Getting Back on The Right Path

“As an individual you incarnate American ideals at many levels. As the final responsible authority, in any hour of great challenge, we depend on you.”

 — William F. Buckley Jr., to President Reagan, 1985

“Let us be sure that those who come after will say of us in our time, that in our time we did everything that could be done. We finished the race; we kept them free; we kept the faith.”

 — Ronald Reagan, 1984 State of the Union address

You could not then — or now — buy the kind of coverage Time magazine gave Ronald Reagan in midsummer 1986. The cover featured a portrait of Reagan with the question, “Why Is This Man So Popular?” Inside, beneath the headline “Yankee Doodle Magic,” Lance Morrow wrote:

Ronald Reagan has found the American sweet spot. The white ball sails into the sparkling air in a high parabola and vanishes over the fence, again. The 75-year-old man is hitting home runs. Winning a lopsided vote on a tax-reform plan that others had airily dismissed. Turning Congress around on the contras. Preparing to stand with a revitalized Miss Liberty on the Fourth of July. He grins his boyish grin and bobs his head in the way he has and trots around the bases.

Via: NRO
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The Hungry and the Well Fed

In William F. Buckley’s mission statement for National Review, written in 1955, he did not mention winning elections. That’s not to say it is unimportant, unneeded, or unwanted. But it was not mentioned. In fact, Buckley wrote, “We believe that truth is neither arrived at nor illuminated by monitoring election results, binding though these are for other purposes, but by other means, including a study of human experience.”

What was mentioned was standing athwart history yelling stop. Buckley sought to build a National Review that provided commentary on the landscape of American politics and culture, building an intellectual case for conservatism. Today’s National Review is willing occasionally to yell Stop. It did so notably on the proliferation of porn in culture. But on many of the day’s fights, the editorial positions read more like those of the Republican National Committee than the standard bearer of American conservatism.

In 1955, William F. Buckley wrote,

Conservatives in this country — at least those who have not made their peace with the New Deal, and there is serious question whether there are others — are non-licensed nonconformists; and this is dangerous business in a Liberal world, as every editor of this magazine can readily show by pointing to his scars. Radical conservatives in this country have an interesting time of it, for when they are not being suppressed or mutilated by the Liberals, they are being ignored or humiliated by a great many of those of the well-fed Right, whose ignorance and amorality have never been exaggerated for the same reason that one cannot exaggerate infinity.

The present editors of National Review, over the last several years, have made it clearer and clearer that they now speak mostly for the well-fed right and not for conservatives hungering for a fight against the leviathan. They have made their peace with the New Deal, moving beyond Buckley. For that matter, Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, and most of the defunders have largely made their peace with the New Deal. And still National Review is too timid to join the merry band of defunders themselves too timid to approach the parameters under which William F. Buckley started his charge. The editors have conformed to the politics of necessary victories instead of the policy of standing “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.”

Via: Red State

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