T he recent PBS television documentary The Incomparable Mr. Buckley has much valuable information and insight in it, but I think it has three serious deficiencies that deserve prompt noting.
First, Buckley grew on racial issues, as Alvin S. Felzenberg has shown in his excellent article “Correcting the Record on William F. Buckley Jr. and Civil Rights.” Second, the association of Buckley with Senator Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s looks very different now after the fall of European communism in 1990, the opening of the Russian KGB files, and the outstanding documentary books, about the extent of Russian communist domestic subversion in the United States, by writers including Ronald Radosh, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Allen Weinstein (Perjury: The Hiss–Chambers Case, 1978), Sam Tanenhaus (his 1997 biography of Whittaker Chambers), and the Annals of Communism series edited by Jonathan Brent for Yale University Press. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Senate hearings on secrecy, his 1998 book on the subject, and other commentary on the Venona transcripts should by now have led to a much more accurate assessment of Russian and American communist behavior in the 1930s through 1950s. Compared with Stalin and his numerous Western apologists and fellow travelers, McCarthy is a very small villain.
Buckley was certainly right in seeing Whittaker Chambers as a kind of tragic victim and hero in the anti-communist cause, in befriending him, in employing him as an editor in the first phase of the existence of National Review, and in esteeming Tanenhaus’s biography of him (on the basis of which he asked Tanenhaus to be his own biographer). It is impossible to believe that anyone can adequately understand the domestic politics and foreign affairs of the United States in the period from 1929 to 1960 without an accurate knowledge of the paradigmatic Hiss–Chambers affair. Buckley in 1978 called the Hiss–Chambers case “a gripping judicial Armageddon,” he edited his correspondence with Chambers (Odyssey of a Friend, 1969), and he wrote a fine eulogy and appreciation of him: “The End of Whittaker Chambers” (1962; reprinted as “Witness and Friend,” National Review, August 6, 2001).
The PBS documentary certainly does not do justice to this indispensable chapter of American political and intellectual history, and generations of American high-school students since that time have been confused or misled by thinking that Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible (1953) is somehow an adequate view of the main issue of “McCarthyism.” Miller’s theatrical fiction is much less important than Chambers’s actual life experience and the domestic and foreign events that it helps to illuminate. For a true taste of the time, The Middle of the Journey (1947), the novel by Lionel Trilling — Chambers’s college classmate, although not altogether sympathetic to him — is excellent. Writing in a 1975 preface to the novel in the last year of his own life, the liberal Trilling saw Chambers as a man of honor.
My final criticism of the PBS documentary is of its treatment of Buckley’s relation to the concept of “the remnant,” which the commentator identifies only with the American libertarian-anarchist thinker Albert Jay Nock, who influenced the young Buckley and about whom he later spoke and wrote (see “Preserving the Heritage,” 1999; reprinted in Let Us Talk of Many Things: The Collected Speeches, 2000). But Nock was a minor figure and a morally ambiguous one, and Buckley knew it and said so.
The real sources and substance of the concept of a “saving remnant” in society are less superficial and snobbish than Nock’s version. They are older, more profound and exalted, of permanent value, and well worth understanding. On his final lecture tour in the United States and Canada, in 1883–84, the great English educator and writer Matthew Arnold delivered 18 times a talk entitled “Numbers; or, The Majority and the Remnant,” which he published with two other essays in 1885 in Discourses in America, “the book he most wanted to be remembered by,” according to his biographer Park Honan. It is no exaggeration to say that from the time of the publication of Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869) until the 1960s, he was the most influential theorist of higher education in the English-speaking world, with ramifying effects incalculably great. Matthew Arnold and American Culture (1961) by Berkeley professor John Henry Raleigh is only one of many good books on Arnold’s vast influence, which decisively affected the development of liberal-arts education throughout the English-speaking world. T. S. Eliot’s literary criticism, together with Lionel Trilling’s fine biography of Arnold (1939) and his own distinguished body of essays, are partial extensions of Arnold’s own humanistic educational project (which I have discussed in my book The Restoration of Man, new edition in English, 2019; in French, 2020).
Arnold’s conception of a saving “remnant” draws directly on Plato, the Hebrew prophet Isaiah, and the New Testament. He bases the essay on what he calls “the inexhaustibly fruitful truth that moral causes govern the standing and falling of states.” It is no exaggeration to say that William Buckley’s first book, God and Man at Yale (1951), is suffused with this idea, as against collectivist, utilitarian, and what he calls “laissez-faire” education. In fact, his disappointment with Yale and his critique of it are rooted in his sense that it had lost this idea of religiously affiliated liberal education as the “remnant,” the leaven of culture and society. Like Arnold, he speaks in explicitly metaphysical-theological terms in his defense of Western civilization, critiquing not only collectivism (especially communism) but the aimless miscellaneity of the “elite” contemporary university, where “academic freedom” has become a false absolute, demoting and relativizing truth, justice, tradition, and religion. Drawing on the same central Western tradition, the philosopher (and Yale graduate) E. A. Burtt had written in 1924 in The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science that “the only way to avoid becoming a metaphysician is to say nothing.” Cognition, conceptualization, language, and morality have an irreducibly metaphysical character and dimension.
Arnold himself insistently asserted “the old and true Socratic thesis of the interdependence of knowledge and virtue,” which is perhaps the finest short characterization of the traditional premise of the educational project of Western civilization in its highest and most noble form. Having no Yale affiliations myself, I nevertheless find it exemplary and moving that Yale has produced perhaps the most impressive group of modern American educational leaders — Robert Maynard Hutchins (president of the University of Chicago, 1929–1951), John Silber (president of Boston University, 1971–2002), E. D. Hirsch (an outstanding literary theorist and founder of the Core Knowledge Foundation), and Buckley himself in his literary and editorial efforts as founding editor of National Review, which he conceived from the outset as a “saving remnant” in American culture. In the 35 years after Buckley left Yale in 1950, that university was also the location of perhaps the greatest “traditionalist” department of English and comparative literature in the world, partly meeting the very needs that Buckley as an undergraduate felt so incidentally, vacuously, or promiscuously treated in his time there. Even as early as God and Man at Yale, he commended two of the department’s members, Maynard Mack and William Wimsatt. Also possessed of an orthodox intellectual-moral sensibility, Hirsch was a later graduate of this department and a professor in it. (I have written about the importance of his own educational project many times since 1988.)
Arnold in “Numbers; or, The Majority and the Remnant” characteristically attacks “mischievous . . . self-flattery and self-delusion” and the resulting dangers of democratic demagogy as well as elite, in-group self-interest. When William Buckley drew on “illiberal,” renegade intellectual outsiders such as Chambers, Russell Kirk, and Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn to found National Review, he was being true to the profound intuition that there is no guaranteed, collective, cumulative, irreversible progress in history: World history in the period 1914–1955 had demonstrated this terrible truth. Yet liberal culture could not then, and cannot now, bear the realization that there is no grand movement of transpersonal “enlightenment” carrying us on a Hegellian wave higher and higher. Thus a “remnant,” sages and saints, repentant sinners, wounded veterans of mental and physical wars, articulate witnesses to unpleasant truths — these are always needed, to leaven the mass. But Plato, the Hebrew prophets, and the Lord Jesus all knew (the last best of all) that the leaven was not only or exclusively a small number of individuals within a social group, but also a small but saving part within each human self, which is perennially educable to wisdom and virtue: and that these mysterious, interior, personal, intellectual, and ethical dynamics cease only with death.
It was the Columbia humanist John Erskine who published in 1915 a notable essay called “The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent,” a title used later (2000) for an anthology of writings by another Columbia humanist, Trilling. This was the Arnoldian legacy that the young William Buckley found his way to recovering and articulating in God and Man at Yale. Democratic outcomes — “Vox populi vox Dei est” — are not ultimately dependable (majorities have been wrong); market outcomes are not ultimately dependable (what sells is not necessarily good); truth and justice do not necessarily “win out,” in the short term or the long term.
As Buckley (and many white Americans) learned, painfully and sometimes woefully late, the Southern white segregationist majorities did not ultimately have any stake in improving the lot of the poor black minorities within their midst. Less grievously and dramatically, successful alumni of elite universities such as Yale had (like Arnold’s aristocratic “Barbarians” and bourgeois “Philistines” in Britain) no very dependable loyalty to higher goods and disinterested benevolence. Inspired by his own personal experience and his reading of G. K. Chesterton, Buckley came after all to repose some trust in the “common man” — “the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory” — rather than in the faculties of Harvard (or Yale), or the Yale Alumni Association. It is a moving and instructive personal odyssey.
To me one of the most moving essays of Bill Buckley’s later career was his National Review cover story “Porn, Pervasive Presence: The creepy wallpaper of our daily lives” (November 19, 2001). He saw clearly how pagan and pornographic our “culture” had become and proposed citizen initiatives to thwart it. Sociologists such as Joseph Schumpeter and Daniel Bell, and literary critics such as Trilling and Steven Marcus, saw soi-disant “advanced” Western societies turning into hedonistic, pagan “pornotopias,” subverting and destroying the beneficial protocols and products of hundreds of years of civilization. Marxist dystopias were (and are) certainly worse, as are Islamic theocracies, but the comparison is not very comforting. Buckley on Firing Line entertained and debated left anarchist-nihilists such as Allen Ginsberg and Norman Mailer and right libertarian-nihilists such as “Playboy” Hugh Hefner. He also saw clearly and said rightly that Donald Trump was a narcissist.
But Bill Buckley was finally saved, not by history or political success but by faith, hope, and a loving-kindness to which many of those who knew him can gratefully attest, expressed through a uniquely courteous generosity, amiability, and good humor. This too is a saving remnant, and an important one as against “numbers,” whether market outcomes, large “data sets,” or temporary majorities.