Buckley had risen to national prominence four years earlier with the publication of God and Man at Yale, which excoriated his alma mater for perceived attempts to persuade its students to become “atheistic socialists.” “I myself believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world,” Buckley wrote in his foreword to the fi rst edition. “I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level.” He married an uncompromising antistatism in the economic sphere with a militant anticommunism and a heightened deference to established religious institutions and ways of life. … As Knight had grimly observed, it is diffi cult to distill challenging ideas into popularly accessible form without doing some violence to their intent. Buckley's success as a polemicist was a product, in part, of his capacity to elide complexities that would detract from his rhetorical force.

Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, loc. 352