Always The Hottest Thing in Town

How shall we speak of conservatism, William F Buckley dead?  Buckley was in some ways a preposterous figure.  Had he emerged from Central Casting as the Archtypical conservative, the page boy haircut, that Mid-Atlantic accent, the millionaire father and Ivy League degree, he would have been dismissed as a Leftist cliche.  Only in his Catholicism did he deviate from the script.  The image of a conservative that American conservatives imagine is that of Ronald Reagan, the self-made man born somewhere in the American heartland.  Not too intellectual but no fool among the learned, optimistic while still being sincere, in short a man of action.  It is one of the gravest ironies of history that America, the only nation every founded by intellectuals, should have so much contempt for the species.  Should the French have been able to produce a figure like William F Buckley - a logical impossibility some would argue - his passing would have been mourned like that of a President.  Reagan was a man everyone in America has meet, the distillation of an American ideal.  Except for those who spent their youth in the precincts of Yale, Princeton or Harvard in the first half of the last century, no one ever met anyone like William F Buckley.

It was a thirty year old Buckley, the age seems impossibly young even to many younger than that still, who became in 1955 founder of the National Review and impresario of the American conservative movement.  The word conservative was a epithet and alien to the American spirit then.  Americans did not conserve anything, they were innovators, their nation founded in rebellion, their whole history a reproach to established conventions, so went the legend. 

Here was Buckley's ingenious twist, radical conservatism, a conservative out to preserve the American Revolution from its alleged defenders.  The narrative of American history, as it stood then, was an arc stretching from Jefferson and Madison, through to Jackson and Lincoln and culminating in Franklin Delano Roosevelt, all under the caption "Progress."  Buckley and the first generation conservatives objection was that at some point a disconnect had taken place, that the ideals of the American Revolution did not logically follow into the current course of Progressive thought.  It was a strain upon historical and philosophical credulity to imagine that the party of Jefferson and Cleveland was also the party of FDR and Harry Truman.  The new American Conservative was out to conserve the ideals of the early Republic against those who would pervert it into another statist Empire.

On the fifty anniversary of the National Review I observed:

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.

Later on in the post I make my essential criticism of the National Review, that it, and its founder, attempted to defend capitalism and liberty on the basis of religion.  In the long-run this is a worse than futile approach.  Keynes famously joked that in the long-run we're all dead.  Sure enough, but how long is your long run? 

Paul Tuns noted earlier today:

Many Canadian conservatives who talk about the need for a conservative infrastructure in this country pine for a Canuck version of National Review. Some people lament the lack of resources or audience, but they miss the point. It is not a shortage of conservative philanthropy or conservative readers, although that might be true, but a shortage of William F. Buckleys that prevents a Canadian Review or some such.

Wealthy conservatives, it should be noted, are thinner on the ground in this country than south of the border.  It should never be forgotten that the National Review has never turned a profit.  To begin to understand the impact of WFB, the how of this remarkable man's life, please, if you have not already, read the Publisher's Statement from the first issue of the National Review.  It stands as one of the greatest pieces of political writing of the 20th century.  Famous for it's promise to stand athwart history yelling stop, the piece is filled with brilliant insights and turns of phrase.

NATIONAL REVIEW is out of place, in the sense that the United Nations and the League of Women Voters and the New York Times and Henry Steele Commager are in place. It is out of place because, in its maturity, literate America rejected conservatism in favor of radical social experimentation. Instead of covetously consolidating its premises, the United States seems tormented by its tradition of fixed postulates having to do with the meaning of existence, with the relationship of the state to the individual, of the individual to his neighbor, so clearly enunciated in the enabling documents of our Republic.

[...]

And there are those who recognize that when all is said and done, the market place depends for a license to operate freely on the men who issue licenses — on the politicians. They recognize, therefore, that efficient getting and spending is itself impossible except in an atmosphere that encourages efficient getting and spending. And back of all political institutions there are moral and philosophical concepts, implicit or defined. Our political economy and our high-energy industry run on large, general principles, on ideas — not by day-to-day guess work, expedients and improvisations. Ideas have to go into exchange to become or remain operative; and the medium of such exchange is the printed word. A vigorous and incorruptible journal of conservative opinion is — dare we say it? — as necessary to better living as Chemistry.

[...]

We have nothing to offer but the best that is in us. That, a thousand Liberals who read this sentiment will say with relief, is clearly not enough! It isn't enough. But it is at this point that we steal the march. For we offer, besides ourselves, a position that has not grown old under the weight of a gigantic, parasitic bureaucracy, a position untempered by the doctoral dissertations of a generation of Ph.D's in social architecture, unattenuated by a thousand vulgar promises to a thousand different pressure groups, uncorroded by a cynical contempt for human freedom. And that, ladies and gentlemen, leaves us just about the hottest thing in town.

For more than half a century WFB and the National Review have been exactly that, the hottest thing in town.  To that, we here at GCH wish a very secular, though completely sincere, Amen.