"...just about the hottest thing in town."

Has it been that long?  Fifty years ago this week since WFB, then a brash thirty year old, as far as an upper class Catholic from Connecticut (and Mexico) can be brash, gave the world one of its most influential magazines.  One of my favourite activities while attending the University of Toronto was to read old back copies of the National Review, as well as the Economist and TLS.  Few Canadians, including more than a few right-leaning university students, know who William F. Buckley Jr. is and about the enormous impact his creation has had on on the political history of the last half century.  It is not in the slightest an exaggeration to say that without NR there would not be a modern conservative movement in the United States of America.  This includes everything from free market economics to religious conservatism.  Buckley was not the movement's founder, indeed the very idea of American conservatism resists belief in a "founder" in the same way it resists grand abstract schemes for governing society, but he was its greatest propagandist.  No, that word isn't quite right.  The word recalls Goebbels or a little further back its original understanding, commercial advertising campaigns.  NR was, and always has been, a forum for debate and Buckley's genius was in not letting the magazine become either so political that it became a back office for the GOP and so unpolitical that it became a conservative version of Paris Review.  Here are some articles from NRO celebrating the magazine's Golden Anniversary.

Standing Athwart History

Issue One, page one.

There is, we like to think, solid reason for rejoicing. Prodigious efforts, by many people, are responsible for NATIONAL REVIEW. But since it will be the policy of this magazine to reject the hypodermic approach to world affairs, we may as well start out at once, and admit that the joy is not unconfined.

Let's face it: Unlike Vienna, it seems altogether possible that did NATIONAL REVIEW not exist, no one would have invented it. The launching of a conservative weekly journal of opinion in a country widely assumed to be a bastion of conservatism at first glance looks like a work of supererogation, rather like publishing a royalist weekly within the walls of Buckingham Palace. It is not that, of course; if NATIONAL REVIEW is superfluous, it is so for very different reasons: It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.

Weeping Over Goldwater

Clare Booth Luce gives us her definition of sarcasm.

Do you remember, last year (when, omigod, there was still time!), what beads of sweat appeared on the Jovian brow — Walter Lippmann's — dank dripping from laurel leaves, they too, trembling like aspens? Oh, he abjured us, for our own sakes, he Lippmann, for three decades the dear daily companion of our breakfast juice, the Peer of Pundits, the King Canute of Columnists, the Plato, the Philosopher King of Journalism — he told us that this would be suicide. He told us this…thing...could never happen.

Ah, again the funereal bell: "California casts 86 votes for Senator Barry Goldwater." We cannot blame the Democrats. They, too, the New Frontiersmen, sought to save us. All highbrows, all intellectual Alpinists, all biographers of the late John F. Kennedy, all Harvard, Princeton, Yale men, even Cornell and Dartmouth men, all people with higher-than-average IQ's and whiter-than-snow white collars, all told us this grave was yawning.

Anti-Acclimatizer

WFB on the death of Waugh.  I happen to be a big "fan" of economic history, but not modernity.

But he was a man of charity, personal generosity, and, above all, of understanding. He knew people, he knew his century, and, having come to know it, he had faith only in the will of God, and in individual man's latent capacity to strive towards it. He acknowledged the need to live in this century, because the jellyfish will not have it otherwise; but never, ever, to acclimate yourself to it. Mr. Scott-King, the classics teacher, after his tour through Evelyn Waugh's Modern Europe, comes back to school, and there the headmaster suggests that he teach some popular subject, in addition to the classics — economic history, perhaps, for the classics are not popular. "I'm a Greats man myself," the headmaster says. "I deplore it as much as you do. But what can we do? Parents are not interested in producing the 'complete man' anymore. They want to qualify their boys for jobs in the public world. You can hardly blame them, can you?" "Oh yes," Scott-King replies. "I can and do." And, deaf to the headmaster's entreaties, he declares, shyly but firmly, "I think it would be very wicked indeed to do anything to fit a boy for the modern world." Waugh got the best of the modern world, but paid a high price for it: he gave it his genius.

"Honey, I Forgot to Duck."

Joking us back to health on a dark day in 1981.

Reagan did not have to say so directly, and indeed he made his point more powerfully by making us say it ourselves: The United States is the most stable republic in the history of the world. It was thus designed by its founders. Four of its Presidents have been killed in office, and others have been targets of assassins. But all transitions have been remarkably peaceful and orderly. The great ship of the Republic sails on through all seas, however stormy. It cannot be sunk by a .22 slug.

Fighting the Good Fight at Fourteen

I can tell you one thing, I wouldn't have had the guts to do this at his age. Bravo.

I am a fourteen-year-old boy. Among other things, I am a Goldwater supporter. I worked hard to see the Senator's election, but I was never able to, nor was anyone else.

Let us reconstruct the first week of September 1964. One week was remaining until school would start for a new year. I had decided to be a conservative Republican the day after the Senator's nomination. I had always been and will always be a Republican. It was on this day, a Tuesday, that I had received my campaign materials from the Republican Headquarters in Stockton, California.

The package consisted of five Goldwater buttons, two "Viva Barry," seven "Goldwater '64," and one "Democrats for Goldwater" bumper stickers.

I immediately put a "Viva Barry" sticker on my binder and attached a Goldwater button to my shirt. Since my mother is a Goldwater-hating Democrat (aren't all liberals?) I could not go near her with my Goldwater button or I would have been disciplined. Since she didn’t see my binder, I was safe in that respect.

When school started, two of my best friends, who wish only to be known as Jimmy and George, agreed to take on the difficult task of assisting my campaign for the Senator.

The Gipper on the Best Man in Britain

One friend about another.

With all of her strength, Margaret Thatcher still is a lady. There is an attractive humanness to her. Our annual "Economic Summits" are meetings of the seven Heads of Government — the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Italy, West Germany, Japan, and the United States. The meetings rotate, with each member country hoisting the Summit in turn. The Head of Government of the host country chairs the meeting.

A few years ago, when the Summit was in England with Margaret presiding, a Head of Government (and I won't name him) launched a veritable tirade at the chair. He claimed that the meeting was not being run in a democratic manner, that the chair was dictatorial, etc. He gave no illustrations or examples to support these charges. Margaret let him have his say and then continued with the business before the meeting. She remained cool and made no effort to respond to the charges.

When the meeting ended I caught up with Margaret. I told her what I thought of the charges he had made, that he was really out of line and had no business or right to do what he'd done. Her quiet response was. "Women know when men are being childish."

The G7 conference in question was held early in June 1984, while Pierre Trudeau was still Prime Minister.  Another potential candidate for summital jackass would be then French President Francois Mitterand.  Mrs. T had to scold Trudeau at a previous G7 conference for behaving like a "naughty school boy."  Perhaps this was his attempt at payback.

Now, no celebration of the National Review would be complete without hearing from the old Russian woman who casts, and rightly so, a shadow across this blog and its writers.  From a 1964 interview she did for Playboy.

PLAYBOY: You have charged that America suffers from intellectual bankruptcy. Do you include in this condemnation such right-wing publications as the National Review? Isn't that magazine a powerful voice against all the things you regard as "statism"?

RAND: I consider National Review the worst and most dangerous magazine in America. The kind of defense that it offers to capitalism results in nothing except the discrediting and destruction of capitalism. Do you want me to tell you why?

PLAYBOY: Yes, please.

RAND: Because it ties capitalism to religion. The ideological position of National Review amounts, in effect, to the following: In order to accept freedom and capitalism, one has to believe in God or in some form of religion, some form of supernatural mysticism. Which means that there are no rational grounds on which one can defend capitalism. Which amounts to an admission that reason is on the side of capitalism's enemies, that a slave society or a dictatorship is a rational system, and that only on the ground of mystic faith can one believe in freedom. Nothing more derogatory to capitalism could ever be alleged, and the exact opposite is true. Capitalism is the only system that can be defended and validated by reason.

Before the NR subscribers in the crowd start balking too hard, let me expand on Miss Rand's comments, speaking for myself but defending the essential correctness of her opinion.  At the surface her argument that religion leads to dictatorship seems patently absurd.  America is almost universally regarded as the most religious nation in the Western world, it is also the freest and economically the most successful.  Certainly the United States has a racially based underclass, but so does Canada and Australia.  Theirs is merely larger and better armed.  Overall, the casual conservative observer can point to America as living proof that religion is an aid to freedom and not its enemy.  Without religion, usually Christianity, the conservative of a religious bent can also point out, with seemingly indisputable evidence, that without a religious foundation the defenders of freedom would have collapsed into the same relativist morass as our statist opponents.  Fair enough, if you take religion, and the religious, as a monolithic block.  Ironically what the secular left has been doing for decades now.

America is the most religious society on earth in the sense that it has very high rates of religious observance and nominal acceptance.  This isn't to suggest that American Christians are insincere, merely that their Christianity is essentially different from that practiced through out much of Western history, it is a Christianity where the rational element still dominates the mystical.  Most Americans say they believe in the power of prayer, but they also believe, with equal fervor, that God helps those who help themselves.  Reality to the American Christianity is not an unknowable cosmos ruled by capricious forces, as it was to his Medieval European ancestors, or to a certain extent his modern European contemporaries.  Even many of those who worry about the role of Darwinism in subverting religious worship behave toward the physical and human world in a remarkably Baconian way.  The archtype for this approach is the devout Christian who is also a corporate executive.  In managing logistics, finance and accounting he behaves in a rational and scientific manner to solve day to day problems, yet on Sunday delivers lay sermons on the power of prayer and the reality of miracles.

Contrast this to the modern European, who though nominally atheistically or agnostic is in fact more mystical than his American counterparts.  Which culture, the American or the Continental European, assumes that the individual is incapable of self-government and the wiser, all knowing, officers of the state will take care?  Which culture believes that anything can be accomplished if the individual, and society, applies itself honesty and diligently to problems, social or personal?  Who are the determinists and who are the nation that still believes in free will?  The seemingly bizarre collapse of many once highly Catholic and Orthodox countries into the hands of communism, or its weak sister democratic socialism, was only to be expected.  Marxism, straight or on the rocks, believes that history is determined by economic forces which are inevitable.  Debate is pointless as "history" will justify everything and anything done to fulfill its logical destiny.  Marx's teachings have often been called a religion, it should not be surprising that the most religious, those who believed that human reason is impotent before the unknowable forces of the universe, should choose a secular religion, that they should rebel from a spiritual tyranny toward a physical and spiritual one. 

Marxism, and its innumerable variants, failed to catch on in America, in the same way it did in continental Europe, because American epistemology was fundamentally different.  Both societies believed in faith and reason as a means of understanding the physical world and human nature.  The American approach, to oversimply greatly, was inherently more Thomistic.  Thomas Aquinas' synthesis of Pagan and Christian thought rested on on his interpretation of Aristotle.  By the nature of existence all things must have causes, nothing can be without a cause, including the universe.  Rationally, then, there must be a Prime Mover, the uncaused cause which stands outside of the universe.  It did not take much effort, for Aquinas anyway, to see the Prime Mover as a version of the Christian God.  He was foreshadowed in this by earlier Scholastics, but his views, more systematic and refined, won the day.  God, argued Aquinas, existed because he had to rationally.  The result was that whereas previously reason had been a hand maiden of faith, their roles now reversed.  The high ground, intellectually, was conceded to reason and it became both the primary and dominant element in Western thought, as compared to non-Western societies, such as Islam, where the reverse process was happening, causing the decline of Islamic culture. 

Hayek wrote of the Road to Serfdom, that controls lead to further controls and that the only alternative to this slippery slope was sticking as closely as possible to a policy of laissez-faire.  The same applies to religion.  The Road to Theocracy is made possible by faith overwhelming reason in the intellectual balance.  The only alternative is hold to reason and reject faith.  This is not the same argument, incidentally, as put forward by the nominally secular left.  Those who see theocracy in every vaguely pro-Christian muttering of a conservative politician are essentially paranoid.  We are still a very long way off from Theocray and to accuse "religious conservatives" of plotting tyranny is slander.  The equivalent would be to blame Shaw and the other Fabians for the Winter of Discontent and the crappy quality of British Leyland's products.  Yes, there is an intellectual chain of descent, but to make a moral equivalence across time and place, with so much in between, is obscene.  Yet the danger is still there.  Rand was not so much afraid of the urbane, sophisticated, essentially rational and pro-American, in all the best senses of the word, William F. Buckley Jr., she was afraid of what comes after.  She thought over the very long term and in very essentialized ways. 

Between now and forever is a very long time.  What mitigating circumstances can happen between now and the predicted cultural apocalypse are often unforeseen.  In the late 1970s, shortly before her death, it was widely assumed that America, capitalism and increasing standards of living were to go the way of the dinosaurs.  The history of the last quarter century has been one of stunning reversal in the West's prospects, even with the threat from Islamic Fascism, a threat so great only because the West refuses to act decisively.  Much of the credit for this transformation must go to William F. Buckley Jr.  If history were, as thinkers from Hegel to Fukuyama assumed, to end tomorrow WFB must be written down as a hero, perhaps even of the first order.  History isn't going to end anytime soon and there is still time for Ayn Rand to be proven right.  The future is not going to be, as it was in NR's first fifty years, a debate between left and right, but between the secular and religious right.  The secular left is intellectually dead.  It is dead in America, it is dead here in Canada. 

The corpse is being unceremonious shoved out the window by men like Karl Rove down south.  Here the corpse has become, often quite literally, a vampire.  If you don't believe me look at the Liberal's child care initiative, Nanny Care.  During Trudeaupia's heyday such a policy would have been implemented with little opposition, except on technical grounds.  Despite a dozen years in power the Liberals are no closer to implementing it.  The people of Canada are not clamoring for it as they were for Medicare and even, in Ontario, for the NEP.  The question is how we drive a stake through the heart of the vampire.  Piously or no?  By saying we must have faith in freedom or by demonstrating its power through evidence and reason.  Of all the things that we don't need to take on faith, the efficacy of a free markets, a strong voluntary civil society and limited government, is at the top of that list.