I’ve just finished reading Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America, a forthcoming biography of National Review founder William F. Buckley by Sam Tanenhaus. It is a magnificent, absorbing work about a man known as the father of postwar American conservatism, and one that will lead to a lot of debate when it is published early next month.

That debate will be good, as there is much to consider when thinking about a figure like Buckley today. The book itself is over 1,000 pages, and it’s best to break it down into parts. Naturally, Buckley was disliked by the left, and he was right about the nature of communism. Yet Buckley also has critics on the right. Many consider that over time Buckley kicked out too many real conservatives from of the movement he helped to found—conservatives like Pat Buchanan, who turned out to be right about many issues, such as immigration. Many of today’s conservative’s also suggest that Buckley’s errors led to the sad state of affairs at today’s National Review, a magazine that has become practically irrelevant.

For the purposes of this first part of the review, however, I’d like to focus on the things Buckley got right. Namely, communism and the totalitarian nature of the American left. The most important paragraph in Buckley appears in a section that takes place in the early 1960s. Buckley was debating Arthur Schlesinger Jr., an advisor to President Kennedy. Schlesinger thought that whenever dictatorships arose in the modern era it was “because democratic government is too weak, not because it is too strong.” The best way to prevent totalitarianism was for the government to create economic prosperity and social equality, providing “a minimum national standard to save individuals from intolerable handicaps.” Tanenhaus explains Buckley’s reaction:

This might sound good, Buckley countered, but in reality, Schlesinger and others were concealing their true intentions, their “intellectual desire to redirect society. Even if every citizen had a million dollars, John Kenneth Galbraith would still find a need for government action….There are in motion today forces that want to drain our power into a reservoir. I hope someday Mr. Schlesinger will turn in horror on the system he has abetted.”