America's original right-wing influencer

In the age of Steve Bannon and Bronze Age Pervert—the pseudonymous author acclaimed by young Trumpists—a biography of William F Buckley Jr seems almost quaint.

- JENNIFER BURNS

Since his death in 2008, the aristocratic founder of the flagship conservative magazine National Review has been wreathed in nostalgia.

Especially as the Trump era dawned, there was a sense that somehow Buckley would have stopped it, even as National Review's iconic 2016 "Against Trump" issue proved no match for the MAGA insurgency. At a moment without gatekeepers or even gates, it was said, Buckley showed how much we had lost: It was he who had kept out the crazies, the conspiracy theorists, the antisemites; it was he who had defined, even created, the respectable right.

Sam Tanenhaus's immersive authorized biography partakes of this nostalgia, even as his portrait of Buckley dispels it. The Buckley that emerges from his exhaustive, 1,000-page portrait is not so much a stranger to our times as a precursor to them. After all, Buckley made his name with God and Man at Yale, his slashing 1951 attack on his alma mater as a hotbed of leftism, complete with the suggestion that alumni withhold donations as a means of pressuring the university to remedy the issue.