Watching William F. Buckley and James Baldwin at Columbia

One of my fondest memories as an undergraduate at Columbia University was the day my classmates and I watched a video of the historic 1965 debate at Cambridge between William F. Buckley and James Baldwin as part of our Social Theory class. At age fifty-five, I was the oldest in my class of about twenty students, and most of my classmates were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one. My classmates were repulsed by William F. Buckley, as well as by my view that he—rather than James Baldwin, a Black American essayist, novelist and playwright—was the winner of the debate. Moreover, we disagreed that when it comes to civil rights, Black Americans are far better off today than at any point in American history.

As a conservative, my worldview has been shaped in large part by Buckley, who embraced anti-communism, capitalism, and cultural traditionalism. In turn, he used these ideas to shape the conservative movement. While I considered myself quite knowledgeable on what Buckley stood for, I was not sure how to sum up his views on the civil rights movement. It is well-documented that Buckley opposed such policies initially but changed his stance later in life.

Shortly following the conclusion of this course at Columbia, I learned that Nicholas Buccola, a political science professor at Linfield College, had written a book that used this debate between Buckley and Baldwin as a backdrop to comment on the history of civil rights in the United States. Judging by Buccola’s comments on the podcast Scheer Intelligence, in which he asserted that the modern Republican Party was built on a foundation of white supremacy (as well as that Buckley was instrumental in the rise of President Trump, both of whom Buccola alleges are linked to white nationalism), I anticipated that the author came from a worldview different from my own. However, I decided to read the book.

In The Fire Is Upon Us, which was published in the fall of 2019, Buccola asserts that despite the civil rights movement, Black Americans face as much discrimination today as they did in the 1960s. The protagonist of the story is James Baldwin, one of America’s greatest Black writers. Baldwin appears as something akin to the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah, a man on a mission to give White America the courage to examine what lies beneath its fortress of white supremacy. The antagonist is William F. Buckley, a self-described guardian of the ideals at the core of the American dream. As such, Buckley is portrayed as a modern Gorgias, with arguments steeped in sophistry. Buccola also claims that Buckley’s legacy reveals that he was a guardian of white supremacy, rather than the ideals of the American dream. The high water mark of The Fire Is Upon Us is the debate between Baldwin and Buckley, which took place at Cambridge University on February 18th, 1965, the debate that provoked the emotionally-charged discussion that day at Columbia.