The MAGA New Right

William F. Buckley Jr.

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William F. Buckley Jr. (1925–2008)

Founder and editor of National Review (1955–1990); patriarch of the postwar American conservative movement; longtime host of Firing Line; the figure most associated with the claim that mainstream conservatism polices its own boundary against the far right — a claim recent historiography (Matthew Dallek 2023, Schlozman and Rosenfeld) treats as substantially mythologized.

Why He Matters Here

The wiki’s Counterrevolution thesis turns on whether the American Conservative Movement ever had a real boundary against the conspiracist, racially reactionary, restorationist right that the MAGA New Right now embraces openly. Buckley is the linchpin of the standard “yes” answer — the man who allegedly excommunicated the John Birch Society and disciplined the movement’s worst impulses. If that story holds, MAGA is a deviation. If it does not, MAGA is a continuation.

Debunking a Longstanding Myth About William F. Buckley (Dallek, 2023) makes the case for “does not hold.” Long before QAnon, Ronald Reagan and the GOP purged John Birch extremists from the party (Trickey, 2021) preserves the standard narrative.

The Standard Story

  • 1955: Founded National Review with the famous prospectus declaring the magazine would “stand athwart history, yelling Stop”; framed the New Deal as a “total revolution.”
  • 1962 Palm Beach meeting with Russell Kirk and Barry Goldwater: agreed on strategy to repudiate Robert Welch without alienating JBS rank-and-file.
  • 1961 / February 1962 NR editorials criticizing Welch’s “views… far removed from common sense.”
  • 1965: After American Opinion attacked Selma protesters as “a horde of termites,” Buckley used his syndicated column to escalate. October 1965 NR ran a 14-page anti-Bircher special.
  • 1991: Published In Search of Anti-Semitism, criticizing Pat Buchanan and Joseph Sobran (signaling, in the standard narrative, his continuing role as boundary keeper into the paleocon era).

In this telling Buckley defines a mainstream conservatism that is anti-communist, pro-market, religiously serious, and self-disciplining against conspiracism, antisemitism, and overt white nationalism.

The Revisionist Story

Dallek (drawing on Schlozman and Rosenfeld) argues Buckley’s gatekeeping was tactical rather than substantive:

  • Ideological overlap with the Bircher right. 1957: described white people as “the advanced race” and defended the legitimacy of Jim Crow. Wrote a book defending Joseph McCarthy. Through the 1950s, NR shared writers with the antisemitic American Mercury.
  • Targeted Welch personally, not the membership. Letter to T. Coleman Andrews (Birch founder): “I don’t think in my life I have made a single unfavorable reference to any members of the John Birch Society.” Vowed in 1962 “to make it absolutely clear that National Review approves of the John Birch Society, while disapproving Bob’s tendency to frame his entire position on the presumption of endemic disloyalty.”
  • Continued material entanglement. Subscriber overlap with American Opinion; 1965 NYC mayoral campaign drew Birch and fringe support; maintained relationships with antisemitic Birch leaders including Revilo Oliver.
  • Internal NR caution. Frank Meyer urged restraint: alienating Bircher members was to be avoided “no more than is strictly necessary.” Publisher William Rusher wrote that JBS membership “has not yet earned our condemnation, by any means.”

In this telling Buckley is a more complicated figure: a brand manager who quarantined an embarrassing personality (Welch) while keeping the substance — and the votes — inside the conservative tent. The “excommunication” was a cordon sanitaire around an individual, not the movement-wide expulsion of conspiracist or racially reactionary politics that later commentary made it out to be.

What Survived from Buckley to the New Right

Several Buckley-era positions survive directly in the contemporary New Right:

  • Anti–civil rights movement framing (Buckley 1957) → Christopher Caldwell’s Age of Entitlement (2020), which dates the bad constitution to the Civil Rights Act.
  • Defense of the “advanced race” → racial-demographic anxiety undergirding Great Replacement Theory and the immigration-restrictionist wing of the New Right.
  • Anti-institutional conspiracism (the un-expelled Bircher tendency) → The Cathedral; “the deep state”; Longmarcherism.
  • Catastrophist framing (“standing athwart history yelling Stop”; New Deal as “total revolution”) → The Flight 93 Election; the Counterrevolution mode generally.

What Buckley did successfully police — open antisemitism in NR’s pages, the most florid Welch conspiracism, the explicit white-nationalist label — has weakened in the New Right era. Sam Francis, who Buckley fired from The Washington Times over racially explicit writing in 1995, became a posthumous patron saint of MAGA-era racial-realist politics. The IM-1776 / “NETTR” wing has effectively reabsorbed the figures Buckley’s generation marginalized.

The Iberian Admiration

Per Iberian Vistas (Zúquete & Hawley, 2025): Buckley’s relationship to Catholic-authoritarian Iberia was substantially deeper than the standard postwar-conservative biography records.

  • Spanish was Buckley’s first language. His father had oil interests in Mexico; the Buckley household was Hispanophone before it was Anglophone. Buckley maintained a love of Spanish language and culture throughout his life.
  • Sustained Franco apologetics in NR. 1957: “General Franco is an authentic national hero… [who] wrest[ed] Spain out of the hands of visionaries, ideologues, Marxists and nihilists.” 1981: “Say what you like about Franco, the Spanish people — those of them who were willing to let their political appetites hibernate — did well. They prospered economically — all classes of Spaniards. And the peace was longer under Franco than at any time in Spanish history.”
  • Salazar. 1958: “We do not despise Salazar for using force to keep his highly benevolent regime in power.” Hunter College debate (1958): “There are many more allusions, on college campuses, to the fact that Salazar governs Portugal undemocratically than to the fact that he governs it well.”
  • Anti-decolonization. 1962, traveling in Mozambique, berated Adlai Stevenson for the “inconceivable” belief that “Mozambique natives would be better off without the Portuguese than with them.”
  • The 1965 NYC Fifth Avenue pro-war march. Per Holden: Buckley marched alongside longshoremen and Medal of Honor winners in the October 1965 march that beat antiwar protesters; bystander Murray Rothfield called the “Buckley goons… Brown Shirts.” The march is the wiki’s clearest single instance of Buckley operating in personal proximity to organized political violence.

The wiki’s structural reading: Buckley’s mature anti-decolonization, anti-democratic, Catholic-authoritarian-tolerant political imagination is not a deviation from his fusionist editorship of NR — it is the substantive Catholic-traditionalist core of which fusionism was the public-facing strategic frame. See Iberian Vistas for the academic version of this claim.

Status in the New Right

Contemporary New Right thinkers treat Buckley with ambivalence:

  • Pro-Buckley fusionist nostalgics (e.g., Heritage Foundation under earlier leadership; the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s pre-2020 orientation) cite him as proof the movement once had a respectable mainstream.
  • Postliberals (Patrick Deneen, Sohrab Ahmari) treat fusionism, of which Buckley is the avatar, as the system that failed — a coalition that won elections while losing the culture and is now defunct.
  • The Hard Right (Costin Alamariu, Curtis Yarvin, IM-1776) treat Buckley as the architect of “Conservative Inc.” — the credentialed, magazine-and-think-tank conservatism that purged authentic right-wing energy and earned the movement’s defeats.

The 2025 Heritage Foundation under Kevin Roberts — which welcomed Tucker Carlson and the Edmund Burke Foundation orbit — is a Heritage that no longer claims continuity with Buckley’s brand-management mode.

Cross-References

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