WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Michael Lucchese: William F. Buckley and the Politics of Normalcy

Episode Date: December 4, 2025

Michael Lucchese is a contributing editor to Providence, an associate editor of Law & Liberty, and the founder and CEO of Pipe Creek Consulting. His recent essay in Civitas Outlook commemorates William F. Buckley’s contributions to conservatism. He joined Luke Miller on WRFH to discuss.

This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Luke Miller, and with me today is Michael Lucasey, the founder of Pipe Creek Consulting, an associate editor of Law and Liberty Online magazine, and a contributing editor to Providence magazine. Recently, Mr. Lucchese wrote an article for the Civitas Institute about William F. Buckley and the Politics of Normacy. Mr. Luckezy, thank you for being here with us today. Luke, thanks so much for having me on. So at the beginning of your article, you posed the question of what William F. Buckley would think of the populist movement in today's Republican Party.

Before we get to that, for our younger listeners and for those who may not know a lot about him, can you explain who William F. Buckley is and why he matters to conservatism? Sure. So Buckley is one of the founding fathers of American conservatism, or at least modern American conservatist. He's best known for founding National Review, the most prominent magazine of conservative opinion. But he also was involved in a number of different things. He wrote a lot of books. He made frequent appearances on television. He had his own television program called Firing Line. And I really think that Buckley, in the 20th century, after World War II, became the face of the conservative movement. All of us who consider ourselves broadly speaking on the American right are in some ways.

heirs to William F. Buckley. There's a great line George Will has where he says, you know, without the founding of National Review, Barry Goldwater wouldn't have become nominated in 1964. And if Goldwater hadn't been nominated, Reagan wouldn't have been nominated. If Reagan wasn't nominated, the Berlin Wall wouldn't have fallen. And so there's a sort of logical way that you could argue that William F. Buckley won the Cold War. And his sort of defense of free markets, of social traditionalism and his commitment to anti-communism. These sort of form the core of the conservative belief system in the second half of the 20th century. That's great. So yeah, definitely a prominent figure in the conservative movement. You argue in your article that

his core principle was the defense of normalcy. What does that mean and what are those principles that make up normalcy? Yeah. So there's a couple different ways of thinking about this. So I mentioned, of course, these three sort of platforms, free markets, social traditionalism, and strong anti-communism. And I think really the way to understand those principles is as a defense of normalcy, right? Buckley was a defender of the norms of American life, both both socially and politically, over and against radical schemes to sort of replace them with something else, whether that's a soft form of liberalism or harder socialism or totalitarian communism. Right. And so in order to do that, though, he had to make the case that that conservatism as a governing philosophy would defend these norms the way that most Americans live their lives. And there's a sort of populist angle to that. There's a famous remark Buckley had where he said he'd rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than the 2000 people in the faculty of Harvard University. Right. And so there's this sort of trust the people thing going on. But but he also binds that up with a commitment to. American constitutionalism. He was fond of quoting Lincoln government for the people by the people

of the people, right? And so Buckley is defending, he's trying to conserve what is essentially normal American life over and against radical central planning. And I would include in that certain forms of right thing central planning. It's not just a left-wing problem for Buckley. So you mentioned like trust in the American people, appeals to the Constitution. It might not be exactly the same way, but that kind of definition of normalcy has been a bit of a buzzword, particularly in the last two election cycles. The promise of a return to normalcy was used in 2020 by President Biden and in 2024 by Donald Trump as in tax on the incumbent. And the challenger won both times. So even if it's not exactly the same definition of normalcy as Buckley might

have had, why do you think the normalcy appeal has been so effective to voters recently? Yeah. Well, I think it's clear that the American people are very upset. with their government. And I think they have every right to be. Whether we're talking about domestic policy or foreign policy, largely speaking, the government has not been doing a great job lately. And so I think you're right to say that both Biden and Trump made an appeal to normalcy as part of their campaigns. The problem, though, is that both Biden and Trump sort of tolerated the freakish fringes of their party, right? We saw this a lot with with Biden and certain elements of the Black Lives Matter movement, critical theory, his coronavirus

lockdown policies, right? That's not normal. And with Donald Trump, you're seeing something similar, right? Where people like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens are sort of pushing the fringe of the right further and further out, and they're sort of dragging certain parts of Trump's coalition with them. Now, I'm not trying to say that Donald Trump is a racist or an anti-Semite or anything like that. But certainly in his Republican Party, those sort of noxious elements have grown considerably. And so while both of these politicians, Biden and Trump make appeals to normalcy, I think they're both of them, as we saw with Biden, I think his coalition collapsed because he gave in too much to the freaks. And I think Donald Trump is in a similar danger zone right now.

as a reminder, this is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Luke Miller speaking with Michael Lucasey. So I did want to ask you about your article mentions the what you called the freaks on both sides, the radicals, that tend to eat the defense of normalcy argument, particularly in recent years. But first, I want to backtrack you talk in your article about Buckley's fight to keep far-right groups from sinking the conservative ship back in the past, particularly dealing with McCarthyism and the Birchers, those were the two that you mentioned. Could you explain for our modern listeners a little bit about that fight and its political results? Yeah. So I think it's important to remember when we're talking about that historical episode,

how deeply Soviet communists had infiltrated the federal government. They were all over the place. The Whitaker Chambers case where he accused Al Jus of espionage is one good example of this. But there were a whole bunch of communists in our government. They came in through the New Deal and they influenced American foreign and domestic policy. So there's this atmosphere of paranoia, which is actually, I think, rooted in something real and true. And people were genuinely concerned about communist infiltration, including Buckley. And so Buckley, when Joseph McCarthy comes out with his list of communist agents in the government, Buckley becomes one of his most ardent defenders. That was kind of a mistake, though, because McCarthy was not the right

messenger for that. Whitaker Chambers, of course, writes to Buckley and sort of says, you're going too far defending McCarthy. He's not a reliable figure, not a reliable character. You need to look for other champions. And eventually McCarthy's anti-communist crusade sort of blows up in his face. He becomes very disgraced. And I think that's a moment in Buckley's life where he comes to realize the problem of extremism. And it's not that extremism puts you in a disadvantaged position at Georgetown cocktail parties or in the Ivy League circles or anything like that. In fact, extremism is often a social asset there. Where extremism really disadvantaged that the early conservative movement was actually with ordinary American voters. They saw the sort of conspiratorial

thinking of Joe McCarthy, of the John Birch Society of other groups. And they said, these people aren't interested in promoting the common good. These people aren't interested in defending the norms of my life that I love. And so they sort of turn their back on it. And in the early 1960s, Buckley sort of flips this switch where he starts expelling. And it's not just McCarthyites or Birchers. It's also people like Ein Rand, the extremist libertarian ideologue. Right. And Buckley, says, these people are not conservative. They're not trying to conserve the American way of life. They're, the term that Russell Kirk, one of Buckley's good friends used, was their political fantastics. And what we really need is a dose of realism. We need, conservatives need to be the

party of reality. And as soon as Buckley sort of figured that out, the conservative movement started catching fire and growing in popularity. Now I want to ask you about how that relates to today, because it's obviously not hard to make the connection to far-right political figures today, like you mentioned, Nick Fuentes, Candice Owens, and their ilk who are rapidly growing in power and popularity. They're clearly attracting attention, particularly from young people. But in your article and in your statement, you imply that conservatives should reject those influences, even if it comes at a political cost. So why is it so important for today's conservatives to follow Buckley's examples and kind

of set boundaries for the movement? Well, first of all, I want to contest one of the, one of the elements of your question, I don't actually think it would come at a political cost if we were to expel the new freaks from the movement. I actually think that it would be a boon politically to signal to the American people that the conservatives, the conservative interest, we're the party of sanity, right? And so I'm not actually sure that distancing ourselves from cooks like Tucker or Candace would hurt us politically. I don't think very many voters go out and vote for Republicans because Tucker Carlson or Candace Owen voted or told them to, if you look at poll data when it comes to issues like U.S. support for Israel or Ukraine,

the American people are far more in favor of an active role in the world than either of those figures are. So I think what is attractive to some in the conservative movement about people like Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens is this sort of sense of energy that they have. right? They're energetic. They're standing up and fighting against the establishment or whatever. And I actually think what we need to do is cultivate that sense of energy, but not defending conspiracy theories or radical ideology, but rather defending the norms of American life. That's what we need to be conserving. And young people will sometimes ask this question, well, what have conservatives conserved after all? And I think we can point to some real conservative victories in the

the last 50 years or so, right, overturning Roe v. Wade, the expansion of originalism, banning of human cloning, certain economic reforms that have happened, right? But beyond that, I think that's a really important question to ask, what have conservatives conserved? And if you look at the last decade of the Republican Party and Republican governance, the answer, I think, candidly, is not very much. Inflation is at an all-time high. It's a very difficult. It's a very for Americans to buy homes, for instance. Grocery prices are skyrocketing. Our enemies are on the march abroad. I think that we have to accept the fact that the Republican Party has been failing at governance, right? And the answer to that, though, is not to sort of go into the

hinterlands of conspiracy theorism. Rather, the answer to that is to double down on the kinds of principles that William Buckley and the early representatives of the conservative movement stood for, right? Free market economics, constitutionalism, social traditionalism, and a strong American foreign policy. Just another reminder. This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Luke Miller speaking with Michael Lukasey. So as you mentioned the past 10 years in particular, and I think in response to what you just said, many defenders of the populist side of the MAGA movement would argue that non-populist Republican candidates have not won many elections over the last 25 years. So even though the more populist wing of the Republican Party isn't conserving nearly as much,

at least they're winning elections, at least that's the argument that a lot of them would make. Would you agree that some degree of populism is necessary to win major elections these days? And can conservatives keep it under control? Absolutely. I'm not opposed to all forms of populism. I think we have to be sort of careful about what we mean by that word. If we mean trusting the people, a fundamental belief in the capacity of Americans for self-government, then I'm a populist. But if we mean by populism, what it seems to mean in most places in D.C. today, i.e., a commitment to central planning for conservative ends or something like that, progressive means for conservative ends. I can't get on board with that. And I don't think the American people are on board with that either. You know, I think what you're seeing in certain parts of the new right today is this, especially when it comes to things like tariffs, welfare policy, lawfare.

I think that you're seeing sort of people who are ostensibly conservative adopting increasingly liberal positions on those questions. And I think that people like Buckley, Kirk, others would laugh at this situation, right? it's not actually very conservative to expand the welfare state, even if you have some sort of tortured argument that would be good for families, right? Conservatives, as Buckley noted in his opening publisher's statement for National Review, conservatives have always been against the New Deal, against the centralization of power, and in favor of free markets and free people. And so I think that's the winning formula, right? And I think Trump, when he has had, electoral success, which let's keep in mind has not been the case at all points in time in his

long political career. But Trump, when he's at his most successful, is sort of echoing those Reaganite themes, right? I think a lot of his criticisms of Biden's coronavirus policies are very much rooted in a sort of Reaganite populism. But that stands in contrast to, you know, tariff policies or handing out welfare in stimulus checks, right? That's that's, that's, that's That's not actually what the American people want. That's not what they're voting for. They're voting for people who will uphold the norms of American life, who will uphold the Constitution, uphold free markets, make the pursuit of prosperity actually possible.

And we're just not seeing that out of the leaders of the Republican Party today. So I actually think it's more or less high time for conservatives to lead a sort of populist insurgency against the Trumpified D.C. establishment. So you say that some of this defense of normalcy is harmed by what you quote as the terrible new digital era. It made me think of the expression that got thrown out a lot during the 2024 election saying the left can't meme. So the right has used online resources to help win elections in some ways. But it's also certainly true that the digital age has certainly given rise to conspiracy theorists, an echo chamber where these kind of ideas confesser.

So how does the right and the conservative movement use the digital era and protect itself from some of the harms it can cause? Yeah. So I'm pretty skeptical about the value of social media, generally speaking. As I think increasingly, young people are generally speaking. So I think there are a few problems with social media. First and foremost, as we saw with Twitter. new account origin feature, many of the kinds of meme accounts that have dominated right-wing

discourse of late aren't even American. From the founding on, American conservatives like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Buckley, Kirk, they've always warned about the dangers of foreign influence in a republic. And I think that we're seeing some of that to some extent today, right? Russia, China, to a lesser extent, Iran, all of these hostile adversary powers have invested considerably in manipulating the digital ecosystem to inflame American politics and radicalize us against each other. So I think first and foremost, we need to be talking about that issue. We need to be talking about foreign interference in American politics. We need to confront that head on, and we need to be really honest with the American people about it. But second,

I think we have to realize that social media is just not conducive to actual, to the virtue of what what Publis describes in the Federalist as deliberation, right? 280 character tweets or however long tweets are now, they're just not good examples of public discourse. It's very hard to reason with our fellow citizens on platforms like that. So I think that conservatives kind of need to take a step back from this kind of, you know, digital culture war that we find ourselves in. And I think Buckley is a good model for this. Buckley was not a moderate by any stretch of the imagination. He did not want to squish out on issues. You know, he had a brother-in-law who went to jail multiple times for protesting Roe v.

Wade. And Buckley was as conservative as they got. What made Buckley different, though, is that his. conservatism was invitational. He wanted people to come along with him on the adventure of self-government. And he made that appealing. And I think that when it comes to the rage of the digital culture war, conservatives haven't been great at cultivating those virtues. So I think we need to invest a lot less in social media fights and a lot more in what Russell Kirk called the permanent things. So you conclude your article by saying,

today's conservatives should ask, what would William Buckley do? If the conservative movement is moving away from Buckley's example and his invitational conservatism, how does it get back on track? Yeah, that's a huge question. And it's a very difficult one to answer. Of course, the conservative movement, even when Buckley was around, didn't have a pope who was excommunicating people or declaring what doctrine was. As Russell Kirk points out, conservatism is not an ideology. And it can't be It can't be contained in a set of ideological formula or something like that. So I don't think there's anything that one central power can do to fix the state of the American right.

But what I think we can do is cultivate institutions that will develop a pious and reflective patriotism, right? The kind of liberal education that Hillsdale College gives students, I think, is a good example of this. And I think that we need to really focus in on not just short-term political battles, although I think winning those is important. But we also need to focus on rebuilding our broader justification for an enlightened American conservatism. What is it exactly that we're trying to conserve? And Buckley can be a good guide in this, because he was so good at articulating those things that are, in fact, the norms of America.

in life, the things that make us who we are as a people, the ideas, the history, everything. And we've just been doing a bad job of that at an institutional level. Groups such as the Heritage Foundation, the Claremont Institute, other groups like that, they've really strayed from that core mission and they've fallen into this sort of culture-warm mindset that's really inimical to a healthy conservatism. So I think education is really is really the key to all that. That's great. And love the Hillsdale College promotion in there, too.

Well, that's all the questions. Yes, go chargers. Well, that's all the questions that I have for you today. Thank you very much for your time. Thanks so much, Luke. It's great to be on. Our guest has been Michael Lucchasey, the founder of Pipe Creek Consulting, an associate editor of Law and Liberty Online magazine,

and a contributing editor to Providence magazine. Here to talk about his recent article, William F. Buckley and the Politics of Normacy. And I'm Luke Miller on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM.