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William F. Buckley Jr. had No Conservative Philosophy
National Review’s fusionism, and conservatism’s unspeakable core idea
William F. Buckley Jr. dominated the conservative landscape in America from the 1950s to the 1990s, largely by framing the political debate in the magazine he cofounded in 1955, National Review, and hosting debates on his television show Firing Line, which he started in 1966.
Yet the very notion of a conservative intellectual thriving in debates is preposterous. To see why that’s so, we must understand the “fusionist” conservatism he pushed with the cofounder of National Review, Frank Meyer.
Buckley’s biographer, Sam Tanenhaus, told The Atlantic,
The single greatest disappointment in Bill Buckley’s intellectual life — letting down himself, friends and admirers, and, I increasingly feel, the country at large — was his failure to articulate a serious coherent conservative philosophy. He tried to do it, with a book he began writing in 1963 after the assassination of President Kennedy, which brought much hard scrutiny to the American right and its growing militancy. He wrote several chapters — some 60 pages — but could get no further. He kept promising himself and others that he would return to this book, but he never did, and by the end of the 1960s had given up.
