When Donald Trump announced he was pulling the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, he fulfilled what is presumably the dream of George F. Will, one of America’s pre-eminent climate change deniers. Yet Will is not fond of Trump. In fact Will, America’s Tory manqué, is manifestly unhappy about the ascension of Donald Trump to the White House, where he is rapidly rubbishing everything that the modern conservative movement has stood for in recent decades. At least this is what Will would have you believe in his latest column in the Washington Post, entitled ‘Conservatism needs another Buckley’. Will means William F. Buckley, Jr., the man whom Evelyn Waugh regarded with lofty disdain, but has come to represent everything good and pure and noble about American conservatism – at least in the eyes of Will and a gaggle of Never Trumpers who want to bring back the good old days.
They are being seconded in their efforts by liberal columnists such as E. J. Dionne, who also writes for the Post. Dionne detects the rise of ‘neo-moderates’ such as David Frum, Michael Gerson and Jennifer Rubin, all of whom have been denouncing Trump. Many of their denunciations can be quite pointed. But the question always has to be: who are they to point fingers? Frum, for example, wrote a book together with Richard Perle that enunciated the utopian theme of An End To Evil, as their title had it. But above all, in their fitful attempts to expel Trump from the conservative conventicle, they elide the inconvenient truth that Trump does not represent an aberration. He is the culmination of conservative trends.
According to Will, however, the conservatism represented by Buckley not only brought ‘elegance to its advocacy’, but also altered ‘the nation’s trajectory while having a grand time’. No longer. Now, we are told, ‘conservatism is soiled by scowling primitives who irritable gestures lack mental ingredients’. It is Whittaker Chambers, the man who exposed Alger Hiss as a Soviet agent in 1948, who is the serpent in the conservative Eden. He ‘injected conservatism with a sour, whiney, complaining, crybaby populism’. Indeed, Chambers created the ‘screechy and dominant tone of the loutish faux conservatism that today is erasing Buckley’s legacy of infectious cheerfulness and unapologetic embrace of high culture’. Matthew Arnold, where are you?
The fact is that Buckley was himself something of a rogue male. In the early 1950s he made his name by defending Joseph McCarthy. Chambers, the supposed populist, warned him against it, as anyone who has read Sam Tanenhaus’ sterling biography would know. Chambers was suspicious of the recesses of the right. Buckley, for the most part, was not. He maintained a lifelong ardor for McCarthy. In 1997, writing in First Things, Buckley reviewed Tanenhaus’ biography. He declared, ‘I am obliged to record that Tanenhaus’ dislike and distrust of Senator McCarthy take him to what I deem unnecessary lengths’. Really? Who, by the way, obliged Buckley to record this, or, to put it another way, under what obligation did he labour? All his life Buckley played the anti-anti McCarthy card – the forerunner of the conservative culture war against traitorous liberal elites.
What Will and his gaggle of Never Trumpers want, however, is a nosegay in front of their doctrines – a prettifying effect. Will quotes from a new biography of Buckley by Alvin Felsenberg: ‘His true ideal was governance by a new conservative elite in which he played a prominent role’. And for which, Will adds, ‘he would play the harpsichord’. At bottom the objection to Trump may be less substantive than aesthetic.
By contrast, Dennis Prager, a popular and necessarily voluble radio talk show host in California who also writes a column for National Review, has recently scandalised his brethren by pointing out that Trump has, in fact, pursued many conservatives causes, or at least catered to them. According to Prager, had a Never Trump conservative been told in 2015 that a Republican would win the election and bomb Syria, appoint a conservative cabinet, ‘begin undoing hysteria-based, economy-choking EPA regulations; label the Iranian regime ‘evil’ in front of 50 Muslim heads of state’ that conservative would have been ‘jumping for joy’. So far, however, it isn’t happening.
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