Last Monday, January 20^th, MLK Day in the U.S., the Trump Inauguration Day in the U.S., and Blue Monday, the most depressing day of the year, worldwide, I’m guessing or, at least for those of us technically suffering through winter, hemispherically, I was finishing up Nicholas Buccola’s The Fire Is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate Over Race In America.

A confluence of most incongruous events on the surface. A trick of the calendar, let’s assume, as opposed to some sign from above, Above, being wherever you may spiritually locate it. Although, I’d guess my choice of reading material some two or three weeks prior to the new/old presidency may have been somewhat influenced by the coming events.

Here’s the short version:

If William F. Buckley Jr. is seen as a godfather of modern conservatism, a pillar of the ideology born from a complete rejection of FDR’s New Deal, then what cannot be denied is the racism sitting deep in the conservative soul. It’s rife with it. It’s a core tenet.

Buckley, if he could be summoned from the depths of Hell to which he was surely hurled some nine months before America elected its first Black president, if a true Christian God actually exists, would still be denying that he and his ilk were racists. All in good time, he constantly chided desegregationists, in debates, TV appearances and on the pages of his National Review. When you’ve proven yourself up to the standards of Western civilization, as judged by your white superiors according to a theory of social hierarchy in which Buckley, funnily enough, had placed himself at the top of.

Buckley wasn’t fighting the expansion of the franchise to just Black voters, you see. Given his druthers, he’d restrict the right to vote to great swaths of the American public who were already allowed into polling booths. That’s not racism. That’s elitism. As the Founding Fathers intended.

Donald Trump and his ilk may not be up to the elite standards that Buckley envisioned. More to the Money Born than Manor Born. But make no mistake here. Donald Trump and is ilk are the bastard offspring of William F. Buckley Jr. His championing of ‘States’ Rights’, his Constitutional ‘originalism’, his ‘understanding but not condoning’ both official and unofficial use of violence in dealing with civil rights activists under the guise of maintaining ‘social order’, his contributions to the Southern Strategy that first swept Richard Nixon into the White House and cemented in place by every Republican politician since, all have contributed mightily to situation we find ourselves in currently.

There is a direct line from William F. Buckley Jr. to Elon Musk’s Sieg Heil on stage at the Capital One arena last Monday night.

Buckley would’ve sneered-leered-smiled but vociferously contend. That wasn’t what I meant at all.

I refuse, however, to give such a despicable man the last word here.

Let that go to James Baldwin [edited by Nicholas Buccola from an interview with Kenneth Clark on Perspectives: Negro and the American Promise], the man Buckley dubbed the ‘eloquent menace’.

“There are days, this is one of them, when you wonder what your role is in this country and what your future is in it. How precisely you’re going to reconcile yourself to your situation here and how you are going to communicate to the vast, heedless, unthinking, cruel white majority that you are here. I’m terrified at the moral apathy–the death of the heart–which is happening in my country. These people have deluded themselves for so long that they really don’t think I’m human… And this means that they have become… moral monsters.”