Every news bulletin brings more breathtaking brutishness from the Trump administration. One day it’s “disappearing” immigrants; another, disdaining court orders. On yet another it might be pardoning thugs who stormed Congress, ditching efforts to protect civilians in conflict, or reorientating global trade around foreign leaders “kissing” the presidential “ass”. All protocols are broken, all precedents defied. As the shockwaves ripple out, commentariat sages describe an explosive populist backlash against a long-established “US-led, rules-based global order”.
That last phrase, though, should prompt anyone who remembers how things actually used to be to stop and ask whether the Trump tsunami truly did arrive from out of the blue. There was, after all, nothing “rules-based” about George W Bush’s unlawful invasion of Iraq or the brutalisation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. And while Ronald Reagan’s personal charm and sunshine were the antithesis of Trump’s rage and “carnage”, his administration was routinely locked in grudge matches with the United Nations and defaulted on contributions to the World Health Organization just as the HIV/Aids pandemic took hold. Reagan staffers wisecracked about “the gay plague” with an anti-science dismissiveness that pre-empted the Trumpians’ approach to vaccines. We remember the smiling Reagan who signed the Martin Luther King holiday into law in front of the cameras, but ought not to entirely forget the Reagan who bitterly opposed the civil rights leader in life—and resisted his legacy long after his murder.
Something has changed with Trump, to be sure, particularly in his flagrant disdain for the United States Constitution. But look closely at the Reagan and Bush eras, and it’s plain that not everything is new. Whether you consider the institutions of “movement conservatism” or the ideas of “neoliberalism”, you will find continuity as well as contrast. Take the Heritage Foundation thinktank. Founded in 1973 to agitate for a break with the paradigms of the New Deal, by the 1980s it was producing reports that Reagan handed out to his cabinet, packed with recommendations he implemented. Today it is best known as the intellectual laboratory that germinated “Project 2025”—the blueprint for Trump’s authoritarian heist.
Two new books help us make sense of Trump by elucidating what was already there for him to grab—and then twist. Sam Tanenhaus’s biography Buckley catalogues 20th-century America’s greatest reactionary life. Quinn Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right grapples with the dark underbelly of chauvinist thought that bulged under the cover of libertarian ideals.
Tanenhaus’s subtitle—The Life and the Revolution That Changed America—may sound hyperbolic, but very few who don’t directly become leaders can claim to have redirected their country in the way that William (or Bill) Buckley did. As the godfather of Reaganism, he heralded a new age in politics from just outside it. A possible comparator might be John Maynard Keynes, who also mixed journalism with public debate, spells in diplomacy and relentless establishment networking. But Keynes was a serious theorist who upended old understandings of how the economy worked. Buckley, by contrast, bequeathed no new ideas—he never got around to finishing his one serious book, which was supposed to provide new underpinnings for elitist rule. Nor was he a scholar, being—in the words of a favourite professor—“very good at discussing books he hadn’t read”. He was, instead, a fluent frontman for an ideology. His achievement and legacy is the modern movement of American conservatism—with all of its truculence, its media megaphones, its purity tests and its tight yet sprawling networks.
Tanenhaus, a former editor of the New York Times Book Review and for many years the chief US correspondent for this magazine, has a wide-open mind and an elegant pen. He has worked on this tome since the late 1990s with the encouragement of the Buckley family—and the involvement of Bill Buckley himself, in the last decade of his life. The thousand-odd pages zip along where they might have dragged, with enjoyable diversions into Buckley’s many apolitical enthusiasms (music, sailing, spy-novel writing) and his loyal friendships across ideological divides, including with the left-liberal economist JK Galbraith. We get a sense, too, of Buckley’s intermittent commitment to quality as editor of National Review, the magazine he founded to proselytise for reactionary thought in the postwar days, when the tide towards liberalism felt unstoppable. Buckley nurtured a stable not only of shrill partisans, but also of genuine talents—the young Joan Didion being one.
While none of this sounds Trumpian, Buckley’s malign political influence emerges remorselessly from Tanenhaus’s generous and rounded personal portrait. No passing of authorial judgement is required: Buckley is damned by meticulous factual statements about the positions he took. Yes, he was a powerful TV interviewer, a man of letters and a clubbable wit, but throughout his long and sparkling public life he was wrong about everything that mattered.
His first and lifelong inspiration was his father, a wealthy oilman who instinctively understood that privilege must be protected with violence. For all his love of “law and order”, Buckley Senior committed to a Mexican counter-revolution against political changes that threatened the position of foreign prospectors like himself, “secretly disbursing large sums of cash to insurgent caudillos and paying for truck-loads of Winchester rifles to be smuggled into Baja California”. Zealous opposition to the New Deal became a great family cause. Economic convulsion and economic remedy were not separate things in the Buckleys’ experience: they had left the US for Europe just before the Wall Street Crash in 1929, and several of them—including young Bill—returned only in mid-1933, when Roosevelt’s reforms were just under way but the Depression was still at rock-bottom.
The next Buckley crusade—to which the teenage Bill was fanatically committed—was keeping America out of the war against Nazi Germany. After Poland, Norway and Paris fell, the Buckleys looked on with the sort of indifference Trump shows to Ukraine. Such was young Bill’s devotion to the original “America First” movement that he wrote a fawning letter to its poster boy, the aviator Charles Lindbergh, a month after Pearl Harbor. Obsessive anti-communism would later lure Buckley away from isolationism and towards the embrace of such bloody misadventures as Vietnam, but even in later life he retained a somewhat Trumpian lack of regard for battlefield heroism.
There is a more direct line between the first campaign of Buckley’s adult life and Trump’s ongoing efforts to subjugate America’s universities to his prejudices. Buckley’s agitation started out while student chair of the Yale Daily News. His editorials castigated a popular sociology lecturer, Raymond Kennedy, whose analysis of “oppression and exploitation” caused Buckley to bristle in much the same way as today’s conservatives do at “woke” teachings. Where Trump threatens federal funding for colleges that don’t fall into line, Buckley began agitating for Yale’s alumni to boycott donations while the university indulged “contrary values” to the Christian individualism he preferred. Chequebooks, it followed, should be used to secure “sovereignty” over the hiring and firing of faculty staff, a proposal lent extra edge by Buckley’s father’s parallel operation to point the finger at “suspect” books and quietly build up files on leftist scholars.
What jumps out of William Buckley’s CV in journalism is all the anti-journalism
From the post-truth age, what jumps out of Buckley’s CV in journalism is all the anti-journalism. Even as a student, he was conspiring with the FBI to undermine the Harvard Crimson’s revelations about political snooping on campus, earning personal praise from J Edgar Hoover himself. He had uniquely good sources for covering Watergate, even being friends with one of the burglars, but preferred to ring up the White House and ask it “to send materials to defend Nixon with”. His response to the Pentagon Papers, the world-historical scoop that exposed Washington’s web of Vietnam lies, was—as Steve Bannon might put it—to flood the zone with shit: publishing an alternative trove of entirely fake memos that supported a hawkish analysis. He “reported” that Reagan had “not sought the Presidency” in 1968—which he knew, first-hand, to be untrue. He preferred to spare the right-wing candidate’s blushes and preserve his own standing for another day. Only much later, with his revolution secure, did Buckley deploy his critical faculties in service of his column—for example, by opposing the second Iraq war—rather than deploying his column in line with what his critical faculties deemed useful for the American right.
Despite a secure personal temperament, Buckley both drew on and deepened the “paranoid style in American politics”, well before Richard Hofstadter coined that phrase for an essay in Harper’s in 1964. He dedicated much of the 1950s to the service of Joe McCarthy’s witchhunts. Bonds were forged amid them, including with Ray Cohn—McCarthy’s truculent counsel, who would later use a bank he owned to clear up a financial mess of Buckley’s and also wheel and deal on behalf of the young Trump. Buckley, though, always had the political nous to cut off the more obvious cranks, such as Robert Welch of the John Birch Society, at just the moment when their ravings threatened to do the movement more harm than good.
Similarly, his personal charm ensured that lapses into personal bigotry were rare—although his infamous “Now listen, you queer” outburst at Gore Vidal is one stain; his readiness to do his father’s dirty work to block his sister marrying a close Jewish friend is another. Buckley didn’t fall prey to race science and could muster respect for black individuals, but—at least into middle-age—remained deeply committed to the furtherance of structural racism, including vote-suppression and segregation in the American South and apartheid in South Africa. He rethought these things late in life, once it was clear which way the world was going and after racist resistance to civil rights had completed its work in unmooring the old “solid south” from the Democratic party. The conservative cause was Buckley’s lodestar—racism being one handy, but ultimately dispensable, tool for steering the way.
Where Buckley fused America’s religious conservatives and its libertarian right, Quinn Slobodian is interested in the thinkers who directly paved the way for Trump by fusing libertarianism with chauvinist pseudoscience. The pre-eminent historian of the intellectual movement that originally self-described as “neoliberal”, Slobodian is back in his happy place—the archives of the Mont Pelerin Society, the international network of market-minded economists founded by Friedrich Hayek in 1947. He also forays deep into several of its wackier offshoots.
Some of Hayek’s followers were outright marketopians, imagining free economic exchange could safely take care of everything if only government would clear out of the way. But Hayek himself was more interesting—and anxious—than that. He felt capitalism had to be embedded in something beyond itself to survive. International treaties and the law were one way to shore it up, but as he aged Hayek grew more interested in the interplay of human nature and human culture, writing in the 1980s about how the morals specifically of the “Christian west” had buttressed the market order with supportive habits of thought.
Hayek himself, then, was already exploring an intellectual basis for the Buckley-Reagan alliance of religious conservatives and laissez-faire liberals. But some disciples hankered to ground capitalism in something more solid than the master’s schematic sociological stories. In Slobodian’s book, we meet so many of them it is hard to keep up—revivalist race scientists, IQ obsessives and gold nuts—all grabbing onto something purportedly natural to justify the unequal rewards that emerge from the market order and explain why efforts to alter them can only do harm.
The single biggest presence is the American economist—and Mont Pelerin man—Murray Rothbard. Way back in the 1970s, he set the tone for successive subsequent waves of “libertarian” thinking, inspired by everything from genomics to fiat money, when he wrote: “The egalitarian revolt against biological reality” was “only a subset of a deeper revolt: against the ontological structure of reality itself, against the ‘very organization of nature’; against the universe as such.” There was never any shortage of “the paranoid style” in the Mont Pelerin mindset: no sooner had communism been vanquished than some speakers were warning that old red menace was reborn, lightly greenwashed with environmentalism.
As early as 1992, Rothbard had hitched himself to Pat Buchanan’s proto-Trumpian run at the Republican presidential nomination. He parked libertarian worries about Buchanan’s trade protectionism because of his conviction that Buchanan’s style of anti-elite posturing provided a plausible political path for smashing the redistributionist and regulatory state.
Amid the capitalist complacency of the 1990s, few with serious money or power saw the Rothbard-Buchanan “revolution of white Euro-males” as the future. That changed in 2008 when unfettered finance unleashed economic ruin on the world. This was doubly dangerous for mainstream libertarians, directly undermining their deregulatory prescriptions and leaving voters hankering for things—security, identity, the venting of rage—they weren’t well placed to provide. Hellbent on clinging to their prescriptions, they sought new alliances to help with the voters. It transpired that “sound money” German economics professors could rub along with ultra-nationalists—and the Alternative for Germany (AfD) was born. First-wave UK neoliberals such as Nigel Lawson, who had once been devoted to the disciplines of European economic integration, swung behind Brexit. Then, in 2023, Argentina elected Javier Milei as president—a state-slashing, protest-busting authoritarian who owned cloned dogs named after right-wing economists, including Murray Rothbard.
All this helps us locate Trump on the wider canvas of our disturbing world today. But what both these books really illuminate about the aberrant 47th president are different aspects of the long backstory to his rise. Even before Trump united the diehard reactionaries, the smash-it-all-up radicals and the more familiar libertarians, it turns out there were many connections. Rothbard, for instance, admired Buckley’s boyhood hero Charles Lindbergh and Joe McCarthy’s populist punches against the “power elite”. Buckley, meanwhile, smiled on the crude Buchanan challenging his own friend George Bush Senior in 1992, because he admired Buchanan’s spirited defence of “the old code”. As for the lofty Hayek, while he was not personally drawn to Rothbardian pseudoscience, he did choose to deliver a lecture against the temptations of social justice in apartheid South Africa. So it seems fair to ask whether, even for him, the race line was ever a red line.
What comes through both books is the sheer instrumentality of ideas on the right. Buckley grabbed at his mentor Willmoore Kendall’s eccentric reading of the philosopher John Locke to lend a veneer of respectability to the more populist aspects of his politics. Rothbard fished for scientific references to back his claims about a “genetic basis for inequality of intelligence”. But what, really, was it all for? Well, the one solid legislative achievement of Trump’s first term was a deep—and deeply regressive—tax cut. Whatever other problems Buckley might have had with him, he would have cheered on Trump’s current efforts to repeat this trick. Bill came from wealth, married into more of it and invested an awful lot of what he had into battling for its privileges. In the end, the inequality was the point. It still is.
