IN OCTOBER 1951, Yale celebrated its two hundred fiftieth anniversary, graced by .the presence of the chancellor of Oxford University (who happened to be Lord Halifax, the “appeasing” foreign secretary of the late 1930s, and very nearly prime minister instead of Churchill in 1940), the chairman of United States Steel and other such dignitaries. But like Banquo’s ghost, a shadowy figure cast a pall over the celebrations.
A “brash, brisk, indecorous young man,” as one observer called him, who had graduated the previous year, now returned as a terrifying specter to haunt New Haven. He was, of course, William F. Buckley, Jr., who died last February aged eighty-two, nearly six decades after he timed that first book deliberately to spoil the party. God and Man at Yale was a magnificent display of ingratitude, a polemical denunciation of the author’s alma mater for indoctrinating the sons of “Christian individualists” as “atheistic socialists,” a succès fou—and a portent.
In any community at any time there are always people who could be called conservatives, and in The Conservatives, Patrick Allitt gives a readable and informative overview of different strains of American conservatism, from the Federalists to the End of History (even if it doesn’t quite seem to have ended so far). And yet “before the 1950s,” as Allitt says, “there was no such thing as a conservative movement in the United States.” It is not far-fetched to see God and Man at Yale as the starting gun which began that movement. The political consequences during Buckley’s lifetime would be dramatic.
With conservatism today in the doldrums, this is a good moment from which to look back at the movement, with its antecedents, its birth, its triumphs and now, if Sam Tanenhaus’s title The Death of Conservatism is correct, its demise. Buckley’s early career makes a useful point of departure, and we have a scintillating running commentary on that career that was provided at the time by that marvelous journalist Dwight Macdonald. Reviewing Buckley’s first book in 1952 (in a “fatherly” spirit “from the vantage point of Yale ’28”), he was part impressed, part amused, part skeptical. Skepticism would turn into an exceptionally penetrating critique as he examined Buckley’s next book, McCarthy and his Enemies, in 1954, and then the newborn National Review (NR) in 1955. Not only was Macdonald’s analysis mordantly witty and acute; more than a half century later, what he said then may also help explain present conservative woes, in particular by way of examining the numerous internal contradictions that have beset the movement from the start.
JUST AS now, Republican and conservative America was at a low ebb at the end of the 1940s. In his sparkling essay, Tanenhaus writes of “the heliocentrism of our two-party system as it has evolved over the past century and a half,” which has meant “long cycles—roughly thirty to thirty-six years—of one-party dominance.” There have been relatively few periods when the major parties were even in close competition. And so, as the journalist and pollster Samuel Lubell said, “our political solar system” has not been characterized by “two equally competing suns, but by a sun and a moon. It is within the majority party that the issues of any particular period are fought out; while the minority party shines in reflected radiance of the heat thus generated.”
In fact, the first such period lasted far more than thirty-six years—the very long Republican ascendancy of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries which was one of the legacies of the Civil War. The GOP of that age by no means resembled the English Tory Party or any of the incipient rightist parties in Europe, and one of our problems is that American politics really don’t correspond to European terminology or concepts; even that dangerous metaphor of Left and Right, inherited from the French Revolution, which can be misleading enough in the European context, often doesn’t fit America at all.
