William F. Buckley recognized that to defend Western civilization, you must also be civilized. This is not to say that would-be culture warriors must share Buckley’s taste in music or literature or art. But it is true that character is destiny.

The late William F. Buckley, the founder of National Review, host of The Firing Line, and a conservative figure so ubiquitous that he had to space out his books so they wouldn’t compete with each other on the New York Times bestseller list, has been much maligned by the new “MAGA movement,” whatever that turns out to be. Reading his new biography by Sam Tannenhaus, Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America, I was struck time and again by how much we could learn from him.

“What did he want to conserve? Western civilization,” Jay Nordlinger wrote recently of Buckley. A quick scan of the X profile bios and AI-generated memery of MAGA edgelords and digital outrage farmers indicates that “fighting for Western civilization” would appear, on the surface, to be a popular pastime. But I can’t help noticing that many of the angry “culture warriors” fueling the national conversation do not even appear to have a culture—they have only war, waged endlessly on despair-riven digital battlefields.

To defend your culture, you must first have a culture. To defend Western civilization, you must, surely, know what that is.

Buckley knew what he was defending because he adored it. “Three hundred years ago on March 21,” WFB wrote, “Johann Sebastian Bach was born. The event is as though God had decided to clear His throat to remind the world of His existence.” The MAGA warriors, however, do not appear to have Bach; in fact, they appear as culturally illiterate as their revolutionary opponents. It is not that they could not have Bach, or any of the other great treasures of the Western cultural inheritance. It is that for them, “defending Western civilization” is not about love. It is about rage.

As G.K. Chesterton put it in a popular quote that is clearly not yet popular enough: “A real soldier does not fight because he has something that he hates in front of him. He fights because he has something that he loves behind his back.”

Much of this rage is understandable. As Machiavelli once noted, “a man is quicker to forget the death of his father than the loss of his patrimony.” Some of it is even righteous indignation at the cultural degeneracy that has become the new moral core of the West, from gender ideology to our bloody abortion clinics with their great clouds of souls rising through the roof. There is much to hate about what the West has become. But as Martin Amis observed, “hatred is a stimulant, but it shouldn’t become an intoxicant.”

The conservative scholar Yuval Levin put his finger on this divide in a recent interview with the New York Times, defining the difference between conservatism and populism:

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