William F. Buckley's Lessons on Losing Winsomely All the Time
The "Father of Modern Conservatism" stage-managed Conservatism's domestic eclipse and, inadvertently, fathered the current populist revolt that wants an end to his starched irrelevance.
William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review in 1955 to “stand athwart history, yelling Stop,” but also, plausibly, to extend his CIA employment and relationships with the Yale Mafia. He taught us, with impeccable diction, to prize cosmopolitanism over covenant and commitment, credit over character and contribution, and abstraction over actuality and accuracy.
Polymath Buckley introduced Americans to a fusion of traditional Western moral precepts, classical liberal economics, and eloquent anti-Communist belligerence. If you peel back all the layers, Buckley was sustaining the specific goals of the Anglo-American global financial and policy networks that had been established and funded via the unprecedented wealth extracted from South Africa’s mineral patrimony by Cecil Rhodes (British)1, Alfred Beit (Anglo-German), and later the Astor Family (Anglo-American).
Buckley’s stranglehold on American Conservative thought and politics seemed prescient when his corner was rewarded with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Indeed, the Reagan–Thatcher era was peak Buckleyism, although he was really a beneficiary of what Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman had structured and driven through the Mt. Pelerin Society, which was the hinge trans-Atlantic power broker. Nevertheless, Buckleyites saw Communism recede, markets liberalize, and conservative journals and think tanks reaped a massive donor harvest.
However, the triumph over the Soviet bloc came at an enormous cost for all Americans, but especially conservatives. Buckley’s moderation and tone policing were supposed to “civilize” American conservatism. Instead, it demobilized it, leaving the Left free to infiltrate and deform our institutions, and the Right was left with larger mailing lists and ever more effete demands to moderate its opposition to anything and everything.
While Buckley was scolding and exiling conservatives he and his masters disapproved of, America went down a road of ruin that it may never return from:
Millions of jobs critical for adults without college degrees were permanently destroyed in the industrial heartland as entire industries had their intellectual and plant capital shipped abroad. Buckley’s “heartland of the free market” is now an archipelago of hollowed-out towns where the biggest enterprises deal meth and fentanyl. It was mostly done for the sake of oligarch arbitrage gains, but also the myth that uplifting the working class in other countries makes lifetime friends, allies, and partners. You only need to look at Mexico and Canada to see where that got us.
The “free trade” deals (NAFTA 1994, CAFTA 2004, TPP negotiations) facilitated the concretizing of emerging corporate monopolies that privatized profits and socialized losses, obliterating local enterprise in the process. Full-time employment gave way to part-time jobs, which gave way to side gigs, and then to rent-to-own everything.
“Homeownership”, once a conservative cudgel to proclaim rugged independence, now means servitude to 50-year mortgages sold into mortgage-backed securities and rented back by private equity parasites buying up entire subdivisions.2
Successive tidal waves of devastating cultural, social, and political losses for Christians and conservatives: reprogramming the family into state-supervised consumption units, birth control, prayer in schools, sodomy, abortion, free association, pornography, drug abuse, cancel culture, feminism, homosexual marriage, pedophiles posing as drag queens reading to your children in tax payer funded libraries, financialization of everything3, loss of sovereignty to UN treaties, mass third-world legal and illegal immigration that imported the very risks foreign wars were justified with, no cash bail, pride parades, DEI, erasure of meaningful architecture, collapse of the mainstream Christian churches and substitution with therapeutic pablum boxes, restorative justice, SNAP and EBT recipients emerging as the new middle class, foreign “full freight” university students displacing American students, literacy and numeracy scores at 30-year lows, transvestitism, child sexual mutilation, government employment besting private employment in salaries and benefits, Frankenstein labs buying and selling choice cuts of aborted children, institutionalized anti-white prejudice explicitly intended to curtail the educational and employment opportunities of white men, ad infinitum.
Nodding sagely as the DOJ, FBI, and IRS were turned into the managerial class’s on-call Cheka, weaponizing trivialities against minor dissidents while ignoring systemic fraud, corruption, and insider trading at the top of our society. Solzehenitzyn would be amazed at the Soviets' comparative ham-handedness.
The First Amendment is throttled by private platforms functioning as state proxies; the Second by bureaucratic strangulation; the Fourth by total state surveillance.
The US is functionally bankrupt at every level with a $36 trillion national debt (~$5 trillion in state and local debt)4, ~$125 trillion in unfunded liabilities, a ~$7 trillion Federal Reserve balance sheet, the Pentagon can’t pass an audit, and Congress can’t pass a budget.
The cost and quality of living crisis that this turbo-usury formula has produced is visible on every American city and large town’s sidewalks, as brain-damaged drug addicts driven to despair wait for a “harm reduction officer” to chaperone them to a fatal overdose.5
America’s human food chain has been corrupted to serve Buckley’s jet-setting pals, who feel nothing to intermingle industrial ingredients with synthetic fillers to pad out battery-farmed and obscenely over-processed protein and carbohydrates handled by scads of illegal labor. Obesity rates rose from 15% in 1980 to 43% today; childhood obesity has tripled.
The U.S. total fertility rate has fallen from 3.6 (1960) to 1.6 (2024)—well below replacement, and the excuse needed by Buckleyite media mavens and tony think tanks to demand that we import foreign labor, even if it can’t read or understand your traffic rules, as it flattens your children with a flip-flop-footed big rig.
By moderating their positions and demanding to be left alone to grill and watch football, conservatives enabled Americans to be over-prescribed shoddy vaccines and sketchy treatments. Autism has skyrocketed, and swathes of the population are insulin-resistant, dying miserable early deaths that make the medical elite extremely wealthy as they siphon off the cream of someone else’s inheritance.
China’s path to becoming a near-peer military threat and the world’s dominant industrial and manufacturing center was greased with transferred American intellectual property6, facilitated by disloyal and greedy “American” consulting firms allied with sultans of the capital markets. It was all about cashing in short-term capital gains at any price except a personal one.
The loss of American global trade dominance, with steady displacement by China from the 1990s. The BRICS bloc (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, joined by Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, etc.) now commands over 60% of global GDP (PPP).
Chinese intrusion into previously unchallenged American spheres of control and influence, ending the Monroe Doctrine without a shot being fired, and ceding most of Asia and Africa to Chinese influence. 7
Replacing anti-Communism with rabid anti-Islamism and converting the Cold War superstructure into a military-industrial complex fed by permanent interventionism.
The neocon wars (Sudan, Somalia, the Sahel, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran, etc) all contained Buckley’s moral idealism (we were promised that the Afghan Jefferson and the Iraqi Lincoln only needed to be brought out from under oppressive rulers) blended with managerial technocracy.
Thousands of American soldiers have been maimed and killed in these misadventures, only for their enemies to be imported, settled next door to them, and gifted more and better benefits than the VA offers.
Centering American foreign policy around NATO expansionism and Zionist ambitions for greater Judea and Samaria.
The hollowing out of Europe as a cultural and economic ally, and ensuring it will remain an irreversible Islamic redoubt.
While National Review cheered its foreign wars, the Frankfurt School’s domestic agents captured the universities, media, and bureaucracies. Marcuse’s “repressive tolerance” became policy logic and, most devastatingly, there was a moral inversion as the language of, and activism for, liberation replaced the virtues Americans once took for granted and relied on in their day-to-day interactions.
Buckley helped win the world for the global elite and lost America for its citizens. National Review preaches limited government when it’s not hectoring for moderation, but, like its bedfellow, The Wall Street Journal, it fosters the ideology of a radical, borderless, authoritarian, and interventionist total state whose citizens are arbitrage pawns in a global capital-allocation chess game.
Respectability: Buckley’s Pyrrhic Virtue
Donald Trump’s 2016 victory was Pat Buchanan blowback; an indictment of Buckley, even if Trump still has no notion of it. Trump was sent to the White House by people infuriated by the neocon lineage that was a closed feedback loop of losing upward—institutions preserving prestige while forfeiting every substantive domain: marriage, speech, association, borders, debt, and sovereignty. Disdain united a fractious and disparate Trump coalition sick of global moral crusades, domestic dismembering, and all mediated by preening parasitic elites.
2020 was the gasping Buckleyite deep state counterassault, but now it is in full flight in the think tanks and media spaces it depended on to propagate its views. 2024 has seen a shift in focus to co-opt Trump, but it’s too late. Team Buckley no longer speaks for conservatism, what must be conserved, and whether respectability is worth its price. Buckley traded on his relationships, intellect, vocabulary, and wit, but his greatest accomplishment was to fear impoliteness more than perfidy. To admire Buckley is to be well-versed in a throat-clearing principled position, but utterly illiterate in long-range power dynamics that preserve and conserve what really matters in a society.
The man who made conservatism protected, profitable, and palatable for D.C. television and lobbyist soirées made it unsafe for history. Buckley had perfect manners and splendid erudition, and it just meant his team lost winsomely. Over and over and over. Pat Buchanan is thoroughly vindicated.
Cecil Rhodes, Confession of Faith
Wall Street’s rentiers engineered a financial sector that accounts for 40% of all corporate profits, mostly by moving money around, versus just 10% in 1950.
The national debt-to-GDP ratio has rocketed from 35% in 1980 to 125% today.
Real median household income has been stagnant since 1999, while asset inflation has rewarded the rentier class with massive realized and unrealized capital gains. Suicide and overdose deaths now exceed Vietnam War combat deaths every three years. Opioid overdoses killed over 100,000 Americans in 2023 alone, but our elites shrug when the genocide is synthetic-chemical and gets your name on a new wing at the art gallery.
The China PNTR (2001) and WTO entry.
China’s navy is now the world’s largest; its Belt and Road Initiative effectively inverted the Monroe Doctrine by capturing Latin American ports and African resource nodes.
I’m impressed with this. Holy smokes. I hope that Pat Buchanan is feeling vindicated. I hope that Conservative, Inc burns to the ground.
Excellent timing on this post. As they say, Conservatives couldn't even conserve the women's bathroom. May the term and movement rest in peace, sooner than later.