The MAGA New Right

Willmoore Kendall

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Willmoore Kendall (1909–1967)

Yale political theorist (1947–1961); Catholic convert; Buckley’s undergraduate teacher and a founding senior editor of *NR* (1955); the wiki’s principal intellectual point of origin for the populist-majoritarian, anti-liberal strain of postwar American conservatism that runs through Bozell to contemporary postliberalism; lived in Franco’s Spain for several years.

Why He Matters Here

Kendall is the wiki’s missing first link between European Catholic political theory and the American conservative movement. He was the figure who taught Buckley to read Plato, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau as political rather than philosophical texts — and who supplied Buckley’s anti-liberalism its theoretical scaffolding. Triumph magazine, the Bozell-era Catholic-traditionalist publication, was substantially a Kendall-influenced project. George W. Carey’s Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition (1970, posthumously co-authored with Kendall) is the underlying anti-Lockean reading of American founding documents that the Claremonters would later overcome with their counter-Lockean Lincolnian-Declarationist reading.

Kendall is also the underdiagnosed populist-majoritarian current in postwar conservatism. His political theory held that the American constitutional order is fundamentally about deliberative legislative supremacy exercised by a “virtuous people” — a position that prefigures contemporary right-populist majoritarianism while remaining philosophically grounded in classical political theory.

Career

  • Born Konawa, Oklahoma, 1909; Methodist minister’s son; Rhodes Scholar (Oxford, Pembroke College, with Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss-adjacent figures).
  • Brief journalist, then Yale political science PhD (1941).
  • OSS during WWII. Latin America operations — first encounter with Hispanic political culture.
  • Yale faculty 1947–1961. Tenured but isolated; Yale colleagues found him personally difficult; Buckley described their disputes as legendary. Trained Buckley undergraduate, taught a generation of conservative intellectuals including Bozell, Garry Wills, and M.E. Bradford (briefly).
  • Convert to Catholicism, c. 1956. Per Zúquete & Hawley, the conversion was part of the NR circle’s overrepresented Catholic gravitational pull.
  • 1955: founding senior editor of NR. Departed editorial role acrimoniously by the early 1960s but maintained relations.
  • Lived in Franco’s Spain for an extended period in the late 1950s/early 1960s. Bozell joined him; the Iberian Catholic context shaped both men’s later work.
  • 1963: bought out of Yale for $42,500 — the legendary terms of his Yale departure. Joined the brand-new University of Dallas as founding chair of the Politics department, which became the principal redoubt of paleoconservative political theory under his and Bradford’s tenure.
  • Died Dallas, 1967, age 58.

Key Ideas

Deliberative Legislative Supremacy

Kendall’s central political-theoretical claim: the American constitutional order is not fundamentally Lockean (rights-individualist) but legislative-majoritarian. Congress, deliberating in pursuit of the public good, is the constitutional center. The Bill of Rights is constraint, not foundation. The judiciary should defer.

This view has two New Right afterlives:

  1. The Bradford/paleoconservative line. Kendall trained M.E. Bradford at Dallas; Bradford’s anti-Lincoln, anti-Declarationist constitutional reading is structurally Kendallian. See M.E. Bradford; Beyond Originalism (Kersch).
  2. The contemporary anti-judicial-supremacy strain. Vermeule’s Common Good Constitutionalism and the broader postliberal preference for legislative or executive rather than judicial action proceed from a Kendallian premise (though Vermeule does not directly cite him).

Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition (1970)

Co-authored with George W. Carey (Kendall’s student), published posthumously. Argues that the American tradition is a Christian republican tradition founded in the Mayflower Compact, not a liberal tradition founded in the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration’s “all men are created equal” is read as a legal (not metaphysical-egalitarian) claim about colonial separation from Britain.

This is the paleoconservative reading of the founding the Jaffa / Claremont reading was constructed against. The wiki’s Bradford-Jaffa axis (see Beyond Originalism) has Kendall as Bradford’s intellectual godfather.

Anti-Liberalism via Rousseau

Kendall taught a populist-majoritarian reading of Rousseau against Locke that rejected liberal-individualist political theory. His students at Yale and Dallas absorbed this; it is one of the underdiagnosed sources of populist anti-liberalism in postwar American conservatism.

Iberian Connection

Per Iberian Vistas: Kendall lived in Franco’s Spain in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Bozell joined him there. Both men’s anti-fusionist Catholic-traditionalist trajectories were materially shaped by their Iberian residence; both effectively rejected Buckley/Meyer fusionism in favor of substantively Catholic political theory after their Spanish period. Kendall is a primary case for the wiki’s Iberian-admiration thread as a formative (not merely rhetorical) influence on postwar conservatism.

What the Wiki Inherits

  • Bozell’s Triumph (1966–1976) is in significant part a Kendallian project: Catholic populist majoritarianism as the right alternative to fusionism.
  • The University of Dallas as a paleoconservative redoubt (Bradford et al.) is Kendall’s institutional legacy.
  • Patrick Deneen’s anti-Lockean reading of American founding documents (in Why Liberalism Failed and Regime Change) is structurally Kendallian, transmitted via Wilson Carey McWilliams (Deneen’s mentor at Rutgers; trained in part by Kendall’s intellectual generation) and via Notre Dame Catholic political theory.
  • The contemporary postliberal preference for legislative/executive over judicial action has a Kendallian root.

Cross-References

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