Firing Line, William F. Buckley Jr., and the American Conservative Movement

Begun just two years after Barry Goldwater’s resounding defeat, amidst great public anxiety about extremist groups such as the John Birch Society, William F. Buckley’s Firing Line would stake a new claim for both “respectable” conservative broadcasting and “respectable” right-wing conservatism, at a time when conservative broadcasting was generally seen as “extremist” and the Republican Party had a moderate political orientation.

Drawing on Firing Line programs themselves (particularly episodes featuring conservative icons such as Reagan, Nixon, and Goldwater), as well as archival material from the Firing Line archives at Stanford and Buckley’s papers at Yale, my paper considers how the program—and its famous creator—can help us chart out new ways to think through the history of the American conservative movement.  I ended What’s Fair on the Air? by pointing to Richard Viguerie and Paul Weyrich as key conservative movement builders of the 1970s and 80s.  Viguerie and Weyrich were doing tactical work, building social movements (popular conservatism) on the ground.  Buckley, via his books, news columns, and especially his TV program, was asking how conservative theory could be translated into practice.  How could Frederick von Hayek’s theories be manifested as “trickle down economics”?  This was intellectual conservatism. 

Writing book after book in the six years following his death, Buckley’s followers have staked a claim that he created modern American conservatism—ignoring the popular conservatism narrative in favor of a story centered on policy wonks and free market economics.  Of course, both ways of telling the story are correct, but my research strikes out new territory by considering how we can think about the interconnections (or the meaning of the disconnect) between the two kinds of narratives, taking Firing Line as a vehicle conveying Buckley’s notion of what conservatism “really” was.