His mayoral campaign loss was a win for conservative politics.
If anyone ever wrote a whole book about his election as mayor of a city, the precedent has escaped this reviewer’s attention. A fortiori, he knows of no one who ever devoted 335 pages to chronicling for posterity, as William F. Buckley, Jr. has done, the campaign in which he ran for mayor and lost. Buckley not only lost; he came in third.
This comment is in no way intended to deplore Buckley’s extraordinary venture into politics as a candidate in the 1965 mayoralty election in New York City, or to disparage the book he has written about it. There are many things about Buckley which are without precedent; this has been known to friends and foes ever since he emerged with honors from college in 1950 and proceeded to write that devastating critique of liberal establishmentarianism in the academic world, God And Man At Yale—a work which did not devastate Yale University, but did devastate any illusion that the prevailing orthodoxy which so repelled the student Buckley in the academic milieu would go without an articulate, brave, and heavily armored challenger in the years ahead. And friends and foes do all concede that among the rare concatenation of personal qualities which have made Buckley a natural leader—if not the leader—of the young, intellectual conservatives of this country, a preference for the well-trod, easy path is not among them.
The Unmaking of a Mayor is only incidentally an autobiographical record of an episode in a man’s career. More broadly, it is a highly perceptive diagnosis of a moral and intellectual malaise that afflicts party politics and the electoral process today, most acutely in the cities. New York City is politically eccentric, no doubt; but even so, this book, more incisively as well as more entertainingly than any other, helps one to break away from the shadowland of demagogy in which the subjects of urban poverty and blight and discomfort are now bogged down.
Handsome and ambitious John Lindsay, nominally a Republican, took a cold-fish look at New York politics and saw that our largest city had been ministered to under liberal auspices for so many years that its typical urban mass-man is a docile, benumbed creature who votes as part of one of several glutinous blocs the professional politicians have learned to seduce. The Democrats, he concluded, have the formula. He decided to infringe their patent. So we had the spectacle of the Republican Party’s candidate, Lindsay, standing to the left of the Democrat, Abraham Beame.
During the long liberal binge, the city had degenerated and was a scandal to the nation. Its bonds had lost prime rating. East Side, West Side, all around the town, New Yorkers walked in fear. Riverside Drive after dark was a lethal obstacle course, Central Park a no-man’s land. Social workers and psychiatrists swarmed like locusts through its swollen welfare agencies, confused and confusing. The marriage of politics and nonsense was consummated in New York City long ago.
There is a Liberal Party in New York, its members more radical than mainstream Democrats. Its historic role, as a “swing force,” has been to nudge the Democrats to the left. To it, Lindsay made himself so palatable that it endorsed him for mayor. One prayed that this could happen only in New York; for if mock Republicans can lead their party into unholy alliances with left-wing auxiliaries of the Democrats, the two-party system in this country will travel down the road of hypocrisy to suicide.
To rescue the election from complete absurdity, Buckley entered the race under the banner of the Conservative Party. He received 340,000 votes, opened some eyes, and planted some seeds—which may have had something to do with the fact that in the November 1966 elections the Conservative Party surpassed the Liberal Party in New York state, thereby gaining the coveted third line on future ballots, and the city’s civilian-dominated police review board, opposed by Buckley but supported by Lindsay, was abolished by vote of the people. In the long run, Buckley’s personal sacrifice in going into the 1965 race should be seen as an important contribution to the preservation of Republican principles and the health of the two-party system.
As a typical Buckleyan paradox, the author writes: “I had working for me, I repeat, an invaluable advantage, namely that I did not expect to win the election and so could afford to violate the taboos.” He must have enjoyed watching his two opponents mincing their way through a labyrinth of inhibitions. Both, he tells us,
In the forensic art, Buckley has few peers; but logical argument and stumping for votes in a city like New York are, he discovered, not the same process. A Lindsay could display his trim frame and profile at Coney Island and in the streets. Each voter is his bosom pal as he asks, “What do you want the Mayor to do for you?” But a Buckley cannot do this, his “ungovernable instinct being to fasten on a weakness in an opponent’s reasoning and dive in . . . on the (Platonic?) assumption that voters will be influenced by the residual condition of the argument.”
A sentence follows which may explain why so many people despair of the efficacy of political debate before a mentally undisciplined audience: “A good debater is not necessarily an effective vote-getter: you can find a hole in your opponent’s argument through which you can drive a coach and four ringing jingle bells all the way, and thrill at the crystallization of a truth wrung out from a bloody dialogue—which, however, may warm only you and your muse, while the smiling paralogist has in the meantime made votes by the tens of thousands.”
Yet one senses that underlying Buckley’s intellectual rigor—which might sometimes be mistaken for hauteur—there is a genuine respect for the ordinary voter without which the whole democratic process would be farcical. The voter who stammers out his reasons in awkward slogans is not necessarily either superficial or venal; and Buckley’s insight on this point marks him as an observer who, in spite of the sport he makes of his fellowmen and the glee with which he throws his verbal harpoons, has a much subtler and surer capacity for human sympathy than the honey-tongued demagogue.
The New Yorker magazine quoted some women who were talking about Buckley: “A woman declares, ‘I think he’s very courageous.’ Another woman adds, ‘I like what he stands for.’ ‘Against welfare,’ says a fourth in a tall magenta hat, ‘and not making New York a haven for . . . well . . . ,’ She says no more.” Apropos of this alleged conversation, Buckley observes that
Buckley sees that people’s slogans, their clichés, “often sit, however uneasily, or self-consciously, at the top of a structure of values and discriminations which are not lightly to be dismissed, at least not more lightly . . . than the democratic system. . . . ‘Why are you a conservative?’ Someone once asked the late, self-effacing Richard Weaver, professor at the University of Chicago. He declined to answer; but, under relentless pressure, finally obliged: ‘Because conservatism is the paradigm of essences toward which the phenomenology of the world is in continuing approximation.’ Professor Weaver would have voted for me in New York, in 1965, along with the lady in the magenta hat: and, in an odd sort of way, very likely for the same reasons, differently grasped.”
The book includes the “position papers” Buckley prepared on welfare, education, narcotics, transportation, taxation, crime, housing, etc. For his fans, this part of the book is a primer of good sense on these ubiquitous topics. Fan or not, anyone concerned with the exigencies of city governments and the multiplying dilemmas of urban life will have a clearer perception of the issues after reading Buckley’s distillations. And if during the process the reader is not titillated by Buckley’s style, his shell is hard indeed.
