Buckley’s Debt to H. L. Mencken

By Bryan A. Garner

Thursday, December 18, 2025

 

William F. Buckley didn’t spring full-grown from the forehead of the American right. His distinctive fusion of wit, erudition, and showmanship had a lineage. Behind the elegant vowels and harpoon syntax stood a precedent: H. L. Mencken. Long before National Review, before Buckley’s eyebrow arched across the television landscape, Mencken had shown that the American polemic could be both cerebral and uproarious, a form of gladiatorial combat fought with syllables instead of swords.

 

It was Mencken who taught that the pen could be both rapier and cudgel. His was a prose of detonations — witty, erudite, and merciless. “Democracy,” he once wrote, “is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” He meant populist democracy, of course. The remark captures his scorn for herd thinking as well as his relish for the well-turned sneer.

 

Mencken made writing a blood sport. He could be as refined as a Latinist and as blunt as a dockworker, sometimes in the same sentence. He wielded language with the precision and ferocity of a heavyweight, his punches softened only by the laughter that followed them. He was a cynic in the grand manner, but his cynicism was charged with the joy of combat.

 

His arsenal was vast: invective, hyperbole, paradox, and the triadic rhythm of the rhetorician. He invented words when English failed him. Booboisie — his most famous coinage — joined boob and bourgeoisie into a deadly epithet for the complacent middle class. Mencken distrusted nearly every institution Americans have traditionally been taught to revere: “Third-rate men, of course, exist in all countries, but it is only here that they are in full control of the state, and with it of all the national standards.” On the clergy: “Archbishop: a Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.” These lines are more than epigrams; they are tiny grenades lobbed at the sanctimonious.

 

He delighted in paradoxes that burn slowly in the mind: “Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.” Or again, “Immorality. The morality of those who are having a better time.” And, with the acid balance of a moral anatomist: “It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake.” Mencken’s voice was unmistakable — sonorous, sardonic, irresistibly urbane. His sentences had the cadence of a sermon delivered by an amused heretic. Tone was his real instrument. He once proposed an “ironics” typeface so that readers could know when to raise an eyebrow.

 

He was a democratic aristocrat, scornful of the mob yet deeply fascinated by it. His egalitarian contempt spared no tribe: not politicians, not preachers, not reformers, not the booboisie. “We live in a land of abounding quackeries,” he observed, “and if we do not learn how to laugh, we succumb to the melancholy disease which afflicts the race of viewers-with-alarm.” His laughter was not nihilistic but curative — a weapon against humbug. Mencken styled himself the nation’s “permanent opposition.” It was not contrarianism for its own sake but a principled refusal to be co-opted.

 

Few escaped his wit. On religion: “We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.” On reformers: “The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.” Puritanism: “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” On marriage: “Lover. An apprentice second husband; victim no. 2 in the larval stage.” And again: “Alimony is the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.” On the legal profession: “The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail. If it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.” And lawyers: “A lawyer is one who protects you against robbers by taking away the temptation.”

 

Yet under the sarcasm lay a stoic fatalism: “The universe is run idiotically, and its only certain product is sorrow.” Still, Mencken smiled at the absurdity, turning cosmic despair into comic resilience. In 1921, he wrote: “If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.”

 

From this lineage, Buckley drew his armor and his music. His prose — voluptuous, Latinate, and mischievous — owed a clear debt to Mencken’s example. His every performance, whether in print or on Firing Line, carried the same theatrical relish for verbal combat. “I don’t stoop to conquer,” he once said. “I merely conquer.” Mencken would have applauded the arrogance.

 

Mencken was a libertarian and a skeptic, allergic to mass movements of any stripe. His atheism and elitism placed him beyond the right–left binary. He mocked Roosevelt’s New Deal as “pillage and bribery,” but he would have ridiculed the Moral Majority just as easily. His creed was independence, his scripture irony. Buckley, by contrast, used the same stylistic voltage to electrify a movement — to make conservatism intellectually stylish and rhetorically armed. For all his showmanship, Buckley possessed a moral seriousness Mencken disdained. Buckley believed civilization was worth saving, even through laughter. Mencken, ever the pagan ironist, suspected it wasn’t — but he chronicled its follies with a relish that made decline entertaining.

 

Mencken once predicted, with oracular malice, “On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts’ desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” The line, prophetic in any era, still ricochets as either side in our polarized society might claim it for one or the other of the past two administrations. That is Mencken’s immortality: his contempt is universal currency. His real bequest was stylistic. He changed how Americans wrote and read argument. His prose had the syncopation of jazz — quick, surprising, sometimes riotous, always alive. He taught that reason could dance, that intellect could sneer without losing grace. He made mockery an art form and skepticism a civic virtue.

 

He also made it clear that laughter could be serious business. Style, for Mencken, was not ornament but weaponry — the broadaxe of the individual mind against the clichés of the age. He fought philistinism with adjectives, cant with cadence. His language still crackles a century later because it embodies freedom: freedom of mind, of speech, of tone.

 

Buckley absorbed that lesson completely. His conservatism was carried on Mencken’s current of verbal electricity. He made erudition dashing, mockery respectable, and debate a form of high sport. The difference is that for Mencken, civilization was a farce; for Buckley, it was a fallen cathedral worth defending.

 

Mencken’s shadow stretches long. Every sharp-tongued columnist, every podcaster who mixes intellect with insolence, is using his workshop. And every conservative writer who strives to make orthodoxy witty is, knowingly or not, a pupil of both Mencken and Buckley. The two together form a distinctly American dialectic: skepticism and faith, irony and piety, laughter and loyalty. Mencken forged the blade; Buckley gilded the hilt. Between the two, they created the vocabulary of modern polemic — the art of the broadaxe aimed at folly.