F.H. Buckley is a professor of law at George Mason University and the author of several books on American politics and mobility. He appeared on The Bob Zadek Show in 2016 to discuss The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America and again in 2022 to discuss Progressive Conservatism: How Republicans Will Become America’s Natural Governing Party. On both occasions, Zadek introduced him as a returning guest and framed the conversation around the decline of American economic and social mobility.
The Way Back (2016)
Zadek introduced Buckley as a professor of law at George Mason University School of Law, noting the school was soon to be renamed for Antonin Scalia, and as a senior editor at The American Spectator [[episodes/f_h__buckley_on__the_way_back__restoring_the_promi|F.H. Buckley on The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America (2016)]]. The episode aired over the July 4th weekend, and Zadek framed it as an attempt to spend the hour discussing the principles of Donald Trump.
Buckley said he wrote The Way Back before Trump decided to run for the presidency, but that Trump had plugged the book and that it overlapped with what Trump had been saying, offering what Buckley called an intellectual defense of his policies. Buckley described his focus as the decline of mobility, contrasting the idea of America as a country where everyone can get ahead with the reality he said the data showed.
Zadek distinguished income mobility from class mobility, describing the latter as the ability to move from one class to another, and noted that moving down has always been easier than moving up. Buckley agreed, saying he discussed both income mobility and social mobility, and argued that America had spawned a new class of aristocrats at the top. He cited the figure that if you are in the top 50%, your kids have about a 50% chance of being in the top 10 or 20%, and said this was not the case in most other first-world countries. He named Denmark and Canada as countries that had surpassed the United States in mobility, and said this betrayed Lincoln’s promise of an America where people can get ahead.
Zadek asked Buckley to list the structural causes of income immobility. Buckley rejected the explanation that structural changes in the economy—specifically the move to a high-tech information age economy that rewards the highly educated—were adequate, on the grounds that other countries beating the United States on mobility were living in the same information age. He said the country the United States most closely resembles is Canada, and that the American Dream lives on there rather than in the United States. His own explanation, he said, was differences in the legal regime of countries: legal barriers to getting ahead in the United States that do not exist elsewhere.
On immigration, Buckley said the United States imports immobility, bringing in people who will not do as well as Americans on average and whose children will not do as well as the children of native-born Americans, with the effect continuing to the third generation. He specified he was talking about legal, not illegal, immigration, and said this was a disservice to native Americans, particularly African Americans, whose jobs he said were being taken away. Zadek pushed back, arguing that nobody owns a job and that a job is an agreement in which an employer looks for the person who will do the best job for the least money; a native-born worker who wants more than the job is worth does not lose his job. Buckley said he completely agreed in the case of an employer choosing between a native-born American and an illegal at much less money, but maintained that illegals should not be there in the first place.
Buckley also linked the mobility decline to a political revolution. He said Americans for the first time say they do not expect their kids to do as well as they did, and that this accounted for a revolution in American politics. He pointed to the Democratic side, where a self-proclaimed socialist did extraordinarily well and surprised everybody; Zadek supplied the name Bernie Sanders. Buckley said Trump and Sanders were similar in railing against an immobile society, and that the Republican establishment did not get it and had been swept aside.
Progressive Conservatism (2022)
By 2022, Zadek introduced Buckley as having been a law professor at George Mason University since 1989, a keen observer of American politics seen through the lens of his Canadian birth, and the author of American Secession, The Republican Workers Party, The Republic of Virtue, and The Once and Future King, in addition to the new Progressive Conservatism Progressive Conservatism with F.H. Buckley (2022). Zadek called the title oxymoronic and asked Buckley to explain it.
Buckley argued that the word “progressive” has been adopted by the left, and that the people who call themselves progressives are anti-moderns who want to turn politics into a battle of race against race and ethnic group against ethnic group, which he called pre-modern. He said there is an important history of progressivism in the GOP, found in Lincoln’s internal policies, in Teddy Roosevelt, and in Eisenhower. He recalled having a coonskin cap as a kid in the 1950s, and said Eisenhower called himself a progressive and said at one point that the Republican Party must become progressive or it would die.
Buckley proposed thinking of American history in terms of East versus West rather than North versus South, and paid tribute to the progressive historian Frederick Jackson Turner, whose Frontier Thesis he called the greatest analysis of American history. He said Turner should be a hero to libertarians because he invented jurisdictional competition, and cited competition between Texas and California, with Texas winning and California losing as a penalty for being ultra-woke. In Turner’s account, Buckley said, the West was democratic, egalitarian, the home of Republican virtue and nationalism, while the East was aristocratic, corrupt, and cosmopolitan. Buckley said Turner argued that the East, realizing it was losing people, had to democratize as well, and that this trend carried back to Europe.
Zadek interjected in support of geographic mobility, recalling that he had hosted Buckley’s colleague Ilya Somin, who wrote on what he called foot voting, which Zadek described as more democratic than ballot box voting. Buckley said Somin had channeled what people like Tiebout said about how people sort themselves out by their jurisdictional and geographical choices, and reiterated Turner’s account of states competing.
Buckley said the United States has become aristocratic and that when he moved from Canada he was immediately struck by how it is a class society where people do not move up the ranks. He said the data show the United States is as aristocratic as England and way behind countries like Denmark and Canada in the mobility sweepstakes. He attributed the American Dream to Abraham Lincoln, describing it as the idea that wherever you are, wherever you come from, whoever you are, you can get ahead and your kids will be better off than you were.
On the future of the Republican Party, Zadek asked why Buckley had chosen to remake the GOP rather than the Democratic Party. Buckley said he could have started with the Democrats if he could travel back to the 1930s and 1940s and talk about FDR, whom he described as saying he was the best friend capitalism ever had because he was trying to save it. Buckley said that period was one of enormous economic distress and unemployment, with people tempted by fascist and communist ideas, and that FDR deserved thanks rather than the Calvin Coolidge Republicans of the time. He cited growth of 10% per annum per year for four years running in FDR’s first administration. But he said the current Democratic Party is not salvageable and is on a suicide watch, dug into its extreme as the race and gender party, mad on the subjects of abortion and race, and incapable of pulling back. He said that until a recovery of the Democratic Party, perhaps decades in the future, sensible Republicans would take over.
Across episodes
Both episodes turn on the same diagnosis—that American mobility has declined and that the United States has become aristocratic, behind countries like Canada and Denmark—and Buckley repeats the Lincoln framing of the American Dream in each. What changed between 2016 and 2022 is the prescription: in 2016 Buckley presented The Way Back as an intellectual defense of Trump’s policies and located the political opening in a revolt against immobility by Trump and Sanders alike, while in 2022 he advanced a historical case for a Republican Party remade along the lines of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Eisenhower, with Turner’s Frontier Thesis and jurisdictional competition as its intellectual scaffolding. Zadek’s role shifts accordingly, from pressing Buckley on the claim that immigrants take native-born jobs to supplying the libertarian foot-voting tradition of Ilya Somin in support of Buckley’s geographic mobility argument.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe Buckley’s early life, education, or career before George Mason, nor the substance of his other books beyond their titles. They do not give the details of any legal regime Buckley blames for immobility, nor the specific policies he would change. The 2022 episode breaks off before Buckley’s discussion of Trump and the sweet spot of American politics, and the 2016 episode does not resolve the exchange over immigration and jobs.
Episodes
2 appearances, 2016–2022.
- [[episodes/f_h__buckley_on__the_way_back__restoring_the_promi|F.H. Buckley on The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America]] (2016) — Restoring American economic and social mobility. Professor of Law at George Mason University
- Progressive Conservatism with F.H. Buckley (2022) — Progressive Conservatism and the Republican Party Future. Law Professor at George Mason University