This year marks the 100th anniversary of William F. Buckley’s birth and the 70th anniversary of National Review, the magazine he founded. There have been several tributes to the godfather of modern conservatism. It’s also a proper occasion to note that Buckley would have lived the Anti-Communist Film Festival. I’m working out the details to hold the event next year.
Buckley would have loved the in-your-face-ness of the festival, as well as the powerful cultural component. We are taking on Hollywood on its own turf, renting out a theater in Washington, D.C., and showing some classic anti-communist films.
This is a different and more powerful approach to changing the culture than delivering a white paper at a think tank. William F. Buckley would know this because Buckley was not just an erudite and brilliant thinker, but a fighter.
This was pointed out by Daniel J. Flynn recently in The Imaginative Conservative. In researching Buckley, Flynn noted that “the aspect of his personality that surprised most pertained to his capacity to morph into Bill ‘the Brawler’ Buckley when the situation called for it.” He went on:
Yes, Buckley spoke in a transatlantic accent of sorts and deployed “eristic,” “lapidary,” and other $2 words one encounters, if at all, on the SAT. But the gentleman could become a tough guy. And given his patrician demeanor, his roughness necessarily grabbed its recipients by the lapels in a way that the aggression of those who rely on it as their default mode simply cannot.
Bill Buckley exuded wit, culture, charm, generosity, and scores of other attributes. In taking on liberals at Yale, defending Senator Joseph McCarthy to the intelligentsia with his brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell in McCarthy and His Enemies, and defying the Republican Party by refusing to give National Review’s endorsement to Richard Nixon in 1960 and running for mayor of New York City as a third-party candidate in 1965, he also displayed courage and inner-directedness. And in his tangles with Cohn, Kendall, Hayek, and so many others, he showed forcefulness, directness, and toughness. Both Right and Left today include so many blind to that Buckley. The larger-than-life character has yielded to caricature that resembles a cross between George Plimpton in Good Will Hunting and SpongeBob SquarePants’s Squidward. This proves convenient both to populists seeking to distinguish manly MAGA from the milquetoast conservatism that preceded and to leftists seeking to undercut one of the right’s heroes by portraying him as a poseur.
Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America, the recent biography of William F. Buckley by San Tanenhaus, details howBuckley was savage about communism and the totalitarian nature of the American left. At one point, Buckley is debating Arthur Schlesinger, an advisor to President Kennedy. Schlesinger, whenever dictatorships arose in the modern era, it was “because democratic government is too weak, not because it is too strong.” The best way to prevent totalitarianism was for the government to create economic prosperity and social equality, providing “a minimum national standard to save individuals from intolerable handicaps.” Tanenhaus explains Buckley’s reaction:
This might sound good, Buckley countered, but in reality, Schlesinger and others were concealing their true intentions, their “intellectual desire to redirect society. Even if every citizen had a million dollars, John Kenneth Galbraith would still find a need for government action….There are in motion today forces that want to drain our power into a reservoir. I hope someday Mr. Schlesinger will turn in horror on the system he has abetted.
The left wants revolution and totalitarian control. Period. If every house had a full refrigerator and every American had a job, they would still be calling for revolution.
Buckley founded National Review in 1955. He sent a reporter to Cuba to honestly report on Castro, and openly called liberals who appealed to the Soviet Union cowards. Buckley once proposed that Taiwan could “liberate the United States” because the Taiwanese fight against communism was much braver than any resistance to the same ideology taking place in the United States.
Sadly, National Review has come to resemble the liberals Buckley once condemned. “National Review thinks we can make peace with the liberals in debates over principles and policies,” the conservative scholar James Piereson told me last year in an interview about NR. “But we can’t go too far lest they call us radicals. The other side thinks we are in a wartime situation: the left wants to destroy us. That is a large difference.”
Piereson said that the conservative divide is like a scene from The Godfather. In the film, a rival faction tries to assassinate the head of the family, and then someone offers the possibility of a peace deal. “The two brothers reply that you can’t make peace with people who are trying to kill you,” Piereson said. Another conservative publisher put it to me in starker terms: “National Review thinks its job is to police the right. We think that our job is to defeat the left.”
Piereson offered examples. There was the case of the Covington Catholic kids. In 2019, high school student Nicholas Sandmann was recorded on video wearing a Trump hat while smiling at a drumming activist, Nathan Phillips, at the Lincoln Memorial. National Review painted Mr. Sandmann as an aggressor when the truth was far different. National Review issued an apology. A National Review senior writer, Dan McLaughlin, tweeted out his support for the long prison sentence given to one of the January 6 rioters who invaded the building.
National Review today has been displaced by MAGA supporters like Victor Davis Hanson or Michael Anton. Anton authored the famous 2016 “Flight 93” essay that argued that if Hillary Clinton were elected, America would be doomed to socialism. In After the Flight 93 Election: The Vote that Saved America and What We Still Have to Lose, a 2018 book expanding on the original essay, Anton went further. “To stand up for truth, morality, the good, the West, America, constitutionalism and decency is to summon the furies. America cannot long go on like this. Something’s gotta give, and something will.”
In his book, Anton pinpoints the 2018 attack on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh as a turning point. “What the Kavanaugh affair has made clearer to me than ever,” he wrote, “is that the Left will not stop until all opposition is totally destroyed. The harm they do to people, institutions, mores and traditions is, in their view, not regrettable though unavoidable collateral damage; it is rather an essential element of the project.”
William F. Buckley would have understood the proactive energy behind the Anti-Communist Film Festival. He probably would have been a speaker, introducing The Lives of Others.
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