Was there ever anyone quite like William F. Buckley, Jr.? The founder of National Review, once the preeminent conservative magazine; the host of a talk show, Firing Line, that over its more than three decades on air formed a visual and oral history of the United States in the contemporary era; the author of popular tracts, memoirs, travelogues, and thrillers, more than one a year for stretches of his life; and the urbane and witty intellect behind the American conservative movement, Buckley embodied a style and a sensibility that belong to the last century. But he pioneered a mode of politics that came fully into power in the present one, in the person of Donald Trump.

For much of the post–World War II era, few Americans could name the precepts that defined conservatism, but they knew Buckley stood for them. Young men didn’t want to follow him so much as be him. Today, if younger conservatives have moved on in their admiration—to a right-wing provocateur such as Charlie Kirk or a supposedly straight-talking podcaster such as Joe Rogan—that is only because the posture and principles that Buckley represented have become the oxygen of the American right, invisible yet essential.

Buckley, who died in 2008, did not live to see the rise of Trumpism. But it is impossible to read Buckley, Sam Tanenhaus’s monumental, honest, fair-minded, and spectacularly enlightening biography—some 30 years in the making and undertaken with Buckley’s cooperation—without seeing in it the trailhead to our own time. Buckley was among the first to sense that American politics is downstream of culture, meaning that the drivers of political life are affect and positioning, not interests and policies. On the page and on the screen, Buckley didn’t so much articulate conservative ideas as perform them: a preference for order over voice, a desire to limit participation rather than enable it, a belief that public morality should have religion near its center, and a conviction that a new elite must remake the Republican Party as the first step toward retaking the United States.

Today, listening to what Buckley had to say—and, crucially, how he said it—can hit like a revelation. Trumpism is often characterized as a fractious coalition of techno-libertarians and populists or a new American version of older European authoritarianism. But through the prism of Buckley’s life, it looks more like a radical return to something more recent and closer to home. What Buckley saw more clearly than any conservative thinker of the twentieth century was the degree to which figures such as U.S. Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan were not fulfillments of the American rightist tradition of Buckley’s youth but aberrations from it. Mainstream conservatism, such as it was, had evolved from old-style liberalism, with its conviction that a good society would magically emerge if government got out of the way. What conservatives lacked, Buckley felt, was both a program for a rightly ordered America—hierarchical, suspicious of opposition, and protective of a civilization under threat—and the will to achieve it. That vision and its pamphleteering defense would be his life’s work. To understand the ideas animating Trump’s world, a good place to start is Buckley’s.

Buckley, born in November 1925, was his household’s sixth child and third son but the one his parents decided should carry the paternal name. His father, William Sr., was a Texas oilman who made his fortune in Mexico and Venezuela. His mother was New Orleans aristocracy. The Buckleys were old Irish rather than Yankee, weekend sailors and equestrians but also Catholic and fecund, and in the years before World War II, they were deeply America First. Their Connecticut estate, Great Elm, housed ten children and a cavalcade of heady guests such as Albert Jay Nock, the author, anti–New Dealer, and casual anti-Semite. (Another visitor, the jazz pianist Fats Waller, a cousin of the Buckleys’ butler, was left to entertain the servants.)

Large, loving families have their unique vices, among them self-​satisfaction. At Millbrook, the New York boarding school, a teacher reported that Buckley was the kind of student who displayed the “dangerous habit of generalizing at times in order to prove a point without knowing the facts.” The problem in the South was not that Black Americans were denied the vote, Buckley wrote in one Millbrook essay, but that too many white citizens of low intelligence were allowed it. He would make the same point, decades later, in his famous debate with James Baldwin at the Cambridge Union.

From Millbrook and then a stint in the U.S. Army after the war, Buckley went to Yale. It didn’t take him long to find his calling as a talker and writer. He excelled in debate, discovered his favorite subjects, and honed his personal style in the Yale Daily News. A university fundraising campaign had yielded extra money that undergraduates proposed........

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