Once upon a time, American political campaigns were literary.
Once upon a time, American writers enlivened—even conducted—political campaigns with wit and flair and acute diagnoses of national ills. Perhaps J.D. Vance, freed of the constraints of second-bananadom, will do so atop the GOP ticket in 2028.
Till then, the acme of auctorial office-seeking remains that achieved by the trio of brio consisting of Norman Mailer, William F. Buckley Jr., and Gore Vidal, whose relationships with each were often rancorous, even fistic.
Buckley’s finest political moment was his 1965 candidacy for mayor of New York City on the Conservative Party line. His platform was higgledy-piggledy, veering from libertarian (legalize gambling) to authoritarian (“quarantine all [drug] addicts”) to the wise and humane (anti-urban renewal and pro-neighborhood schools). Buckley’s twitting of the handsomely hollow limousine-liberal Republican (and eventual winner) John Lindsay—who “rises from banality, if only to arrive at fatuity,” and whose outstanding attribute was “the brilliance of his teeth”—was the primary delight of his campaign.
His supercilious disdain for grubby politics, affected or not, was also amusing. “Do you want to be mayor, sir?” queried a reporter upon Buckley’s declaration of candidacy, to which the candidate replied, “I have never considered it.” He launched his staff into apoplectic orbit when, asked what he would do if he won, he answered, “Demand a recount.” Murray Kempton said that Buckley addressed a crowd “in a tone [like] that of an Edwardian resident commissioner reading aloud the 39 articles of the Anglican establishment to a conscript assemblage of Zulus.”
When Lindsay said that Buckley’s claim that the two had known each other at Yale was a “delusion of grandeur,” Buckley remarked, “Grandeur was not defined, while I was at Yale, as having the knowledge of John Lindsay.”
Four years later, the Democratic primary for New York City mayor was immeasurably enriched by the combative presence of Norman Mailer, who ran the most thoughtfully decentralist campaign this side of Vermont’s John McClaughry.
“The left has been absolutely right on some critical problems of our time,” said Mailer, “and the conservatives have been altogether correct about one enormous matter—which is that the federal government has no business whatever in local affairs.” Mailer’s signature 51st state proposal called not only for the secession of New York City from the state (to which we hicks cried “good riddance!”) but a radical devolution of municipal duties.
“Power to the neighborhoods!” was Mailer’s cry, by which he meant that “any neighborhood could constitute itself on any principle, whether spiritual, emotional, economical, ideological, or idealistic.” Education, social welfare, police and fire, sanitation, moral regulation: the city-state of New York would transfer these functions to the most local unit of government possible.
“An Instrument for the City,” Mailer’s manifesto, is one of the great documents of practical political philosophy in American history—far more understanding of human nature than, say, the Federalist Papers, whose wooly abstractions asserting the superiority of a centralizing Constitution over the decentralized republic favored by the Anti-Federalists have had all the predictive accuracy of Nostradamus.
Mailer’s and Buckley’s sparring partner Gore Vidal, who grew up reading the Congressional Record to his beloved blind grandfather, the anti-FDR Oklahoma Democratic Senator Thomas P. Gore, sought his own place in the Senate when in 1982 he challenged Jerry Brown for the Democratic nomination for the California seat ultimately won by Pete Wilson. (Vidal had also run for Congress in 1960 in a Hudson Valley, New York, district. He lost but was proud ever after that he had outpolled ticket-topper JFK in Dutchess County.)
Vidal made the uni-party system—two wings on one bird of prey—a central theme of his Senate candidacy. George Wallace, he said, “was on to something” with his crack that “there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the Democrats and the Republicans.” He proposed a 25 percent reduction in defense spending (“the budget of the Pentagon will continue to expand because of whatever enemy the enemy-of-the-month club has selected for us”), cutting taxes on the middle class (“which is the country”), and renunciation of the role of world policeman.
“We have neither the intelligence nor the wealth to govern the world,” said candidate Vidal. If America traded in the empire for a revived republic, “We could repair and perfect our own country and be what we were intended to be, a great commercial power in the world.”
Ideas may have consequences but they sure don’t attract votes. Buckley won 10 percent of the ballots in his race, Mailer took 5 percent, and Vidal earned 15 percent. To borrow from 1960s prankster Dick Tuck, the people had spoken—the bastards.
J.D. Vance has four years to come up with a theme, a platform, and a collection of quips worthy of Vidal, Mailer, and Buckley. As for attracting votes—well, that’s someone else’s department.
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