On September 16th, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and the National Review Institute marked the centennial of William F. Buckley Jr. with a debate on his legacy as a leading intellectual of the American Right.
At issue was a central question: should Buckley be remembered primarily as a conservative or a libertarian? And what does the answer mean for the fragile coalition of the Right today?
Moderator Charles C. W. Cooke, senior writer at National Review and the host of The Charles C. W. Cooke Podcast, opened the evening with a reflection on the September 10th assassination of conservative political activist Charlie Kirk. National Review senior writer and American Enterprise Institute Fellow Michael Brendan Dougherty led a moment of silence and a prayer for zeal and courage.
The Conservative Case
Dougherty argued that Buckley’s moral vision, from God and Man at Yale (published in 1951, just after graduating from Yale) through Nearer, My God (1998), consistently placed liberty within a hierarchy of higher ends. Libertarianism, Buckley warned, falters when it grows indifferent to “the loyalties of the community to perceived truths.”
He recalled Buckley’s willingness to endure criticism—from defending Joe McCarthy in his youth, to placing Francisco Franco in historical context. While Buckley worked with fusionists such as Frank Meyer and defended free markets, Dougherty emphasized that he never reduced politics to economics. “Buckley swallowed the libertarians into the movement,” Dougherty argued, “without surrendering a fundamentally conservative core.”
Speaking briefly to The Harvard Salient, Dougherty added:
“Even if he left us with [a] conservative movement that was far more permeated with libertarian ideas, he also left us speaking to the transcendent values that undergird American life… So for that, his legacy is fundamentally conservative.”
The Libertarian Case
Daniel McCarthy, Vice President of the Collegiate Network, Editor-in-Chief of Modern Age, and contributing editor at The American Conservative, countered that Buckley’s record reveals a persistent libertarian streak. From the “individualist” of God and Man at Yale, to the author of Happy Days Were Here Again: Reflections of a Libertarian Journalist (1993), to the editor who consistently championed free-market economics, Buckley often aligned with libertarian instincts even against the grain of his Catholic faith.
McCarthy pointed to Buckley’s cultural breadth—hosting Firing Line (1966-1999), contributing to Playboy Magazine in May, 1970—and his skepticism toward state economic management as evidence of a libertarian sensibility wrapped in a conservative style.
In comments to The Harvard Salient, McCarthy observed:
“If you take a Venn diagram of where conservatism and libertarianism overlap, you will always find Buckley right there in the middle. And when conservatism and libertarianism diverge, you’ll more often find Buckley with the libertarians.”
In sum, the debate considered Buckley as movement-maker and institution-builder. Buckley’s ends-driven moral framework, it seems, never mapped neatly onto a single label. If Dougherty pressed the primacy of the permanent things, McCarthy pressed the continuity of Buckley’s individualist economics. A century later, Buckley remains capacious enough to force the Right to define what exactly it wishes to conserve and how much liberty it is prepared to risk to do so.
The Intercollegiate Studies Institute is a grantor to The Harvard Salient.
WJBJr. Was a conservative. Full stop. His understanding of man’s fallen nature led him to a devotion to limited government, which in turn aligned him with many libertarian positions, but these alignments were an accident of his irrepressible conservatism. Buckley despised Ayn Rand precisely because her dogmatic libertarianism trumped his most cherished conservative values. Buckley was truly Tom Wolfe’s “a man in full.” Lord, I miss him.