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The Realignment
563 | Sam Tanenhaus: William F. Buckley Jr. and the Battle for Political Ideas
00:52:26
Sam Tanenhaus, author of Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America, joins The Realignment. Marshall and Sam unpack Buckley's influence on today's political landscape, how his ideas, debates, and style shaped postwar conservatism, the rise of MAGA conservatism after the 2012 election, the ideas vacuum on the left, and why developing a coherent worldview, beyond following the polls and vibes, matters more than ever post-2024.
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- [00:00]
A
Marshall here. Welcome back to the Realignment. For today's episode, I spoke with author and journalist Sam Tenenhaus, whose new biography, the Life and Revolution that Changed America charts the legacy of Willyn F. Buckley Jr. The intellectual godfather of modern American conservatism. In our conversation, we explore how Buckley's ideas, debates, and media empire helped shape American political discourse on the right, center and left from the post World War II era to today. But this conversation moves far beyond just biography. We go into the rise of the Maga right from the post2012 period onwards, the collapse of ideology within the Democratic Party, the rise of figures like Vice President J.D. vance, the failures of modern political rhetoric, and what it means to truly have a worldview when it comes to politics. Whether you're on the left, the right, or somewhere in between, this is a conversation about the power of ideas, the need for political imagination, and why Buckley's model might hold unexpected lessons for anyone thinking about the state of American politics from 2024 and beyond. Hope you all enjoy the conversation.
- [01:11]
B
Sam Tannenhouse, welcome to the Realignment.
- [01:14]
C
Pleasure to be here. The name alone has got me interested.
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B
Yeah, there's a frame here. So we're obviously here to discuss your. Your new book, the Life and Revolution that Changed America. But I want to start by just giving you a real shout out. So it was the summer of 2014. I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I was a very, very terrible intern at the Congressional Research Service, focused on cybersecurity. So not a topic I was interested then and I'm definitely not interested in it now. But you had a piece come out in the New York Times Magazine called Can the GOP Become the Party of Ideas Again? And I, from center left suburban Oregon, during a period of time when I'd say American politics felt very bereft of ideas. So just introducing this idea that 2014 post Romney, there are all these interesting thinkers who are trying to reconfigure conservatism for the 21st century. And all those different challenges really expanded my mind. It got me into Raihan Salaam and Ross Douthit, who became friends. I had J.D. on the podcast. So you really played a huge role in shaping the sort of thought and approach approach to this podcast. So I just wanted to say I really appreciate you and I'm excited to chat.
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C
Well, you know, it's interesting you mentioned that, Marshall, because every now and again I talked to Oren Cass the other day and they kind of chide me for Saying about that article, that story in the Times Magazine said you got there a little bit early because we have all the ideas, right? Because that was Yuval Levin and Reihan Salaam and. And Ramesh Panur. It was all about a little bit of Ross style, that it was about that kind of, you know, what do they call it, Sam's Club? Conservatism. And they hadn't gotten to the next stage yet. So when I talk to those guys, they kind of wink at me and they say, well, you had the right idea, but you jumped the gun. And the great writer Tom Wolf said, I never forget this. I was reminding somebody the other day, it never does a writer good to be early. Like, your friends may say, well, you were prescient, but it doesn't do you any good as a writer because the story's not there yet.
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B
Let's just kind of get to the core here. And this is why I find Buckley so fascinating. I've also worked on the reboot of his show on Firing Line with Margaret Hoover. Buckley was a man of ideas. And I think in this political moment right now, it seems like everyone and their cousin is trying to find the next idea, the next way to sort of shape how we think about the world after 2024. Who was William F. Buckley? Especially for a zoomer? I was in high school in the 2000s, so I definitely was aware of who Buckwhe was, especially when he passed away. But a lot folks won't know who he was. Who was William F. Buckley?
- [03:57]
C
And it's interesting you say that, because when you work as long as I have in a book like this, you see how the public shifts. When I started writing it, started working on it, William F. Buckley Jr. Was the most famous public intellectual in America. He's the architect of the modern conservative movement. Out of Buckleyism, we'll call it, came first Barry Goldwater, then Ronald Reagan. This idea of a conservative movement that is taking into account where the country is now while trying to stay true to these core principles. What are the core principles? It's kind of small government, very much individualistic. What you and I would call libertarian, and probably your viewers and listeners would call it that, too. They called individualism. It's the same idea. And that the individual person left alone should be able to live the life they want. Well, we know what some of the problems are, because individuals can cause a lot of harm to other people. So you need a government. You need a wider culture that accommodates different sorts of people and is more pluralistic and Diverse than the world they were used to. And so that's what they're struggling with. They're trying to figure out how can you keep alive an older idea of what America used to be. Very constitutionally driven, very much about separation of powers, things that are kind of going away right now and yet still be relevant to voters. Get people to vote for your party. Here's the thing to think about. William F. Buckler Jr. Was born in 1925. That means when he first became. So he turns 100 in November as his magazine National Review, which he founded, turned 70 in November. Two big anniversaries coming up. And what are they trying to do? They're trying really to, to roll back the New Deal. So if you were born as William F. Buckley, was in a wealthy family, they lived in the northwest corner of Connecticut, as it's called, just northwest. It's near Dutchess county in New York and the Berkshires in Massachusetts. Gorgeous, beautiful place. He grew up in a 47 acre estate with a household, nine siblings, parents and a household of grooms, people, you know, the ones who take care of the horses, right, who do this, who, who tend to the lawns. You're growing up that way during the Great Depression and you think, well, there's a disconnect here because life feels pretty good to me. But I'm seeing all this other bad stuff going on. How do you reconcile? So remember those years when he's growing up? Franklin Roosevelt was elected President Franklin four times in a row, right? That's why they had to create the, the, the amendment, to keep that from happening again. Roosevelt was not some distant figure to the Buckleys. He's the other rich guy who lives in the other, across the state line in Dutchess County. So this is a world of elites, super privileged people, but they're just fighting tooth and nail over what the future of the country is going to be. Buckley, Bill Buckley, we'll call him, came in. He was William F. Buckley Jr. His father was from South Texas. First thing your listeners have to know if they may be aware of Buckley as this kind of aristocrat, this Yankee Connecticut aristocrat. His mother was from New Orleans. His father was from South Texas, just above the Rio Grande Valley. There were Southerners and, and Catholics in Yankee Connecticut. So there's already a little tension there. Bill Buckley, the third of four sons to go off to Yale University. His case after World War II is in a universe. This will sound very familiar now with the college professors. The professors seem far to the left of, of a Lot of the students and especially alumni and donors. And Bucket thinks what's going on here? And he sees this is what made him in my mind a kind of genius, is that the big deb facing the country are not going to be about budgets and taxes and allocation and redistribution of funds through a federalist system or a more state centered one. All these debates, it could be a culture. Who's teaching in the classroom? What textbooks are you reading? Who controls the debate? Who owns the media? His career was about reshaping all of that. That. So he became the impresario of a conservative media empire magazine. In those days, syndicated newspaper columns were big. The 1960s and 70s, Buckley's column was syndicated in 362 newspapers. So the calculation was maybe 20 or 30 million people at least have the opportunity to put their eyeballs on a Buckley column. He's got a television show which you worked on firing line, 100 markets, yet only gets a tiny share. But they're reaching the right people. So he does that. He writes books. He wrote 50 books. He ran for mayor of New York and turned the Republican party upside down when he did it frightened the daylights out of more conservative Republicans. Because here's this brilliant guy who's you with a gold plated vocabulary with very conservative views turned America upside down. And out of that mayoral campaign, an actor in California thought, well, maybe I can do this too. And his name is Ronald Reagan. He got elected twice governor and then of California and then you follow the thread to wfb, William F. Buckley and you see the rise of the movement. And so that's who he was. And skier, novelist, sailor, socialite, party guy in Manhattan. All the literary types are coming over to the house. He has music salons, he's got the world's greatest pianists playing in his living room. You know, it's just wild. You can imagine a life this big. That's why it took me so long to write the book.
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B
And we have to talk about the mayoral campaign for a second because what's so to your point about, you know, writing magazine covers and articles that are a little before their time or wrong from a certain perspective. We should remember that, you know, in the mid-1960s you're coming out of, you're right in the middle of LBJ's America before everything starts to collapse, Vietnam, trust deficit, credibility gap, etc, and you have one of Buckley once again, who is probably the least central casting figure you would think for like a populist insurgent campaign in New York. Because to all your descriptive descriptors of him. Those all exist. And if you talk to a lot of people, what's the future of the Republican party in that LBJ's America? It's Nelson Rockefeller, it's George Romney, it's John Lindsay, the Republican mayor of New York. There's this famous, I think it was either a Time or a Newsweek cover where it shows John Lindsay and John Lindsey is so handsome, they call him the Republican jfk. It's this model for what the future will look like. In many ways, that is exactly the sort of model you had in the mid 2010s where you had Marco Rubio on Time magazine's cover. Can this handsome, young, charismatic Hispanic man get an immigration deal done and get America's GOP to be more moderate, more future facing? So people think that, like Lindsay and Rockefeller and those types are the models. But William F. Buckley, who does not win this mayoral campaign, is able to have a more than respectable showing if it's powered by white ethnic. White ethnic is, by the way, one of my favorite, like, dated 20th century terms.
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C
See, I'm old enough to remember what it means. Yeah, it's all those.
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B
You hear it, you're sort of like, okay, I get what it's saying. So, like white ethnic voters and, you know, Staten island and like the outer boroughs of New York City, they actually respond to his populous campaign. They're not responding to the moderate JFK like Lindsay. They're responding to Buckwheat Mitch, in many ways is what you kind of see with Trump, not kind of what you. Quite quite literally what you see with Trump. So what was it about William of Buckley's presentation and his ability to transcend who he was and what he represented that appealed to that voter set the same way Trump could do?
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C
You know, it's a very, very great point. And I had not made the connection with Rubio. So I thank you for that. Because in that story you mentioned that I wrote whenever it was about in 2014, Rubio was in it. I interviewed him for that. And you're right, he was kind of the. The shining knight who's going to make the. The movement more humane. What Buckley discovered, it partly came out of another episode in the book that some listeners may have read in the Atlantic Monthly. That's an excerpt of the book, was this quite amazing debate he had with James Baldwin at Cambridge University in England. And Buckley was a good debater. James Baldwin just like deboned him because he made a very different kind of argument. He said, in essence, let's look at the reality of race in America. Let's not talk about your abstract principles. Let's talk about what race is really like in America. And Buckley, shocked. He's, he's absolutely defeated in this debate. He's almost stunned when he hears Baldwin make this famous speech about historical slavery and capitalism. Then he goes to New York and makes similar remarks. Just like a month or two later, Buckley, because the first one was done in England, while Buckley's on a ski vacation in Switzerland, comes back to New York. This time he makes a speech in front of 6,000 cops in New York City. And they're like, enthralled by what he's saying. Why? Because he's not talking about the shocking fact of Jim Crow in the South. He's talking about the fears of what you say, that term nobody uses anymore. White ethnics in New York. And just so people get what we mean by that, we mean working class or middle class, outer borough, as you say, Italians, Irish, German immigrants, Eastern European immigrants. Now, the battle over race is very different. It's over who's going to what school, who gets what job, who lives in what neighborhood. It's not de jure segregation, it's de facto segregation. It's the way people's lives are being led. Buckley looks around and he thinks, omg, they're hanging on every word I'm saying. So add a piece. Barry Goldwater was just a nominee in 1964, suffered the worst defeat in modern, maybe ever, presidential history. And Buckley's movement had created him. The movement looks finished. Buckley gives his press conference. You know, there he is with his vocabulary and his style and his wife, a ski accident with a big boot on her foot. He said, Mr. Buckley, what would happen if you actually win? What would you do? And he says, demand a recount.
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B
The wit.
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C
And at that point, every journalist in New York says, this is the one I want to write about because it's fun. There's a columnist, Pete Hamill, great famous columnist, New York Post, and he says for the first time, you were seeing someone with like a top rate intellect running for public office. And you think, yeah, there are people we admire. They're incredibly smart and brilliant. Barack Obama was a brilliant candidate. Bill Clinton, there are many people with a high intellect. Nutty Ted Cruz has got a brilliant intellect, but Buckley brought a kind of flair and style to it. So if you're living out in Queens and people are calling you a yahoo or a thug, because, you know, I'm talking about the, you know, we'll call them again, the White ethnics. Here's a guy in, gets up in front of the cameras and brings all that style and wit to it. You think he believes the same things I do? Only when he says it. People listen to him, right? When he says it, he makes the logical argument. He doesn't name call. He doesn't do all this stuff that gets us in trouble. It's not about dog whistles, is actually about having the debate. And. And so he gets on stage. There's a newspaper strike. Most people knew Buckley's name, but they'd never seen him. He wasn't doing television yet. There's a newspaper strike in New York right before election day in 1965. So the local networks, there were three, you know, big. The big three networks, CBS, NBC, ABC, each with its New York affiliate has a debate. And Buckley had been debating since he was 15 years old. And they put him on with the other two guys. Lindsey, as you say, the Camelot, like Republican little Abe Beam, who's even shorter than me, the accountant from Brooklyn. And there is Buckley just playing with them. I mean, imagine. Marcia, let's say we had a campaign today. Let's say you come out of the maga, right? Okay. The nearest we may be getting to it is JD Van, whom I also know too, very slightly. And you put him at. Imagine JD Vance, who can treat it all more light heartedly. That's what Buckley did. You're living in a terrible time. JFK has been assassinated. Dr. King is going to be assassinated soon. Robert Kennedy is going to be assassinated. Malcolm X, whom Buckley liked. Actually, National Review was for Malcolm X. They liked him. All this stuff is happening and Buckley can say, well, let's just have a contest to see who speaks better. Let's see who can make the ideas more convincing and persuasive. And then you think he's opened up American politics in a new way. He's made it entertainment in a good way. He brings everybody into the conversation. A guy he knew from Yale named Ray Price, who really revered Buckley and then became a big speechwriter for Richard Nixon, told me the most important thing Buckley did was to start his Firing Line broadcast, which came right after the mayoral campaign. They saw Buckley was magic on television because he didn't disguise his eccentricities, the odd voice and the raised eyebrows. He knew he had more respect for the public to think he had to make himself wooden to appeal to them. He could be himself. And Ray Price said to me every week, if you turned on Buckley and you're a liberal or progressive, you hear Him. And you think he's smarter than I am. He speaks better than I do. He knows more than I do. I may not agree with him, but I'm going to listen to him. And then once somebody starts to listen, really listen to you, then you're open to persuasion. Like you. You open up that magazine article. It's got nothing to do with me. It's reading like Yuval Levin or somebody making, like, serious arguments about what the movement needs to do. And you think, okay, you've got me. Keep talking. I'll listen. I'll read the books. You read, right? I'll look at it all again. That's what Buckley did, and he knew the way to do it was media. So he just did it all at once. He would write a column in 20 minutes. And I saw him. He could type 100 words a minute. This typewriter days. So you don't have any autocorrect. You're typing 100 words a minute. You got to get your fingers in the right keys. And he would be in the back of his limousine. There's a picture of. In the book. He's just typing away. And off the column goes. Then he's on the phone booking guests for the TV show. He brought the Black Panthers on his television program. Why? Let's have a debate. So historians come along later, and they say, if you actually want to know which Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver had to say, you have to watch Buckley's Firing Line, because he's the only one who would. Who didn't just show black people rioting, who would actually. And favorite was Jesse Jackson. He really liked Jesse Jackson. He met him in the late 60s, brought him to New York, said, look to his friends. You have to have lunch with this guy. You got to hear this guy talk. Bring him on his program. And it just opened it up. It's exactly what we don't have now. And you think, well, why can't we do it? And I don't know the. Maybe you know the answer to that. I think we probably could actually.
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B
I think the. Well, that actually gets to my next question that's also going to share an anecdote with you that I'd love to hear your thoughts on. So, like I said, my encounter with Buckley started when I was in high school. I went to Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon, and I saw. I. It was. It was his Reflections on a Libertarian Journalist. I think that isn't quite the title, but I just saw the book, and I Had a, I had a contrarian streak that I'm still trying to like, overcome. But my form of like rebellion as like an upper middle class kid in like Portland, Oregon, was to like Buckley and conservatism and the neocons and all of that. And by, when I say the neocons, I don't mean the Iraq war neocons, I mean like the OG original 1960s, 1970s mudlight reality.
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C
Yeah, right.
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B
Yeah. So I was, I was interested in that thought and what, that engaging with Buckley was so helpful for me. And I want folks in the younger end of this audience to think about this. Is Buckley established for me the idea that conservatism, libertarianism, liberalism, progressivism, left liberalism, these are a body and set of ideas that are separate from the Democratic or Republican parties. These, these are actually like political philosophies and approaches to the world that are not one for one equivalents to whatever the Democratic Party says. Whatever the Republican Party says. And something that was really fascinating to me, having sort of come up in that space and thought about the world that way, is I think, you know, if we're to describe the state of the Democratic Party today, you could in many ways write like the inverse article that you wrote in 2014, which is basically, can the Democratic Party become the party of ideas again? Because as I would basically articulate the state of affairs right now, I would say if you are center left to left liberal, not if you're progressive or like a DSA socialist, you have plenty of ideas, but you have a lot of sort of tumult or uncertainty within this, like, center left faction of what do we do moving forward? Okay, the emerging Democratic majority is not going to happen. Progressivism is not this advancing social phenomenon which we could just basically chart in. Maybe there's a backlash once in a while, but things are going to keep them advancing towards 2050. None of that's clear right now. So I think the fact that, so I raised this to one of my center left friends who's like in elected office right now. And I said, you know, if you're, if, you know, you should really start thinking about this question of like, where does the center left, like where does liberalism go next? And he kind of said to me, you know, I don't really think about, I don't think a lot of our peers think about center left liberalism being a separate phenomenon than the Democratic Party. I think of there being the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party has a set of ideas, but there isn't just this thing that's separate from it. And I'm just sort of reflecting on this with you for the first time here. But that just really struck me because that just seems to be completely antithetical to my understanding of how conservatism evolved after the 1950s, after we left Buckley, because he was once again a conservative libertarian. And then there was a gop. But these weren't inherently kind of the same things. So I'd love you just to get like your, your broad thoughts on the existence of there being something conservative, libertarian, that's different from the GOP and how the evolution of that ideology in many ways serves as like a helpful, I don't know, corrective or a, a helpful phenomenon so that this all doesn't get reduced to sort of partisanship and hackishness.
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C
It's a very interesting point because if you think about it, National Review was started in 1955. There was a very popular Republican president. So why do you have to start a conservative magazine in protest? It's because from the worldview of an anti communist libertarian. So let's add that piece to it as well. You get to the classic fusionism. And what I do in the book is I draw on the earlier version of that, which was called Faith and Freedom. So on the one hand, you want to crusade in defense of the higher values, which were often, let's be honest here, the Christian values. I said, this is the Jew, or we'll call them now, Judeo Christian values. At the same time. So you have to build up a military, you have to be able to fight the Cold War. At the same time, you don't want that idea encroaching on how people live at home domestically. So you get these famous people to the right of Buckley, like Murray Rothbard, who's a favorite of my friend John Ganz, he really likes Murray Rothbard because Rothbard or Sam Francis, they take the arguments further and they dabble in these other issues that get us close to identity and such in ways that may not make either one of us very comfortable. But they're out there. So Buckley and company are thinking, we've got a Republican president elected with Roosevelt, like majorities, everybody loves him, but he's not doing any of the stuff we want. In fact, Eisenhower is successful because he perpetuates the New Deal. He doesn't take it down. That's his pragmatic genius. Who's a parallel to that Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton follows Ronald Reagan and he says this is what the country wants. So we are going to accept we're living in the world where people don't want a lot of government spending and programs. They believe in capitalism. They think that can elevate us. And then we'll try to. We'll try to protect the people we can. And then the greatest figure, in my estimation, to come out of that worldview was President Obama because he was able to add the missing piece, which was the extended Medicare. Right. Which right? First you have Social Security, then you have Medicare, then you have Obamacare, and there's your continuity. But what is Obama really good at? Finding the language you can use with everybody. But there's a great comment he made when Reagan was first governor in California, 1967, after he'd been elected in 66. And conservatives are complaining because Reagan seems to be giving too much way to liberals. And so Buckley's great line, he said, what's he supposed to do, padlock the state treasury? Notice how he says padlock. That's the genius of it. He has that exact word. But then he says, rhetoric precedes action. You have to find the way to talk about it. Then you start to make things happen because the ideas don't change all that much. For instance, I saw Professor Kendi interviewed by Ezra Klein. And when they, this is back when Kendi was super big with all those books that came out. And when Klein says to him, well, what do you want to do as far as actual programs go? It's a Democratic Party. It's a bigger safety net. It's helping people out to pay college loans. In other words, the program is not radical. It's really the language you use that makes it acceptable. The advantage that conservatives had is, and I mean the Buckley style conservatives who called themselves radical conservatives is no, the ideas aren't necessarily new. It's the argument that's new. It's the way you present your case. That's what a lot of it is about. And this is where I sense the Democrats need help. And you're right, Marshall. It's because they're looking too much at themselves as a party and not as vessels of a movement. So what does Buckley do at National Review? He finds these guys who are 30 years older or 20 years older than he, he is, they're all ex communists. Whitaker Chambers, James Burnham, Billy Schlom, Wilmore Kendall. Every single one of them is a refugee from the left left, but they're now on the right and they're going to help Buckley create this vision of a conservatism that will take over the Republican Party. So you say to yourself, who's doing that in the Democratic Party. There's something I'm reminded of years ago when I was editing the New York Times Book Review. One of the great journalists of that period was Michael Kinsley, the founder of Slate. And he did some big piece for us. And I said to him, well, there doesn't seem. And I think he came into the office once to talk about something. And I said, well, there don't seem to be a whole lot of ideas on the right. And he said, oh, really? Are you seeing a lot of ideas on the left? And I thought, my gosh, he's right. You hold the other side to a higher standard when you should do the opposite. That's what Buckley and company did. They said, it's not good enough that you have a guy with an R next to his name and the ballot that gets elected president. Where are the conservative ideas? Right? And then you start saying, maybe there's some other candidate out there who's closer. Maybe there's somebody who gets what we're talking about. Hence Goldwater, hence Reagan, you know, and there's a great thing Buckley said. I quote it all the time because he said it to me face to face. I knew Buckley very well. I said, so how did you make the connection with Goldwater and Reagan? He said, they came to me. And you think, like, what writer can say that now? You know? No, they came to me. There's a very interesting piece you probably read. You seem to read everything George packer did on J.D. vance in the. In the Atlantic, and he's trying to figure out what Vance is really about. To my mind, the weakness there, and I'm a fan of George Packer, believe me, is if I were doing that story, I would have said I have to talk to Elizabeth Warren and have her tell me about the pieces of legislation she collaborated on with Vance. What would those mean? I don't know that George did that. He does so much the psychological portrait. He's not looking ahead. Where will advanced conservatism take us? My friend Mike Lind, who I think is really kind of a genius, and it's quite close to Vance in a kind of. As a. We'll say, you know, as a kind of consumliere, right, said to me, vance has the best mind in politics for policy since Daniel Patrick Moynihan, which in my era, in my world, is a very big thing because that's all about ideas and programs.
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B
Speaking of neocons, yes, the greatest of.
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C
All, the neo gun. What does neocon mean today? It means A liberal Democrat who's a little bit to the right of some of the others. But. So you think with Vance there might be something interesting going on there. See, everybody got caught up in the silly things he said. And you know, those interviews, because you go in these programs and you have to and you say this stuff that you jazz up your audience. And now I think there's some concern about where the rhetoric is taking him. I bet you I still have a feeling I went to the radio program with him. Sounds like you talk to him a lot, is if you actually had to talk about policy, it would sound very different. And how do you make that transition from. Well, actually, I've got a couple of ideas that Liz Warren and I worked out together, that sort of work. But we, you know, we got Holly and a couple others, but we couldn't get the rest to come around. You're thinking, yeah, that's how you want, that's how you want the system to go. But if you don't have the rhetoric, if you don't have the platform where those ideas can get disseminated and debated. A smart thing Buckley did early on was it if you were in the big tent, he was going to step back and let you say what you wanted. So he created something called the open question in National Review. Open question meant you disagreed with everybody else, but you got to say it anyway. And that's what we need more just. I could see somebody. I guess the language is outdated now. Just a big open question, like we don't know the answer. How about that? We don't know the answer. Nowadays everyone thinks they do have the answer. It's part of, you know, being, being part of the conversation, being a player in it is you have to have your sound bite and say which team you're on. And the idea that you're going to work through things is seen as like a weakness, you know, it's like a right. Failure to commit. Right. Is that true, would you say? I mean, you're a lot younger than me, so you know these things better. Is it. Are you supposed to kind of stake out your position now? Is that how it works?
- [33:46]
B
You're supposed to. And this speaks to what? Because on the one hand, when you were pointing out like, why doesn't anyone, you know, do what Buckwheat did? Why isn't that exchange of ideas happening? Oh, there's an exchange of idea. I have a, I have a zoomer sister in law who like hops on these like streaming channels and all the zoomers are Debating each other, quote, unquote. But the key difference between debate and I think Ben Shapiro plays a very negative role in this is, you know, it's much more like a debate club than an exchange of ideas. So it's sort of like, okay, I support a $15 minimum wage. You do not support it. I'm going to, as quickly as possible, say the three things. That means that's a correct idea. And then you have to respond with the three things. And if you say, well, on the one hand, on the other hand, that's actually not committing. No, just commit. $15 minimum wage. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. There is something about this discourse of style. It doesn't work. And I just want to pick up on something you said because I think this speaks to JD's strength in comparison to basically every single on the table Democrat moving forward. I think we did see this with the debate with Tim Walls. Jd, I can say this because I know JD knew him before he was famous. JD has a rooted worldview. I think JD has sat through, actually. I think Elizabeth Warren is like this too, and so is Bernie to a certain degree. But I'm talking more about the future facing people on, like the center left to left. J.D. vance spent the 2010s thinking through his perspective and developing a worldview on what I think to be the big questions of this moment. And I think if there's a central weakness on the center left to left to broader Democratic Party ecosystem is that there is very little encouraged efforts to do similarly. So think of Kamala Harris and all of the other Democrats in 2019 raising their hands, saying they supported the decriminalization of border crossings. Why did they get to that position? Did they get to that position because. Because they really sat down and thought about the meaning of citizenship. Thought about like, okay, on the one hand, there's a backlash to Trump's immigration crackdown, but there are, there is this border crisis, but we have to reconcile that to the fact that Build the Wall was a successful campaign. I don't think any of that process, that that's how I get to answers of questions. I think that's how JD gets the answers of questions. I don't think that is true on the Democratic Party side. Which is why you then saw in the 2024 campaign, when Kamala Harris is forced to take the opposite position that she was taking during those 2019 debates. It wasn't just that she was afraid to talk about how her position had changed. I think it's because there wasn't actually A process by which she got to that position. So the reason why she was no longer in favor of the border crossing position, the reason why she wasn't in favor of transgender surgeries in prisons paid for by the taxpayer, was because these positions didn't reflect their worldview. They just reflected. Find whatever the correct answer is from a center left to left perspective. State that position, then you know, that's the deal. That is kind of your job. And I think that's just JD's central advantage. I do not think most Democratic politicians, other than Jake Auchincloss, has been a guest on the show multiple times. Jake is incredibly smart. Everyone's always blown away with him. I think Jake has a developed worldview in the same degree. I'm not really seeing that with other politicians and other figures. And I think, once again, I think it's just such an advantage that. And this should also be noted as well, too. Buckley led to this culture on the right where there was this real serious ecosystem. Her talk programs, AEI summer honors programs. You've interviewed a friend of mine named Caleb Orr who's like, now working in the State Department. Caleb lime met in 2015. We both had. We both. You appreciate this because we both read your article, the Reform Time magazine.
- [37:35]
C
Yeah, that was what I did in Time.
- [37:37]
B
They put out this. They put out this pamphlet called Room to Grow. It was these solutions. Caleb and I both, because we're nerds, brought our copies of Room to Grow to our summer dorm, saw them on each other's bookshelves, and we're like, okay, we're going to be friends. That culture does not exist on the center to left, the center to the left to the same degree. And it's a serious weakness during a period where there are open questions. That's not a problem in the 2000s when George W. Bush is that, you know, at 28% approval ratings and the answer is Barack Obama, it's not a problem. During the 1990s when you have Bill Clinton and he's like responding with triangulation, It's a real problem right now.
- [38:20]
C
So interesting. You remind me of a couple of things. One is, you know, the very famous statement of John Maynard Keynes when he goes before, you know, he's interviewed, being questioned in Parliament or wherever. It was this, well, Dr. Kane, she said this about the economy five years ago. Now you're saying this. How do you. How do you explain yourself? And he said, well, when the facts prove me wrong and turn out to be different, I changed my mind. What do you do Right. And the presumption is, yeah, you're trying to figure it out. You try. And yeah, you're going to change your, your mind. But that's a really good point you make if you just see them.
- [38:58]
B
And one quick thing, one quick thing in response to that, though, I think when you're talking about, you know, Keynes, like the, the facts are like data and real world outcomes. I think the facts in the case of Democratic policymakers are, oh, wait, I thought this was pulling super high, but actually super low. That, that I think they do the worst version version of facts changing.
- [39:23]
C
Yeah, no, I, I think you're right. I think that's exactly right. It does become a kind of endless horse race thing. I wrote about a book, one of these new books that are not the J. Tapper one, another one that that kind of re litigates the last election. And all it's about is polling. So I did, I, I wrote about it for the Washington Post. And, and as you know, because you get these books in PDF, like you have my huge Buckley book on PDF, you can do word searches and see where things come out. So I start doing word searches for Gaza, for Ukraine, and the only time they ever come up is in connection with polling. Is it good to be. What side do you want to be on? And this is Democrats. I'm thinking, really, there's nothing at stake. Here's the thing to keep in mind for the Buckley contention, and this is important for Bill Buckley's own story. He came out of the isolationist, anti interventionist Pre World War II. Right. What even then was called the old right. Right. Charles Lindbergh was his first hero. Not that many years later, 10 years later, he's ready to fight a global war against communism. How do you go from the isolationism to that he saw the world had changed. Yeah. And if you're still committed, what are you committed to? A free America. Well, a free America is going to have to assert its freedom in different ways at different moments. And you're not giving up any principles by doing that. You're adjusting to reality. If you lock yourself into poles and the horse race all the time, then you're going to do the thing you're talking about. And if you have a core belief that's why Bernie does so well, you just know, he says what, what he really thinks. He goes to those town halls in the south and he says, okay, how many people think health care is a right and not a privilege? Raise your hand if you think health care. And every hand shoots up in the audience. Right. Because of course, that's what we think. So argue that way, argue that way and not here's what the bad people on the other side are doing, right? Here's the names they use, here's the language they use, or all the rest. And there's a weird intolerance that came out of that. I think that really hurt the Democrats for a long time. It was a kind of, you know, in the earlier phase, you know, when I was first doing some of this stuff, they called it political correctness. Now they call it wokeness. It's basically a form of, of excluding people, of exclusion. Wait a minute. It used to be the hard right that excluded people. They're the ones who were, you know, Buckley was defending Jim Crow in the south. And I think you're, you know, your, your listeners should know that. I have many pages. I uncovered the actual history of the Buckley family because they had two mansions, they had a one in Connecticut and they had another one in Camden, South Carolina. And that's where the racial views came from. So all that's part of the story too. Buckley evolved over time. It took him a while to get there. But National Review was defending the Jim Crow south for a number of. They opposed the Civil Rights act, they opposed the Voting Rights Act. People should know this. And yet if you walked into a room, no matter who you were, Buckley was going to look you in the eye and treat you as his equal. That's what I found when I was a kid starting out on all this stuff and first met him. I want to add one more thing to your picture you've given, because this, I don't do a lot of autobiography, but this is important for me. Many years ago, when I was first starting to write about all of this, my first idea was to write a biography of Whitaker Chambers, who had been the famous witness in the Alger Hiss case. That really kind of a pivotal moment in the Cold War, which had a long time ago. And he was a figure, he was an interesting guy. Not, not as big and attractive as Buckley, but because of the role he played in this, in this pivotal spy drama, everybody knew who he was. When I first started researching that life, Chambers life and writing about him, people on the left would have nothing to do with me. It was the conservatives who said, how can we help you? They didn't know what my politics were. They assumed if I was going to write a serious minded, truly researched biography of Whitaker Chambers, since they believed Chambers was a great figure, it would only help them. It didn't matter who I was. The left held back then when the positive reviews came in and the prize nominations and all that, then they would say, why don't you write for us? And I never forgot, it was the conservatives, including Buckley. That's how I met Buckley, was. He helped me. He freed money up for me through foundations. He made phone calls for me. Talk to this guy. He really means business. He's going to write a good biography of Ottoma Whitaker. He's gonna write a good biography of Whitaker. He's gonna get him off that damn pumpkin patch where the microfilm was held. He's gonna write a real story about his poetry and all this stuff. I think he's the most famous guy I've encountered, and he's the. And. And he's the one who's most open to me. And he's the only one who. I met a lot of neocons back then. Buckley was the only person I met who'd actually been a friend of Chambers and all the neo cons and would, you know, these Democrats who'd gone right would all say, well, we have to prove Chambers was right, you know, and this book needs to prove that Chambers told the truth in this famous case because he's accused of being a liar and a fantasy and all this. Buckley was the only one who said, you know, this book isn't just about Chambers. It's about you. It's about your career as an. As a writer. There's a big project and I really want you to succeed at it. Just in human terms, I thought, he's much bigger than other people. There was no pettiness in him. His most famous dispute was with Gore Vidal. They called each other very ugly names. I can attest to this, and so can my friend Michael Limit. I never heard Bill Buckley make a disparaging comment about Gore Vidal. And I talked to Vidal's biographer, Fred Kaplan, and he said he never heard Vidal mention Buckley without disparaging him. And it's that bigness. It's the bigness. That's where, like J.D. was best with Tim Walls when he went very big. Yep, Right. And I mean big. I don't mean big by out arguing and debating. I mean personally big. When I talked to Andrew Sullivan for this book, he had an interesting, complicated relationship with Buckley. He said, you know, I've read this 900 page book. He said, no one has a bad word personally to say about Buckley. They never say he was mean to them. They never say he lied to them, that he talked behind their backs. That he denigrated them. When David, the very young David Remnick, you know, Edison New Yorker now, interviewed Buckley, famous interview. Remnick was 25 years old. He's a star writer at the Post. And this is big things. A style section of the Washington Post was a very big thing for a young journalist. And he goes and he interviews Buckley for his, his 60th birthday and he, and he and Reagan's elected and he's kind of taunting Buckley a little bit and he says, well, what about George Will's column is read more than yours? What do you think about that? Buckley said, fine with me. He said, I never said it should be a one man operation. The more the merrier. You think nobody does that anymore. Nobody does that anymore. It's always defending yourself, staking out your turf, one upping the opposition. And what it shows is a lack of confidence, a lack of confidence in your position and in your sense of the future. What I found with wfb, with William Buckley was I really wanted to use and I didn't. In the end, the book is epigraphs, you know, those quotes that go at the beginning. And one of them I almost used but did, is from the Great Gatsby. Jay Gatsby and Bill buckley both turned 100 this year. Now, he was born the year the Great Gatsby was published. And there's a beautiful passage Fitzgerald has very early in that novel where he said Gatsby had a capacity for hope. He said he had the gift of hope. And I thought, yes, that's what Buckley had, is he really believed and part of it came out of his faith. We have not talked about his Catholicism. The Catholicism was so important to him. The philanthropy and good works came out of that. Andrew Sullivan told me that because of course, he's raised Catholic, a devout Catholic. And he said reading about Buckley, he realized Buckley is doing the thing you're told every Sunday in church, which is to live like a good Christian. Buckley was defending Jim Crow and also sending money off to HBCUs. You know, it's just a different worldview, but always humane, philanthropic in your personal dealings. And what does that do you? It begins to broaden your worldview, your perspective. So when Buckley went on a tour, the National Urban League was interested in Buckley. They knew he's making arguments other people wouldn't make about what the real issues in the country were, that they're not just race, they're class and money. Who has access to capital? All these things we take for granted. Now, the Buckley was a Big fan of black capitalism, for instance. So the National Urban League sent him on these tour of the inner cities. And what do they realize? Buckley's the only one who will look at a leader like Reverend Jackson and say, well, what do you want Exactly. Not in an aggressive way, curious, like, what should we do? And the others all come in, all the other white, the white liberals, and say, look, we're really on your side and we know things are terrible. Buckley says, forget all that. What do you want? What should we do? And he's listening. So the same guy who is defending Jim Crow does an interview with Life magazine in 1970, and he says, I'll tell you, what we need in 1980 is a black president. So that's something we can get behind. Why? It's more. You drop a data, more of it is coming into the system. You know, we have this very quick, absorptive mind. And, and I say, you know, he was not the deepest reader, right? There were other people who did the deep reading, but if you told him the gist of an argument in a book, he'd master it. That's what most journalists are like. I mean, I, I don't see that as a shocking thing. You know, most of us, we work very quickly, and you do the best you can to learn what you can. You talk to people who are smarter than you are. I talk to you, you know far more about the Democratic Party and the contemporary left than I do. So I want to hear about it. That's why I ask you questions. And one of them is, who are all the Democrats you've spoken to? Is it really true you're not hearing serious ideas from them or just from the few you've mentioned? Like, you can have a conversation like this with somebody with like an, I don't know, AOC or somebody. You can't have that conversation.
- [50:57]
B
I think the, the, the further left you go, the more you're able to have a conversation. I think the central issue, and this is a problem that stems from sort of the Clintonian 1990s. And then, unfortunately, we're going to have to wrap this interview, but we need to do a second part of this at some point. The central issue is that as a result of the Clintonian triangulating 1990s and then just the multiple Trump victories, you find Democratic center left politicians being inherently defensive. So, okay, how do we, like, modulate? How do we accommodate? Okay, we were pro lgbtq, but now there's backlash to it. So how do we find, like, a new defensive position and we used to think immigration was going to turn this country progressive, but now actually some of the immigrants are sort of voting to the right. So actually now we have to find a new position on that that it's very defensive. And I think that's the biggest, like there's, there's a joke going around how, you know, if you look at the New York City mayor's race, like Zoran Mandani is like, he's got aura, he's got energy, he's got aggression, he's moving forward. The center has Andrew Cuomo on a sort of redemption tour that's very bereft of ideas and very bereft of energy. And that is just the fundamental problem facing the Democratic center. There's efforts to get at this with Ezra Klein's sort of abundance project, but that has problems in of itself. But I would love if we can bookmark this for a part 2 later on after your tour because we have a lot to chat about.
- [52:19]
C
We're just getting started, man. We got a long way to go.
- [52:23]
B
Thanks for joining me, Sam.
- [52:24]
C
It's been a pleasure. Marshall, thanks again.