As magazine editor, author and political talk-show host, William F Buckley Jr is often called an intellectual godfather to the US hard right. Godfather, perhaps. Intellectual? Yes and no. He is remembered today less for his own ideas or for the big book on conservatism that he never wrote than for outstanding personal gifts. Buckley (1925-2008) had fierce verbal skills, charm that disarmed opponents and a talent for keeping disputatious intellectuals of the right together on the same magazine, National Review.
A sample of Buckley’s one-liners shows his pugilistic lightness and speed of attack: “I should sooner live in a society governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 faculty members of Harvard University” (1961); “Now listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered” (on network television, to fellow author Gore Vidal, 1968); “If Donald Trump were shaped a little differently, he would compete for Miss America” (2000). How little has changed over decades. Gender stereotypes and rival Harvard — Buckley was at Yale — were objects of hard-right scorn or mockery then, as now.