Would William F Buckley Jr Be A Never Trumper?

Buckley died in early 2008, before the Obama phenomenon, but my fast answer is "yes".The more considered answer will take this post, one tomorrow, and possibly more. With his contemporary Hugh Hefner, he developed a new kind of persona in the 1950s, the publisher as public dilettante. His depictions in media rotuinely show him vamping and mugging for the camera to a remarkable degree, but it's always a question of tone and style, not substance. He espoused Catholicism, but he never did it with any particular rigor, and it's difficult to know if the Buckleys were Catholic in any readily distinguishable way from, say, the Kennedys.

By the same token, the intellectul figures the National Review embraced included Edmund Burke, whom I've always tended to regard as another public dilettante. While his political writings are best known, he also wrote on the sublime (an essay that I think is better and more important than the other stuff). But he had no center, which is why the early Obama administration could claim to be "Burkean", and well-known conservatives like David Brooks would buy it. Would Buckley have as well? There's reason to believe it, which I'll go into.

But probably more important is that Buckley was an Ivy Leaguer with connectons in the CIA. According to Wikipedia,

Buckley attended the National Autonomous University of Mexico (or UNAM) in 1943. The following year, upon his graduation from the US Army Officer Candidate School (OCS), he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Army. In his book Miles Gone By, he briefly recounts being a member of Franklin Roosevelt's honor guard upon Roosevelt's death. He served stateside throughout the war at Fort Benning, Georgia; Fort Gordon, Georgia; and Fort Sam Houston, Texas.

. . . In 1951, along with many other Ivy League alumni, Buckley was recruited into the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); he served for two years, including one year in Mexico City working on political action for E. Howard Hunt, who was later jailed for his part in the Watergate affair. The two officers remained lifelong friends.

This indicates that Buckley's family had considerable social standing, although it should be noted that another Buckley contemporary, Paul Moore Jr, though of equivalent social standing and another Yalie, served at Guadalcanal and was decorated for heroism. This was not Buckley.

It should also be pointed out that between the late 1930s and the late 1940s, the Ivies loosened their Jewish quotas (Princeton also began to admit African-Americans) and adopted greater rigor in selecting student applicants. Prior to the late 1940s, attendance at an Ivy was determined heavily by social standing, and even now, quotas of various sorts continue, and it is understood that some number of any entering class has slots reserved for legacies, the children of major donors, and other influential figures.

David Brooks (isn't it interesting that he keeps reappearing here?) wrote in his 2000 book Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There that the adoption of College Board tests in the late 1940s made the Ivies and equivalent elite universities true meritocracies. This, of course, neglects that if anything, since that time, they've adopted increasingly secretive and intricate quota systems that in fact discrininate against merit.

Although Buckley criticized Yale in his first book, God and Man at Yale, his disagreement was essentially with how the faculty viewed its mission. He doesn't seem ever to have questioned the position of Yale and other Ivies as bastions of the right sort of people -- indeed, the sort of people who are entitled to run things behind the scenes. David Brooks, an upwardly mobile post-SAT product of the University of Chicago, would see himslf only very slightly differently as a member of that sane class.

Brooks, of coursee, sees Obama, his advisers, and presumably other leftists as worthy members of that class, too. The problem, it seems to me, is with the basic assumption, that there's a class of people entitled to run things. I'm not at all sure that Brooks and Buckley disagree here, and they would disagree only mildly on who those people are. And both must certanly agree that the CIA, a locus of the Deep State, is fully entitled to run things. Buckley's spy-novel hero, Blackford Oakes, is not Jason Bourne.

These are 20th century assumptions that drove much of national policy in administrations of both political parties, with only a few exceptions (Nixon was one. As Alger Hiss sneered at him, “I attended Harvard Law School. I believe yours was Whittier.") Oddly, Buckley's tone was often not far from Hiss's.

Tomorrow I'll look at a close Buckley associate, Jeffrey Hart, who outlived Buckley long enough to becme an Obamacon but, suffering from dementia in his last years, probably had no opinion on Trump.