{"id":18657,"date":"2023-05-18T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-05-18T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2023\/05\/18\/how-william-f-buckley-jr-s-right-wing-college-crusade-paved-the-way-for-ron-desantis\/"},"modified":"2023-05-18T10:00:00","modified_gmt":"2023-05-18T10:00:00","slug":"how-william-f-buckley-jr-s-right-wing-college-crusade-paved-the-way-for-ron-desantis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2023\/05\/18\/how-william-f-buckley-jr-s-right-wing-college-crusade-paved-the-way-for-ron-desantis\/","title":{"rendered":"How William F. Buckley Jr.\u2019s Right-Wing College Crusade Paved the Way for Ron DeSantis"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The novelty was not in the messaging\u2014nor in DeSantis\u2019s bland delivery. It was in the staging. Normally, the dais is set up at midpoint on the long central green, the speakers facing east, with the Mother Theresa Museum on one side\u2014her visage on a mural next to Pope John Paul II. The DeSantis team, however, \u201cwanted to flip\u201d the stage, according to a university official\u2014that is, pivot in the opposite direction. The difference was evident in the video and photos of the event. As DeSantis addressed the sun-drenched crowd, cameras framed him before a mighty structure, a hulking futuro-Gothic hangar of travertine stone, Carrara marble, glass, and steel, its fa\u00e7ade, more than 100 feet high, shaped like a bishop\u2019s miter\u2014Ave Maria\u2019s parish church (\u201cthe spiritual and physical centerpiece for the first new major Catholic university in the U.S. in 40 years,\u201d the Catholic News Agency reported in 2004 when the plans were being drawn), one of the most improbable churches built in the US this century, rising up from the drained and bulldozed tomato fields.<\/p>\n
DeSantis did not need to squeeze extra votes out of Ave Maria or anywhere else in Collier County, Florida, a GOP stronghold. But getting that picture, preserving that image\u2014which then graced his website and Twitter feed\u2014was reason enough for Catholic archconservative Ron DeSantis to come to Ave Maria.<\/p>\n
The all-important<\/strong> affinity between politics and religion is usually told as a Protestant story, particularly in the modern era: the political campaigns of the Moral Majority in the Ronald Reagan \u201980s, which targeted the LGBTQ+ community during the AIDS epidemic; the Christian Coalition in the \u201990s, with its broad-based culture war that called for restoring prayer in schools; the faith-based politics of George W. Bush in the 2000s, with the banning of stem cell research and zealous promotion of \u201cintelligent design\u201d; up through the perplexing devotion of evangelicals to the libertine Donald Trump, based chiefly on his promise to appoint Supreme Court justices who would reverse Roe v. Wade.<\/em><\/p>\n
But the story of the contemporary far right and the church, the Catholic Church, is one we\u2019ve been slower to understand\u2014in part because the subject feels tainted with prejudice and bigotry. \u201cCatholic-baiting is the anti-Semitism of the liberals,\u201d the poet and political thinker Peter Viereck observed in the 1950s, one of that decade\u2019s enduring aphorisms. He was writing at a time when suspicions of Catholicism verged on the feverish, complete with accusations that Catholics were subversives secretly bound to Rome, like Communist spies serving an alien cause. Catholics belonged to \u201can organization that is not only a church but a state within a state,\u201d as a highly respected journalist put it back then, \u201ca foreign-controlled society within American society.\u201d This attitude persisted through 1960, when John F. Kennedy, the first elected Catholic president, came under attack from the powerful Protestant clergymen Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale, who tried to mobilize voters to defeat him, lest the country be sold out to the Vatican.<\/p>\n
It was only later, in 1973, after a women\u2019s right to choose became the law of the land, that Catholic conservatives and evangelicals formed an alliance. Opposition to abortion \u201cwas a godsend for leaders of the Religious Right,\u201d the historian Randall Balmer recently pointed out. And it was Catholic intellectuals, writers, and jurists who framed the main arguments, crowned by the Dobbs<\/em> opinion, which last year overturned Roe v. Wade,<\/em> written by Justice Samuel Alito, one of six Catholics on the Supreme Court, the most conservative in modern history.<\/p>\n
Alito has said that National Review<\/em> and its founding editor, William F. Buckley Jr., were among \u201cthe greatest influences on my views.\u201d The staunch conservative ideas Alito was referring to are inseparable from a vision of higher education in which universities would become citadels of faith and dogma, or would be depicted as such. And the first to grasp this in the full potential of its meaning was, indeed, Bill Buckley, three quarters of a century ago.<\/p>\n
Buckley would go<\/strong> on to become the most influential leader of the modern American conservative movement. But in the winter of 1949, when he was just a second-semester junior at Yale, he fired the first important shot in the culture wars. He had been voted \u201cchairman\u201d\u2014that is, chief editorial writer\u2014of his campus paper, the Yale Daily News,<\/em> and immediately put readers on warning. There would be \u201cno squeamishness about editorial subject matter,\u201d Buckley vowed in his first opinion piece.<\/p>\n