F.H. Buckley is among the more eccentric figures on the Right today. A self-proclaimed “Right-wing Marxist” and admirer of the Frankfurt School, he is also a scholar of contract law, an advocate of the parliamentary system, a defender of pop multiculturalism, and a passionate opponent of bicycle lanes. For good measure, Buckley is a naturalized citizen who argues that Canada, the country of his birth, has become a better guardian of American ideals than the United States itself.
It is not surprising that so contrarian a mind emerged as a leading intellectual supporter of Donald Trump's campaign for President. Among signatories of the “Scholars and Writers For America,” an open letter in support of the Trump campaign, Buckley was one of a handful who have followed a mainstream academic career (he teaches at George Mason University's law school). By the time the letter was published in late September 2016, Buckley had been working for several months as a speechwriter and strategist for the Trump campaign. His activities began to receive public attention when Donald Trump, Jr. was accused of plagiarizing Buckley in an address to the Republican National Convention—an accusation Buckley waved off the grounds that he helped write the speech in the first place.
In The Republican Workers Party, his most recent book, Buckley combines vignettes from the campaign with extracts from journalism published in the two years since the election. The result is somewhat episodic and baggy, like many books intended to be timely, but it is far from a partisan defense of the President in the style of Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie's recent Trump's Enemies (2018). Rather than praising Trump per se, Buckley contends that disruption of the GOP in particular, and the political system in general, was a precondition of changes that might make America great again.
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