Before Buckley, “there were a bunch of different ideas and different factions that were critics of liberalism, which was the dominant philosophy, a belief that government could solve problems,” said Goodman, whose previous documentary subjects include the Scottsboro Boys and the Oklahoma City bombing. “But there was never a figure that could galvanize these disparate factions into one movement.”
Not until Buckley, anyway.
“Not only did he have the charisma, talent, and energy to do it,” Goodman said, “he had the vision and he had the intellectual chops to be able to create something coherent out of this and then to excite people and to bring them into one tent.”
History doesn’t smile upon Buckley’s more extreme views. In a 1957 National Review editorial titled “Why the South Must Prevail,” he essentially argued in support of racial segregation, positing that Southern Black Americans had not earned the right to vote. (He was also known to argue that many white people hadn’t earned that right, either.) His views on race softened over the years, at least in public, but in 1965, eight years after that National Review essay, he was praising the patience of those police officers in Selma at a New York policemen’s communion breakfast. (Buckley, who was widely criticized for the remarks, claimed they had been misrepresented in news reports.) As is explained in the film, Buckley was a firm believer in the idea of a ruling “remnant,” a class of people like himself who he believed were naturally inclined to lead the less refined masses.
“Go back and look at Buckley’s civil rights record,” Gage said. “If you are a believer in human equality and in racial justice, it’s not a good record.”
Possessed of twinkling eyes, quick wit, and a wide, crooked smile, Buckley became the erudite symbol of his cause, especially once he launched his PBS debate series, “Firing Line,” in 1966. “He rendered palatable a set of authoritarian ideas that cultured people didn’t want to see themselves entertaining,” the historian and author Rick Perlstein, who appears in the film and has chronicled the conservative movement in books including “Before the Storm” and “Nixonland,” said in a video interview.
Some of the best recent works on Buckley have focused on his famous public debates. “The Fire Is Upon Us” (2019), by Nicholas Buccola (who also appears in the film), looks at Buckley’s 1965 debate with James Baldwin at the Cambridge Union Society in England, which is featured in “The Incomparable Mr. Buckley.” The topic: “The American Dream Is at the Expense of the American Negro.” Baldwin won the vote in a landslide, though Buckley would maintain that he won the debate. Then there is “Best of Enemies: Buckley vs. Vidal,” a 2015 documentary about the televised debates between Buckley and Gore Vidal, who were chosen by ABC to discuss their respective parties’ 1968 political conventions.
