidential convention in Houston, the Bush campaign sought to co-opt Buchanan, the failed primary challenger from the far Right. Given a prime-time address on August 17, Buchanan scowled and smirked and declared: “There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.”
Watching the spectacle, I decided that Bill had been Right that mainstream conservatism would be tainted by association with Buchanan and the rest of the culture-war Right. I composed an op-ed and sent it to an editor I knew at the New York Times, which published it on August 19, two days after Buchanan’s speech.
I wrote:
Pat Buchanan, with the help of Pat Robertson, is undisputed leader of the masses of the American right. That means the chances for a responsible, intelligent conservatism are in danger. The William F. Buckleys and Irving Kristols who detoxified the right are being succeeded by a generation of Buchanans and Rush Limbaughs setting up a retox ward.
I also criticized the libertarian wing of the GOP:
What can decent Republicans like Jack Kemp offer mainstream Americans who are repelled by the militant fundamentalism of the Buchanan brigades? A capital gains tax cut? Enterprise zones? These are not ideas to send middle Americans to the barricades—even to the polls.
The morning that my New York Times oped appeared, Owen Harries, the editor of The National Interest, called me in to his office and told me that our publisher Irving Kristol was furious with me. I was puzzled, because in his open letter to Buckley following the publication of the magazine version of “In Search of Anti-Semitism,” Irving had written that Buchanan, Sobran, and others were “debasing the conservative movement and robbing it, in the eyes of the public, of its political legitimacy. That is why I think, in the end, Bill Buckley’s essay is so important. It is a forceful statement, by our leading American conservative, as to what kind of political body and what kind of political soul American conservatism is to possess.” Those who relish irony will appreciate the fact that on October 15, 1992, the book version of “In Search of Anti-Semitism” was published—almost two months to the day after Irving Kristol turned against me for publicly criticizing Pat Buchanan.
At some point in the nine months between December 1991, when Bill’s critique of Buchanan appeared in National Review, and August 1992, when I published my critique of Buchanan in the New York Times, the party line among mainstream intellectual conservatives had changed from “purge the far right” to a strategy of “no enemies to the right” in the service of re-electing President George Herbert Walker Bush. Unfortunately, I had not received the memo.
In 1992, I was thirty years old—the same age that Bill had been when he founded National Review in 1955. With the brashness of youth, I refused to follow the unprincipled new conservative party line.
In 1992, I was thirty years old—the same age that Bill had been when he founded National Review in 1955. With the brashness of youth, I refused to follow the unprincipled new conservative party line.
Earlier, during the Gulf War in 1991, when I had worked for the State Department, I purchased Pat Robertson’s book The New World Order and discovered that the TV preacher attributed the French Revolution to the machinations of Jews, Freemasons, and the Illuminati, and explained the Gulf War as a conspiracy of international bankers, aided by Lucifer’s agents who controlled the Council on Foreign Relations, to which I belonged as a term member thanks to Pat Moynihan and Bill Buckley. In the December 14, 1992 issue of The New Republic, Andrew Sullivan published my first expose of Robertson,“The Exorcism,” while I was still working for Irving Kristol as executive editor of The National Interest. Three years later, a second and more influential article by me was published by The New York Review of Books: “Rev. Robertson’s Grand International Conspiracy Theory.” Once the conservative bouncer, Bill dismissed my concerns. On September 5, 1993, he wrote: “On Wednesday-Thursday I will be in South Carolina doing one of those big two-hour debates (on your favorite subject, The religious right).”
The Firing Line debate to which he referred can be found today on YouTube under the title “Resolved: We need not fear the Religious Right.”
It was a sharp departure from his six-page National Review editorial denouncing Welch in 1962, in which Bill wrote: “There are bounds to the dictum, anyone on my right is my ally.” Calling conservatism “the politics of reality,” the young Buckley said of undecided Americans: “If they think they are being asked to join a movement whose leadership believes the drivel of Robert Welch, they will pass by crackpot alley, and will not pause until they feel the embrace of those way over on the other side, the Liberals.” Now in 1993 on television, Bill sat as chief character witness next to Robertson.
One back and forth in the Firing Line debate illustrates the change. When Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State pointed out that in The New World Order Robertson had written that if he were president he would appoint only Christians and Jews because they were “better qualified to govern American than Hindus or Muslims,” Robertson replied: “Well, let me ask you this: would you like to have Muammar Gaddafi as Secretary of Defense? Would you like to have the Ayatollah Khomeini in charge of Health and Human Services?”
In an essay in the Washington Post on October 16, 1994, “Calling All Crackpots: A New Conservative Credo: No Enemies on the Right,” I criticized Bill in print for the first time:
William F. Buckley, Jr., who drove Birch leader Robert Welch from the ranks of the respectable right, has repeatedly defended Robertson, even though the latter’s claim that a “tightly knit cabal” of Satan-worshipping occultists is secretly running the United States through the Council on Foreign Relations makes Bircher conspiracy theories look tame. Other mainstream conservatives such as William Bennett and Midge Decter are doing their best to change the subject from Robertson’s bizarre views by accusing critics of the religious right (many of them Jews) of anti-Christian or anti-religious bias. (In the same way, defenders of Farrakhan accuse his critics of racism.)
On October 26, Bill responded in a letter to the Washington Post:
Mr. Lind would have done better to proclaim my ignorance than my cowardice. You see, I (along with William Bennett and Midge Decter, also cited by Mr. Lind) have gone no further than to defend many of Pat Robertson’s public positions on what ails U.S. policy. Mr. Lind makes it sound as though Mr. Robertson’s theory about the Satanists who run U.S. foreign policy were as broadly identified with Robertson as Copernican astronomy is with Galileo. Well, if Pat Robertson indeed believes that crazy stuff, I here and now expel him from the conservative movement and await a Silver Star for courage from Mr. Lind.
Our friendship had come to an end.
***
In a column of August 26, 2005 entitled “Robertson’s Death Wishes,” three years before his death, Bill finally denounced Pat Robertson, who had called on the U.S. government to assassinate Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez: “The blurt by Pat Robertson on the matter of Hugo Chavez received the kind of spastic disavowal it deserved, and also warranted.”
Already being eclipsed as the best-known media conservative by Rush Limbaugh, Bill had diminished authority as a gatekeeper of responsible conservatism in the 1990s. But the abandonment of their gatekeeping role by Bill and other conservative opinion leaders and politicians led to disaster for the American Right, the nation, and the world during George W. Bush’s two presidential terms.
The neoconservative militarists and libertarian zealots whom Reagan had kept leashed in the kennel were now given free rein. Although Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, Bush lied about his possession of weapons of mass destruction as an excuse to invade and occupy Iraq. In his Second Inaugural address, Bush committed the U.S. to the messianic mission of subverting or invading all non-democratic governments on earth: “So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” In domestic policy, Bush’s priority was his failed attempt to privatize Social Security—a long-time goal of libertarian ideologues, which Reagan had ignored. And the Bush administration led a nationwide campaign against gay rights and gay marriage which backfired, accelerating the public acceptance of both.
In the 2000s, there were no conservative figures with the authority to stand up to the neocons, libertarians, and evangelical moral minority who had hijacked the Republican party: Maybe calling for wars of choice to topple foreign autocracies that have not attacked the U.S., and then reconstructing foreign nations as liberal democracies at gunpoint in open-ended occupations is not a good idea. Maybe we should think twice before shipping much of our manufacturing out of the country, while importing tens of millions of low-wage, illiterate immigrants to compete with Americans for the remaining service jobs. Maybe trying to divert payroll taxes from Social Security into mutual funds in the volatile stock market with high private management fees should be reconsidered. Maybe trying to impose the sexual morality of the Southern Baptist Convention on a rapidly-secularizing society is unlikely to succeed.
Democrats as well as Republicans need gatekeepers. The Biden administration failed in the same way that the Bush administration failed. Each allowed its agenda to be hijacked by sectarian ideologues whose policies lacked public support from the beginning and were punished by voter backlash. The neocons, Social Security-privatizers, and economic globalists were to the presidency of George W. Bush what the wind-and-solar Greens, the “antiracist” quota-pushers, and the open-borders activists were to the presidency of Joe Biden—parasites who killed their hosts.
If the second Trump administration fails, it will fail because, instead of delivering a few broad policy results favored by the “normie” majority in the electorate, it promotes the niche issues of bizarre subcultures like “dismantling the administrative state” at the expense of the concerns of the multiracial working class majority about grocery and gas prices.
The history of the 21st century to date shows that American voters do not approve of presidential games of “bait and switch,” promising one set of policies and then pursuing another. Trump won in 2016 and again in 2024 by promising what the multi-ethnic, working-class majority wants, according to polls: ending expensive and unnecessary military interventions, controlling immigration, promoting growth through economic nationalism and industrial policy, preserving and strengthening social insurance, rejecting affirmative action/equity and multiculturalism for color-blind law. If the second Trump administration fails, it will fail because, instead of delivering a few broad policy results favored by the “normie” majority in the electorate, it promotes the niche issues of bizarre subcultures like “dismantling the administrative state” at the expense of the concerns of the multiracial working class majority about grocery and gas prices.
The number of possible ideological sects is limited only by the imagination, so today’s non-viable Right contains all kinds of subcultural fauna and flora: weird techno-libertarians who are into microdosing, charter cities, technocratic dictatorship, the Singularity, and colonies on Mars; creepy race-and-IQ hereditarians; oxymoronic “national libertarians” who, like nineteenth century robber barons, are pro-tariff and anti-worker; Trad Caths who want to restore Latin Christendom and papal supremacy; anarcho-libertarians who want to shrink government until it can be drowned in a bathtub; Russophile reactionaries who look to Vladimir Putin to save Western civilization; neo-pagan bodybuilders who are into Nietzsche and manly manliness; and, of course, old-fashioned white nationalists and anti-semites. The contemporary American Right is a big tent—but too much of it covers a carnival sideshow.
A governing Right would not seek government persecution of these ludicrous and sometimes nasty sectarians; it would simply refuse to acknowledge them, hire them, or debate the denizens of “crackpot alley” and “Freak House.” On “Firing Line,” until he adopted the “no enemies to the right” strategy in 1993 in defense of Pat Robertson, Bill Buckley debated intelligent liberals and radicals, while disdaining to invite those to his right whom he considered kooks. Bill didn’t debate libertarians who opposed paper money, or paleoconservatives who thought Jefferson Davis was the true hero of the Civil War, or for that matter his brother-in-law Brent Bozell, a Catholic convert who moved his family to the supposed Christian paradise of Franco’s Spain (today Orban’s Hungary serves this role for some on the fringe Right). That limiting principle helped foster healthy debates, while sidelining those who would undermine the quest for a conservative movement that could be trusted with government power by the voters.
The George W. Bush coalition of militaristic neocons, utopian free traders, and evangelical scolds never had significant public support for its policies, and now it is as dead as the Free Silver movement or the Prohibitionists. Bill Buckley was right to embrace the Galbraith Rule: “I would like to see the leftmost viable candidate run against the rightmost viable candidate.” The right wing of the possible is the only place for a successful American Right.
