Posted on Facebook by G.P. :
"I was researching school vouchers decades ago and came across the infamous Buckley editorial.
"In his most notorious editorial, "Why the South Must Prevail," Buckley drew on Calhoun's championing of the "concurrent voice" to defend voting restrictions since "the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically," even if it meant violating the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Buckley repeated the argument in his book Up From Liberalism(1959),
suggesting that African Americans needed to be properly educated and trained before they were brought up to the level of the enfranchised whites who were holding them down. And just as Calhoun had defended the "positive good" of slavery, so Buckley defended Jim Crow as being born of "custom and tradition ... a whole set of deeply-rooted folkways and mores." As long as the South did "not exploit the fact of Negro backwardness to preserve the Negro as a servile class," segregation was acceptable."
School vouchers for white academies was one of the first things segregationists thought of after Brown. However, as religious run elementary and high schools were mostly Catholic, the voucherites all agreed that it was unconstitutional for tax money to go to church affiliated schools. (Buckley, a Catholic, nevertheless agree, if ancient memory serves.)
The National Review also championed people who claimed that Black people had lower IQs, people whom Julian Bond's father had already mercilessly satirized that nonsense. As near as I can tell, Buckley, at that time anyway, believed that secular hope was...hopeless. There was no reason for the government to try to help people because only religion offered hope for a better life... or afterlife anyway.
The Syndicate | New Republic
William Buckley, Jr. was a stalwart conservative and intellectual, and obviously, a racist and a bigot, like most of the Republican Party.