Baldwin vs Buckley

The 1965 Cambridge Union debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley is now viewed as an important moment in the discourse about race in America. Let's explore it.

Interestingly, a lot of ink has been spilled about the brief debate between the literary luminary and social critic, James Baldwin, and the father of modern American conservatism, William F. Buckley Jr., at The Cambridge Union in February 1965. I say this because in watching the debate itself and the loaded yet vague debate proposition - "The American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro" - it is hard to see its effect on the trajectory of racial politics at that time. For instance, the Civil Rights Act had already become law. It’s also a bit of a stretch to see its historical relevance to race relations today or as a dividing line in partisan politics; other than the fact our discourse continues to circle the same questions and that progressive and left-liberal partisans are sometimes inclined to point to Buckley's position in this debate in order to score cheap points against conservatives and right-liberals. Personally, I think the debate does very little to even symbolize some cosmic conflict of visions between the Left and the Right. Baldwin's position is more moralizing and morose than the Left of his time, and Buckley’s efforts were coalitional. He hoped to consolidate different types of right-wingers under his particular ideological project, specifically Frank Meyer's fusionism, but only ever managed to do so briefly during the 80s and early 90s. To me, the preoccupation with this debate arises from our (as in America's) contemporary obsession with racial politics and our love of celebrity culture. Baldwin and Buckley are elite and niche intellectuals but celebrities nonetheless. Their performances are both erudite and compelling, and their pairing is interesting in that it's a rare juxtaposition of two quite different intellectuals. Though in other ways, it is remarkable that Baldwin and Buckley’s paths crossed so minimally (even in print), especially because of Baldwin's close relationship with Norman Podhoretz, the Commentary editor who eventually joined Buckley's ideological project after becoming disaffected with the New Left in the late 60s.

After all this throat-clearing, we can finally address Nicholas Buccola's The Fire is Upon Us. This work is a close inspection of the Baldwin vs Buckley debate, which is the work’s climactic event. Most of the work is composed of interlaced biographical sketches of each figure combined with psychological and philosophical analysis of their written works on race and politics. In my reading, Buccola's analysis is mostly fair and accurate, but is more astute when it comes to Baldwin's ouerve. The author is clearly more familiar with Baldwin's work, which is forgivable in that Buckley's body of work is quite capacious, especially if his editorial choices at and leadership of National Review are considered, which of course they must be. Some of this gap in familiarity with Buckley may have induced Buccola to be overly critical when representing Buckley's positions on civil rights and race relations generally. The major oversight being that Buckley's position on civil rights changed significantly in the years after the debate, including Buckley's open acknowledgement that federal intervention was needed to end segregation, his strong criticism of George Wallace in 1968, and his “Why We Need a Black President in 1980" piece written in 1970. Buccola minimally acknowledges Buckley’s changed position, but works hard to minimize it and question its authenticity without any support.

I do think Buccola's stinging critique of Buckley's racial positions and politicking pre-1964 are warranted and reasonable (despite some of the presentism it relies on) in most respects, but he should have trained the same scrutiny on Baldwin's ideas as well, including his "morose nihilism" (a charge of Buckley against Baldwin) and his flirtations with radicalism. Instead Buccola is mostly a partisan of Baldwin's on all questions and to a minor extent tries to indict conservative ideas more broadly as inherently retrograde and immoral. I think it is reasonable to highlight like Buccola does how Buckley's willingness to entertain segregationist and anti-civil rights arguments in National Review despite largely playing coy on that question himself or advocating gradual liberalization was likely incentivized by the composition of his readership and political strategy. But it is unfair to use Buckley's pre-1964 position on race to claim that, "his goal was to maintain white domination of the South, one way or the other." A closer and more accurate reading of Buckley shows that Buckley hoped that cultural change and local politics would improve the conditions and status of black Americans over time. Moreover, Buckley quickly realized that his pre-1964 prescriptions for race relations were inadequate for that moment and embraced civil rights.

I also wish that Buccola dissected Baldwin's argument about race in America a bit more. Some of Baldwin's ideas still animate many claims about race today made by progressives and identitarian social democrats. His primary claim is that racism allows low-status white Americans to lay false claim to self-esteem and dignity because they can point to the relatively lower position of black Americans. This is morally degrading to both parties. Baldwin also holds that this racial hierarchy is perpetuated by a willful blindness by whites generally about the injustices attendant to race. Thus, the organization of society continues to immiserate and ghettoize blacks because the true problem must be ignored by the overclass. These same ideas animate many claims about “structural racism” or ‘implicit bias” and other invisible barriers to racial progress today. But there is some internal tension in these ideas. They imply that white Americans benefit from both race-consciousness and race-blindness - a racial Catch-22. It's a tension that isn't resolved by Baldwin nor many modern anti-racist thinkers and activists: Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Isabel Wilkerson, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and Ijeumo Oluo. Moreover, it doesn't respond to Buckley's point that America is indeed quite concerned with improving life for black Americans and is likely to see those improvement if its founding ideals are fulfilled. Buckley challenges his debate opponents “to name another civilization anytime, anywhere, in the history of the world in which the problems of a minority is as much the subject of dramatic concern as it is in the United States.”

Substack Image Generation: debate in Oxford Union

Despite Buccola's obvious rooting interest, which seems to have affected his analysis and his distance from and enmity toward conservative thought, The Fire Is Upon Us remains an interesting work that deserves a deep reading. It is a useful work of intellectual history even if its questions and content are not as historically relevant as Buccola would like us to think. Despite many of the same ideas still appearing in our contemporary discourse, especially Baldwin’s positions, their presence signals a regression of the discourse on race and identity broadly. If we were to draw a trend line of progress on this issue, we’d see a peak somewhere in the late 2000s and a subsequent dip with periodic fluctuations (Michael Brown, the Great Awokening, Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling protest, the 1619 project, and George Floyd) punctuating a level trend through to today. However, books on the history of ideas don’t need to be topical to be worth reading, and I think the value of The Fire Is Upon Us lies in Buccola’s obtainment, preservation, and analysis of mid-century writing on racial politics from niche intellectual figures in conflict. It helps today’s thinkers contextualize and reflect upon our political moment.

I also found something interesting tidbits in this book that I don’t think I would have happened upon otherwise. For instance, I found it very engaging to learn about Baldwin's literary criticism. Surprisingly, Baldwin was hostile to political art, which was illuminated in his writing about works like Uncle Tom’s Cabin. He lambasted protest novels and art driven primarily by ideology. He found these works hollow and off-putting. He felt that placing politics first in art erects barriers to emotional and psychological depth. I think this is an astute point, and it is a conclusion I've intuitively been drawn to before but never articulated as persuasively as Baldwin. I look forward to reading more of Baldwin’s work. Ultimately, The Fire Is Upon Us is a good read for those deeply interested in mid-century America political and cultural discourse.

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Interviews of Author:

• Hugos There Podcast

• Princeton University Press

• The New York Times

Recommend Reviews of The Fire Is Upon Us

• The Fire and The Dream by David B. Frisk

• Debating Race in America by Alvin S. Felzenberg