Where are we going?

John Willson
Hillsdale College

Where in the World Are We Going?
Sunday Morning Session
The Philadelphia Society National Meeting
Philadelphia, April 2, 2006

I begin with a parable. A sixty-two year old blond haired grandmother forgot to take off cross-stitch scissors as she approached an airline check-point. She was patted down. She was virtually strip-searched. They took her scissors away. She looked at me for help. I failed her. In 1966 President Lyndon Johnson announced what he said was his “overriding rule”: “Our foreign policy must always be an extension of our domestic policy. Our safest guide to what we do abroad is what we do at home.” It will come as no surprise to members of this society that foreign and domestic policies always reflect each other. It is a truism.

Progressives usually reason from the domestic to the foreign, but that doesn’t mean that the truism doesn’t work the other way around. LBJ wanted to make a Great Society in Vietnam and prove it by what he called “coonskins on the wall;” proofs of “good things” we were doing to create democracy. We became as great a destabilizing force in Southeast Asia as the communists.

Walter Lippmann warned us in 1938 that the “dominant dogma of the age” was that government has the ability to make us happy. If government can make us happy, then using our military might to make other people happy should not, it seems, make Americans less happy. I’m afraid, however, and we have ample evidence of this in the history of every policy adventure since the Philippines: that those who think that “regime change” is a proper and valid goal of foreign policy almost always think that our republic is made of play-dough. Social engineering abroad leads inevitably to social engineering at home, and vice-versa.

The opposite of “conservative” is not “liberal” or “progressive,” The opposite of conservative is “ideologue.” I’m with Forrest McDonald on this point. America’s great achievement, our only real achievement, is limited government. The march away from limited government is led by the band playing the dominant dogma of the age, conducted by ideologues, who used to call themselves liberals but most recently
insist that they are Republicans and conservatives.

I had a good talk with David Hackett Fischer (a great historian) after he had read a piece I wrote called “World War II: the Great Liberal War”. My argument was that although Robert Taft may have been a little gloomy when he said that going into World War II guaranteed the demise of the Constitution, he wasn’t far off. David argued that World War II “unleashed the full potential of American democracy.” I replied that the way we fought the war wounded the American constitutional republic nearly unto death. Both of us may have been right.

Our foreign policy failures since World War II—and there have been many (except for one)—are almost all due to sound principles being transformed into ideology, sometimes intentionally, sometimes by circumstances. If one reads NSC-68 carefully, a document that bound us to one folly after another for twenty-six years before it was declassified shortly after the last helicopter left Saigon; or if one reads carefully Prospect for America, a frightening book funded by the Rockefeller family that sent one ideologue after another into top policy positions from Kennedy to Bush II, one would understand why Peggy Noonan and my wife get strip-searched at airports. Ben Franklin, whose contributions to our republic I sometimes quibble with, said famously that “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

National Security Strategy 2002, widely acclaimed (and criticized) as a statement of conservative foreign policy principles, in fact stands directly in the tradition of NSC-68 and Prospect for America. NSS2002 is supposedly innovative because it warns that the United States “will exercise our right of self-defense by the first use of armed force.” In fact the earlier documents implied this same doctrine, and all three spend far greater amounts of ink putting together comprehensive political, economic, social, and educational plans to democratize the
world. This used to be called “Liberal Internationalism.” Now that it’s associated with Republicans and conservatives, it must mean that we have all bought into the Dominant Dogma of the Age. George Kennan was the greatest of our foreign policy conservatives. Thank God that the ideologues didn’t transform his measured, humble, prudent “containment” into nuclear war, although they came close. Such limited government as we have left is probably due to him, or to his way of thinking. If we any longer wish to maintain a constitutional republic, what is our proper “role in the world?” As small a role as possible.

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November 19, 2008 Posted by Mr. Montague | Conservatism | Conservatism | No Comments Yet

Unshakable Books

John Willson

Hillsdale College

The Philadelphia Society, Williamsburg Meeting

November 22, 1996

“Was There A Founding?”

(Permission to quote this speech must be granted by the Author)

(For a short Real Audio excerpt of John Willson’s clarion call for

unshakable books, click here)

Some of you–my friends and colleagues in this society for more than twenty years–know what an honor, what a privilege it is for me to introduce this pathbreaking meeting. Bill Campbell tells me that it is the largest regional meeting in the thirty-two year history of the Philadelphia Society. Without a doubt that is due to the fantastic drawing power of my name. It has nothing to do with Williamsburg, or that we are here to discuss the origins of our republic, or that we have assembled a remarkable group of the most promising young scholars in the country.

Most of you will be glad to know that the title of these remarks does not imply that I am about to rehearse an old debate between Russell Kirk and Harry Jaffa about whether America is “unfounded” or “founded.” That debate is interesting and to a degree even important. But tonight I want to give instead an exhortation, to the scholars we will hear tomorrow, to the Society, to the academy in general. That exhortation is based on the conviction that we are now closer to recovering our past (or at least we have a greater opportunity) than we have been in over seven decades.

Stan Evans told me about two months ago about a conversation he had in Indianapolis with the great Richard Weaver, about 1960. Stan asked him what was most needed to keep the conservative momentum going, after the revival of ideas that Weaver was so instrumental in bringing about. Weaver said, we need “unshakable books.” Unshakable books. Books so compelling and elegant and true that they survive all challenges and the ravages of time. Weaver said this, remember, only about a decade after Lionel Trilling had pronounced the absence of conservative and reactionary ideas in America. Well, now, in 1996 there are no liberal or progressive ideas in America. They were used up in the sixties. To paraphrase Trilling, there are only “pollyannish or tyrannical mental gestures seeking to resemble ideas.”

But this doesn’t mean that it is entirely clear in which direction we are going. Daniel Boone’s biographer (1) recently told a story about the old hunter. A young interviewer asked Boone (when he was an old man) if he had ever been lost. Boone thought for a minute and said, “No, but I was once bewildered for three days.” Old Boone may well have been bewildered about the Founding. During the War for Independence he lost his son Israel in a disastrous and ill-considered attack at the battle of Blue Licks in Kentucky. He was accused of treason, although acquitted in a court-martial. Neither the Commonwealth of Virginia nor the United States Congress sympathized with his debt problems or his applications for land grants. He eventually moved to Spanish territory, pretty ambivalent for a while about the future of his country.

As things were uncertain for Boone looking ahead, they are also complicated and sometimes bewildering for us looking back. I often wish there were more honest bewilderment in my profession.

Here, we have brought together some of the ablest young scholars who are thinking about ideas, especially ideas concerning our Founding. In fact, if Mount Williamsburg were to erupt this weekend and bury the Old Capital, the prospects for recovering that Founding would be dim, indeed.

This program is a first for this increasingly venerable organization; but notice that lest we allow the kids to be home alone, the sessions are chaired by folks of my generation–that is, born after the Great Crash and before December 6, 1941. We have fought against the pagan forces of Leviathan. We have fought against New Dealers and Fair Dealers and no-dealers. We took on the Vital Center and the End of Ideology and have shown that all reports of our death were premature. We have not gone away. We have bequeathed to this new generation unshakable books and the deconstruction of deconstruction, and we charge them to “see then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise; Redeeming the time, because the days are evil.” (Eph5:15-16)

You must deal with Boomer-books, and the legacy of the Left’s long march through the institutions. On one level you have a task easier than ours: how much of a problem can it be, intellectually to annihilate the Clinton generation and its pathetic offspring, multiculturalism? On the other hand you have almost invincible ignorance to combat. I have found that almost three-quarters of my Hillsdale freshmen have not read the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. What do suppose is the percentage at Appalachian State, or even William and Mary?

As a teacher, I used to worry about this, but it is actually a bad-news, good news situation. The bad news is that they haven’t read the documents. The good news is that they haven’t read the documents–taught to them by people who think the Revolution was a multicultural event. In a way, the generation following yours is a forest of virgin timber. We have held off the clear cutters of the Left, and have destroyed or rendered obsolete most of their tools. It is your forest to harvest.

Not that it’s an easy task. Three-quarters of a century ago progressive ideas (almost all of them collectivist and relativist) about the Founding swept through the habitats of elite culture. Charles Beard was one of the apostles (An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution had come out in 1913), and he wanted us to believe that the Founding was, eventually, about greed. Walter Lippmann made a comment that could have saved us a great deal of pain: that, far from creating the Constitution to protect their property, the founders used their “class privileges” to preserve their country.(2) This was apparently too much common sense; it was a generation later that an unshakable book by Forrest McDonald finally laid the forces of neo-marxism to rest.

But, just as failed socialism in recent years has put on a new political disguise (environmentalism), progressives keep grasping at the Founding. Their headings are more likely now to be “race, class, gender” than “the Revolution considered as a social movement,” but the point is the same. “The compelling image of Revolutionary transformation”(3) is still very exciting for a whole new generation of neo-progressives. They believe the Founding was “as radical and as revolutionary as any in history.”(4)

There wasn’t much change, on the whole. I keep looking. Not long ago I discovered that the loyalist Anglican Rector of Trinity Church (which owns Wall Street), Samuel Auchmuty, was part of a notable social event. Fleeing New York, “his critics were amused to see his house immediately taken over by female camp followers of the Regulars for a place of business.”(5) That, I guess, is social change. And George Washington did try to fix wages and prices in areas controlled by the Continental Army, prompting John Witherspoon to criticize him severely on behalf of the Congress. Neither episode lasted long.

I am particularly annoyed when neo-progressives take refuge in the “touched-off” or the “made possible” theory. The Founding “touched off” the anti-slavery movement, for example, or it “made possible” the movements for women’s rights in the 19th century. Aside from the silliness of this argument–everything, it can be said, was “touched off” in the Book of Genesis–do we really need to be reminded that the United States was one of the last civilized countries to abolish slavery? And then only after a war which really was a revolution in certain undebatable ways? Or that every argument ever made by women’s rights movements was written down by Mary Wollstonecraft by 1792; who had nothing whatsoever to do with the American Founding?

In fact, most of what is really important about the American Founding lies in how a potentially harmful revolution was contained. It was not entirely averted, but it was contained and directed to the ends of limited government and the practice of liberties that had long existed in most American provinces. David Hackett Fischer tells this story:

…historian George Bancroft asked a New England townsman why he and his friends took up arms in the Revolution. Had he been inspired by the ideas of John Locke? The old soldier confessed that he had never heard of Locke. Had he been moved by Thomas Paine’s Common Sense? The honest Yankee admitted that he had never read Tom Paine. Had the Declaration of Independence made a difference? The veteran thought not. When asked to explain why he fought in his own words, he answered simply that New Englanders had always managed their own affairs, and Britain tried to stop them, and so the war began.(6)

The old Yankee’s attitude helps to explain why a potential revolution could be contained, but it doesn’t explain how that attitude was converted successfully into a relatively stable republic. We should note here that progressive historians have the same advantage as their political counterparts. In pursuit of what Forrest McDonald has called their “dogmatic, scientific, secular millenialism,” if a program doesn’t work, it hasn’t been tried ardently enough. The “touched-off” historians won’t leave their dreams of social transformation alone until they have gotten grants to study every backcountry settlement, slave cabin, Iroquois longhouse, sailor’s wharf, and household kitchen in revolutionary America.

In contrast, the men and women on these panels this weekend take ideas and the public record seriously. A few liberals learn to do this from experience. Theodore White, reflecting on his confrontation with revolution in Yenan during World War II, said (many years later, in In Search of History), “In the simplest historic terms, [Mao] was not campaigning against Chiang K’ai-shek; he was campaigning against Confucius and two thousand years of ideas he meant to root out and replace with his own.”(7) White was unusual: an intellectually honest progressive, who eventually gave up on his visionary agenda and learned how right John Dickinson was when he said to the federal convention, “Experience must be our only guide. Reason may mislead us.”

Dickinson’s wise counsel brings me to what I really want to say tonight–and I’ll say it briefly. In continuing to take ideas seriously, as they are held by people, and contained in the public record and in the great documents of the Founding, and in its law and literature, we are engaged in a powerful act of recovery. The “experience” to which Dickinson referred was the common experience of his (or by extension any) generation in their solemn deliberations; the tests of history and common sense. “Experience” was the “ubiquitous criterion” of the ages, the “cardinal touchstone of validity.”(8) Dickinson wrote a note to himself for one of his convention speeches: “The best Philosophy is drawn from Experiments, the best Policy from Experience.” The Founders (or most of them) knew they were doing something profound, or they would never have used the phrase, Novus Ordo Seclorum. But they knew that they were doing it in a way that was consistent with older orders, too.

Four elements of their common experience appear in all of the Founders’ debates, writings, and documents: Classical history, especially the history of the Roman Republic (often as it was filtered through Renaissance and Enlightenment authors) The Bible, which they read as history as well as theology English Common Law, which was the repository of natural law as well as of English liberties American colonial history, containing by then lessons from a century and a half of “managing their own affairs”; that so much of their discussion was conducted in this context shows that they were engaged in recovering as well as founding, of protecting liberty much more than inventing it.

They were as serious about what could be learned from the fate of the Amphictionic Council as we should be about their arguments over imitating foreign fashions. They thought that stable and secure and decent governments, devoted to the protection of liberty, must be based on truths of human nature revealed in experience.

It seems to me that our unshakable books should emulate their enterprise. John Adams once said about the American and French revolutions, “Ours was resistance to innovation; theirs was innovation itself.” A flippant comment, certainly; it nevertheless captures an important truth: insofar as it was successful, the American Founding was rooted in ancient truths, it was not attempting to “touch-off” a transfiguration of the world.

Let me finish this exhortation with an example and a suggestion. I have tried for many years to teach the American Founding by inviting my students into the lives of its Philosopher-Statesmen, and then into the rich things they wrote. A teacher cannot do this with Big Books, however unshakable. I have written four Little Books, hoping to prepare students to read with profit the greater works of unshakable scholarship my generation has produced. I have found that even the generally conservative and often religious students at Hillsdale College are infected with what Perry Miller once called “obtuse secularism.” It is hard for them to connect liberty and religion in a way that will help effect a recovery of our past. They want either to put a wall of separation between the two, as the Supreme Court instructs them to, or to believe that the Founders were empowered by the Almighty to proclaim a Christian nation.

That Christianity (and the Bible) was at the heart of the Founding is simply undeniable. The controversy over a resident Bishop consumed at least as much ink as the Stamp Act. The constitutions of the states and the United States are nothing if not written expressions of the Christian view of human nature. In every one of the first twenty years of independent national existence governments at all levels proclaimed days of fasting, prayer, and thanksgiving. The churches (even a majority of Anglican priests) overwhelmingly supported the War for Independence. The definition of liberty preferred by Americans was Biblical: “They shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid.” (Mi4:4) John Adams said in 1818 (and by that time he was a Unitarian) that the revolution was over before the war began–it was a change in the religious sentiments of the American people. So important was the Great Awakening to later events that it is very tempting to parody Mark Twain. He said that Sir Walter Scott caused the Civil War; we might add that George Whitefield preached the American Revolution.

This does not mean that even the most enthusiastic ministers thought that the Founding created a Holy Commonwealth. But it does mean that the deism of Benjamin Rush and Tom Paine dramatically failed to become the faith of the republic, that the ambivalent Unitarian Jefferson was profoundly out of step with his countrymen religiously, and that a crucial part of our act of recovery is to show again the right relation between religion and liberty.

The Rev. Dr. John Witherspoon, President of Princeton, signer of the Declaration, member of Congress, teacher of statesmen, a principal author of the Presbyterian Constitution, has had one biography written about him in the 202 years since his death. That was in 1925. The Rev. Dr. Timothy Dwight, President of Yale, epic poet, chronicler of New England and its “second citizen” (John Adams was its first), has inspired one biography since his death in 1817. That was in 1939. I pray that someone will write these characters into unshakable books.

We don’t have to claim unreasonable things, or to insist that the American Founding was “conservative” in its essence, or that America was Christian at its core, to make our point, and to effect a recovery. There were radicals around, even French-style Jacobins, and they had their followers. There were plenty of “enlightened” deists and Unitarians willing to take Christianity to new heights of progress. But a remarkable generation of Founders–not “inventors,” but Founders–contained them all, and built, and protected institutions based on ideas about liberty and truths about human nature that are as old as God. Do good work this weekend. Advance the cause of recovery.

End of exhortation.

Footnotes

1. John Mack Farragher, at Hillsdale College’s Center for Constructive Alternatives Seminar, “Legends of the American West,” September, 1996.

2. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (NY: Macmillan, 1923), p.280

3. Ronald Hoffman, in the Preface to The Transforming Hand of Revolution: Reconsidering the American Revolution as a Social Movement, ed. Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville and London: United States Capitol Historical Society by the University Press of Virginia, 1996).

4. Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1992), p.5.

5. Clifford K. Shipton, New England Life in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), p.482.

6. David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (NY: Oxford University Press, 1989), p.827.

7. Theodore H. White, In Search of History (NY: Harper & Row, 1978), p.260.

8. Ellis Sandoz, “Philosophical and Religious Dimensions of the American Founding,” Intercollegiate Review, XXX (Spring, 1995), p.29.

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November 19, 2008 Posted by Mr. Montague | First Principles, Founding Fathers, Permanent Things, Western Civilization | First Principles, Founding Fathers, Permanent Things, Unshakable books, Western Tradition | No Comments Yet

Mountains beyond Mountains

Sarah Bramwell

The Philadelphia Society 40^th Gala! National Meeting
May 1, 2004

In your program, you will read that I am a freelance writer. This was true at the time the program was printed, but it is no longer. I am in the employ of Colorado Governor Bill Owens as his deputy press secretary. I tell you this not only because of the obvious benefits of self-aggrandizement, but because my position obliges me to say that the following opinions are my own, and do not reflect those of the Governor.

Modern American conservatism began in an effort to do two things: defeat Communism and roll back creeping socialism. A half century later, these goals are no longer relevant. The first was obviated by our success, the latter by our failure. So what is left of conservatism?

Many conservatives, especially since September 11, believe that a major, if not the major calling of conservatives today is to articulate and defend a certain brand of international grand strategy. Let me say that I believe this view to be not only mistaken, but quite possibly harmful to the conservative movement.

It is mistaken because the truth of the matter is that conservatism neither has nor ought to have a particular foreign policy. I certainly do not mean to say that conservatives should cease to be interested in foreign policy. But the role of conservatives qua conservatives in foreign policy, as in every other area, is to resist the temptations of ideology. Everything else, like so much in politics, is a matter of prudence and judgment, on which there is wide room for legitimate disagreement.

I suspect that confusion exists today on this rather elementary point in large part because the Cold War created an artificial situation in which all conservatives agreed on the same foreign policy goal and strategy. Communism was an armed, international ideology that threatened to obliterate civilization. All conservatives, therefore, were obliged to fight it and buck up the West’s resolve in the struggle against the Soviet Union. In sum, anti-Communism was not a question on which conservatives could reasonably disagree, but an essential conservative principle.

No similar principle, however, exists today. Despite this, many conservatives have continued the Cold War habit of making foreign policy into an ideological battle. On one side we have conservatives who believe that the United States has a moral obligation to spread democracy anywhere and everywhere around the globe; on the other, we have conservatives who believe that an activist foreign policy betrays conservatism’s isolationist or “America First” roots.

Neither view will wash. Isolationism in the 1930s was nothing but a logical deduction from conservative anti-Communism. Right-wingers argued against intervening in World War II because Nazi Germany, as unappealing as it was, thwarted Stalin’s ambitions. With Nazi Germany gone, therefore, hardly a single conservative isolationist remained by the time the Cold War was in full swing. All quondam isolationists either died like Nock, or converted, like Buckley.

Isolationism, in other words, was a strategy, not a guiding principle. Today, it wears a no less utopian guise than pro-democracy triumphalism. What do we do, after all, with our myriad deployments and alliances around the world? To back out on them all immediately would be disastrous. It is all very well and good to say that in some Platonic Empyrean the United States would only worry about its own liberty and not that of others, but here in our fallen state, such a scenario is unimaginable.

We likewise have no moral obligation to spread democracy around the world. After all, democracy is not even the best form of government. Conservatives, together with the weight of the Western tradition, have always favored a mixed constitution that balances the interests of the one, the few, and the many. It goes without saying that “We must make the world safe for mixed constitutions” is not the most euphonious rallying cry.

None of this is to say that some form of isolationist or interventionist foreign policy cannot be endorsed by conservatives. On the contrary, my very point is that both policies could be seen as properly conservative grand strategies for achieving American interests. For some time now, conservatives have enjoyed the liberty to disagree on important questions of foreign policy. What I would like to see is that we be allowed to do so without fear that someone else in the movement will declare us anathema.

My own opinion is that while Islamist-inspired terrorism is the most immediate threat to our security, in the long term our major struggle is against the international class of technocrats that in the name of “international law” seeks to efface our bitterly-won rights to self-government. Conservatives must fashion a strategy not only against terrorism but also against the international New Class, and our strategy for defeating the one must not be inconsistent with our strategy for defeating the other.

In any case, the important point is once again that articulating and defending some kind of international policy is not the major goal of conservatism in the next forty years. How about the second founding goal of the conservative movement, namely, halting creeping socialism? Like it or not, the administrative state is here to stay. Conservatives can continue to nibble away at it, and the past decade has seen a small wave of reforms that leaves one with some modest hope for the future. We’re not going to abolish social security, but we are going to see private health accounts that give Americans more freedom. The public-school system will clatter along in all its disastrousness, but charter schools will become more and more popular. These and other improvements on the margins should continue, but there are other things that are more important.

So, when the two founding goals are no longer relevant, what is left for us as conservatives to do? Well, since the 1960s, the conservative movement took on a third goal, namely winning the culture wars. By culture wars, I mean everything from preserving traditional morality, to passing on the Western inheritance, to preserving a distinctly American common culture, to resisting the threat posed by biotechnology to human nature itself. To win these wars, conservatives must make the case against such things as gay marriage, stem-cell research, open borders, and our hideous suburban sprawl. All these battles are really part of the same war—a war, unfortunately, that we seem determined to lose.

Since my time is limited, I’d like to examine our losing ways by looking only at one issue: gay marriage. In college, even as we conservatives would lament the inglorious decline of the West, even as we steeped ourselves in doom-and-gloom conservatism like so many Romans in their baths, still we could not help but be mightily optimistic about the future of conservatism. Never had conservatives at Yale been so many and so active; never had conservatives had such a wealth of opportunities for writing, bringing in speakers, and influencing the debate on campus.

And yet in the past nine months, this has all appeared quite hollow to me. Why? Because of the amazing disappearing act conservatives have pulled in the face of gay marriage. After so many advances, it seems, we have rolled over and played dead.

The most rigorous and intellectually impressive conservative writers—the ones we depended upon to articulate the conservative position on such controversial issues as stem cells, abortion, and affirmative action—have, it seems, been struck dumb. They have relegated themselves to reporting on the political reaction to gay marriage or critiquing the vicissitudes of federal marriage amendment proposals. Virtually everyone has avoided the basic issue of whether sodomy ought to be normalized.

It used to be that, when challenged in the culture wars, conservatives only gain in strength. The conservative movement benefited greatly from an infusion of intellectual firepower and initiative from disenchanted liberals and democrats during the 1960s and ’70s. Ronald Reagan extended this crossover effect into the political arena, solidifying the intellectual gains that conservatism had made in a very public and concrete way. Conservatism has continued boisterously to defy the aftershocks of the 60s and 70s.

Now, by contrast, as gay marriage becomes a reality, we have amazingly only become weaker. I have no idea what accounts for this extraordinary lack of nerve. What I do know is that no sooner had the Lawrence decision come down from on high but conservatives, discouraged before the battle had even begun, lamented the inevitability of gay marriage, posited a new world of alternative arrangements, and even urged that family law be in some sense privatized. It seemed that the fighting spirit had all of a sudden departed from even the most reliable conservative organs.

That few prominent conservative thinkers and writers are making the intellectually difficult and socially risky case against homosexualism has had a devastating effect. Thousands of conservatives—college students, housewives, activists, even President Bush and members of Congress—rely on the pundit class to make the controversial arguments not just so that they know what to think and say, but because the pundit class has given them the intellectual cover to do so. The most important job of polemicists is constantly to move—or, at the very least, defend—the boundaries of debate. In effect, they are expanding and securing the perimeter for the footsoldiers to occupy. Well, when the advance guard goes AWOL, the whole conservative side in the culture wars collapses.

To say that the institution of marriage is important to Western civilization and therefore worth fighting for is an understatement. And yet when this institution is under attack as never before in Western history, conservatives are silent. One need look no further than the covers and tables of contents of the most prominent conservative journals for evidence of this. Of 50 articles, probably 40 of them will be on the War on Terror, and only two or three on gay marriage. This is the cultural battle of our age, and we write an article here and there on the subject. There is no precedent for this disappearing act in the history of the conservative movement.

This is precisely what the other side wants. This is a fight, mind you, not only for traditional sexual morality, but for the very liberty that conservatives have always prided themselves on defending. With the advent of government-mandated gay marriage, what is taught in the public schools will change: gay sex will have to be taught just as heterosexual sex is. The words “husband” and “wife” will have to go. Meanwhile, the full power of federal anti-discrimination laws will be brought to bear, making discrimination against gays illegal. Catholic charities and Christian schools may be forced to hire and teach against their religion. I am not being hysterical, for these things have already come to pass in other Western nations. Sure, we have the free speech clause of the First Amendment to protect us, but that only goes so far, and it is subject to the vagaries of Supreme Court interpretation. There is a chance that we conservatives will no longer even be allowed our saving remnant, much less be a major political and moral force.

Once we lose the gay marriage fight, the hard-won gains that have been made with regard to traditional sexual morality will be lost. How do you argue for abstinence and monogamy when there’s a whole population of people who can get married but don’t bother? Once heterosexual and homosexual sex are equated, all the arguments for traditional sexual morality—from prudence, from nature, from religion—collapse.

So, where do I think conservatism will be in the next 40 years? I must confess that I am not exactly full of hope. The danger in the next 40 years is not losing the battles but, for want of fighting them, becoming irrelevant.

The issues with which we will grapple in the coming decades—chief among them cloning and other matters biotechnological—will require our focus and our unity. If we can but put aside our differences for a while, we stand a chance. If we cannot, then we don’t deserve that chance.

Thank you.

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November 19, 2008 Posted by Mr. Montague | Conservatism, Sarah Bramwell, Western Civilization | Conservatism, Rising Generation, Sarah Bramwell, Young Right | No Comments Yet

Bush as the Dark Knight

JULY 25, 2008

What Bush and Batman Have in Common

By ANDREW KLAVAN

Article

Buckley Announces Departure

June 29, 2004

National Review Founder Says It’s Time to Leave Stage

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

In 1954, when Ronald Reagan was still a registered Democrat and host of ”General Electric Theater,” the 28-year-old William Frank Buckley Jr. decided to start a magazine as a standard-bearer for the fledgling conservative movement. In the 50-year ascent of the American right since then, his publication, National Review, has been its most influential journal and Mr. Buckley has been the magazine’s guiding spirit and, until today, controlling shareholder.

Tonight, however, Mr. Buckley, 78, is giving up control. In an interview, he said he planned to relinquish his shares today to a board of trustees he had selected. Among them are his son, the humorist Christopher Buckley; the magazine’s president, Thomas L. Rhodes; and Austin Bramwell, a 2000 graduate of Yale and one of the magazine’s youngest current contributors.

Mr. Buckley’s ”divestiture,” as he calls it, represents the exit of one of the forefathers of modern conservatism. It is also the latest step in the gradual quieting of one of the most distinctive voices in the business of cultural and political commentary, the writer and editor who founded his magazine on a promise to stand ”athwart history, yelling ‘Stop,’ at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who urge it.”

In explaining his decision, Mr. Buckley said he had taken some satisfaction in the triumph of conservatism since then, though he expressed some complaints about President Bush’s unconservative spending and some retrospective doubts about the wisdom of invading Iraq. But his decision, Mr. Buckley said, had more to do with his own mortality.

”The question is choose some point to quit or die onstage, and there wouldn’t be any point in that,” Mr. Buckley said, recalling his retirement from his television program ”Firing Line” a few years ago. ”Thought was given and plans were made to proceed with divestiture.”

With characteristic playfulness, Mr. Buckley said that he had not disclosed the timing of the hand-over. He plans to give the trustees his shares at a private party tonight at an Italian restaurant near the magazine’s East 34th Street office. ”It is kind of a big event in my life,” he said, sipping a glass of wine over lunch at the same restaurant last week. ”I thought I might as well put a little bit of theater in it. When I leave this building a week from now, I will probably feel a little bit different.”

Mr. Buckley, whose syndicated column will continue to appear in the magazine, said he did not expect changes in the contents of the magazine. Richard Lowry, the editor, will continue in that job. Mr. Rhodes, president of National Review, will become chairman of the newly formed board of trustees. The trustees will include Evan Galbraith, an executive of Morgan Stanley who was ambassador to France under Mr. Reagan, and Daniel Oliver, who was chairman of the Federal Trade Commission under Mr. Reagan and whose son, Drew Oliver, was an assistant editor at the magazine.

By virtue of his relative youth, Mr. Bramwell is the most notable of the five trustees. ”I wanted somebody who is very young and very talented,” Mr. Buckley said. ”One likes to think in the long term.”

A former officer of the Conservative Party of the Yale Political Union, Mr. Bramwell began writing for National Review two years ago as a Harvard law student. At a recent ceremony at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, he presented Mr. Buckley an award for contributions to the conservative movement along with an admiring, perhaps even Buckleyesque, appraisal of Mr. Buckley’s literary style.

”By ironic periphrasis, arch understatement and surprising deployment of familiar and of course unfamiliar words, Buckley convinced his opponents that he knew something they did not, and what’s more, that he intended to keep the secret from them,” Mr. Bramwell said as he presented the award. ”Thus did he waken their minds to the possibility that liberalism is not the philosophia ultima but just another item in the baleful catalogue of modern ideologies.”

Not everyone shares this assessment of Mr. Buckley’s work. Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, called Mr. Buckley’s sometimes baroque style ”genially ridiculous.”

Mr. Wieseltier added: ”It is a kind of antimodern pretense, but of course he is in fact a completely modern man. His thinking and his writing have all the disadvantages of a happy man. The troubling thing about Bill Buckley’s work is how singularly untroubled it is by things.”

But Mr. Buckley’s voice has always been singular. He was not much older than Mr. Bramwell when he founded National Review. The son of an oilman, Mr. Buckley was already famous for his first book, ”God and Man at Yale” (1951). Conservatism in the United States was close to its 20th-century nadir, marked by Dwight D. Eisenhower’s defeat of the conservative Robert Taft for the 1952 Republican nomination.

The first issue of National Review appeared in 1955. As Mr. Buckley tells it, he became chief editor in part because deferring to a young man was unthreatening to many venerable contributors. ”It was easier to allow them to accept a 29-year-old than to select among themselves who will be boss,” he said.

William J. Casey, who later became director of central intelligence under Mr. Reagan, incorporated the magazine. Mr. Buckley retained ownership of all the voting stock. National Review has never made a profit, Mr. Buckley said. It makes up any shortfalls each year with contributions from about 1,000 to 1,500 donors, and every other year it sends a solicitation to its subscribers in an effort to add names to the ”A list” of regular donors. Mr. Buckley will continue to write the fund-raising letters, he said.

As for conservatism today, Mr. Buckley said there was a growing debate on the right about how the war in Iraq squared with the traditional conservative conviction that American foreign policy should seek only to protect its vital interests.

”With the benefit of minute hindsight, Saddam Hussein wasn’t the kind of extra-territorial menace that was assumed by the administration one year ago,” Mr. Buckley said. ”If I knew then what I know now about what kind of situation we would be in, I would have opposed the war.”

Asked whether the growth of the federal government over the last four years diminished his enthusiasm for Mr. Bush, he reluctantly acknowledged that it did. ”It bothers me enormously,” he said. ”Should I growl?”

Still, he professed more than a little pride at the country’s rightward drift during his years in control of National Review. ”We thought to influence conservative thought, which we succeeded in doing,” he said.

Correction: July 1, 2004, Thursday An article on Tuesday about William F. Buckley Jr.’s decision to give up control of his magazine, National Review, misstated the location of a ceremony at which he received an award from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. It was the National Building Museum in Washington, not the Heritage Foundation.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A00E6DE1538F93AA15755C0A9629C8B63

November 19, 2008 Posted by Mr. Montague | William F. Buckley Jr. | William F. Buckley Jr. | No Comments Yet

Conservative Foreign Policy

April 19, 2004

Lack of Resolution in Iraq Finds Conservatives Divided

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

A growing faction of conservatives is voicing doubts about a prolonged United States military involvement in Iraq, putting hawkish neoconservatives on the defensive and posing questions for President Bush about the degree of support he can expect from his political base.

The continuing violence and mounting casualties in Iraq have given new strength to the traditional conservative doubts about using American military power to remake other countries and about the potential for Western-style democracy without a Western cultural foundation. In the eyes of many conservatives, the Iraqi resistance has discredited the more hawkish neoconservatives — a group closely identified with Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, and William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard.

Considered descendants of a group of mostly Jewish intellectuals who switched from the political left to the right at the height of the cold war, the neoconservatives are defined largely by their conviction that American military power can be a force for good in the world. They championed the invasion of Iraq as a way to turn that country into a bastion of democracy in the Middle East.

”In late May of last year, we neoconservatives were hailed as great visionaries,” said Kenneth R. Weinstein, chief operating officer of the Hudson Institute, a center of neoconservative thinking. ”Now we are embattled, both within the conservative movement and in the battle over postwar planning.

”Those of us who favored a more muscular approach to American foreign policy and a more Wilsonian view of our efforts in Iraq find ourselves pitted against more traditional conservatives, who have more isolationist instincts to begin with, and they are more willing to say, ‘Bring the boys home,’ ” Mr. Weinstein said.

Richard A. Viguerie, a conservative stalwart and the dean of conservative direct mail, said the Iraq war had created an unusual schism. ”I can’t think of any other issue that has divided conservatives as much as this issue in my political lifetime,” Mr. Viguerie said.

Recent events, he said, ”call into question how conservatives see the White House. It doesn’t look like the White House is as astute as we thought they were.”

Although Mr. Bush appears to be sticking to the neoconservative view, the growing skepticism among some conservatives about the Iraqi occupation is upending some of the familiar dynamics of left and right. To be sure, both sides have urged swift and decisive retaliation against the Iraqi insurgents in the short term, but some on the right are beginning to support a withdrawal as soon as is practical, while some Democrats, including Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the likely presidential nominee, have called for sending more troops to Iraq.

In an editorial in this week’s issue of The Weekly Standard, Mr. Kristol applauded Mr. Kerry’s stance.

Referring to the conservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan, an outspoken opponent of the war and occupation, Mr. Kristol said in an interview on Friday: ”I will take Bush over Kerry, but Kerry over Buchanan or any of the lesser Buchananites on the right. If you read the last few issues of The Weekly Standard, it has as much or more in common with the liberal hawks than with traditional conservatives.”

In contrast, this week’s issue of National Review, the magazine founded by William F. Buckley and a standard-bearer for mainstream conservatives, adopted a newly skeptical tone toward the neoconservatives and toward the occupation. In an editorial titled ”An End to Illusion,” the Bush administration was described as having ”a dismaying capacity to believe its own public relations.”

The editorial criticized the administration as having ”an underestimation of the difficulty of implanting democracy in alien soil, and an overestimation in particular of the sophistication of what is still fundamentally a tribal society and one devastated by decades of tyranny.”

The editorial described that error as ”Wilsonian,” another term for the neoconservatives’ faith that United States military power can improve the world but a label associated with the liberal internationalism of President Woodrow Wilson.

”The Wilsonian tendency has grown stronger in conservative foreign policy thought in recent years,” the editorial continued, adding, ”As we have seen in Iraq, the world isn’t as malleable as some Wilsonians would have it.”

The editorial was careful to emphasize that the war served legitimate United States interests and that violence against Americans in Iraq deserved harsh retribution. But it concluded: ”It is the Iraqis who have to save Iraq. It is their country, not ours.”

Some conservatives who focus on limited government and lower taxes said they were also worried about the political costs of an extended occupation of Iraq.

”We don’t want to put troops into a situation that is increasingly a public-relations problem for the president,” said Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth, a group of conservative political donors. ”No one wants body bags coming home in September and October.”

So far President Bush appears to be sticking to Wilsonian goals. ”We’re changing the world,” he said last week in a White House news conference, defending the occupation and pledging to maintain a military involvement after the planned June 30 handover of sovereignty to an Iraqi governing body. ”My job as the president is to lead this nation into making the world a better place.”

Some of the main conservative opponents of the invasion, including Mr. Buchanan and the libertarian Cato Institute — were quiet after the war began but have now renewed their criticism.

In his syndicated column last week, Mr. Buchanan, who argued against the invasion on the grounds that the United States should use military force only to defend its vital interests, posed a series of questions: ”Do we go in deeper, or do we cut our losses and look for the nearest exit? How much blood and treasure are we willing to invest in democracy in Baghdad, and for how long? Is a democratic Iraq vital to our security? What assurances are there that we can win this war?”

David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, said conservatives were becoming more receptive to Mr. Buchanan’s arguments against the neoconservatives. ”Now that they see Iraq edging into a nation-building kind of thing, conservatives are more skeptical,” Mr. Keene said. ”It isn’t that someone went out and rhetorically beat the neoconservatives in an argument. It’s just that they went out and tested their scheme against reality on the ground.”

In a recent interview, Representative John J. Duncan Jr. of Tennessee, one of the few Republicans who voted against the invasion, said he believed the administration should seek an exit soon. ”I think we should announce to the world that no country has come close to doing as much for Iraq as we have, but there are a significant number of people who don’t appreciate what we have done,” Mr. Duncan said. ”I think we should get on out, we should celebrate victory and we should leave.”

Conservatives who question the occupation can point to a long history of opposition from the right to United States military action overseas. Conservatives opposed Wilson’s entry into World War I, and many opposed United States involvement in World War II until after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

But the cold war rallied conservatives around the military interventions abroad, and the protests of the Vietnam War era solidified the reputations of conservatives as hawks and liberals as doves. Still, even if some conservatives appeared to be returning to the movement’s more isolationist roots, Mr. Kristol said he was undeterred.

”If we have to make common cause with the more hawkish liberals and fight the conservatives, that is fine with me, too,” he said.

Recalling a famous saying of his father, the neoconservative pioneer Irving Kristol, that a neoconservative was ”a liberal who has been mugged by reality,” the younger Mr. Kristol joked that now they might end up as neoliberals — defined as ”neoconservatives who had been mugged by reality in Iraq.”

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A00E0DE113BF93AA25757C0A9629C8B63

November 19, 2008 Posted by Mr. Montague | Conservatism, Foreign Policy, Iraq | Foreign Policy, Iraq, neoconservatives | No Comments Yet

Buckley on the War on Drugs

January 22, 1996

Leading Conservative Voice Endorses Legalizing Narcotics

By CHRISTOPHER S. WREN

The war on illicit drugs has yet to gain prominence in this campaign year, although public concern about drug abuse is unabated.

Indeed, a recent Gallup poll reported that 94 percent of the 1,020 adults surveyed last September viewed drug abuse as a crisis or serious problem for the United States, more so than health care, welfare or the Federal budget deficit.

Positioning the Republicans to seize the issue, Senator Bob Dole, the majority leader, and Speaker Newt Gingrich last month announced the formation of a task force of 18 Congressional Republicans, a group intended to fill what Republicans labeled “the leadership void” on drug policy left by the White House.

Now the evangelist of libertarian Republicanism, William F. Buckley Jr., has taken to his pulpit hoping to force a debate about drugs. In what would seem uncharacteristic for a conservative political weekly, Mr. Buckley’s National Review asserts that it is time to make narcotics legal.

“The War on Drugs Is Lost,” announces the cover of the new issue of National Review, and for 15 pages Mr. Buckley and a half dozen other proponents make their arguments for dropping the criminality of marijuana and even harder drugs, like cocaine and heroin.

Far from endorsing drugs, National Review’s editors insist in an editorial that “we deplore their use; we urge the stiffest feasible sentences against anyone convicted of selling a drug to a minor.”

“But having said that,” the editorial continues, “it is our judgment that the war on drugs has failed, that it is diverting intelligent energy away from how to deal with the problem of addiction, that it is wasting our resources, and that it is encouraging civil, judicial and penal procedures associated with police states.”

Robert W. Sweet, a Federal judge in New York who contributed one of the essays in National Review, noted that proposed Government spending on the drug war would exceed $17 billion this year, with more than $1 billion going to Federal prisons, while overall drug use remained constant. “Our present prohibitive policy has failed, flatly and without serious question,” he wrote.

In a telephone interview from Florida, Mr. Buckley said that National Review’s endorsement of legalization is “a dangerous one, in view of the association of drugs with evil.” He expressed the hope that “the thinking community will now begin to face the issue.”

Mr. Buckley, who plans to follow up with three televised debates on his PBS program, “Firing Line,” has advocated legalization before. So to varying degrees have the other contributors. Besides Judge Sweet, they are Steven B. Duke, a law professor at Yale University; Joseph D. McNamara, a former police chief in Kansas City, Mo., and San Jose, Calif.; Ethan A. Nadelmann, director of the Lindesmith Center, a research institute in New York; Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke of Baltimore and Thomas Szasz, a psychiatrist at Syracuse University.

They generally support Mr. Buckley’s thesis that “the cost of the drug war is many times more painful, in all its manifestations, than would be the licensing of drugs combined with intensive education of nonusers and intensive education designed to warn those who experiment with drugs.”

His view was not shared by prominent Republicans like Senator Dole, who said yesterday, “Legalizing drugs is a terrible idea that would only raise the white flag of surrender.”

The prospect also angers law-enforcement officials and narcotics experts whose views were absent from National Review’s colloquium.

“I think it would be a disaster,” said Thomas A. Constantine, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration in Washington. “As a citizen, I’m appalled at adding one more social ill to a country that already has AIDS and murders.”

Legalizing drugs, he said, would encourage more people to experiment, increasing addiction and creating a substantial black market for those not old enough to buy drugs legally. For the socially and financially well off to propose legalization is elitist, Mr. Constantine said, because “the hard-core drug problem exists in the most vulnerable part of our society,” including among poor or jobless minority groups.

Taking the libertarian view, Mr. Buckley wrote that “those who suffer from the abuse of drugs have themselves to blame for it.” He argued that their plight should be subordinated to that of nonusers whose life, liberty and property were threatened by the climate that illegal drugs have created.

Opponents of legalization include the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, which released a study last September on the consequences of legalizing narcotics. By making drugs as easy for young people to get as cigarettes and liquor are now, it concluded, “legalization of drugs such as heroin, cocaine and marijuana would threaten a pediatric pandemic in the United States.”

“Drugs like heroine and cocaine are not dangerous because they are illegal,” the report said, “they are illegal because they are dangerous.”

Dr. Herbert Kleber, the center’s medical director, said there were about 15 million alcoholics and 2 million cocaine addicts in the United States. “Cocaine is much more addicting than alcohol,” he said in an interview. “There is every reason to believe if you make cocaine as freely available, the number of addicts will rise” and even exceed the number of alcoholics.

Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, a co-chairman of the new Republican task force, reported: “There’s absolutely no sentiment on Capitol Hill for drug legalization. In fact, drug legalization would be an invitation to the Mad Hatter’s tea party.”

At the White House, Rahm Emanuel, a special assistant to President Clinton, rejected the notion that the President had ignored the drug problem. He also criticized Mr. Buckley’s stance.

“The National Review may want to throw in the towel, but we’re not,” said Mr. Emanuel, who advises the President on narcotics matters. Legalization, he said, “is wrong because it sends the wrong signal to children and because it’s defeatist.”

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9806E7DF1F39F931A15752C0A960958260

November 19, 2008 Posted by Mr. Montague | Conservatism, National Review, William F. Buckley Jr. | libertarian conservative, War on Drugs, William F. Buckley Jr. | No Comments Yet

Bramwell to Define Post-Buckley Future

July 17, 2004

Young Right Tries to Define Post-Buckley Future

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

n 1954, when he was 28, William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review to bear the standard of a fledgling conservative movement defined by three commitments: to fight Communism, to diminish the federal government and to uphold traditionalism in social affairs.

That formulation held the movement together for five decades, as Ronald Reagan brought conservatives to power, George H. W. Bush declared victory in the cold war and Bill Clinton pronounced the end of big government.

Now, many conservatives say, the current Bush administration is testing that definition of conservatism as it has never been tested before, from the expansion of federal health and education programs to the campaign to remake Iraq. And as Mr. Buckley prepares for retirement by handing over control of National Review, a new generation of young would-be Buckleys is debating just what conservatism means when their side has taken over Washington, and yet they still do not feel that they have won.

“Conservative is a word that is almost meaningless these days,” said Caleb Stegall, 32, a lawyer in Topeka, Kan., and a founder of The New Pantagruel, newpantagruel.com, an irreverent Web site about religion and politics named for the jovial drunkard created by Rabelais. “It tells you almost nothing about where a person stands on a lot of questions,” he said, like gay marriage, stem cell research, the environment and Iraq.

Kevin Moloney for The New York Times

Austin Bramwell, 26, of Denver, one of five new trustees of National Review, is a leader in a group no longer characterized by uniform views.

The debate among members of the young right is unfolding on Web sites like Mr. Stegall’s and Oxblog, oxblog .blogspot.com, set up by three Rhodes Scholars. It is discussed at roundtables and cocktail parties organized by groups like America’s Future Foundation in Washington. In journals for young conservatives, they tackle subjects as heterodox as the perils of Wal-Mart and urban sprawl, the dangers of unfettered capitalism to family life, and the feared takeover of their movement by hawkish neoconservatives.

In May the Philadelphia Society, a prestigious club for conservative intellectuals, tapped Sarah Bramwell, a 24-year-old Yale graduate and writer, to address the views of the young right at its 40th-anniversary conference. “Modern American conservatism began in an effort to do two things: defeat Communism and roll back creeping socialism,” she began. “The first was obviated by our success, the latter by our failure. So what is left of conservatism?”

Rearing new conservatives has long been a subject of keen interest to their elders. To counter what they considered the liberal dominance of the major universities and news organizations, a handful of conservative foundations has helped build a network of organizations to train young members of the movement, most prominently the 51-year-old Intercollegiate Studies Institute. It publishes journals and books, sponsors fellowships and administers a network of 80 conservative college newspapers.

“I think one of the principal, even signal, features of the conservative movement is its overriding concern for nurturing young people,” said Jeff Nelson, 39, the institute’s vice president for publications.

Mr. Buckley recently chose Sarah Bramwell’s husband, Austin Bramwell, 26, as one of five trustees of National Review. Mr. Bramwell, a clerk for the federal appeals court in Denver and an alumnus of the institute’s programs, declined to comment because of his job at the court.

Mr. Nelson said young conservatives’ greatest challenge might come from their predecessors’ success. “Buckley started the conservative movement athwart history, yelling `stop,’ ” he said, “but there has been a subtle shift in the conservative movement’s view of itself, from history’s opponents to destiny’s child.”

“We have a lot of conservatives who reflect the values of the mainstream culture,” he continued. “There are polls that show younger-generation conservatives trust the government much more deeply than their parents did.”

The increase in federal domestic spending under President Bush would have been “unimaginable” to conservatives a few years ago, he said, and so would foreign policies like the invasion of Iraq.

Doubts about the justification for the war are a common theme among young conservatives. “Many conservatives, especially since Sept. 11, believe that a major, if not the major, calling of conservatives today is to articulate and defend a certain brand of international grand strategy,” Ms. Bramwell argued in her address to the Philadelphia Society. “I believe this view to be not only mistaken, but quite possibly harmful to the conservative movement.”

Still, Ms. Bramwell, who now works as deputy press secretary for Gov. Bill Owens of Colorado, said in an interview that she nonetheless supported the war in Iraq as a chance to advance United States interests in the Middle East.

Daniel McCarthy, 26, an assistant editor at The American Conservative, the magazine founded by Pat Buchanan, said that although many of his contemporaries questioned the war, few were willing to turn against the president, as he had.

“I say we have to go back to before the conservative movement became a movement,” he said, “back to when it was just a few tormented intellectuals who didn’t necessarily see themselves as a coherent group, and even to the so-called isolationist and noninterventionist right. America is a nation state. It is not meant to be a sort of world government in embryo, not meant to be a last provider of justice or security for the entire world.”

But some young conservatives argue that the United States may need to become more active, not less. Eric Cohen, 26, is the director of the biotechnology and American democracy program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington; the editor of its journal, New Atlantis; a consultant to the President’s Council on Bioethics; and a contributor to The Weekly Standard.

In an interview, he argued that conservatives needed to accept an active role for government in dealing with advancing technology, whether in the form of terrorists’ weapons abroad or attempts to change the nature of life at home. “The conservative project is making the case for progress abroad while confronting the dilemmas of progress at home,” he said.

Mr. Cohen defended the Bush administration’s preventive intervention in the Middle East as well as its limitations on federal financing for stem cell research.

“Medical progress is going to keep people alive longer than they would have been,” he said. “I think prudent conservatives are going to have to find some responsible way to have sensible government to deal with the needs of aging generations. We have seen a version of this in the prescription drug bill, and there are going to be other obligations.”

Mr. Stegall, an evangelical Presbyterian and the son of a minister, said he shared Mr. Cohen’s support for government social programs, but for religious reasons. He said he and other theological conservatives had founded The New Pantagruel as an alternative to the politics of the older generation of Christian conservatives.

“If I could sum up what we stand for in one word, it would be sustainability,” he said. By that, he explained, he meant theologically conservative views on sustaining family life, as well as typically liberal views on sustaining the environment and local communities and helping the poor. “For us, those two halves are inextricably linked,” he said.

But several conservatives, young and old, said the greatest division in the movement pitted young traditionalists against their more libertarian peers. David Weigel, 22, the former editor of a conservative magazine at Northwestern University, a contributor to the libertarian magazine Reason and an intern at the editorial page of USA Today, said that last spring his college paper had trouble finding any conservatives on campus who supported amending the constitution to ban same-sex marriage.

He contended that even young conservatives who maintained a strict moral code for themselves were increasingly reluctant to regulate the behavior of others. “I am personally abstinent,” he said, “and I plan to stay that way, but I have no problem with international aid programs that use or distribute condoms.”

Ramesh Ponnuru, 29, a prolific writer for National Review, complained that the Republican party had been focusing on social issues because limited government did not have as big “a political payoff.”

“There is a serious possibility that the libertarian wing of the conservative movement goes off in its own direction, either breaking off or allying with the Democrats,” he said.

Mr. Buckley, however, said he was unperturbed. “The sweep of the Soviet challenge was what I call a harnessing bias, and now that harness has come apart,” he said. “But I don’t think the threads are by any means abandoned.” He added: “There has never been a movement that doesn’t go through this perplexion and development.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/17/arts/17CONS.final.html?ei=5090&en=828102e3a05108e4&ex=1247803200&partner=rssuserland&pagewanted=all&position=

November 19, 2008 Posted by Mr. Montague | Austin Bramwell, Rising Generation, William F. Buckley Jr., Young Right | Austin Bramwell, Rising Generation, William F. Buckley Jr., Young Right | No Comments Yet

Gottfried vs. Frum

Fatuous and Malicious

by Paul Gottfried

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Responding to David Frum (who may soon become the first non-Catholic editor-in-chief of National Review) is a bit like wading through a cesspool. His writing is wall-to-wall toxic waste, though apparently smelly enough to scare Bob Novak into denouncing the “unknown” paleos with whom he was being linked. Novak assured his readers, before Frum went after him a second time this Tuesday, that he thoroughly “abhors” the “racist and anti-Semitic” paleos Frum had just excoriated. Although Novak strained to distance himself from the evil ones, he gave himself away by defending one of the neocons’ favorite whipping boys, Charles A. Lindbergh. That may have driven Frum into launching his second attack.

The question that goes begging in any case is whether Frum proves that any of his targets is a racist, except by implication. Expressing reservations about the fetid personal life and leftist demagogy of Martin Luther King, a practice that Bill Buckley, George Will, Will Herberg, and even Ronald Reagan once pursued, now qualifies as “racist.” And somehow all paleos, including Tom Fleming, who is perpetually denouncing racial nationalism, are linked to explicitly racial nationalist publications. As for the anti-Semitism raging among the paleos, has Frum bothered to notice all the Jews lined up on the paleo side? One could furnish several minyanim (prayer quorums), including Israelis. Speaking of Israelis, Frum should read the acidic comments about his bad manners published on this website yesterday by Ilana Mercer. In contrast to the NR editorial board, Ilana is not impressed by David’s slipshod accusations or his endorsement of Jewish interests.

Another relevant issue that comes to mind about Frum is selective amnesia. Certainly he knows me and not only as a “relentlessly solipsistic” and “unfocused” professor. My late father-in-law rented commercial property to his family; and my late wife knew his mother, a famous leftist TV personality on CBC. I first met David (before he became a neocon echo) in 1986, when I was a featured speaker at the Philadelphia Society panel to which he makes portentous references in his screed. In fact, the speech that he (Ed Feulner and Emmett Tyrrell) objected to most strenuously at the time was mine; not surprisingly, I was never invited back to inflict my rhetoric on another national meeting of the Philadelphia Society. What I said tout simplement is that neocons are social democrats and that except for their rightwing Jewish nationalism, it is hard for me to see how they fit into any kind of Right. This judgment came from my investigations as an intellectual historian, who had written books on the European and American Right. At that time, however, I had not yet encountered the Trotskyist fury of the Frum-Goldberg-Podhoretz gang.

The speech by Stephen Tonsor, which the Frum claims “startled the room by anathematizing the neocons and their work,” is falsely depicted as a statement of Catholic anti-Semitism. For those who are interested, William Campbell of the Philadelphia Society has available for distribution tapes of this oration, which should make the following facts clear: Tonsor was attacking the neocons (counterfactually) as rightwing Nietzscheans, “whose ideas, as even the guards at Auschwitz knew, led to the death camps.” Tonsor was speaking as a Catholic democrat, who based his belief in constitutional government on Catholic and Anglo-Catholic natural law teachings. Supposedly the neocons were dangerous to the American Right because they believed in pagan elitism, which Tonsor considered as incompatible with American conservative values. While the speaker went on to criticize the self-assertiveness of neocons trying to take over and redefine the American Right, it is unclear to me what was anti-Semitic about his presentation.

Note this speech was full of dubious assertions: that Nietzsche’s thoughts led ineluctably to the Holocaust, that the neocons are (utinam fuisset) rightwingers, and that the conservative movement until the 1980s was Catholic and Anglo-Catholic. (What the hell do you do with all those Protestants who predominated in the interwar American Right?) What Tonsor was not doing, however, was venting anti-Semitism on his Jewish listeners.

A few other observations may be in order concerning the dishonest way in which Frum pads his brief against the paleos. Mel Bradford did not come “to the government hiring window with certain disadvantages” in his bid for the directorship of NEH in 1981 simply because he was too far to the right for a “balky Congress.” He underwent months of character assassination at the hands of Frum’s neocon pals, including George Will, Ed Feulner, and the Kristol family, the result of which was to make him unconfirmable. One of the most effective smearers was the far-left historian Eric Foner, whom, as I show in my history of the conservative movement, was awarded under Bill Bennett’s tenure as director close to a half a million dollars in personal grants. The incriminating statement by Bradford, which Foner and his neocon sponsors turned against Bradford, comparing Lincoln to Hitler, was yanked out of context. It came from a crabbed footnote about messianic rhetoric in a number of political figures, among whom were listed Lincoln and Hitler. By the way, it is not clear why Southerners like Bradford, whose ancestors had been devastated by invading federal armies sent to overrun them by President Lincoln, should share the admiration for the same heroes as a Canadian global democrat resident in the US. Why can’t Frum and Bradford have their own separate list of heroes? Although I personally regard Cromwell as a protector of my own Jewish ancestors and as an inspired nation builder, I do not expect my wife, who had Irish ancestors, to share this admiration.

And even assuming that I am “relentlessly solipsistic” and “unfocused” as a teacher, neither of which charge Frum demonstrates, why should I not “repeatedly complain” if neocons kept me from a graduate professorship at Catholic University? If that charge is true, which happens to be the case, why should I not be ticked off, even if the Frum judges me in a malaprop to be “solipsistic”? What he means to say is that I’ve been graceless enough to go after my attackers, who left fingerprints all around the scene of the crime.

Since a number of young defenders have weighed in on our beleaguered side, I shall skip over the rest of Frum’s baseless accusations. But I would like to underline, as Myles Kantor began to do a few days ago, that the most lurid examples of unpatriotic conservatism and rightwing racial and ethnic insensitivity can be found in Frum’s and Goldberg’s magazine of choice. In the sixties National Review, and its flamboyant editor-in-chief, defended segregation and the civilizational right of white people to keep Negroes, as they were then called, from gaining political power. One of Buckley’s best-remembered editorials of the sixties took this position emphatically. During the Eichmann trial in 1961, the unreconstructed NR lamented “Jewish vengefulness” and the harmful effect that this alleged German-bashing would have on the “struggle against Communism.”

Only God knows what Frum (or perhaps Novak) would say about us paleos if we sounded like the old Bill Buckley, before he was taken over by the neocon body-snatchers! And on the subject of the unpatriotic American Right, what about this statement, ostensibly on white identity politics, that Jonah Goldberg placed on NROnline: “After all the United States took land from the British. And, no matter how you slice it, America’s claim to Texas and the Southwest is certainly far less compelling than Israel’s to its land. When European Jews not already living in Palestine arrived there after World War II, the area was largely empty. Meanwhile, when colonists came to North America, they had no historic claim to the land whatsoever and, besides, it was occupied.”

This last assertion is so unmistakably stupid that Goldberg should be “envious,” as he told us in a recent blog, of Frum’s relatively elegant polemics. For the record: Arabs were far more densely present in Palestine and stood at a higher level of civilization when Jewish settlers arrived there from Europe than were those 3 to 3.5 million Amerindians who were roaming North America when the European settlers came. The pristine character of Palestine when the Jewish settlers arrived is even more questionable than the image of American pioneers building their homes on totally uninhabited American land. But why would a “conservative” and “patriot” sound like the Nation in challenging the American claim to what is now American territory, while pushing a chauvinistic Israeli fiction that most sensible Israelis have rejected?

Shall we try to guess? The answer, I would submit, is not that Goldberg and his fellow-neocons are real or wannabe agents of the Israeli government. I doubt such an explanation can account for why Frum this morning announced on public radio that the US must revolutionize Iran, because women there are being “punished for wearing lip stick.” The neocons are serious about their doctrine of permanent modernizing revolution spearheaded from Washington, quite independently of their commitment to the Israeli Right. Moreover, their place of origin and activity is in this part of the world and not in the Middle East; and their chief sponsors have been those who enabled the neocons to take over the American Right. It is these enablers, and not Mr. Sharon, who produced the American conservative debacle. This disaster on the Right has now morphed into something even worse that is polluting the entire body politic. Bob Novak’s attempt to protect himself from being identified with those who have noticed the problem will help neither his moral reputation nor his journalistic credibility.

March 28, 2003

Paul Gottfried is professor of history at Elizabethtown College and author of, most recently, the highly recommended Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/gottfried/gottfried48.html

November 19, 2008 Posted by Mr. Montague | Conservatism | Conservatism, David Frum, Paul Gottfried | No Comments Yet

Frum vs. Conservatives

Unpatriotic Conservatives
A war against America.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This piece appears in the April 7, 2003, issue of National Review.

“I respect and admire the French, who have been a far greater nation than we shall ever be, that is, if greatness means anything loftier than money and bombs.”
— THOMAS FLEMING, “HARD RIGHT,” MARCH 13, 2003

rom the very beginning of the War on Terror, there has been dissent, and as the war has proceeded to Iraq, the dissent has grown more radical and more vociferous. Perhaps that was to be expected. But here is what never could have been: Some of the leading figures in this antiwar movement call themselves “conservatives.”

These conservatives are relatively few in number, but their ambitions are large. They aspire to reinvent conservative ideology: to junk the 50-year-old conservative commitment to defend American interests and values throughout the world — the commitment that inspired the founding of this magazine — in favor of a fearful policy of ignoring threats and appeasing enemies.

And they are exerting influence. When Richard Perle appeared on Meet the Press on February 23 of this year, Tim Russert asked him, “Can you assure American viewers . . . that we’re in this situation against Saddam Hussein and his removal for American security interests? And what would be the link in terms of Israel?” Perle rebutted the allegation. But what a grand victory for the antiwar conservatives that Russert felt he had to air it.

You may know the names of these antiwar conservatives. Some are famous: Patrick Buchanan and Robert Novak. Others are not: Llewellyn Rockwell, Samuel Francis, Thomas Fleming, Scott McConnell, Justin Raimondo, Joe Sobran, Charley Reese, Jude Wanniski, Eric Margolis, and Taki Theodoracopulos.

The antiwar conservatives aren’t satisfied merely to question the wisdom of an Iraq war. Questions are perfectly reasonable, indeed valuable. There is more than one way to wage the war on terror, and thoughtful people will naturally disagree about how best to do it, whether to focus on terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda and Hezbollah or on states like Iraq and Iran; and if states, then which state first?

But the antiwar conservatives have gone far, far beyond the advocacy of alternative strategies. They have made common cause with the left-wing and Islamist antiwar movements in this country and in Europe. They deny and excuse terror. They espouse a potentially self-fulfilling defeatism. They publicize wild conspiracy theories. And some of them explicitly yearn for the victory of their nation’s enemies.

Common cause: The websites of the antiwar conservatives approvingly cite and link to the writings of John Pilger, Robert Fisk, Noam Chomsky, Ted Rall, Gore Vidal, Alexander Cockburn, and other anti-Americans of the far Left.

Terror denial: In his column of December 26, 2002, Robert Novak attacked Condoleezza Rice for citing Hezbollah, instead of al-Qaeda, as the world’s most dangerous terrorist organization: “In truth, Hezbollah is the world’s most dangerous terrorist organization from Israel’s standpoint. While viciously anti-American in rhetoric, the Lebanon-based Hezbollah is focused on the destruction of Israel. ‘Outside this fight [against Israel], we have done nothing,’ Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the organization’s secretary-general, said in a recent New York Times interview.” The sheik did not say, and Novak did not bother to add, that Hezbollah twice bombed the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, murdering more than 60 people, and drove a suicide bomb into a Marine barracks in October 1983, killing 241 servicemen.

Espousing defeatism: Here is Robert Novak again, this time on September 17, 2001, predicting that any campaign in Afghanistan would be a futile slaughter: “The CIA, in its present state, is viewed by its Capitol Hill overseers as incapable of targeting bin Laden. That leads to an irresistible impulse to satisfy Americans by pulverizing Afghanistan.” And here is Patrick Buchanan that same day gloomily asserting that the United States would be as baffled by Osama bin Laden as the British Empire was by George Washington: “We remain unrivaled in material wealth and military dominance, but these are no longer the components of might. . . . Our instinct is the strongman’s impulse: hit back, harder. But like British Lobsterbacks dropped in a colonial wilderness, we don’t know this battle, and the weapons within our reach are blunt.”

Excuse-making: On September 30, 2002, Pat Buchanan offered this explanation of 9/11 during a debate on Chris Matthews’s Hardball: “9/11 was a direct consequence of the United States meddling in an area of the world where we do not belong and where we are not wanted. We were attacked because we were on Saudi sacred soil and we are so-called repressing the Iraqis and we’re supporting Israel and all the rest of it.”

Conspiracy-theorizing: Justin Raimondo, an Internet journalist who delivered Pat Buchanan’s nominating speech at the Reform party convention in 2000, alleged in December 2001 that Israel was implicated in the terror attacks of 9/11: “Whether Israeli intelligence was watching, overseeing, collaborating with or combating the bin Ladenites is an open question. . . . That the Israelis had some significant foreknowledge and involvement in the events preceding 9/11 seems beyond dispute.” Raimondo has also repeatedly dropped broad hints that he believes the October 2001 anthrax attacks were the work of an American Jewish scientist bent on stampeding the U.S. into war.

Yearning for defeat: On January 30, 2002, Eric Margolis, the American-born foreign editor of the Toronto Sun, appealed to the leaders of the Arab world to unite in battle against the U.S. “What could Arabs do to prevent a war of aggression against Iraq that increasingly resembles a medieval crusade? Form a united diplomatic front that demands U.N. inspections continue. Stage an oil boycott of the U.S. if Iraq is attacked. Send 250,000 civilians from across the Arab World to form human shields around Baghdad and other Iraqi cities. Boycott Britain, Turkey, Kuwait, and the Gulf states that join or abet the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Withdraw all funds on deposit in U.S. and British banks. Accept payment for oil only in Euros, not dollars. Send Arab League troops to Iraq, so that an attack on Iraq is an attack on the entire League. Cancel billions worth of arms contracts with the U.S. and Britain. At least make a token show of male hormones and national pride.”

Raimondo was more explicit still on March 12, 2003. Speaking of the negative consequences he foresaw of even a successful American campaign in Iraq, he wrote: “It is a high price to pay for ‘victory’ — so high that patriots might almost be forgiven if they pine for defeat.”

The writers I quote call themselves “paleoconservatives,” implying that they are somehow the inheritors of an older, purer conservatism than that upheld by their impostor rivals. But even Robert Taft and Charles Lindbergh ceased accommodating Axis aggression after Pearl Harbor. Since 9/11, by contrast, the paleoconservatives have collapsed into a mood of despairing surrender unparalleled since the Vichy republic went out of business. James Burnham famously defined liberalism as “the ideology of Western suicide.” What are we to make of self-described conservatives who see it as their role to make excuses for suicide bombers?

“While paleos sometimes like to characterize their beliefs as merely the continuation of the conservative thought of the 1950s and ’60s, and while in fact many of them do have their personal and intellectual roots in the conservatism of that era, the truth is that what is now called paleoconservatism is at least as new as the neoconservatism at which many paleos like to sniff as a newcomer.”
— SAMUEL FRANCIS, IN THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE, DECEMBER 16, 2002

I HAPPEN to have been in the room when “paleoconservatism” first declared itself as a self-conscious political movement. It was in the spring of 1986, at a meeting of the Philadelphia Society, and Professor Stephen Tonsor of the University of Michigan read the birth announcement.

The Philadelphia Society is a forum where the various conservative factions met (and meet) to thrash out their differences: libertarians who believed that parks should be sold to private industry, traditionalists who regretted the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy, and — most recently — neoconservatives who had cast their first Republican ballot in 1980. At first, the neoconservatives were warmly welcomed by the veteran members. But the warmth did not last long, and at a panel discussion that day, Tonsor startled the room by anathematizing the neocons and their works.

True conservatives, Tonsor said, were Roman Catholic at root, or at a minimum Anglo-Catholic. They studied literature, not the social sciences. And while he was very glad to see that some non-religious social scientists were now arriving at conservative conclusions, they should understand that their role in the conservative movement must be a subordinate one. “We are all delighted,” he said (I am quoting from memory), “to see the town whore come to church — even to sing in the choir — but not to lead the service.”

I wish I could say that Tonsor’s outburst was motivated by a deep disagreement over important principles. Certainly principles had their place. But as the paleos themselves tell the story, the quarrel that erupted into view that day in 1986 began as a squabble over jobs and perks in the Reagan administration — from the perception that, as Francis later put it, neoconservatives had arranged matters so that “their team should get the rewards of office and of patronage and that the other team of the older Right receive virtually nothing.”

A quick reality check here: It is not in fact true that the ambitions of the paleos fell victim to neocon plots. Paleo Grievance Number 1 is the case of Mel Bradford, a gifted professor at the University of Dallas, now dead. Bradford had hoped to be appointed chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1981, but lost out to William Bennett. Unfortunately for him, Bradford came to the government hiring window with certain disadvantages: He had worked on the George Wallace campaign in 1968, and he had published an essay that could plausibly be read to liken Abraham Lincoln to Hitler. In the spring of 1981, Ronald Reagan was trying to persuade a balky Congress simultaneously to enact a giant tax cut and to authorize a huge defense buildup; to slow inflation, end fuel shortages, and halt Soviet aggression, from Afghanistan to Angola. It was not, in other words, a good moment to refight the Civil War.

Bradford could never accept that it was his own writings that had doomed him. As Oscar Wilde observed, “Misfortunes one can endure: They come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one’s own faults — ah! There is the sting of life.” Easier and less painful to blame others and pity oneself. And so Bradford’s friends and partisans did. When this one was passed over for a promotion at his newspaper or that one failed to be hired at a more prestigious university, they detected the hand of the hated neoconservatives.

Perhaps the most relentlessly solipsistic of the disgruntled paleos is Paul Gottfried, a professor at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania who has published an endless series of articles about his professional rebuffs. Gottfried teaches at Elizabethtown because, as he repeatedly complains, “in what is literally a footnote to conservative history . . . I was denied a graduate professorship at Catholic University of America by neo-conservative lobbying.” Nor did the neocons stop there. When a routine outside professional evaluation of the Elizabethtown faculty reported in 2002 that Gottfried often arrived in class “unprepared or with little thought as to what he would say” and that his students found his classes “unfocused, with often rambling discussions,” he responded by posting an article on the LewRockwell.com website complaining that he had been the victim of, yes, a “neocon attack.”

“[Clarence] Thomas calls the segregation of the Old South, where he grew up, ‘totalitarian.’ But that’s liberal nonsense. Whatever its faults, and it certainly had them, that system was far more localized, decent, and humane than the really totalitarian social engineering now wrecking the country.”
— LLEWELLYN H. ROCKWELL

FRUSTRATED ambition is not a propitious foundation for an intellectual movement. “Jobs for the lads” may be an effective slogan for a trade union, but the paleos needed to develop a more idealistic explanation for their resentments, if they were to have any hope of influencing the main body of the conservative movement. They needed an ideology of their own.

Developing such an ideology was not going to be an easy task. There was no shortage of disaffected right-wingers; but what did Samuel Francis (who had spent the early 1980s investigating subversives for Senator John East) have in common with the economist Murray Rothbard (who had cheered when the Communists captured Saigon)? What connection could there be between the devoutly Catholic Thomas Molnar and the exuberantly pagan Justin Raimondo? It didn’t help that people attracted to the paleoconservative label tended to be the most fractious and quarrelsome folk in the conservative universe.

Yet the job had to be done — and thanks to a lucky accident, there was a place to do it. In the 1970s, Leopold Tyrmand, an émigré Polish Jew who had survived the death camps, scraped together some money to found a magazine he hoped would serve as a conservative alternative to The New York Review of Books. He called it Chronicles of Culture, and based it (for Tyrmand was not a man to do things in the obvious way) in the rusting industrial city of Rockford, Ill. Tyrmand died suddenly in 1985. His successor, Thomas Fleming, shortened the magazine’s name to Chronicles and redirected its attention from cultural critique to ideological war.

Fleming was in at least one way a poor choice for the role of paleoconservative ideologist-in-chief. He is the very opposite of a systematic, deliberate thinker: a jumpy, wrathful man so prone to abrupt intellectual reversals that even some of his friends and supporters question his equilibrium. But Fleming proved himself a nervy and imaginative editor. He recruited Samuel Francis as a columnist and collaborator, and Francis was a man nobody could accuse of inconsistency.

Francis advocated a politics of uninhibited racial nationalism — a politics devoted to the protection of the interests of what he called the “Euro-American cultural core” of the American nation. He argued that the time had come for conservatives to jettison their old commitment to limited government: A “nationalist ethic,” he wrote in 1991, “may often require government action.”

So, Chronicles advocated protectionism for American industry and restrictions on nonwhite immigration. It defended minimum-wage laws and attacked corporations that moved operations off-shore. And it championed the Southern Confederacy of the 1860s and the anti-civil rights resistance of the 1960s.

The decisive year for both the magazine and paleoconservatism was 1989. Until then, Chronicles had managed to coexist with most of the rest of the conservative community. This coexistence was symbolized by the Rockford Institute, which sponsored not only Chronicles but also the Center for Religion and Society in New York, headed by Richard John Neuhaus, a Lutheran minister who had been involved in both the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam protests.

Neuhaus’s experiences as a pastor in the New York slums and his passionate opposition to abortion had led him rightward in the 1980s. But he was disturbed by the racial politics of Chronicles, and also by what he termed its “insensitiv[ity] to the classical language of anti-Semitism.” Neuhaus contemplated severing the connection between his institute and Rockford. Word of his dissatisfaction filtered back to Illinois, and, one day in May, Rockford struck back. An executive from the institute jetted out to New York, fired Neuhaus and his entire staff, ordered them literally out onto the streets, and changed the office locks. The paleos at Rockford exploded in dumbfounded rage when the foundations that had been supporting Neuhaus’s work refused to switch the money over to them instead.

The shuttering of Neuhaus’s offices brought the emerging paleoconservative movement to national attention. The incident was covered by the New York Times and commented upon by the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. It was, however, events across the Atlantic that gave the shuttering a larger importance.

At the same time that Fleming was sacking Neuhaus, the people of Leopold Tyrmand’s native Poland were engaged in their country’s first free elections since World War II. Solidarity won all but one open seat in the lower house of parliament and 92 of 100 seats in the Polish senate. Over the next six months, the Communist governments of central Europe would collapse.

The conservative movement had come to life in the 1950s to goad the governments of the West to wage the Cold War more energetically and skillfully. When NATIONAL REVIEW declared in its founding editorial that it would stand “athwart history, yelling Stop” the history it had in mind was Marx’s “History” — the “History” with a capital H that was supposed to run inevitably toward Communism. By November 1989, that History had indeed stopped — was rapidly running backward — and the great question for conservatives was, “What now?”

“How horrible to realize, ten years after the Cold War, that the real evil empire is not some foreign regime, but the U.S. military state. It bombs buses, bridges, factories, churches, and schools, expresses ‘regret,’ and then continues to do the same. A host of innocents have died from U.S. attacks — a fact which should make every patriot wince. The propaganda should also make us wonder to what extent the old Communist Threat was trumped up to plunder the American taxpayer.”
— LLEWELLYN H. ROCKWELL, “THE END OF BUCKLEYISM,” IN SPINTECH, JUNE 12, 1999

IN August 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded and annexed Kuwait. Iraq plus Kuwait and prospectively Saudi Arabia would possess the world’s biggest reservoir of oil. With this vast new oil wealth, Saddam could at last acquire the nuclear weapons he coveted — and thus dominate the entire Middle East. President George H. W. Bush quickly decided that the conquest of Kuwait “will not stand” and assembled a global coalition against Saddam. The paleoconservative repudiation of the Gulf War would be their first major independent ideological adventure.

Three weeks after the invasion, Pat Buchanan declared his opposition to war in one of his regular appearances on The McLaughlin Group: “There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East — the Israeli defense ministry and its amen corner in the United States.”

It would be hard to come up with a more improbable idea than that of George H. W. Bush of Kennebunkport as warmaking servant of the interests of International Jewry. Yet over the next six months, Buchanan and the Chronicles writers would repeatedly argue that America was being dragged to war in the Gulf by a neoconservative coterie indifferent to true American interests: the “neoconservatives,” as Buchanan said, “the ex-liberals, socialists, and Trotskyists who signed on in the name of anti-Communism and now control our foundations and set the limits of permissible dissent.”

Early in 1990, Buchanan published an article in The National Interest (a journal founded, ironically enough, by Irving Kristol, who sometimes seemed to be the only person in America willing to accept the “neoconservative” label), in which Buchanan called for a new foreign policy of “America First.” And “America First” would be the slogan of Buchanan’s presidential run in 1992: more irony, because by 1992 the paleos were frankly disgusted, not merely with the rest of the conservative movement and the Republican party, but with much of America. “Last month,” Buchanan wrote in 1991, “during a week at CNN in New York, I rode nightly up Eighth Avenue in a cab. It was like passing through a different world. We are two countries; and many Americans in the first country are getting weary of subsidizing and explaining away the deepening failure of the second, and want only to get clear of it.”

Fed up as they were with the Second America, however, the paleos felt sure that they spoke for the First America with an integrity the traditional conservatives, let alone the neos, never had. Francis in particular scolded NATIONAL REVIEW’s conservatives for their isolation from America’s “grassroots.” He chose an interesting means of illustrating his point: “Of the twenty-five conservative intellectuals whose photographs appeared on the dust jacket of George H. Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, published in 1976, four are Roman Catholic, seven are Jewish, another seven (including three Jews) are foreign-born, two are southern or western in origin, and only five are in any respect representative of the historically dominant Anglo-Saxon (or at least Anglo-Celtic) Protestant strain in American history and culture (three of the five later converted to Roman Catholicism).” No wonder then that these fringe characters were able to achieve nothing more impressive than the election of Ronald Reagan and victory in the Cold War.

Now Francis had the helm of an ideological movement of his own. “[A] new American Right,” he wrote in 1991, “must recognize that its values and goals lie outside and against the establishment and that its natural allies are not in Manhattan, Yale, and Washington but in the increasingly alienated and threatened strata of Middle America. . . . A new Right, positioning itself in opposition to the elite and the elite’s underclass ally, can assert its leadership of Middle Americans and mobilize them in radical opposition to the regime.”

Buchanan, inconveniently, was himself a Roman Catholic. But his skills were manifest, and the writers at Chronicles convinced themselves that his 37 percent showing in the 1992 New Hampshire Republican primary was the long-awaited breakthrough for their Middle American Revolution. It was a false hope. Bill Clinton won the presidential election of 1992. And Newt Gingrich, impeccably Anglo-Celtic though he was, soon proved himself just another neocon: He even helped Clinton enact NAFTA in 1993. With this final betrayal, the Chronicles crowd’s last faint hope for political triumph through Middle America died.

“It is clear that neither laws nor any sense of fair play will stop this rampant U.S. arrogance. The time may soon come when we will have to call for the return of the spirit of the man who terrified the United States like no one else ever has. Come back Stalin — (almost) all is forgiven.”
— GEORGE SZAMUELY, IN “TAKI’S TOP DRAWER,” NEW YORK PRESS, JULY 11, 2001

HUMAN beings yearn to identify with something bigger than themselves. That’s why patriotism sways the heart. When patriotism falters, something else takes its place. For a good many of the paleoconservatives, that something was, for a spell, Serbian nationalism.

The Yugoslav civil wars divided conservatives. Some — William F. Buckley Jr., Richard Perle, John O’Sullivan, and Republican political leaders like Bob Dole — advocated an early and decisive intervention against Slobodan Milosevic. Others — Charles Krauthammer, Henry Kissinger, and (to drop a few rungs down the ladder) I — argued against.

Pat Buchanan, one can say, permitted a dual loyalty to influence him. Although he had denied any vital American interest in either Kuwait’s oilfields or Iraq’s oilfields or its aggression, in l991 he urged that the Sixth Fleet be sent to Dubrovnik to shield the Catholics of Croatia from Serbian attack. “Croatia is not some faraway desert emirate,” he explained. “It is a ‘piece of the continent, a part of the main,’ a Western republic that belonged to the Habsburg empire and was for centuries the first line of defense of Christian Europe. For their ceaseless resistance to the Ottoman Turks, Croatia was proclaimed by Pope Leo X to be the ‘Antemurale Christianitatis,’ the bulwark of Christianity.”

Chronicles, though, along with most of its writers, followed Thomas Fleming into a passionate defense of the Serbian cause. Even if all the war crimes alleged against the Serbs proved true, Fleming argued in 1997, “they are trivial in comparison with anything done not just by the Germans, but by Americans in recent years.” When the U.S. and NATO finally went to war against Serbia, Fleming identified himself with the enemy side: “[W]e have to be as faithful as the Serbs in preserving our heritage,” he said in a June 1999 speech, “as brave as the Serbs in fighting our enemies.”

To an uncharitable eye, Fleming and his magazine appeared to have succumbed to what George Washington might have condemned as a “passionate attachment” to a foreign country. The origins of this attachment are mysterious to me — and they clearly baffled Chronicles readers as well. At the time that Milosevic launched his wars, Chronicles had nearly 20,000 paid subscribers. By the time the Kosovo war ended in 1999, the magazine’s circulation had plunged to about 5,000. One guesses that the readers of Chronicles were not so much affronted by Fleming’s Serb advocacy as they were simply bored by it. Yet for the Chronicles writers, opposing their government in time of war seems to have been a liberating experience. In 1991 Pat Buchanan had accused the neoconservatives of enforcing the “limits of permissible dissent.” The paleocons were now defying those limits with ever-increasing gusto and boldness.

“The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people.” — SAMUEL FRANCIS, SPEECH AT THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE CONFERENCE, MAY 1994

OF all the limits against which the paleoconservatives chafed, the single most irksome was the limit placed by civilized opinion upon overtly racialist speech. Francis’s speech at the 1994 conference of the white-supremacist American Renaissance organization, for example, ultimately cost him his job as a staff columnist at the Washington Times. Today he earns his living as editor-in-chief of the Citizens’ Informer, the newspaper of the Council of Conservative Citizens, the successor group to the White Citizens’ Councils of the segregated South; he moonlights as an editor of The Occidental Quarterly, a pseudo-scholarly “journal of Western thought and opinion.”

Conservatives have had a vexed history with the topic of race. In the 1950s and early 1960s, many conservatives, including the editors of this magazine, questioned and opposed the civil rights movement, sometimes for high-minded constitutional reasons, sometimes not. Race, though, was not in those days central to conservative thinking, if only because, as Francis himself noted, the early conservative movement was so urban and northern. For the paleos, however, race and ethnicity were from the start essential and defining issues — and so they remain to this day.

Now, in one respect, the paleos have a point: Race and ethnicity are huge and unavoidable issues in modern life, and the liberal orthodoxies on the matter tend to be doctrinaire and hypocritical. But the paleoconservatives took a step beyond debunking when they advanced orthodoxies of their own. Buchanan, for example, gave an impressive speech on immigration at the Nixon Library in California in January 2000: “The last twenty years of immigration have brought about a redistribution of wealth in America, from less-skilled workers and toward employers. [Harvard economist George] Borjas estimates that one-half of the relative fall in the wages of high-school graduates since the 1980s can be traced directly to mass immigration. . . . Americans today who do poorly in high school are increasingly condemned to a low-wage existence; and mass immigration is a major reason why.” His words were persuasive, even moving, but they would have been far more convincing if they had not been spoken by the same man who had written nine years earlier that he wished only to “get clear” of those high-school graduates who had been born with dark skins.

For some of the paleos, the difficulties of non-white America provoke amused condescension. For others, this America inspires only horror. The United States, Thomas Fleming predicted in 1989, would soon be “a nation no longer stratified by class, but by race as well. Europeans and Orientals will compete, as groups, for the top positions, while the other groups will nurse their resentments on the weekly welfare checks they receive from the other half.” Some of the paleos’ racial animus is expressed via their obsessive — and even obscene — denunciations of Martin Luther King. “King bedded other men’s wives, other wives’ men, underaged girls, and young boys,” raged a columnist in the newsletter Rockwell ran before he started his website. “[M]y guess is that even holes in the ground had to watch out.”

Racial passions run strong among the paleos. And yet, having read many hundreds of thousands of their words in print and on the screen, I come away with a strong impression that while their anti-black and anti-Hispanic feelings are indeed intense, another antipathy is far more intellectually important to them.

White racialists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries have to resolve a puzzling paradox. On one hand, they believe in the incorrigible inferiority of darker-skinned people. On the other hand, they perceive darker-skinned people to be gaining the advantage over whites. How to resolve the contradiction? One solution is to posit the existence of a third force, a group that is cunning and capable but, for reasons of its own, implacably hostile to America’s white majority.

“Jewish intellectuals initiated and advanced a number of important intellectual and political movements during the 20th century. I argue that these movements are attempts to alter Western societies . . . to weaken the power of their [the Jews'] perceived competitors — the European peoples who early in the 20th century had assumed a dominant position not only in their traditional homelands in Europe, but also in the United States, Canada, and Australia.”

The author of those words, Kevin MacDonald of the California State University at Long Beach, does not quite belong to the paleoconservative club, although he does publish in The Occidental Quarterly. Yet MacDonald’s name and ideas do keep turning up in paleo conversation. On March 17, 2003, for example, VDare.com prominently posted on its homepage an anonymous letter celebrating MacDonald’s work and quoting his allegation that the Iraq war “is being fomented by Jewish neo-conservative activists based in the Bush administration, congressional lobbying organizations, and the media.” More generally, MacDonald said — and VDare.com repeated — “the most important Jewish contributions to culture were facilitated not only by high IQ but by closely cooperating, mutually reinforcing groups of Jews who were centered around charismatic leaders and excluded dissenters.”

Erstwhile NATIONAL REVIEW editor Joseph Sobran also seems to have been greatly influenced by MacDonald’s writings. After the defeat of his friend Buchanan’s second presidential campaign, Sobran wrote: “The full story is impossible to tell as long as it’s taboo to discuss Jewish interests as freely as we discuss those of the Christian Right. Talking about American politics without mentioning the Jews is a little like talking about the NBA without mentioning the Chicago Bulls.” Sobran was following MacDonald’s advice: “It is time to be frank about Jews.”

“The Bush administration should not only ignore the advice of such characters as Mr. Ledeen and Mr. Podhoretz but consider placing them under surveillance as possible agents of a foreign power.” — SAMUEL FRANCIS, IN CHRONICLES, DECEMBER 2002

WHO was the first paleo to blame Israel for 9/11? It’s a close call, but Robert Novak seems to have won the race. His column of September 13, 2001, written the very day after the terrorist attack, charged that “the hatred toward the United States today by the terrorists is an extension of [their] hatred of Israel.” Novak lamented that, because of terror, “the United States and Israel are brought ever closer in a way that cannot improve long-term U.S. policy objectives.”

The next day, Scott McConnell quoted Malcolm X on Justin Raimondo’s website: “The chickens have come home to roost.” Raimondo himself soon began work on a book that alleged that 9/11 was in the broadest sense an Israeli plot.

“Whose war is this?” Buchanan demanded to know on September 26, 2001: “Powell’s war — or Perle’s?” “Judging from President Bush’s State of the Union message,” Sobran lamented on January 31, 2002, “what began as the War on Terrorism will now be broadened to become a War to Crush Israel’s Enemies.”

“In private conversation with Hagel and many other members of Congress,” Robert Novak wrote on December 26, 2002, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon “leaves no doubt that the greatest U.S. assistance to Israel would be to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime. That view is widely shared inside the Bush administration, and is a major reason U.S. forces today are assembling for war.”

The accusations culminated in a March 2003 article by Buchanan in The American Conservative that fixed responsibility for the entire Iraq war on a “cabal” of neoconservative office-holders and writers: “We charge that a cabal of polemicists and public officials seeks to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America’s interests. We charge them with colluding with Israel to ignite those wars and destroy the Oslo Accords. We charge them with deliberately damaging U.S. relations with every state in the Arab world that defies Israel or supports the Palestinian people’s right to a homeland of their own. We charge that they have alienated friends and allies all over the Islamic and Western world through their arrogance, hubris, and bellicosity.”

Who were these war-mongering “neoconservatives”? At a June 2002 conference sponsored by the Institute for Historical Review, the leading Holocaust-denial group, Joe Sobran defined “neoconservatism” as “kosher conservatism.” And in his March cover story, Buchanan seasoned Sobran’s definition with his own flavorful malice. “Cui Bono? For whose benefit these endless wars in a region that holds nothing vital to America save oil, which the Arabs must sell us to survive? Who would benefit from a war of civilizations between the West and Islam? Answer: one nation, one leader, one party. Israel, Sharon, Likud.”

The echo in that previous paragraph of the Nazi slogan “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” is unlikely to have been unintentional. Yes, it was indeed time to “be frank about Jews.”

Having quickly decided that the War on Terror was a Jewish war, the paleos equally swiftly concluded that they wanted no part of it. It’s odd: 9/11 actually vindicated some of the things that the paleos had been arguing, particularly about immigration and national cohesion. But the paleos were in no mood to press their case. Instead, they plunged into apologetics for the enemy and wishful defeatism.

On September 16, 2001, Samuel Francis suggested that America deserved what it got on 9/11: “Some day it might actually dawn on someone in this country that the grown-up but unwelcome answer is that the terrorists attacked us because they were paying us back for what we had started. Let us hear no more about how the ‘terrorists’ have ‘declared war on America.’ Any nation that allows a criminal chief executive to use its military power to slaughter civilians in unprovoked and legally unauthorized attacks for his own personal political purposes” — Francis is referring here both to Operation Desert Fox in 1998 and to the Kosovo war — “can expect whatever the ‘terrorists’ dish out to it.”

It seems incredible, but there is actually more. “If, as President Bush told us this week, we should make no distinction between those who harbor terrorists and those who commit terrorist acts, neither can any distinction be made between those who tolerate the murderous policies of a criminal in power and the criminal himself.”

The 9/11 attacks sent Patrick Buchanan plunging into handwringing and pessimism. He wrote on September 28, 2001: “We are told the first target of America’s wrath will be the Taliban. But if we rain fire and death on the Afghan nation, a proud, brave people we helped liberate from Soviet bondage, we too will slaughter hundreds of innocents. And as they count their dead, the Afghans too will unite in moral outrage; and, as they cannot fight cruise missiles or Stealth bombers, they will attack our diplomats, businessmen, tourists.”

The week after the fall of Kabul, Raimondo acknowledged that though the Afghan war seemed to have succeeded, disaster lurked around the corner: “The real quagmire awaits us. . . . When the history books are written, Operation Enduring Freedom will be hailed as a great success — provided it doesn’t endure much more than a few weeks longer.” Llewellyn Rockwell would not tolerate a war that lasted even so long as that. By October 2002, he was calling for immediate and unconditional surrender — by the United States. The right approach to the War on Terror, he wrote, “as to all government programs, is to end it immediately. . . . The War on Terror is impossible, not in the sense that it cannot cause immense amounts of bloodshed and destruction and loss of liberty, but in the sense that it cannot finally achieve what it is suppose[d] to achieve.”

“The U.S. government has probably killed more people outside its own borders than any other. Or am I overlooking something?”
— JOSEPH SOBRAN, SPEECH TO THE JOHN RANDOLPH SOCIETY, HERNDON, VA., JANUARY 1992

And now it is time to be very frank about the paleos. During the Clinton years, many conservatives succumbed to a kind of gloom. With Bill Bennett, they mourned the “death of outrage.” America now has non-metaphorical deaths to mourn. There is no shortage of outrage — and the cultural pessimism of the 1990s has been dispelled. The nation responded to the terrorist attacks with a surge of patriotism and pride, along with a much-needed dose of charity. Suddenly, many conservatives found they could look past the rancor of the Clinton years, past the psychobabble of the New Age gurus, past the politically correct professors, to see an America that remained, in every important way, the America of 1941 and 1917 and 1861 and 1776. As Tennyson could have said: “What we were, we are.”

America has social problems; the American family is genuinely troubled. The conservatism of the future must be a social as well as an economic conservatism. But after the heroism and patriotism of 9/11 it must also be an optimistic conservatism.
There is, however, a fringe attached to the conservative world that cannot overcome its despair and alienation. The resentments are too intense, the bitterness too unappeasable. Only the boldest of them as yet explicitly acknowledge their wish to see the United States defeated in the War on Terror. But they are thinking about defeat, and wishing for it, and they will take pleasure in it if it should happen.

They began by hating the neoconservatives. They came to hate their party and this president. They have finished by hating their country.

War is a great clarifier. It forces people to take sides. The paleoconservatives have chosen — and the rest of us must choose too. In a time of danger, they have turned their backs on their country. Now we turn our backs on them.

http://www.nationalreview.com/frum/frum031903.asp

November 19, 2008 Posted by Mr. Montague | Conservatism, National Review | Conservatism, David Frum | No Comments Yet

Buckley on Reagan

When Character Counted

The importance of Ronald Reagan.

By William F. Buckley Jr.

EDITOR’S NOTE: On February 4 and 5, 1999 the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Center for Public Affairs sponsored a two-day symposium at the Ronald Reagan Library and Museum in Simi Valley, California. The theme of the event was “Eight Years that Changed the World: The Reagan Legacy in the New Century.” Mark Burson, executive director of the Reagan Foundation, opened the meeting. Speakers and panelists were: Brian Mulroney, Martin Anderson, Sander Vanocur, Edwin Meese, Murray Weidenbaum, Dinesh D’Souza, Stephen Entin, James Miller, Clark Judge, Larry Arnn, Richard McKenzie, William Niskanen, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Maureen Reagan, Ken Adelman, Richard Allen, Howard Baker — and Mrs. Reagan.

The keynote speaker was William F. Buckley Jr. His remarks were published in the March 8, 1999, issue of National Review and are reprinted here.
An excerpt from Mark Burson’s introduction: “With the establishment of National Review, Buckley gave to conservatism what it previously lacked — intellectual firepower, sophisticated and literate reasoning, and, yes, even a sense of humor. These are the weapons with which the long, twilight struggle with liberalism has been waged, and along the way attracted more than a few converts to the root message. And we know that one of the proud Americans who heard the message was a popular movie actor, television personality, and former Democrat who also did a few things in politics.”

Mrs. Reagan, Mr. Mulroney, Mr. Burson, ladies and gentlemen:

I recall that Henry Mencken described an introduction to him on a celebratory occasion as having evoked “a full moon, the setting sun, and the aurora borealis.” In this perspective, if all of that which Mark Burson has said of me really belongs to me, how am I expected even to intimate the achievements of Ronald Reagan? Well, I can do that, really, in one sentence.

He succeeded in getting Nancy Reagan to marry him.

The country is familiar with the legend of Nancy, familiar with her accomplishments as companion, aide, monitor, wife, and lover. There was never anyone who more devotedly served a husband. She has renewed for us all the meaning of the pledge to stand by in sickness and in health.

This being a convocation of friends and admirers, in celebration of his birthday, I propose as keynoter to dwell a while on a longtime friendship. It began in the spring of 1960. Ronald and Nancy Reagan, whom I hadn’t met, were seated at one end of the restaurant, I and my sister-in-law at the other end. We were out of sight of one another. Both parties were headed, after dinner, across the street to an auditorium in a public high school. There I would be introduced, as the evening’s speaker addressing an assembly of doctors and their wives, by Ronald Reagan, a well-known actor and currently the host of a television series sponsored by General Electric; moreover, a public figure who had taken an interest in conservatives and conservative writings.

We bumped into each other going out the door. Ronald Reagan introduced himself and Nancy, and said he had just finished reading my book, Up From Liberalism. He quoted a crack from it, done at the expense of Mrs. Roosevelt, which he relished. I requited his courtesy by relishing him and Nancy for life.

He distinguished himself that night — and dismayed Mrs. Reagan — by what he proceeded to do after discovering that the microphone hadn’t been turned on. He had tried, raising his voice, to tell a few stories. But the audience was progressively impatient. Waiting in vain for the superintendent to unlock the door to the tight little office at the other end of the hall in which the control box lay, he sized up the problem and, having surveyed all possible avenues of approach, climbed out of the window at stage level and, one story above the busy traffic below, cat-walked, Cary Grant-style, twenty or thirty yards to the remote office window of the control room. This he penetrated by breaking the glass window with a thrust of his elbow, climbing in, turning on the light, flipping on the microphone, unlocking the office door, and emerging with that competent, relaxed smile of his, which we came to know after Grenada, Libya, Reykjavik, and Moscow; proceeding with the introduction of the speaker. And all that was thirty years before bringing peace to our time!

In later years I thought his movements that night a nifty allegory of his approach to foreign policy, the calm appraisal of a situation, the willingness to take risks, and then the decisive moment: leading to lights and sound — and music, the music of the spheres.

We stayed friends.

Twenty years later he was running for President of the United States. Early that winter the Soviet military had charged into Afghanistan, beginning a long, costly, brutal exercise. A week or two after he was nominated in Detroit, I wrote him. I told him I thought he would be elected. And told him then that, on the assumption that on reaching the White House he might wish to tender me an office, I wished him to know that I aspired to no government job of any kind.

He wrote back that he was disappointed. “I had in mind,” he said, “to appoint you ambassador to Afghanistan.” Over the next eight years, in all my communications with him, I would report fleetingly on my secret mission in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan where, in our fiction, I lived and worked. In his letters to me he would always address me as Mr. Ambassador. The show must go on, where Ronald Reagan was involved.

Soon after his election I was asked by the Philadelphia Society to speak on the theme, “Is President Reagan doing all that can be done?” It was a coincidence that my wife Pat and I had spent the weekend before the speech as guests of the President and Mrs. Reagan in Barbados. I recalled with delight an exchange I had with my host on the presidential helicopter. We were flying to our villa the first evening, before the two days on Easter weekend reserved for bacchanalian sunning and swimming on the beach in front of Claudette Colbert’s house. I leaned over and told him I had heard the rumor that the Secret Service was going to deny him permission to swim on that beach on the grounds that it was insufficiently secure. I asked him whether that were so, that he wouldn’t be allowed in the water.

Helicopters, even Marine One helicopters, are pretty noisy, but I was able to make out what he said. It was, “Well, Bill, Nancy here tells me I’m the most powerful man in the Free World. If she’s right, then I will swim tomorrow with you.”

Which indeed he did.

I recall also that during one of those swims I said to him, “Mr. President, would you like to earn the National Review Medal of Freedom?” He confessed to being curious as to how he would qualify to do this. I explained, “I will proceed to almost drown, and you will rescue me.” We went through the motions, and that evening I conferred that medal on him, in pectore.

I remember telling the Philadelphia Society that the most powerful man in the Free World is not powerful enough to do everything that needs to be done. Retrospectively, I have speculated on what I continue to believe was the conclusive factor in the matter of American security against any threat of Soviet aggression. It was the character of the occupant of the White House; the character of Ronald Reagan. The reason this is so, I have argued, is that the Soviet Union, for all that from time to time it miscalculated tactically, never miscalculated in respect of matters apocalyptic in dimension. And the policymakers of the Soviet Union knew that the ambiguists with whom they so dearly loved to deal were not in power during those critical years. So that if ever the Soviet leaders were tempted to such suicidal foolishness as to launch a strike against us, suicidal is exactly what it would prove to have been. The primary obstacle to the ultimate act of Soviet imperialism was the resolute U.S. determination to value what we have, over against what they, under Soviet dominion, did not have; value it sufficiently to defend it with all our resources.

TOTAL COMMITMENT
Ronald Reagan, in my judgment, animated his foreign policy by his occasional diplomatic indiscretions: because of course it was a diplomatic indiscretion to label the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” But then, quite correctly, he would switch gears when wearing diplomatic top hat and tails. He did not on those occasions talk the language of John Wayne — or of Thomas Aquinas. But how reassuring it was for us, you remember, every now and then (“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall!”), to vibrate to the music of the very heartstrings of the leader of the Free World who, to qualify convincingly as such, had after all to feel a total commitment to the free world. When in formal circumstances the President ventured out to exercise conviviality with the leaders of the Soviet Union, the scene was by its nature wonderful, piquant: What would he say that was agreeable, congenial, to the head of the evil empire? The summit conferences brought to mind the Russian who, on discovering that his pet parrot was missing, rushed out to the KGB office to report that his parrot’s political opinions were entirely unrelated to his own.

The ensuing chapter in the life of Russia presents its own problems. They are internal problems, with a surly outer face. You can hear the words framed on the mouth of the few remaining statues of Lenin. His lips are saying, So much for your capitalism! Russia poses no strategic threat to the Free World, to which Russia, de jure, belongs. But the contemporary experience of Russia is a devastating rebuke to facile, universalist ideas about what it is that needs to be done to nurture advances towards prosperity.

One key, of course, an indispensable key, is human freedom. When West Germany was liberated from fascist tyranny, and Japan from imperialist militarism, well-wishers of freedom cheered the results as life began its dramatic turn toward self-rule and a market economy. But in Russia the old brew didn’t mix, did it? It isn’t hard to compile a list of the missing elements. We know now about the profound corruption, and know how corruption conjoined with industrial satrapies can defy the benevolent ministrations of a free market. The causes of the wealth of nations heralded by Adam Smith cannot make their way in the absence of a reasoned mobility of a nation’s resources and a receptive theater for the entrepreneurial energies of its people.

There will be many books written about what happened in Russia in the decade beginning with liberation. The inquests will be various and prolonged, and they will all be sad; but they will make vivid lessons we need to absorb, as we project the economic future of other nations to be sure, but also of our own. The overarching lesson is that the elements of a good society oriented to the improvement of life aren’t all disembodied, inanimate; weight scales at a free-market counter. There is the live component.

And it is not just formal self-rule. Democracy is a mantra, but it isn’t an amulet. We can chant the benefits of democratic arrangements and cheer democratic practices; but these practices do not always lead to enlightened policies. One third of the Duma in Moscow are Communists. The freedom the Russians had, for the first time, to vote, very nearly returned a Communist president in the election of two years ago. The popularity of the democratically elected president of Russia today is given as 1 percent. (He should try poking an intern.) A substantial number of Russians would exchange life as it is today for life as it was yesterday. Thirty million Russians have not been paid for weeks of work, in some cases for months of work. What is a Russian gravedigger supposed to do, if he is not paid? Dig his own grave?

At the other end of the world we have the dismaying spectacle of Japan, recently referred to as the Land of the Setting Sun. “It is quite amazing,” Larry Kudlow recently opined: “They haven’t managed to do anything right.” Eight consecutive years of mismanagement by the second wealthiest country in the world. A democratic society whose people are demoralized, seemingly lost.

A STAMP ON THE NATIONAL MOOD
The lesson for our students of political economy is that we cannot fully depend on autopilots to do what is necessary. The Framers of our own republic said it again and again, that in the absence of virtue, no government could vouchsafe to a people a life of liberty and order. There are technical questions to solve and others that aren’t at all technical. What Japan needs to do its governors are not doing, in part because of ignorance, in part because pride and stubbornness and fear prompt them to preserve decadent enterprises. The Russians despair of reform, and the social festers continue, awaiting what almost inevitably and sadly we think of as another revolution, one that might make dominant a class of leaders willing to adjourn their own fleeting interests today, for prospective gains tomorrow that will endure.

The problem is theirs; our concern is limited to geostrategic questions. At our blessedly immediate geographical remove from Tokyo and Moscow, we have the finite benefit of a little insularity. But the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific are exactly that, finite comforts, only as reassuring as the distance between where mid-range missiles land and where strategic-missiles land, a distance that time is battering away at, progressively diminishing the security we feel in our little snuggery here. To utter the words From sea to shining sea used to evoke an almost infinite distance. It is now a mere stretch of space, traveled by missiles in about 18 minutes.

The Reagan years accustomed us to a mood about life and about government. There were always the interruptions, the potholes of life. But he had strategic visions. He told us that most of our civic problems were problems brought on or exacerbated by government, not problems that could be solved by government. That of course is enduringly true. Only government can cause inflation, preserve monopoly, and punish enterprise. On the other hand, it is only a government leader who can affect a national mood or summon up a historical period. One refers not to the period of Shakespeare but to the period of Elizabeth. Reagan’s period was brief, but it put a stamp on the national mood. He did this in part because he was scornful of the claims of omnipotent government, in part because by nature and by the words he spoke, he felt, and expressed, the buoyancy of the American Republic.

We have now the paradoxical situation, a leader whom 75 percent of the American people don’t wish to disturb, and whom 75 percent of the American people do not trust. It is comforting to tell ourselves that what this means is that we live in an age in which the long arm of government is so discredited, it can’t really do us much damage. If Mr. Clinton were indeed powerless, then he would be a threat only to maidens passing by. But leaving aside the power he wields as commander in chief, he has the power, and has exercised it, to cultivate a cynicism whose final effects we cannot appraise, nor even imagine. If what he has done is trivial, then much of what we think of as the infrastructure of civil society is also trivial — our commitments to truth, to the processes of justice, to the sanctity of oaths. It is possible that in future years, if there will be a return to wholesomeness of habits of thought and deed, the cloud that will hang over the last year of the 20th century won’t be the memory of a year spent on impeachment, but the memory of a year in which no action was taken after impeachment.

It is fine that the Ronald Reagan Library, Museum, and Center for Public Affairs, which serves as our host, will collect his papers and ambient literature, permitting generations of students and scholars to explore and linger over those happy years which augured the end of the Soviet threat, the revitalization of our economy, and a great draft of pride in our country. To the library I’ll convey in years ahead my own collection of letters from Ronald Reagan. The very last one written from the White House the day the Soviet Union announced that it would withdraw from Afghanistan was addressed,

“Dear Mr. Ambassador:

“Congratulations! The Soviets are moving out of Afghanistan. I knew you could do it if I only left you there long enough, and you did it without leaving Kabul for a minute.”

He closed by saying, “Nancy sends her love to you and Pat.” That was eleven years ago, and we cherish it today, and through her, convey our own love and gratitude to the President, on his 88th birthday.

http://www.nationalreview.com/flashback/buckley200406051743.asp

November 19, 2008 Posted by Mr. Montague | Conservatism, Rising Generation, Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley Jr. | Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley Jr. | No Comments Yet

The Conservative Spirit

THE NOCKIAN SPIRIT LIVES:

“The Conservative Spirit” (William F. Buckley, Jr., Keynote Address, The Philadelphia Society, 40th! Anniversary Gala, Chicago, Illinois April 30, 2004)

I noticed some months ago the remark of a cosmopolitan Englishman who had been asked about persistent British unemployment, which had sat there for many years at about 10 per cent. He said that all that those figures revealed was that some of his fellow citizens preferred not to work. “I think,” he said, “that unemployment is something we can afford.”Well of course it is, and we in America can “afford” subsidies of various kinds, which is different from saying that, in detached thought, we approve exactions from the public purse extrinsic to safety and justice.

Adam Smith did teach us that we correctly impose upon the state the burden of paying for public monuments.

The image sneaks its way into the imagination: Are the unemployed, in an expanded focus, entitled to pass as a monument to what an affluent society can sustain? As a kind of testimonial to its latitudinarian impulses?

The easiest answer to that question, and almost certainly the correct one, is No. Such extensions of what Adam Smith acknowledged as social embellishments are the business not of the state, but of the YMCA. Still, a fugitive thought to take to bed tonight—or another night, tonight’s thought being reserved for gratification at having spent time in one another’s company.

So we must sleep well, even though there are always grounds for discouragement. But those who, staring the data hard in the face, are driven to inconsolability, do well to guard against that temptation.

Richard Posner observed in a column in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday that conservatives have a duty to be cheerful, because we have no right to be disappointed by failures, knowing as we do about the limitations of the state, and the weaknesses of human beings. Mr. Posner is surely correct, and surely that counsel of his shone always through the face and the attitude toward life of Don Lipsett.

We have many forebears; Albert Jay Nock is but one, and his investment in pessimism is not for us. In later years I have come to admire Mr. Nock more for how he said what he had to say, than for what he had to say.

We are devoted here to the proposition that what we do and say and write does matter, does have effect. Mr. Nock wrote in the closing pages of his book Our Enemy the State, “I would be the first to acknowledge that no results of the kind which we agree to call practical could accrue to the credit of a book of this order, were it a hundred times as cogent as this one—no results, that is, that would in the least retard the State’s progress in self-aggrandizement, and thus modify the consequences of the State’s course.”

But manifestly there has been a slowing down of statist impositions, even if not on the scale the Philadelphia Society seeks. Mr. Nock was the total platonist in respect of what can be achieved on earth. As for the efforts all of us here undertake, we “might indeed,” in his language, “be thought bound to do [such things] as a matter of abstract duty.” He says of the remnant that they—we—do indeed “have an intellectual curiosity, sometimes touched with emotion, concerning the august order of nature”—never mind that what we do is of no purpose.

But of course it does have purpose.

Mr. Buckley is a bit unfair to Nock, who, after all, succeeded admirably in Isaiah’s job. Hard to fault him too much for being too humble to realize that the American people harbored a sufficient remnant to reverse the slide of the 30’s. No other Western nation did.

&

The Conservative Spirit

WFB’s keynote address to the Philadelphia Society’s gala 40th-anniversary meeting in Chicago, April 30

Mr. President, Mr. Secretary: The trouble with this assignment is that there is so much to do, at least so much that I want to do. And since the auspices tonight are libertarian, that which I want to do, I shall of course proceed to do.

It will strike cynical members of this assembly that I speak kindly of Lee Edwards immediately following his speaking well of me. But he should not be penalized by my ignoring him, simply because he has not ignored me.

I keep wondering when Lee Edwards will receive the critical attention he has earned with his continuing work as historian of our movement. His most recent book, the history of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, is wise, penetrating, and readable. His brief history of the Philadelphia Society, published in this weekend’s program, is a remarkable feat of research and organization. Among other of his revelations, I am pleased to be reminded that I put up one hundred dollars to launch the Philadelphia Society’s bank account, forever rupturing my relations with the bank, which used to be friendly to me, but now spent its time coping with the Society’s overdrafts.

Indeed, my concern over the Society’s financial distresses is more regular than my irregular participation in our proceedings. That concern has been at one level steadfast, at another, reckless. I remember trying anxiously to reach Senator Goldwater on the phone years ago because I needed his vote before the end of a trustees’ meeting at noon the next day, in order to effect a grant for the Philadelphia Society.

I couldn’t locate him. He was off somewhere flying his airplane. In desperation, I sent a telegram to all seven of our fellow trustees, registering approval of the proposed grant to the Philadelphia Society. I signed it, “Best regards, Barry M. Goldwater.”

I was enormously relieved, when his airplane finally landed and I was able to tell him what I…

Notes & asides.

Publication: National Review

Publication Date: 31-MAY-04

November 19, 2008 Posted by Mr. Montague | Albert Jay Nock, Philadelphia Society, The Remnant, William F. Buckley Jr. | Albert Jay Nock, Philadelphia Society, The Remnant, William F. Buck | No Comments Yet

A Man and His Mag

On the morning of October 6, the White House held an event in honor of William F. Buckley Jr. and the magazine he founded 50 years ago. Here is a sampling of the remarks made on that occasion, culminating in those of the president.
JAMES L. BUCKLEY

Fortunately for Bill I have no anecdotal memory, so he will be spared the embarrassment of my reciting a litany of his youthful indiscretions. But what I can say is that being related to Bill is not an unmixed blessing. For example, shortly after I was elected to the Senate, Bill chose to appear on the television program Laugh-In, on which he asserted, among other things, that he would only fly on planes that had two right wings. Two days later, I received an angry letter from a lawyer in Buffalo who described himself as a former admirer. He went on to say that he was appalled to see my disgusting performance on Laugh-In in which I disgraced my office and embarrassed my constituents by acting the clown on that nauseating program. He acknowledged that some people might enjoy its indecencies, but trusted that they were in the minority.

Now, for someone in elective office, it’s a worrisome thing to lose even one admirer. So by return mail, with copy to Bill, I advised him that it was Bill, not I, who had appeared on Laugh-In, but added that I couldn’t help wondering why he had consented to watch a program of which he so strongly disapproved. I was rather pleased with my putdown until, three days later, I received my copy of the letter Bill sent my former admirer:

Dear Mr. _____:

It is typical of my brother to deceive his constituents. It was he, not I, who appeared on Laugh-In, just as you suspected. But his greatest deception remains undiscovered. It was I, not he, who was elected to the Senate.

So you are represented in the Senate by an honest and truthful man.

Yours sincerely,

Wm. F. Buckley Jr.

Bill published that exchange in National Review, and a Buffalo subscriber posted it on the bulletin board of a stuffy club to which my poor constituent belonged.

The question that people continually ask me is whether my other siblings and I knew, as we were growing up, that we had such a prodigy under our roof. The answer, of course, is no. We did realize that Bill was precocious (at age seven, for example, he wrote the King of England demanding that he repay England’s war debt), and his older siblings would tease him about the mouth-filling words he would occasionally use and, at times, misuse. But as the years went by, our amusement turned to awe as three of Bill’s signature qualities manifested themselves: an Olympian self-assurance, an unrestrained imagination, and the self-discipline required to accomplish whatever he set his mind to.

And when, with the self-assurance we have come to know, he decided the time had come to save the nation from liberalism, he had the imagination to see how this might be accomplished and the infinite self-discipline and determination required to bring it about. Bill proposed to save the Republic by founding a magazine that would lay the intellectual groundwork for a counterrevolution. And Bill proceeded to do precisely what he had set out to do: transform American politics. Not a bad accomplishment for a precocious younger brother.

Unfortunately, as the years went by, Bill developed the habit of commandeering his siblings’ services. My sister Priscilla had a promising career in journalism until he yanked her home from the United Press bureau in Paris to become his managing editor and nanny to a cantankerous group of editors. And he has had the most direct impact on my own life, beginning with a telephone call in the spring of 1965 when he called to announce a) that he had decided to run for the position of mayor of New York City on the strict understanding that he could not win, and b) that he required my services as his campaign manager. Now it happens that at that time I had never been involved in a political campaign of any kind and I have never had any talents as a manager. So it would be an exercise in the blind leading the blind. What Bill wanted was a buffer to protect him from the New York Conservative party’s amateur political strategists. And, as has always been the case, I yielded. It was a glorious campaign. As expected, Bill didn’t win, but I had been introduced to the fathers of the Conservative party who would later conscript me for a run for the Senate. And it seems I have been on one government payroll or another ever since.

I have had many blessings in life, but few that match the pleasure and privilege of having Bill for a brother.

Mr. Buckley is a senior judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals and a former U.S. senator from New York.
ROGER KIMBALL

One question that many in this room will have asked themselves over the years is, how does he do it? He is graduated from college and instantly incites apoplexy with his book God and Man at Yale. He founds National Review and at one stroke rescues American conservatism from parochial irrelevance and provides a platform for generations of conservative commentators.

He may have advised us, in the first issue of NR, to stand athwart history yelling Stop! But look how much he has instigated.

Recognizing the importance of debate to the health of our political culture, he starts Firing Line and for 30-odd years provides the most intelligent and entertaining forum for the exchange of ideas and exhibition of eccentricity in the history of television. He skis; he sails across the Atlantic, across the Pacific, to Canada, to Bermuda. He plays the piano and harpsichord, not just in the privacy of his living room but in concert halls. In his spare time, he runs for mayor of New York City — though not, I should point out, posthumously, as The New York Times Magazine seemed to imply last week when it ran the World’s Most Ghastly Photograph of Bill on its cover.

In addition to these sundry avocations, there are the central employments of speaking and writing. For many years, Bill averaged 70 lectures a year. That’s seven-zero. I pause to remind you that a year contains but 52 weeks.

And then there is the writing: the thrice-weekly column, the articles for NR and a galaxy of other magazines from — well, from The New Criterion to Playboy — how’s that for range?

The sage of Ecclesiastes observed that of the making of books there is no end. Bill obviously absorbed that verse at a tender age and regarded it as a vocation. How many books has he written, edited, introduced, been midwife to? Political and social commentary; memoirs and travel writing; essays, polemics, and a shelf full of novels — the list is long and daunting.

But this catalogue of achievement, impressive though it is, forms merely the integument of Bill Buckley’s activities. The core, I suspect, centers around a twofold conviction and an accident of temperament.

The conviction is, first, that liberty is essential to our humanity; but, second, that genuine liberty requires acknowledgment of what transcends and gives direction to our discretion — in other words, that genuine liberty requires faith and what one British jurist memorably called “obedience to the unenforceable.”

Bill’s embrace of liberty has made him, famously, the scourge of political tyrants who would trample upon freedom, and latitudinarian anarchists who would beguile us with counterfeit substitutes. Yet it is important, I think, to note that the withering lucidity of Bill’s rhetoric has sometimes obscured the fact that, unlike many able polemicists, he is a profoundly non- or even anti-ideological character.

He is conservative, yes; he has assiduously followed St. Paul’s directive to “speak thou the things which become sound doctrine.”

But Bill’s conservatism is fundamentally a creature of amplitude. Like Walter Bagehot, he knows that “the essence of Toryism is enjoyment.” And this brings me to that accident of temperament I mentioned a moment ago. I daresay that everyone in this room is, in one way or another, a beneficiary of Bill Buckley — his insight, his admonition, his infectious enthusiasm and unstoppable generosity.

Let me say a word about the element of admonition. It transpired one day that I had never heard of the remarkable controversialist Westbrook Pegler. Bill’s astonishment was profound — and unremitting. It was also effective. For I have since acquainted myself so closely with the works of Westbrook Pegler that I sometimes believe that I am Westbrook Pegler!

The author of Genesis tells us that God made the world and saw that it was good. To my mind, that is the imperative bulletin that Bill Buckley has been bringing us for decades. He has been graced with many talents; but he has been graced above all with a genius for friendship. I am immensely grateful for the benefactions of that genius. Thank you, Bill. Long may you flourish.

Mr. Kimball is co-editor and co-publisher of The New Criterion, and publisher of Encounter Books.

HENRY A. KISSINGER

For over 50 years, Bill Buckley has been a friend — a staunch support in every crisis and an inspiration amidst the political turmoil of the times.

It cannot be said that our relationship began auspiciously. What brought us together was a journal called Confluence that I — then a second-year graduate student — was editing. Its purpose was to reconcile European and American attitudes by inviting authors from both sides of the Atlantic to write essays on the same topic. Shortly after the publication of God and Man at Yale, I invited Bill to contribute. I cannot recall what possessed me to make this — in the Harvard context — foolhardy decision. I have no recollection of what I expected. In fact, there was no basis for forming any expectation because, in the 1950s, conservatives were an unknown species at Harvard. When I read Bill’s draft, all ambiguity vanished. By Harvard standards, it was beyond unorthodox, verging on the sacrilegious. So we turned the article down, preserving our prospects for Harvard tenure. It is not an action of which I am proud — though no doubt we found an elevated justification at the time.

Bill gave me my comeuppance during the controversy over détente when he said — in my presence — on Firing Line: “Henry Kissinger reminds me of an athlete carried around the arena to the applause of the multitude while someone else is winning the race.”

Despite unpromising beginnings, Bill and I became close friends. He has always been tolerant of deviant opinions, and his civilized urbanity that had vanquished such veterans of ideological struggle as Ken Galbraith found it easy to disarm a Rockefeller Republican — so much so that as time went on, Bill occasionally appointed himself my conscience. For example, he was part of the press corps accompanying President Nixon to China. While I was briefing the journalists on the Shanghai Communiqué, Bill respected our friendship too much to ask a hostile question. But he made sure to sit in the front row with a raised eyebrow that was not lowered once during an hour’s briefing.

Bill could leave me defensive amidst general adulation because I cherished his integrity, his warmth, his serenity, and his values. Having escaped a totalitarian society, I appreciated his resistance to the politics of manipulation. When Bill first appeared on the scene, the dominant agenda tended toward the homogenization of societies, without regard to history, culture, and circumstance. Bill’s message was that every society must tread a path partially charted in its past and that its future depends on the sustaining value it can draw from its roots. The dominant agenda treated society as a mechanism subject to continuous tinkering. Bill’s conservatism saw society as an organism requiring its own special nurturing. This is why conservatives strive to replace the tyranny of programs with a respect for the unknowable and an acute sense of responsibility for the possibilities of unintended consequences. The insistence on imposing perfection in a finite time is a cause of much of humanity’s suffering. Real conservatism believes in absolute values but is willing to reach them in imperfect stages. This humility — which in Bill’s case could be described as flamboyant — is the prerequisite to achieving the ultimate liberation of man and societies to evoke the best within them.

The most difficult challenge for any society is to chart the path between its past and its future. To travel that road, courageous guides are needed, not afraid to stand alone and capable of both battles and reconciliations.

Bill has performed this service for our society.

Let me conclude with a quotation from Winston Churchill:

“What is the use of living, if it be not to strive for noble causes and to make this muddled world a better place for those who will live in it after we are gone? How else can we put ourselves in harmonious relation with the great verities and consolations of the infinite and the eternal?”

Bill always has recalled us to the great verities. It has been a privilege to be his contemporary, an honor to be his friend.

Mr. Kissinger was secretary of state from 1973 to 1977.
GEORGE F. WILL

In his 40th-anniversary toast to his Yale class of 1950, Bill Buckley said: “Some of us who wondered if we would ever be this old now wonder whether we were ever young.” Those who were not young 40 years ago, in 1965, can have no inkling of what fun it was to be among Bill’s disciples as he ran for mayor of New York vowing that, were he to win, his first act would be to demand a recount.

Murray Kempton, the wonderful liberal columnist who later joined Bill’s eclectic legion of friends, wrote after Bill’s first news conference as a candidate that Bill “had the kidney to decline the customary humiliation of soliciting the love of the voters, and read his statement of principles in a tone for all the world that of an Edwardian resident commissioner reading aloud the 39 articles of the Anglican establishment to a conscript assemblage of Zulus.”

For conservatives, happy days were here again.

Back then, espousing conservatism was regarded by polite society, which was then soggy with that era’s barely challenged liberalism, as a species of naughtiness, not nice but also not serious. Bill, representing New York’s Conservative party, which was just three years old, won 13 percent of the vote. When the winner, John Lindsay, limped discredited from office eight years later, Bill’s brother Jim had been elected, on the Conservative line, U.S. senator from New York.

Bill soon turns 80 and National Review, which he founded in the belly of the beast — in liberal Manhattan — soon turns 50. It is difficult to remember, and hence especially important to remember, the slough of despond conservatism was in in 1955.

Ohio’s senator Robert Taft, for more than a decade the leading conservative in elective office, had died in 1953. Joseph McCarthy had tainted conservatism in the process of disgracing himself with bile and bourbon. President Eisenhower had so placidly come to terms with the flaccid consensus of the 1950s that the editor of U.S. News & World Report, the most conservative newsweekly, suggested that both parties nominate Eisenhower in 1956.

National Review demurred. When it nailed its colors to its mast and set sail upon the choppy seas of American controversy, one novel on the bestseller list was Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. It voiced the 1950s worry about “conformity.”

National Review’s premise was that conformity was especially egregious among the intellectuals, that herd of independent minds. National Review is one reason that the phrase “conservative intelligentsia” is no longer, as it was in 1955, an oxymoron.

In 1964, National Review (its circulation then was 100,000) did what the mighty Hearst press had often tried to do but had never done. National Review had determined a major party’s presidential nomination.

Barry Goldwater’s candidacy was essentially an emanation of National Review’s cluttered offices on East 35th Street. Which is why an audience of young Goldwaterites took it so hard when, two months before the 1964 election, Buckley warned them that bliss would be a bit delayed. He said:

“The point of the present occasion is to win recruits whose attention we might never have attracted but for Barry Goldwater; to win them not only for November the third, but for future Novembers; to infuse the conservative spirit in enough people to entitle us to look about us on November fourth, not at the ashes of defeat, but at the well-planted seeds of hope, which will flower on a great November day in the future, if there is a future.”

There was a future. It arrived 16 years later.

Bill is the author of more than 4,000 columns, and still adding two a week. He is the author of 47 books, 18 of them novels. He was the host of the Firing Line television program for 33 years. For 50 years he has been a public speaker, often making as many as 70 lectures and debates a year. He has been an ocean mariner, a concert harpsichordist — Bill’s energy reproaches the rest of us.

He is married to a woman who matches his mettle. His proposal to her, made when he called her away from a card game, went like this:

He: “Patricia, would you consider marriage with me?”

She: “Bill, I’ve been asked this question many times. To others I’ve said no. To you I say yes. Now, may I please get back and finish my hand?”

In his memoir Miles Gone By, Bill recalls the story of an American GI who asked a caretaker at Windsor Castle to explain the secret of the Castle’s splendid lawn. The caretaker replied: You make a very shallow furrow before planting the grass. Then you carefully water it — for 700 years.

Liberty is like that, and Bill, head caretaker of America’s political lawn, understands the patience required for its cultivation.

Bill, so young at 80, was severely precocious at age seven when he wrote a starchy letter to the King of England demanding payment of Britain’s World War I debts. Seventy-three years on, Bill’s country is significantly different, and better, because of him. Of how many journalists, ever, can that be said? Only one.

Mr. Will is a syndicated columnist.
GEORGE W. BUSH

Editor’s Note: Below is a transcript of the president’s remarks, which were in part off the cuff.

I’m here to escort William F. Buckley Jr. To lunch. (Laughter.) But first I’ve got some things I want to say. It’s an honor to celebrate the 50th anniversary of National Review, and soon to be the 80th birthday of our honoree. You probably think this is a — the Yale Scholars Association meeting. (Laughter.) Actually, Bill Buckley did have an influence on me when I followed him at Yale. You might remember one of his famous quotes — the job of conservatives was to stand athwart history, yelling Stop. That’s the approach I took to most of my classes. (Laughter.)

I also do want to throw a little bouquet to him, and let him know that all I’ve learned about the English language . . . (Laughter.)

At any rate, it’s good to welcome the Buckley family. Thank you all for coming. It’s such an honor to have you all here. You’ve got a great family, and you’re a family of public service and a family that has stood strong for what you believe, without wavering. I appreciate Dr. Kissinger, and Dusty Rhodes, and Ed Capano as well. It’s good to see you all.

The interesting thing about Bill Buckley’s career is he’s a — obviously, not idle. He likes to do a lot of different things. He was an author, an editor, a spy, a novelist, a sailor. . . The most important thing he did was to contribute to the realm of ideas for America. He was an entrepreneur. He kind of gathered up some dreamers and decided to do something. A lot of times dreamers don’t do anything, they just sit there and dream. He decided to do something, and he formed a magazine that helped move conservatism from the margins of American society into the Oval Office. That’s a significant contribution.

The amazing thing is that sometimes it’s hard to be a leader because you hear all kinds of voices. He certainly heard different voices when he formed National Review. He had an eclectic group of people. That’s a Yale word. (Laughter.) He had voices that included ex-communists who knew better than most the threat posed to America by the Soviet Union. He had voices such as free-marketers who knew that markets could deliver better results than bureaucracies. He had voices from the traditionalists who understood that a government of and by and for the people could not stand unless it stood on moral ground. They were all different — represented a different strand of conservative thought. Yet, when they came together under the conductor’s baton, they made beautiful music. Congratulations for being a leader. (Applause.)
Wenn Photos

I’m sure it’s hard for some of the youngsters — unfortunately, that doesn’t include me anymore (laughter) — to imagine the day when the only conservative game in Washington, D.C., was Bill Buckley and National Review. And today we’ve got, of course, an abundance of conservative columnists and radio hosts and television shows and think tanks and all kinds of organizations. I guess in an intellectual sense, you could say these are all Bill’s children. And like children, they grow up and go their own way. But I’m confident that the faithful advocates of the free-enterprise system, like those at National Review, regard the competition they have created as a good thing. I certainly hope so.

It’s hard to believe that in 1955, the Soviet Union was in full power, that Ronald Reagan was a Democrat — and the truth of the matter is, Bill, I was more interested in Willie Mays than I was in you. (Laughter.) But a lot has changed in a brief period of time, when you think about it. Many of the more important changes of the 20th century happened because National Review stood strong, and that’s a fact — that’s a fact of history.

I’m glad to know that the people of National Review aren’t resting on their laurels. A sign of a good leader is somebody who can lay the foundation so that people are able to carry on. I think that’s going to be a legacy of Bill Buckley. He didn’t just show up and create something that cratered, he created something that stood the test of time and grew.

The people of National Review are determined to leave their mark on this new century, and we appreciate it. You got a lot of readers here in the West Wing. My admonition is to keep thinking, to keep writing, and keep working.

I found another Buckley quote interesting — when he wrote, with characteristic modesty, that did National Review not exist, no one would have invented it. (Laughter.) I think it’s more accurate to say that only Bill Buckley could have invented National Review. And that’s a tremendous influence on American life that can be explained only by the appeal of human freedom — this great understanding of the power of freedom to change societies and to lift up people’s lives.

It is an honor to be here to thank you for your service. I want to thank you for leaving us a magazine and a group of thinkers that will help make the advance of liberty over the last 50 years look like a dress rehearsal for the next 50 years.

May God bless the Buckley family. Thank you for coming.

http://nrd.nationalreview.com/article/?q=N2RjNzc4ZjM2YzkxMzhiNWE4NTZlZjRkZWFlMTI5ZjA=

November 19, 2008 Posted by Mr. Montague | William F. Buckley Jr. | William F. Buckley Jr. | No Comments Yet

Russell Kirk

Russell Kirk Web Site

Russell Kirk (1918–1994)

Russell Kirk (1918-1994) was the premier architect of the post World War II conservative intellectual revival. This web site will be devoted to his life, works and continuing influence on the shape and direction of cultural conservative thought. I welcome your suggestions for additions and improvements of this web page. Please send to: mcdonaldw@etown.edu

Subscribe now to “The Permanent Things,” a listserver about the life and thought of Russell Kirk.

List members should be interested in promoting the Permanent Things as advocated by the great writer and thinker, Russell Kirk. It is specially created as a meeting place for those who served as assistants of Dr. Kirk, and those who have studied with him. This list is open to all who have an interest in the Permanent Things, however. Appropriate topics of discussion would include Dr. Kirk’s writings, announcements of lectures and seminars and of course, amusing Dr. Kirk stories. Certainly other topics would be acceptable–use your own Right Reason

Click to subscribe to PermanentThings

Life and Thought

Hall of Fame – Russell Kirk Images of Kirk provided by The National Review magazine.
The Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal The primary mission of the Center, founded by Mrs. Kirk, is to identify, educate, and mentor thoughtful young men and women interested in Kirk’s ideas and principles.
Old Family Photos of Mecosta, John Kirk (Kirk’s grandfather), etc.

Excerpts in Books about Kirk

An impressive collection of Kirk materials provided by Prof. William Campbell of Louisiana State University. The text is taken from George Nash’s, The Conservative Intellectual Movement and reprinted here with Dr. Nash’s permission. The photographs at this site were originally published in Kirk’s The Sword of Imagination: Memoirs of a Half Century of Literary Conflict and are used with the kind permission of Mrs. Annette Kirk and Eermands Publishing Company. For information on how to order a copy of Kirk’s memoirs, click here.

Dr. Nash and Dr. Campbell are currently working on creating a CD-ROM version of The Conservative Intellectual Movement For more information on this work email Prof. Campbell at: campbellw1@prodigy.net

Other Web Sites of Interest

Hall of Fame – Russell Kirk

Created and maintained by The Heritage Foundation, Washington, D.C., this is the best all around source of information on Kirk available on the Web. Site includes a biography, his Heritage Foundation lectures, a list of his works, numerous photographs taken throughout his life, and brief audio clips of the great man himself! A good introduction to his life and works.

The Henry Regnery Legacy Project. A web site devoted to Henry Regery, the publisher of many of Kirk’s works.
The Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Publishes The Intercollegiate Review a quarterly journal of conservative scholarship and opinion, and several other publications including The University Bookman formerly edited by Russell Kirk. Other ISI services include a speakers bureau, and special offers on classic conservative works. Check out this site and become an ISI student or faculty member. No charge to students or faculty.

The National Humanities Institute

A Washington based think-tank dedicated to promoting the humanites. The first and only site where an explication and discussion of the ideas of the founders of the American Humanist Movement, Irving Babbitt (1865-1933), Paul Elmer More (1864-1937) and the Swedish philospher (Folke Leander (1910-1981) can be found. More and Babbitt profoundly influenced the thought of Kirk. Also, check out the “Internet Links for Humanities Research.” NHI is preparing to start an “Electonic Bulletin Board” site which will include brief items and announcements.

Michigan’s Russell Kirk and the Roots of Liberty By Joseph G. Lehman
Transaction Publishers

Several of Kirk’s books are currently available through Transaction Publishers. Check out this Web Site for more information. Kirk was also the founding editor of The Library of Conservative Thought, also published by Transaction Publishers. “The Library of Conservative Thought offers you a good sampling of conservative theory, analysis, criticism, and imagery,” wrote Kirk, “We mean to resurrect the works of some able men and women of letters and public affairs who, when the choice had to be made, preferred the devil they knew to the devil they did not know.” For a list of available volumes in this series and ordering information click on the Transaction Publishers link.

The Conservative Town Hall.

Lots of good stuff here for conservatives of all stripes and anyone interested in the American conservative movement. A nice graphical interface which makes this an easy site to navigate around.

Lord Acton Book Shoppe

The following items are available for sale through the Acton Book Shoppe.

All prices are in U.S. Dollars. A printable copy of the Order Form is available for your convenience. Offers include several Russell Kirk books that are out-of-print and not available elsewhere. http://www.acton.org/books.html (30K)

Richard M. Weaver, 1910-1963: A Life of the Mind by Fred Douglas Young
1. Malcolm Muggeridge’s Scourging of Liberalism. Lecture given September 21st, 1989.
2. Political Errors at the End of the Twentieth Century, Part I: Republican Errors. Lecture given 2/27/91.
3. Political Errors at the End of the Twentieth Century, Part II: Democratic Errors. Lecture given 5/6/91.
4. May the Rising Generation Redeem the Time? Lecture given 12/11/91.
5. Renewing a Shaken Culture Lecture given 12/11/92.
6. The Meaning of Justice. Lecture given 3/4/93
7. The Case for and Against Natural Law Lecture given 7/15/93.

Richard M. Weaver was a complex individual who lived chiefly to think and to write. Interest in his work remains high, even though he died in his early fifties. http://www.system.missouri.edu/upress/fall1995/young.htm (2K)

Texts of Speeches by Russell Kirk

1. Heritage Foundation Speeches

2. Other Misc. Works

Freud and the Educationists from the National Review, August 29, 1959, p. 304
Lord Acton on Revolution
“Ten Conservative Books” reprinted from Kirk’s The Politics of Prudence (This link seems to be broken. Anyone know the new address?)

Speeches and Articles about Russell Kirk

“An Economist’s Tribute to Russell Kirk“ William F. Campbell Originally appeared in The Intercollegiate Review, Fall 1994
“Life with Russell Kirk.” Annette Kirk (Mrs. Russell Kirk) recalls 30 years of marriage to Russell Kirk. Lecture given at the Heritage Foundation, November 17, 1995.
First Principles in the Public Arena. The First Russell Kirk Memorial Lecture given by Governor John Engler of Michigan at the Heritage Foundation, Washington, D.C., on 9/26/95.
Review of The Sword of Imagination by Russell Kirk written by John Attarian of the The Detroit Free Press. This is Kirk’s memoirs and his last published work. Find out how to order The Sword here.
Wilfred McClay “The Mystic Chords of Memory: Reclaiming American History” Russell Kirk Memorial Lecture at the Heritage Foundation, Washington, D.C., on 12/13/95.
Russell Kirk’s Economics of the Permanent Things By the late John Attarian in The Freeman, a publication of The Foundation for Economic Education, Inc., April 1996, Vol. 46, No. 4.

Russell Kirk Obituaries

William F. Buckley’s obituary of Russell Kirk written for National Review
T. Kenneth Cribb, Jr. Director of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.
Edwin Feulner Jr., president of the Heritage Foundation

http://users.etown.edu/m/mcdonaldw/kirk.html

More on Kirk here: http://www.kirkcenter.org/kirkbio.html

November 19, 2008 Posted by Mr. Montague | Russell Kirk | Russell Kirk | No Comments Yet

The Founders and the Rising Generation

The Founders and the Rising Generation
by T. Kenneth Cribb, Jr.
delivered at
The Philadelphia Society Meeting
Williamsburg, Virginia
November 23, 1996

Alexander Solzhenitsyn once remarked that “A people which no longer remembers, has lost its history and its soul.” That profound insight underscores the centrality of our deliberations this weekend. It is especially haunting when applied to the theme of tonight’s session: the Founders and the rising generations.

It is appropriate that we gather this weekend in Williamsburg, a city where the mist of history surrounds us, to discuss ways in which to recover our historical consciousness. The alarming rate at which historical ignorance–and worse, apathy–are advancing in the ranks of our fellow citizens puts the future of the nation as conceived by the Founders at risk. Indeed, a recent symposium in a highly regarded journal has gone so far as to suggest that the experiment undertaken by our Forefathers in erecting a republican system of limited, representative government is in acute danger of failing due to a “long train of abuses and usurpations”–to use the language of the Declaration–by the courts and by big government. The question explored in the symposium by several distinguished writers in “whether we are reaching the point where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime.” That such a question is seriously posed by leading conservative thinkers is a sobering comment on the state of the republic.

How have we come to this pass? Certainly one of the principal reasons is the ever widening gap between the Founding generation and the rising generation. This chasm is a “generation gap” of a different sort than the kind commonly referred to by political pollsters. I mean here something much different than chronological distance–I mean a separation more in consciousness than in time. Today’s high school and college youth exist, in an historical sense, a mere 220 years from the signing of the Declaration–but for most it may we well be 2020. Survey after survey confirms the basic fact that the rising generation is learning next to nothing about American history. What is at stake here is more than a lost acquaintance with names, dates, events, and figures, important as that acquaintance is. More significantly, the rising generation increasingly is being denied the acquisition of an historical consciousness and the cultivation of the discipline of historical memory.

The fact that most citizens today complacently accept the abrogation of power by governments and the courts at the expense of their own sovereignty is not surprising given the dramatic recession of historical understanding and memory among large numbers of Americans now coming of age. What is the significance of historical consciousness and its connection to our present discontents? Wilfred McClay, an historian of distinction here with us this weekend, put the connection this way in a recent, and poetic, address at The Heritage Foundation.

“Historical consciousness,” McClay writes, “is to civilized society what memory is to the individual identity. One cannot say who or what one is–one can’t say one is anyone, or anything, at all–without some selective retention of experience and source of continuity. One cannot learn, use
language, pass on knowledge, raise offspring, or even dwell in society without the aid of
memory….A culture without memory will necessarily be barbarous, no matter how technologically
advanced and sophisticated, because the daily drumbeat of artificial sensations and amplified
events will drown out all other sounds, including the strains of an older music.”

What is it about the men of America’s founding generation that makes them worthy of the memory of the rising generation? For some, the extraordinary extent to which large numbers of our forebears were prepared to sacrifice their fortunes and their very lives to preserve liberty is enough to merit historical distinction and commemoration. For still others, the extraordinary fact about the Founding era was the talent it generated. People seemed to notice from the beginning the shear number of planters and shopkeepers, men of the courts and countinghouses, coming together to fight a war and forge a nation. Silas Deane, a member of the Continental Congress wrote home in 1775 that “Times like these call up Genius, which slept before, and stimulate it in action to a degree, that eclipses what might before have been fixed as a Standard.” And in 1789, David Ramsey of my own South Carolina noted that the heroic events of the war and the succeeding years of constitutional deliberation had “not only required, but created talents. Men, he said, “spoke, wrote, and acted, with an energy far surpassing all expectations, which could be reasonably founded on their previous acquirements. And, indeed, in our own day historian Edmund S. Morgan expressed a similar sentiment when he observed that “if one were to make a list of the great men of American history, by whatever standards one chooses to measure greatness, an astonishingly large proportion would be found whose careers began or culminated in the Revolution. It would be hard to find in all the rest of American history more than two or three men to rank with Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, or John Adams.” When a society wishes to encourage right conduct, the ability of history to throw forward exemplars of right conduct is not to be underestimated.

But when we attempt to unveil these, and other, ways in which the Founders are worthy of a central place in the individual and collective memory, we are met by formidable obstacles. One is the reigning utilitarian approach to history, which is surely one overwhelming reason why such a large historical generation gap currently exists. A utilitarian view of historical studies is not a new problem; since the early decades of this century conservatives have waged a sustained offensive against the progressives and John Dewey, objecting principally to the transformation of the educational mission of one of “social efficiency.” Transmitting the legacy of the Founding Fathers will never be a central concern of historians chiefly occupied with constructing a program directly “relevant” to their students interests, and in concert with their students’ personal and professional goals. The extreme of this view was best expressed thirty years ago by radical educator Edgar Wesley in an infamous essay entitled, “Let’s Abolish History.” In it, Wesley argued that students need a history they can “appreciate.” “No teacher at any grade level,” he confidently asserted, “should teach a course in history as content. To do so is confusing, unnecessary, frustrating, futile, pointless, and as illogical as to teach a course in the World Almanac, the dictionary, or the Encyclopedia. [History should be] utilized and exploited–not studied, learned, or memorized.” Needless to say, such ardent utilitarianism, and even milder expressions of the same view, had proved disastrous for the study of history generally, and the cultivation of an historical appreciation for our American forebears in particular.

A corollary view to the utilitarian approach to history is the scourge of moral relativism which, in the modern academy, cloaks itself in the garb of multiculturalism.

Relativism has stalked the corridors of the academy for years, but the echoes of those footsteps resound as never before. Of the strains of academic relativism, two of the most virulent are relativism as among cultures and relativism as among standards. The transmission of culture depends on the assumption that there is in the body of Western thought truths that are worth preserving through the ages, truths that justify the immense effort and cost of the educational establishment traditionally entrusted with transmitting the culture. but what if there is no truth? Or mores specifically, what if the traditions and institutions of the West, and the moral order that these imply, are neither more nor less valuable than those of other cultures? Well then, concern for transmitting an inherited body of learning does not matter, because the culture of the West itself does not signify.

Once the leveling scythe of relativism has cut the higher achievements of civilization down to size, we are exempted from thinking through such fundamental questions as What is the good? What is just? What deserves the allegiance of duty and of honor? Why do civilizations rise? Why do they fall? For relativism also attacks any notion of standards that proceed from a moral order and that form the basis of right conduct.

Forrest McDonald has observed that the Framers themselves were not strangers to this notion of moral relativism. But, McDonald notes, the Founders “put it to their use, with their understanding that a regime must be suited to the manners and morals of a people if it is to endure.” “They would [however] have been appalled,” he argues further, “at the modern idea that Western civilization is no better than other civilizations, that the heritage of The West is not superior to as well as different from that of The East, that the Judaeo-Christian tradition is not morally superior to as well as different from that of Islam or paganism or tribalism, that one so-called life-style is as good as another. Such thinking, if it can be so described, is a rationalization for being unable to measure up to the duty of living in accordance with and transmitting the higher values.” Political correctness and identity politics are the practical manifestations of this relativistic approach to academic inquiry.

There are of course trends other than utilitarianism and moral relativism which make it difficult to advance the Founders as a group worthy of study, appreciation, and placement in a broader “community of memory.” But I want to turn finally to a brief consideration of some hopeful developments in recent years that can perhaps serve to embolden us in our efforts to close the ever widening consciousness gap between the rising generation and our Founding generation.

The first cause for tempered hope is the proliferation of idea-mediating institutions dedicated to redressing the woeful neglect of our Founding principles among the rising generation. Frank Chodorov, the man who founded ISI as many of you know, once noted that “what was done can be undone if there is a will for it.” That will has been “institutionalized” in the form of organizations like our own ISI, and like Jim Taylor and Ron Robinson’s Young America’s Foundation, Ed Feulner’s Heritage Foundation, Gene Meyer’s Federalist Society, Larry Arnn and Charles Kesler’s Claremont Institute, Father Sirico’s Acton Institute, and many, many other organizations like these now dotting our cultural landscape. Such groups exist to put ideas into action, and serve as vital mediators between an establishment treading heavily on the intellectual tradition of the West, and students wearied of politicization and in search of the historical truth and the roots of their own cultural order. And so an infrastructure now exists that was but a dream even three decades ago. Scholars, books, journals, seminars, reprints, tapes, fellowships, and similar resources are now available in abundance to provide intellectual substance for young minds. The plenitude is so great that the main problem is organizing what is available and bringing it to bear where needed.

But the will that animates institutions like those mentioned above had to come from some source: and for most of them, the direct source has been the intellectual legacy of a broad ranging group of conservative intellectuals who for the most part put aside their differences in emphasis and approach and came together as a movement at a critical moment in our history to strengthen the faltering institutions of the West. This fact is the second reason to be mildly sanguine about our prospects for recovering our past. Because while intellectuals on the Left have for decades been working to tear down the cultural bridge that extends from one generation to the next, thinkers on the Right have been laboring heroically, and I think successfully, to extend that bridge unto the next generation. While after the last great war, the circle of those concerned with the recovery of our patrimony was a small one, it has with every decade been enlarged–creating a kind of concentric development of conservative-leaning scholars that is slowly extending itself outward into the most hostile cultural venues, poised, perhaps, one day to envelop them. One need only recall the names of Kirk, Niemeyer, Weaver, Burnham, Voegelin, Kendall, Meyer, Tonsor, and Strauss; and then consider those who picked-up their mantle, more numerous and diverse, Evans, McDonald, Carey, Liggio, Edward McClellan, Campbell, Kesler; and then consider their students, still more numerous and more diverse.

And, indeed, it is this last group which represents the third reason why I believe we can be reasonably cheered by our prospects for recovering an historical consciousness among the rising generation. For there is now in place in the university classroom a generation of young faculty members who are friendly to at least the broad strokes of the above analysis and are working in the “trenches”–often against serious odds and at risk to their careers–to transmit our Founders’ intellectual, political, and cultural legacy to their students. And the numbers and quality of their graduate students–those who will succeed them–are truly impressive. The most striking testament to the truth of this proposition is this assembly itself. Present in this room is a representative sample of young scholars that prove, I believe, that our hope is not misplaced. This conference is the perfect analogue to the question at hand, senior scholars learning from and refining the energies and insights of the ascending generation; and both together looking to a previous generation–our Founding generation–for the new perspectives on the issues we confront today. This is historical consciousness at work, and we are to commend Stan Evans and Bill Campbell for seeing the need and importance of such an event.

As I mentioned, Stan and Bill have told me that their source of inspiration was a program near and dear to my heart–the ISI Richard M. Weaver and Henry Salvatori Fellowship Programs. This may be the ISI program with the smallest number of participants, but it probably has had the highest multiplier effect and the greatest impact. Both are awarded to promising students intent upon pursuing a career in the academy–with the Salvatori program focusing specifically on young thinkers with a demonstrated interest in the principles of the American Founding. Well over 400 total ISI fellowships have been awarded since 1964, with most of the Fellows now teaching or writing, as well as pursuing careers in politics and public policy. This weekend we have all had the privilege to see first-hand many products of this particular ISI program. ISI Weaver and Salvatori Fellows present please stand. Four of the other young speakers have not held fellowships from ISI, but work with us closely, and are certainly poised to make their mark on the academy and the world of affairs.

It is not inevitable, then, that our collective memory be totally lost. With the human and institutional resources such as the ones just mentioned, we should have good reason to hope that what has been done to sever the historical connection between our Founders and ourselves can be undone, in Chodorov’s phrase, and repaired by this most promising generation with us tonight.

Burke, at the moment of his most bitter parliamentary defeat, still had the confidence in the young to say: “I attest the rising generation.” And why should the rising generation listen to us?

Put yourself in the place of an undergraduate of keen mind and superior preparation, a student who likes to read and dispute and flex the muscles of his mind. What does the Left offer him? Turgid Marxists tracts. The straight jacket of the closed system. The politically correct jargon of a welter of splintered interest groups. A false compassion that is but thinly disguised lust for power in
the people’s name, but notably without the people’s participation.

And what do the conservators of the great tradition offer him? They offer a rich and various story that Russell Kirk called a tale of four cities. Jerusalem, of the one God and his Incarnation; and Athens, the birthplace of democracy and of that school of philosophy to which all other philosophical inquiries are a series of footnotes; and Rome of the stern republican fathers of the rule of law; and London, the mother of parliaments and of the chartered rights of Englishmen; and this weekend our young scholars have recommended to our attention our own Philadelphia, where just over two hundred years ago our Founding Fathers taught that self government could be preserved from the eventual corruption of power, by dividing power against itself.

And you offer not just analysis, but allegiance born of a love of the truths that our founding tradition embodies. That which has made your lives rich, you wish to share freely with those students whose life of the mind is before them. You offer them your hands, to boost them onto the shoulders of the giants of the West. And from there they will see farther than any of us.

Let us believe with the faith that abided in Burke, that the best of the new generation will clasp your proffered hands–and that they themselves, in good time, will offer theirs to those who follow.

http://www.phillysoc.org/cribbphi.htm

November 19, 2008 Posted by Mr. Montague | Founding Fathers, Philadelphia Society, Rising Generation | Founding Fathers, Philadelphia Society, Rising Generation | No Comments Yet

Chuck Baldwin on Patrick Henry

PATRICK HENRY TODAY: “GIVE ME SECURITY, ANYTHING BUT DEATH”

By Pastor Chuck Baldwin

January 4, 2006

Patrick Henry (1736-1799) was one of America’s greatest Founding Fathers. In fact, he was the most famous orator of the American Revolution. He was admitted to the bar in 1760, served as a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, the Virginia Patriotic Convention, the First Continental Congress, the Virginia Legislature, and the Virginia Ratification Convention, and was Virginia’s first Governor.

Patrick Henry’s fiery speech delivered on March 23, 1775 in St. John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia was the catalyst for the heroic stand taken by American patriots at Lexington and Concord, where America’s fight for independence began. Perhaps no man was more influential in sounding the clarion call for freedom than Patrick Henry.

In his famous speech, Henry shouted, “What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”

Compare the spirit of Patrick Henry with the spirit of modern day conservatives. What do we hear from them? What is their clarion call?

The battle-cry (or should I say, surrender-cry) of the modern day conservative is, “Give me security, anything but death!” Yes, it seems that to most conservatives today, life and peace are willingly purchased with the price of chains and slavery! Just look at how eager and willing they are to accept abridgements and usurpations of our constitutional liberties.

All over America, conservatives, including Christian conservatives, defend President Bush’s decisions to abuse the power of his office and ignore the rule of law by spying on Americans without warrants and ignoring the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution and procedures of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). They defend him as he unabashedly calls for greater power and promises to continue to ignore basic liberties. Such conduct is both unconscionable and unforgivable!

That America is “at war” is no excuse for President Bush (or any president) to violate his oath of office and trample the rights and freedoms of the American people! And anyone who thinks otherwise doesn’t understand the first thing about America!

Since when did conservatives forget their history and heritage? When did they decide that security was more valuable than liberty? When did they lose their love for freedom and loyalty to our Constitution? When? When George W. Bush became president. That’s when.

Ever since Bush was elected, conservatives have been capitulating and compromising basic American values to the point that they have become slaves! Yes, slaves. Slaves to the Republican Party! Slaves to George W. Bush! Slaves to security! Slaves to their own ambitions and comforts!

America has always stood for liberty! All nations promise security, but America has only promised freedom. A bird in a cage is secure, but it is not free. George W. Bush wants to put America in a cage. And, unfortunately, most conservatives seem fine with that.

Shame on us! Shame on us conservatives! We sully the memories and stain the honor of our forebears!

Listen again to the words of America’s founders. Hear again their cries for freedom. Hear George Washington when he said, “The thing that separates the American Christian from every other person on earth is the fact that he would rather die on his feet than live on his knees.”

Hear Samuel Adams when he declared, “If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home and leave us in peace. We seek not your council, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”

Listen to Benjamin Franklin when he said, “They that would give up essential liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Hear Patrick Henry one more time, “Give me liberty, or give me death!”

There is more to life than living! There is more to being an American than being secure! Patrick Henry understood that.

http://www.newswithviews.com/baldwin/baldwin274.htm

November 19, 2008 Posted by Mr. Montague | Chuck Baldwin, Founding Fathers, Patrick Henry | Chuck Baldwin, Founding Fathers, liberty, Patrick Henry | No Comments Yet

Advice of Friedrich Hayek

Advice of Friedrich Hayek’s: “We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a programme which seems neither a mere defence of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism which does not spare the susceptibilities of the mighty…, which is not too severely practical and which does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible. We need intellectual leaders who are prepared to resist the blandishments of power and influence and who are willing to work for an ideal, however small may be the prospects of its early realization. They must be men who are willing to stick to principles and to fight for their full realization, however remote. … Unless we can make the philosophical foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in the power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost.”

November 19, 2008 Posted by Mr. Montague | Conservatism, Friedrich Hayek, Libertarian, The Remnant, Western Civilization | Conservatism, Friedrich Hayek, libertarian conservative, libertarianism, The Remnant | No Comments Yet

The Screwtape Letters

Wicked Good

The Screwtape Letters, on page and stage.

By John J. Miller

C. S. Lewis once complained that writing The Screwtape Letters brought him no pleasure. “I never wrote with less enjoyment,” he said. “The strain produced a spiritual cramp.” That’s because Screwtape is a devil, and his letters are pieces of fiendish instruction sent to Wormwood, an apprentice demon who is trying to tempt a soul into Hell. “The world in which I had to project myself while I spoke through Screwtape was all dust, grit, thirst, and itch,” said Lewis. “Every trace of beauty, freshness, and geniality had to be excluded.”

And yet The Screwtape Letters, published in 1942, is one of Lewis’s best-loved books—it is probably more widely read than any of his titles, with the exception of Mere Christianity and The Chronicles of Narnia. It might even be said that in certain respects it was the most important book he ever wrote, if only because it “made Lewis a household name,” according to biographer A. N. Wilson. Would we know Lewis if he had never written Screwtape? Probably. But it’s a little like asking whether we’d know Shakespeare if he had never written Hamlet—removing it from his opus diminishes him.

Anybody who has dipped into the book can sense its power. The concept of a devil writing letters to his subordinate is pure genius, and The Screwtape Letters if full of crackling-good prose. Here’s a sample, from the first letter in the book:

Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily “true” or “false,” but as “academic” or “practical,” “outworn” or “contemporary,” “conventional” or “ruthless.” Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong or stark or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about.

This is at once a firm denunciation of moral relativism, a bracing plea for coming to grips with its seductive power, and a clear message of warning to readers. Lewis believes that by creating a fictional devil and trying to plumb his ways, his audience will improve its faith.

Screwtape is continually mystified by the agenda of the Enemy—i.e., the God that he and his fellow devils have rejected. This gives rise to one of the best passages in the book, from Screwtape’s eighth letter:

One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself—creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like his own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to his. … He cannot “tempt” to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is there He is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do the Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

There are 31 such letters. They vary slightly in length but average perhaps 1,000 words each. Lewis was a speedy writer, spending only a few hours on each one, and they initially appeared in a weekly newspaper in serial form. (He donated the initial proceeds to a fund for the widows of clergymen.) The letters may be read quickly, too, though they may also be read repeatedly with profit. It might be said that the first half of the book is stronger than the second half, but the book as a whole deserves its status as a popular classic.

I have often wondered how The Screwtape Letters might be dramatized, especially in the wake of last year’s Narnia movie. A splendid audio version of the book is available, performed by John Cleese of Monty Python fame. It is at bottom a recitation of the letters. Turning the letters into an actual story that might be made into a film would require an enormous amount of invention—the creation of characters and situations that are only dimly hinted at in the words Lewis actually wrote. Anybody who attempted it would be accused of deviating from the script.

Last month, I did watch an excellent stage performance of The Screwtape Letters in New York, put on by the Fellowship for the Performing Arts. It opened in January and closed earlier this month. “We have sold out for the vast majority of the performances,” says Jeffrey Fiske, the FPA’s artistic director. “There have only been around half a dozen performances that have not sold out, and the lowest attendance we have had was 75 percent.” The production may move to a larger venue off-Broadway venue in New York, and there is also a hope for shows in other cities.

The presentation is simple enough: Screwtape, played in a bronze smoking jacket by a Robert De Niro-ish Max McLean, recites his letters to Toadpipe, a demonic scribe and dancer played by Jenny Savage. Yet McLean so dominates the stage that The Screwtape Letters seems almost a one-man show. He is both charming and gruesome, which is exactly how theatergoers who are familiar with the book would want him to be. The show is essentially an edited version of the book plus a snippet from “Screwtape Proposes a Toast,” a short essay that Lewis wrote in 1962—it clocks in at roughly an hour and 45 minutes (compared to about three hours for the unabridged recording by Cleese). There are a handful of embellishments, such as Toadpipe chanting “Om,” like a 1960s hippie, when Screwtape urges Wormwood to produce “a vague devotional mood” in his patient. At another point, Screwtape, seated in a high-backed brown leather chair, flips through a book about Madonna (i.e., the singer). Between the letters, Toadpipe dances to music—this is a bit distracting, but at least it serves the purpose of breaking up what otherwise would be an extended monologue. All in all, The Screwtape Letters, as produced by the FPA, is an outstanding piece of work.

There have been other attempts to revive Screwtape—I enjoyed this short, unofficial “sequel,” which won a contest sponsored by Lewis’s publisher several years ago. But each one of them owes everything to the original author, who was always finding new ways to instruct his flock of fans, proving that a spiritual cramp for Lewis can be a revelation for the rest of us.

—John J. Miller is national political reporter for National Review and the author, most recently, of A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZGVjOGNmYzE5Zjg3OGVjNWRhY2ZmNTE3ZjFiNmUxYjg=

November 19, 2008 Posted by Mr. Montague | C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters | C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters | No Comments Yet

Doing C.S. Lewis Justice

Classic

Doing Lewis justice.

By Frederica Mathewes-Green

Any director who attempts to bring a beloved novel to the screen can expect his fair share of slings and arrows. Just ask Peter Jackson, the hardworking genius behind the Lord of the Rings trilogy, or any of the parade of directors who have delivered Harry Potter films. The latest to step up for a smackdown is Andrew Adamson, previously known for Shrek, as he offers his fresh and magnificent production of C. S. Lewis’s novel, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Unlike the Potter directors, Adamson has not only junior readers to please, but armies of adults who have treasured every page in this seven-book series over the 50-plus years since it was published. (That accounts for the bulky title: The whole set is The Chronicles of Narnia, and the Wardrobe volume, published first, makes an excellent introduction.) And, unlike Jackson, Adamson has to deal with fairly explicit religious content. J. R. R. Tolkien, author of Lord of the Rings, and Lewis were fellow professors at Oxford; they were close friends, and Tolkien facilitated Lewis’s conversion to Christian faith. Both men hoped to use fiction to convey profound truths, and they met regularly to share works in progress. But Tolkien felt that Lewis went too far in Narnia, and warned his friend that the allegory was laid on too thick. Evangelical Christians prize this book because it presents the Gospel squarely, and any attempt to soften those elements would bring out the gangs carrying pitchforks and torches.

Never fear. Thanks no doubt to the guiding hand of Lewis’s stepson, Douglas Gresham (himself a well-known evangelical), the script keeps the faith. Yet the message does not overpower the story (despite Tolkien’s fears), but rather hits the very target Lewis intended. It draws its emotional power from the spot inside that lifts up when we catch the refrain of that “old, old story,” in which a supernatural battle is won by glorious self-sacrifice. This is a story, Lewis would say, that God has prepared human beings to recognize when we hear it, and hid inside our hearts from our creation.

Everything that is strong and good and satisfying in this movie can be found in the book. The main characters are brilliantly realized, and skirt potential problems by wise casting. The littlest of the four children, Lucy Pevensie (Georgie Henley) is indisputably a child, with a broad face made squarer by a side part, wearing a Peter Pan collar and with a bow pinned in her hair. This is a refreshing change after excessively pretty leads in movies like A Series of Unfortunate Events and Because of Winn Dixie, young actresses who look more like beauty pageant sweethearts than real little girls.

Lucy’s sister Susan (Anna Popplewell) and brother Edmund (Skandar Keynes) are likewise believably real, and only big brother Peter (William Moseley) appears to have been plucked from a teenaged Brad Pitt lookalike file. Unfortunately, Peter also has the most unrelievedly noble role of the four children, and such a character threatens to turn bland even with much more experienced actors.

Tilda Swinton is extraordinary as the White Witch. When I made a recording of this book for my grandchildren, I gave the Witch the full Cruella DeVil treatment, going from oily to raging to haughty to manic in a single paragraph. Well, that’s one approach, and at least one young recipient preferred to listen to the recording with the lights on. But Swinton does something much more intelligent with the role. Even when most exhilarated, at the height of her powers, she is still apprehensive; she breathes with her mouth open, like an animal. She’s pale, hungry and tense. It’s an original approach, and juices up the movie.

Aslan caps all, however. I expected to be disappointed—it would seem that any visible depiction of this majestic character would inevitably reduce it. But this Aslan succeeds, and I think one secret is that the character’s eyes are somewhat hard to read. They’re the same color as his tawny mane, and sometimes hidden by it. This inscrutability preserves mystery in a character who, if he was fully comprehensible, would be too small.

But if the film just misses perfection, it’s because elements that don’t appear in the book have been imported to fit contemporary moviegoers’ expectations. For example, though the book’s battle scene takes just three swift, clean pages, in the film it is a grand set-piece, piled with all the CGI extravagance we now take for granted. There’s an invented sequence in which the children must cross a frozen river as it thaws, and ride an ice floe down the flood, but it feels contrived, not to mention pointless. Not for a moment do we believe that any of these characters are in serious danger. Tension is cranked up and cranked down again, just because that’s the way the formula goes.

Moviegoers expect tension in the dialogue, too. In the book, the children are touchingly polite and sensitive to others’ feelings. In an early passage, when a guilt-stricken Faun tries to tell Lucy that he is a wicked kidnapper, she persists in consoling and reassuring him, not realizing that she is his victim. Yet children aren’t touchingly polite any more, so these characters must bicker at each other (“Why can’t you do as you’re told!” “Mom isn’t here!”). I guess they don’t apologize either; the exchange toward the end, when Edmund asks his siblings’ forgiveness, is quietly dropped. Sarcasm is now ubiquitous, and even innocent Lucy has an occasional snarky line.

Not every new element is unwelcome, however. Book fans will be surprised by the opening, which shows London during a wartime bombing raid. We see the children and their mother huddling for shelter as a formation of planes, regular as a wallpaper pattern, cover the night sky. This supplies the backstory that Lewis’ original readers would have known too well, and explains why the children are sent to the Professor’s countryside estate. In the shelter, Edmund grips a framed photo of his soldier dad, though the glass is smashed. Later, the Faun Tumnus looks at his own father’s portrait, and mourns that he is not as good a Faun as his dad; on a next visit to Tumnus’s cave, the portrait is smashed on the floor. And, when the great battle begins, the flying griffins that hurl rocks on the enemy cover the sky in familiar formation. Visual echoes like these work well in a movie, but would seem forced in print.

The best parts of this film are those that are urgent and authentic—the tense and glittering Witch, the dear, believable child Lucy, the piercing moment of Aslan’s death. The parts that limp are those that were invented to fulfill the dreary rules about what a contemporary family blockbuster must include. Those are the moments that, a few decades from now, will seem dated and out of tune with the harmonious original. But that’s all right, because in the future there will still be fast-forward buttons on home-video systems, when your great-great grandchildren watch and re-watch this marvelous story—as they surely will.

—Frederica Mathewes-Green writes regularly for NPR’s Morning Edition, Beliefnet.com, Christianity Today, and other publications. She is the author of Gender: Men, Women, Sex and Feminism, among other books.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NDg5ZjA1MDdiNzUzNjNkODhiODRiZDQzZTFkMTJjY2Y=

November 19, 2008 Posted by Mr. Montague | C.S. Lewis | C.S. Lewis | No Comments Yet

About

Albert Jay Nock defined the Remnant this way:

They are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each rubbing along as best he can. They need to be encouraged and braced up, because when everything has gone completely to the dogs, they are the ones who will come back and build up a new society, and meanwhile your preaching will assure them and keep them hanging on.

…

You do not know, and will never know, who the Remnant are, nor what they are doing or will do. Two things you do know, and no more: First, that they exist; second, that they will find you.

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What Bush and Batman Have in Common

By ANDREW KLAVAN

National Review Founder Says It’s Time to Leave Stage

Lack of Resolution in Iraq Finds Conservatives Divided

Leading Conservative Voice Endorses Legalizing Narcotics

July 17, 2004

Young Right Tries to Define Post-Buckley Future

Fatuous and Malicious

by Paul Gottfried

When Character Counted

THE NOCKIAN SPIRIT LIVES:

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The Conservative Spirit

A Man and His Mag

Russell Kirk Web Site

Life and Thought

Excerpts in Books about Kirk

Other Web Sites of Interest

Russell Kirk Obituaries

PATRICK HENRY TODAY: “GIVE ME SECURITY, ANYTHING BUT DEATH”

Wicked Good

Classic

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