In 1951, a 25-year-old oil heir with an unplaceable accent declared war on Yale University — and modern American conservatism was born.

On this WhoWhatWhy podcast, Sam Tanenhaus, former editor of The New York Times Book Review and the author of Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America, talks to me about his monumental 1,000+ page biography of Buckley, a project 30 years in the making.

We constantly ask how did we get here? How did the Republican Party transform into MAGA? The answer lies with Buckley — he was the engine that drove this evolution.

William F. Buckley Jr. understood what few politicians grasped: Politics was becoming theater, and ideological battles would be won on cultural battlefields.

Through meticulous research, including previously unknown family archives, Tanenhaus reveals how Buckley became the original conservative-coalition builder — simultaneously maintaining elite respectability while appealing to grassroots activists.

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