Can the man who paved the way for Trump heal divisions in the US?

From left, US Senator Barry Goldwater (1909 - 1998), US President Ronald Reagan (1911 - 2004), and writer and TV host William F Buckley Jr (1925 - 2008) in1987. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

For at least the past 10 years, there has been a steady stream of articles and surveys that have concluded that the world is more divided than ever: over the rise of China and ethno-nationalism, Russia-Ukraine, Brexit, gender ideology, culture wars, the revival of racial conflicts, free speech, religion versus secularism, to name just a few issues. The re-election – sometimes, it feels, the very existence – of Donald Trump is also usually on the list.

So it may be a surprise to hear that a man who has recently been described as “the conservative intellectual who laid the ground for Trump” or who “paved the way for Trump” could provide a model for how to bridge those divides. Not necessarily for how to heal them; but how to keep the conversation going.

William F Buckley Jr is considered by many to have been the architect of the modern conservative movement in the US, and an intellectual flagbearer whose influence helped it completely take over the Republican Party (which for a long time had also been the party of northern liberals). In 1955, he founded the influential National Review magazine, and later backed both Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan as Republican presidential candidates.

From 1966-1999, he presented Firing Line, a weekly television show that set a very high bar for depth of debate and width of discussion. He was so famous that his distinctively patrician tones were impersonated by both Robin Williams – in the 1992 Disney film Aladdin – and by the talk show host Johnny Carson.

Mr Buckley wrote more than 50 books and was an aesthete with high-brow tastes. The connection with Mr Trump may not be immediately obvious; although Mr Trump knew all about him. When Senator Ted Cruz tried to claim that Mr Trump was not a true conservative in a 2016 primary debate, saying that “not a lot of conservatives come out of Manhattan”, Mr Trump replied: “Conservatives actually do come out of Manhattan. Including William F Buckley.”

The similarities between the two are currently being examined partly because of a new biography, Buckley: The Life and Revolution that Changed America by Sam Tanenhaus, which has just come out. Two salient points are that both understood the power of mass media, and that both were suspicious of elites and wanted to overturn a liberal establishment that each saw as not consisting just of a few big corporations but as having infiltrated state institutions and a vast number of professions at nearly every level. In an important sense, Mr Buckley and Mr Trump can both be seen as genuine revolutionaries.

By this point, some readers may be doubting that Mr Buckley has any lessons to offer about uniting people. But he does. Take this line from an interview with Tanenhaus, who was also his biographer: “Yet the current era feels a world away in other respects. For one, Buckley’s politics rarely affected his many friendships. ‘His best friends were liberals,’ Tanenhaus said. He greatly admired Jesse Jackson. It was not strange for Eldridge Cleaver, the black nationalist, and Timothy Leary, the psychonaut, to stop by his house. ‘If he became your friend, and then you told him you joined the Communist party, he would say: That is the worst thing you can do, I’m shocked you would do it, but you’re still coming over for dinner tomorrow, right? It’s just a different world view, and we don’t get it because we take ourselves more seriously than he did.”

Buckley and Trump can both be seen as genuine revolutionaries

That’s one way of putting it. I think there’s more. It may have been to do with Mr Buckley’s devout Roman Catholicism – and hence the possibility of redemption – or the belief, common to all Abrahamic faiths, that we are all part of God’s creation, but he didn’t see people solely as the sum of their beliefs. It’s there on Firing Line (now available on YouTube), where Mr Buckley had many guests who he clearly believed not only were wrong but had morally flawed views. But he engaged them in highly informed debate, and never treated them as irredeemably evil.

Nowadays many appear to have accepted that certain beliefs absolutely define who people are. One columnist wrote last week that “Trump and Brexit” were “two causes so clearly defined between left and right that few of those from one camp were pre-existing friends with the other”. As a lifelong Eurosceptic with a huge number of pro-EU friends in the UK, I take exception to that. But I understand the position.

The dangers of such an attitude are outlined in a new book Against Identity by the Australian philosopher Alexander Douglas. “People respond to criticisms of their views as though their very identity is being attacked,” as a review of the book this week put it. “Here we have the basis for division and intergroup conflict,” Mr Douglas wrote.

I remember seeing the consequences of identity being all among my family’s Northern Irish friends at Al Kharj dairy farm in Saudi Arabia in the 1980s. The Catholic nationalist farm manager my family used to spend happy weekends with would socialise with the Protestant unionist vet in that setting. But “back home I wouldn’t acknowledge him if I crossed him in the street,” said our friend.

Similarly, I saw politics in Malaysia become so rancorous, so personal, and so all-identifying during the prime ministership of Najib Razak (2009-2018) that when a friend went to work for him, he was viciously attacked by close associates who supported the then opposition. Believing in the policies of a moderate reformist leader was enough to sunder bonds that went back decades.

Mr Buckley offered another way. On his television shows, he engaged persistently but politely, and with a weight of research that paid his guests the evident compliment of taking them seriously, even if he thought them dangerously misguided. And in his personal life: you advance something I think is terribly wrong, but we can remain friends and – of course! – we should still break bread together. Because we are more than our views, and our identities and common humanity transcend them.

Isn’t that something we could do with a lot more of? In a sea of uncertainty and bad news, I didn’t expect to find my spirits lifted by the man “who paved the way for Trump”. But I did. Thank you, Bill Buckley Jr – and may many more follow your example.