Rumbles Left and Right: A Book About Troublesome People and Ideas

The book is a collection of essays rather than a single sustained argument, but its unifying claim is that American liberalism in the early 1960s rested on misconceptions and contradictions that conservatives should expose. Buckley rejects the liberal consensus on civil liberties for Communists, federal welfare expansion, and accommodation with the Soviet Union. He praises Barry Goldwater as a man of principle who would end farm subsidies, eliminate federal welfare, and take government out of integration. The book's mode is polemical portraiture rather than systematic philosophy.

Saturday Review's Margaret L. Coit praised Buckley's analysis of Edward Bennett Williams, the civil-liberties lawyer, for delivering a 'stinging challenge' to those more concerned with clumsy prosecution than with crime itself. She also called the account of Whittaker Chambers's final years 'genuinely moving and compassionate,' noting that even a dedicated champion of Alger Hiss could not read it 'without being moved.' Buckley's challenge to educators like Robert Hutchins—that they know what education is not but not what it is—was judged worthy of thoughtful consideration.

The New York Times's Richard L. Strout noted that Buckley 'swats gnats with a sledge hammer' and that his tone shifts between promoting 'radical conservatism' and willfully provoking sensation. Saturday Review's Margaret Coit acknowledged Buckley's wit and readability but argued the book's greatest weakness was that he saw liberals' contradictions with clear eyes while remaining 'quite blind to his own.' She called it too simplistic to dismiss all liberals as believers in centralization at home and appeasement abroad. Kirkus called the political essays less comfortable than the personal ones.

Buckley's 'hymn to Barry Goldwater' is a key document of the pre-1964 conservative realignment. He praised Goldwater as 'full of principle' and listed what a Goldwater presidency would accomplish: ending farm price supports, eliminating industry-wide bargaining, banning federal support for integration, and halting federal assistance to the idle. Saturday Review's reviewer doubted Goldwater was quite so principled, noting his 'remarkable versatility' in cutting conservatism to fit Republican orthodoxy. The book captures Buckley's role as a movement intellectual working to elevate Goldwater as its standard-bearer.

Kirk's introduction frames Buckley's essays as 'social criticism worthy of survival in its own right,' not ephemera. He cites T. S. Eliot's observation that 'there are no lost causes, because there are no gained causes,' suggesting the follies Buckley scourges recur in every generation. Kirk predicts that thirty years hence, Americans seeking to understand the 'curious moods' of the 1950s and 1960s may find in the book 'a sturdy thread to lead them through the Minoan labyrinth' of political controversy. Kirk was a founding figure of American conservatism alongside Buckley.

Buckley quoted Arthur Schlesinger Jr. on the dust jacket of Rumbles Left and Right, prompting a minor public dispute. A National Review item from April 1963 reported that Schlesinger did not intend to sue Buckley for the 'outrageous decision' to quote his sentences on the jacket, though a 45 rpm recording existed of Schlesinger saying nice things about Buckley. The episode illustrates Buckley's flair for publicity and his willingness to deploy opponents' words for his own purposes—a tactic consistent with the book's combative ethos.