God and Man at Yale

"What is important about God and Man at Yale is that, although it’s not the best argued or even the most serious of modern conservative books, it changed the argument. It made the conservative argument about culture. What Buckley is saying is that if you want to identify your adversary, he’s in the ivory tower of the Ivy League, and not only there, but in the most conservative of the Ivy League universities. Buckley himself was not only a recent alumnus of Yale, but the big man on campus, the most celebrated undergraduate of his moment. He edited the campus newspaper, he had written editorials that were widely read at other universities and even filtered out into the broader population. That somebody who came from inside of that establishment should identify that establishment as the enemy changed the way conservatives looked at their arguments. It would no longer be just about economics, or just about monetary policy, or about economic individualism (though Buckley comments on all of that) – it would be about the class, the ruling class as he saw it, the academics at this prestigious university. Not at all. God and Man at Yale was published in 1951, at precisely the moment that Joe McCarthy was emerging as the first truly populist figure on the right. What Buckley did was to provide a high-minded analytical text to accompany McCarthy’s allegations that there was a kind of treason going on within the upper ranks of the American establishment. So when McCarthy is denouncing Dean Acheson, Alger Hiss, Owen Lattimore and all these members of the foreign policy establishment, Buckley shows you all these economics professors, religious professors and political scientists at Yale, who are indoctrinating their innocent students with New Deal propaganda. In a way, what he did was to give you a more educated, erudite version of McCarthy’s attack on the culture. There is a tension, though Buckley’s background is more complicated than people often realise. He grew up on a very large and well-appointed estate in the Berkshires, in Sharon Connecticut. But his father was an oil wildcatter from Southern Texas, who tried to make his career in Mexico as a lawyer and oilman, before he was driven out by the Revolution in 1917-21. Buckley’s mother was from New Orleans. So Buckley actually comes out of the political tradition of the Deep South, Dixie, and that’s why for a long time you saw some of those complicated and misguided racial arguments in the National Review. It also reflected a kind of Creole culture that Buckley came out of – where blacks and whites would mingle, but in their separate strata, where you’d grow up in a house full of servants, some of them Spanish-speaking. In a sense, it was a complicated microcosm of a society, only very rigid in its social stratification – and that’s how Buckley looked at the world. At the same time his father was constantly fighting battles on Wall Street. That’s why he moved to Connecticut: to get Wall Street backing for his new ventures against the big oil companies. So William F Buckley senior would regale his family with stories of how he outwitted the big shots at Standard Oil. That’s one reason Buckley and Rockefeller were at sword points for many years. In a way there was an odd distrust of the East Coast and Wall Street in the Buckley background, even as he seemed to be a product of the East Coast élite. That’s a good comparison. What figures like that always struggle with is not only the apparent contradiction, their not being very good at pretending to be the common man, but also many of their tastes and values are not to the mass popular taste. Buckley has an uncompleted manuscript called The Revolt Against the Masses, taking on the arguments of Ortega, about the dangers of mass man – at the same time that he and his colleagues discovered the value of a figure like McCarthy. And that’s one reason why they put up with McCarthy. They saw McCarthy as having political utility, even if they didn’t like him very much. Very much so."