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What William Buckley and Charlie Kirk had in common

As George Will noted, both made ‘politics fun’ (to be sure, even while disparaging equal rights).

William Buckley, we were told in a Washington Post column last week by the venerable George Will, “would have recognized the 31-year-old [Charlie] Kirk as a kindred spirit.” Writing in the wake of Kirk’s horrific assassination, Will noted that Buckley, “like Kirk, had a talent for making politics fun.”

Working within the iron cage of the 750-word Post opinion column, however, Will lacked the space to document many of the myriad similarities between Buckley (particularly the young Buckley, to whom Will devoted most of his consideration) and Kirk. Allow me, then, to add some specifics to Will’s glowing generalities.

Among the deeply held beliefs that Kirk and the young Buckley shared was a staunch opposition to the federal government’s striking down the Southern laws that mandated race-based segregation. In 1957, when Buckley was the same age as Kirk was when he was cruelly struck down, he authored an editorial in his magazine, National Review, entitled “Why the South Must Prevail.” In the wake of the 1956 Montgomery bus boycott, in which Blacks won the right to sit where they wished on public buses rather than in the last few rows, and at a time when the leader of that boycott, Martin Luther King Jr., had called for legislation enabling Blacks to win the right to vote in Southern states, Buckley wrote:

The central question that emerges—and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalogue of the rights of American citizens, born Equal—is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race … The question, as far as the White community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage.

As Buckley saw it, “the claims of civilization,” collectively personified by the white South, did indeed trump those of universal access to the ballot. For which reasons, Buckley would oppose both the 1964 Civil Rights Act, mandating an end to racial discrimination in public institutions and employment, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, mandating an end to the Southern states’ effectively prohibiting Black voting.

Buckley doubled down on these views many times in the years following. In 1961, for instance, he answered a question posed in a 1961 Saturday Review symposium—“Desegregation: Will It Work?”—with an all-caps “NO,” going on to disparage King’s call for an end to Jim Crow by terming King “more sensitive, and so more bitter, than the average Southern Negro, and hence unqualified as a litmus of the Southern Negro’s discontent.” With the passage of time, however, Buckley eventually reconciled himself to desegregation.

During the past couple of years, Kirk began sounding remarkably like the Buckley of the 1950s and ’60s. In a December 2023 speech to the annual conference of Turning Point, the organization that Kirk founded and led, he said, “We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s,” according to a story published in Wired (whose particulars, when Wired ran the text by him, Kirk confirmed). Kirk went on to term Martin Luther King “awful. He’s not a good person.”

The 1964 Civil Rights Act, of course, banned racial discrimination in public facilities and hiring; it did not institute affirmative action policies. King himself, as he made clear many times, particularly by his support for the 1966 “Freedom Budget,” called for the extension of universal, as explicitly counterposed to race-specific, social and economic rights. Given those well-documented historical facts, it’s clear that Kirk’s sweeping condemnation of King specifically and equal rights generally really does extend to the law banning racial discrimination in facilities like restaurants.

In that better world where we can still imagine Kirk dining with his good friend JD Vance on a cold winter’s evening, then, we can call up the happy image of their supping, free from the dictates of an intrusive federal government and its bureaucratic mandates, in a congenially whites-only restaurant, and their graciously braving the snow to venture out of doors to bring food to Vance’s shivering wife and children—all warmed, despite the weather, by the glow of good fellowship and civil discourse.

Critics on the left might quibble with the actual doctrines that Buckley and Kirk so articulately advanced, and their real-world consequences. But that would require ignoring the palpable joie de vivre they brought to their bold endeavors, to their capacity, as Will put it, for “making politics fun.”

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

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