Fred Siegel: William F. Buckley’s Unmaking of a Mayor
[Fred Siegel is a contributing editor of City Journal and a professor of history at the Cooper Union for Science and Art.]
William F. Buckley’s 1965 New York mayoral campaign is perhaps best remembered for a memorable quip: asked what he would do if he won, the Conservative Party candidate responded with a bemused smile, “Demand a recount.” Buckley, a man of Tory manners and radical principles, ran as an intellectual provocateur. But his campaign against Democrat Abe Beame and the eventual winner, then-Republican John Lindsay, was far more than an historical footnote. The issues it raised and the constituencies it energized made it a harbinger of the ensuing era of Republican presidential dominance.
Buckley’s sparkling account of the campaign, The Unmaking of a Mayor, published in 1966, is a meld of journalism, literature, and political essay, as well as a powerful critique of 1960s Great Society liberalism. Early on he sets the scene: “You can’t walk from one end of New York to the other without a good chance of losing your wallet, your maidenhead, or your life; or without being told that white people are bigoted, that Negroes are shiftless, that free enterprise is the enemy of the working class, that Norman Thomas has betrayed socialism, and that the only thing that will save New York is for the whole United States to become like New York.”
The book provided a highbrow case for linking the simultaneous growths of crime and welfare, which were beginning to make parts of the city nearly uninhabitable. But its personal reflections were at least as interesting. Buckley entered the campaign an elitist critic of the welfare state and dubious about democracy. He left it having discovered that his arguments were most cordially received among working-class Catholic voters—the forebears of the Reagan Democrats.
Albert Jay Nock—the former World War I–era philo-Bolshevik bohemian-turned-Nietzschean anarcho-elitist and anti-Semite—was a friend of Buckley’s father. Nock’s 1943 book Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, an elegant (and racist) denunciation of modern man, was an enormous influence on the young William, who first read it in high school. Nock wrote, in an argument that the New Left would later pick up, that only the “saving remnant,” an elite not polluted by mass society, could save Western culture from total collapse. There were some at Buckley’s magazine, National Review, who took a more populist view of democracy. But in 1962, explains Buckley biographer John Judis, the future mayoral candidate decided to follow up his own criticism of the “liberals’ fetishistic commitment to democracy,” as evidenced by their support for black voting rights, by writing a book tentatively titled The Revolt Against the Masses. The title was borrowed from Ortega y Gasset’s 1930 book of the same name, and the book was to be a blast against the commercialization of culture that went hand in hand, as Nock and Buckley saw it, with the statism of Stalinism, fascism, and the New Deal. The famously prolific Buckley never wrote the book, however, because during the 1965 campaign there was a revolt against the masses—but much to his surprise, it was directed by upper-middle-class liberal reformers against working-class Democrats, whose fears about crime and the impact of welfare were dismissed as merely racist....
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William F. Buckley’s 1965 New York mayoral campaign is perhaps best remembered for a memorable quip: asked what he would do if he won, the Conservative Party candidate responded with a bemused smile, “Demand a recount.” Buckley, a man of Tory manners and radical principles, ran as an intellectual provocateur. But his campaign against Democrat Abe Beame and the eventual winner, then-Republican John Lindsay, was far more than an historical footnote. The issues it raised and the constituencies it energized made it a harbinger of the ensuing era of Republican presidential dominance.
Buckley’s sparkling account of the campaign, The Unmaking of a Mayor, published in 1966, is a meld of journalism, literature, and political essay, as well as a powerful critique of 1960s Great Society liberalism. Early on he sets the scene: “You can’t walk from one end of New York to the other without a good chance of losing your wallet, your maidenhead, or your life; or without being told that white people are bigoted, that Negroes are shiftless, that free enterprise is the enemy of the working class, that Norman Thomas has betrayed socialism, and that the only thing that will save New York is for the whole United States to become like New York.”
The book provided a highbrow case for linking the simultaneous growths of crime and welfare, which were beginning to make parts of the city nearly uninhabitable. But its personal reflections were at least as interesting. Buckley entered the campaign an elitist critic of the welfare state and dubious about democracy. He left it having discovered that his arguments were most cordially received among working-class Catholic voters—the forebears of the Reagan Democrats.
Albert Jay Nock—the former World War I–era philo-Bolshevik bohemian-turned-Nietzschean anarcho-elitist and anti-Semite—was a friend of Buckley’s father. Nock’s 1943 book Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, an elegant (and racist) denunciation of modern man, was an enormous influence on the young William, who first read it in high school. Nock wrote, in an argument that the New Left would later pick up, that only the “saving remnant,” an elite not polluted by mass society, could save Western culture from total collapse. There were some at Buckley’s magazine, National Review, who took a more populist view of democracy. But in 1962, explains Buckley biographer John Judis, the future mayoral candidate decided to follow up his own criticism of the “liberals’ fetishistic commitment to democracy,” as evidenced by their support for black voting rights, by writing a book tentatively titled The Revolt Against the Masses. The title was borrowed from Ortega y Gasset’s 1930 book of the same name, and the book was to be a blast against the commercialization of culture that went hand in hand, as Nock and Buckley saw it, with the statism of Stalinism, fascism, and the New Deal. The famously prolific Buckley never wrote the book, however, because during the 1965 campaign there was a revolt against the masses—but much to his surprise, it was directed by upper-middle-class liberal reformers against working-class Democrats, whose fears about crime and the impact of welfare were dismissed as merely racist....