Sam Tanenhaus, _Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America_, Part 3: Buckley’s Revolution (1961-1965)

 1. Barry Goldwater lost in a landslide, but the story of how Buckley and his movement helped gain him the 1964 Republican presidential nomination makes for swift and exciting reading (as Rick Perlstein also demonstrated in Before the Storm). The relative youth of many of the most active participants, the sense of overcoming entrenched powers in the Republican party (pragmatic moderation had prevailed for decades), and the delirium of victory at the 1964 convention all make for a thrill-ride narrative that the Reagan campaign of 1980 cannot match, even though it was much more successful. 

2. An irony of Buckley’s career is that he was a writer as much as anything else, a graceful and lucid and prolific one, yet he never wrote the conservative classic that everyone assumed he must have in him: no Road to Serfdom or Witness or Ideas Have Consequences. He did publish a lot of books, including fourteen novels. His books sold well, and one of them, his first, God and Man at Yale, was a center of national attention for a while. Tanenhaus describes Buckley’s attempt to write his definitive statement of principles, to be titled The Revolt Against the Masses, but Buckley eventually abandoned the project despite fervent encouragement from Hugh Kenner (no less). Since it’s the books of public intellectuals like Mencken, Niebuhr, Hofstadter, and (gag) Ayn Rand that keep them part of the conversation, I wonder whether Buckley’s not having a "you-really-should-read-this” book will lead to his fading from the conversation as the people who remember him from television succumb to mortality.  You can still watch Firing Line on YouTube, though.

3. Tanenhaus argues that Buckley’s quixotic but stylish campaign for major of New York City in 1965 was an early and influential example of the “white grievance” approach later successfully deployed by Nixon, Reagan, Trump, and a few thousand others. This is ironic, too, given Buckley’s patrician background and his tendency to speak de haut en bas, but I think Tanenhaus has a point.