The Open Mind explores the world of ideas across politics, media, science, technology, and the arts. The American Prospect is republishing this excerpt.
Alexander Heffner: Take us inside the worldview of these two men on that night.
Nicholas Buccola: Baldwin is among the most famous writers in the world. He had written in every genre: fiction, nonfiction, journalistic pieces. Baldwin was interested in really fundamental questions of the human soul. His goal was to figure out what it means to be a free and fulfilled human being and what are the obstacles to that freedom and fulfillment. So a lot of Baldwin’s writing had addressed the sort of issues that were at the center of the civil rights revolution.
He didn’t like to be identified as an activist necessarily because he was really primarily interested in being what he called a witness, trying to write it all down and explain what was happening from his perspective, inside of people’s minds and inside of their souls really. By the time they appear in ’65, Baldwin has written Go Tell It On the Mountain, this autobiographical novel about growing up in Harlem, [and] Giovanni’s Room, which is another really important piece of Baldwin’s fiction. Baldwin played this role of describing from the inside, trying to give people a sense of what the world looks like through the eyes of others, especially those at the margins of society. Baldwin is the leading literary voice of this freedom struggle.
Buckley, on the other hand, was not quite internationally known yet, but he was definitely the second most prominent conservative in the United States, second only to Barry Goldwater who just lost the 1964 presidential election. The thing they had in common was that they were both masters at using the power of language to change the world. So Buckley was somebody who you knew, through his public speaking, through his thrice weekly newspaper column and, of course, his magazine, National Review.
He had an outsized role in shaping what we now call the conservative movement, forming a coalition of disparate groups on the right. One of the central stories of the book is how Buckley thought about race and civil rights and how that has shaped the conservative movement, as we know it today.
Heffner: When Baldwin says he wants to be a witness and not a practitioner of civil rights, did he find Buckley’s views at that point to be dehumanizing, to be eroding civil society?
Buccola: Baldwin viewed Buckley as somebody who was helping weave the web of white supremacy in American political culture. Buckley says 10 years after he founded National Review, that his goal for the magazine on race matters was to be extremely articulate, non-racist but not reflexively egalitarian. What that amounted to for Buckley was a very sophisticated philosophy of resistance to black liberation.
They were against Brown v. Board of Education. They were against any federal intervention to protect the civil rights of African Americans. So Buckley’s in this position of resistance, and although it does not contain racial animus, it definitely contains a kind of fundamental commitment to the idea that some lives matter more than others. And that was always racialized for Buckley.
Looking at Buckley through the lens that Baldwin provides us is extraordinarily powerful because Baldwin was somebody who had a remarkable amount of empathy. When Baldwin is reflecting on the politics of white supremacy in the U.S., he is struck by the fact there’s a tendency to think when we see somebody who has racist views, that they are operating from a place of evil. But Baldwin is always there to say that in many cases it’s not evil, but fear.
When he’s thinking about white supremacy, what interests Baldwin is that a lot of folks in the South and elsewhere who are fundamentally animated by this idea of white supremacy, what they’re really animated by a desire to feel a sense of status, to feel a sense of superiority to others, to define themselves against something else. When we see Jim Clark brandishing his cattle prod and using it against human beings, what’s happening to those victims is ghastly. But in some ways what’s happening to Clark is much, much worse.
What Baldwin means by that is that the moral life of somebody like Jim Clark has been destroyed by the plague called color. Clark’s sense of self, his sense of value is bound up in this delusion of white supremacy.
When Baldwin sees somebody like Buckley, he sees somebody who knows what he’s doing. He knows better than somebody like Jim Clark. He is weaving these webs of delusion and he’s doing it not because he really cares about the interests of Jim Clark, he’s doing it to advance an agenda that has nothing to do with the interests of people like Jim Clark.
Heffner: How does Buckley evolve going forward?
Buccola: When I started working on this book, I bought into the popular narrative about Buckley that the story of Buckley and race is a story of redemption by the end of his life, he’s sort of apologetic. It’s actually a much more complicated story than that. The evolution of Buckley on race is really, really important for us to think about in terms of making sense of our own politics because Buckley goes from that position of resistance and intransigence that I talked about to a kind of more nuanced racial politics.
Just before the ’64 election Buckley commissions a special section of National Review on race in the campaign. During the campaign, of course, Goldwater had voted against the Civil Rights Act of ’64. There’s accusations of racism in the Goldwater campaign. But what’s interesting about this special issue that Buckley commissions is that there’s almost no mention of rights issues. There’s almost no mention of issues in the South. There’s almost no mention of Goldwater.
He knows by that point that Goldwater is going to lose, but he knows that Goldwater has won the Deep South, right? So at that point, the solidly Democratic South is now what they’re calling Goldwater country.
And so what Buckley does in this special issue of National Review is he has an essay about white backlash, right? He wants to justify the idea that white people are feeling a sense of resentment about black liberation and they should be. So you use that as a framing article. And then the two articles that follow are about busing in New York and fair housing law in California, right? For Buckley, these are the two issues that where the action is in terms of racial politics, whites who think of themselves as moderate or even liberal, but they feel a sense of racial resentment. They don’t want the civil rights movement to go too far into their backyard.
That’s something that we see coming down to us today. The politics of racial resentment is fueling our moment and right now, and in many ways, Buckley is somebody who popularized that politics in his own campaign for mayor of New York [in 1965]. He had no chance of winning. It was very serious ideologically because one of the great ironies is one of the most elitist figures in American political history, William F. Buckley, runs as a populist.
