Politics & Power Quote by William F. Buckley, Jr.

Buckley’s line lands like a velvet-gloved slap: crisp, patrician, and calibrated to scandalize the very class he knew best. The provocation isn’t really about the Boston phone book or even Harvard as a set of buildings. It’s about epistemic authority: who gets to claim the right to rule because they’re credentialed, fluent, and certain.

The “first 400 people” is a deliberately clumsy yardstick. Randomness becomes a weapon. Buckley implies that ordinary citizens, selected with no regard for prestige, might govern with more humility and common sense than an insulated professoriate trained to mistake intelligence for legitimacy. The jab at Harvard is strategic. Harvard stands in for the mid-century American elite that produced administrators, policy experts, and tastemakers - the people conservatives increasingly suspected of treating the country as a social laboratory.

Subtext: Buckley isn’t rejecting expertise so much as the politics smuggled in under expertise. By targeting a faculty, he signals that the danger isn’t merely “smart people,” but smart people whose incentives run toward abstraction, ideological fashion, and institutional self-reinforcement. The joke works because it compresses a whole worldview into a single class insult: the governed should not be managed by a clerisy that answers primarily to its own peer culture.

Context matters: Buckley helped build postwar American conservatism in an era when universities were gaining enormous cultural and governmental influence. The line anticipates today’s populist revolt against “experts,” but with Buckley’s more polished sneer - less pitchfork than fencing foil.