Posted on 08/01/2004 12:00:11 AM PDT by SEA
Over a decade ago, a column I wrote in these pages got me fired by National Review, as I figured it would, after twenty-one years of working with Bill Buckley. Those years were mostly very happy for me, thanks to Bill’s truly sweet nature. But tensions had arisen between us, first when I criticized the holy state of Israel, and again when I opposed the first Iraq war. When Bill threatened to fire me over the latter, I felt that it was he, not I, who had abandoned the conservative cause. Since my job was hanging by a thread, I decided to cut it myself.
Now Bill too, at age 78, has retired from the magazine he founded in 1955. Since I left, I’ve sadly watched it go further in the same direction it was headed at the time. Abandoning the conservative principles it was once devoted to, its new generation of editors and writers has shilled for the Republican Party, for George W. Bush, for the Likud government of Israel, and above all for war with Iraq. In effect, it has capitulated to neoconservatism, even lending itself to smears of real conservatives like Patrick Buchanan and Samuel Francis.
I’ve often wondered if Bill was entirely comfortable with this departure. After all, the magazine’s original reason for being was that Eisenhower Republicanism had conceded far too much to liberalism — and the Bush administration is far more liberal than Ike’s by any measure. The notion, almost universal among pundits, that the country has “moved to the Right” is extremely superficial, and utterly wrong. Things once unthinkable now pass unnoticed.
Bill Buckley seems to sense as much; in an interview with the New York Times on the occasion of his retirement, he acknowledged that the expansion of the Federal Government under President Bush “bothers me enormously.” As for the Iraq war, he said, “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. If I knew then what I know now about what kind of situation we would be in, I would have opposed the war.”
It’s a little late for such admissions. They amount to a confession that National Review, after a half-century, has failed in its mission: It has merely tailed along behind the big-government Republican Party it once hoped to recall to a conservative philosophy. Yes, lots of people now want to be known as conservatives, even if they aren’t; but this is about the only achievement Bill Buckley can claim.
To put it bluntly, he has been swept away by the very currents he once hoped to stop. And as a connoisseur of fine ironies, he may note that he is now being hailed as a great conservative by the enemies of conservatism.
Now I remember why I stopped being a Sobran fan
Buckley is awesome. Ever seen the clip where he called Gore Vidal a "Queer" and threatened to punch him in the face?
Should be a law forbidding Bill Buckley's name, used in vain with the likes of old joe.
Buckley is the first one who noticed that conservatism was its own political force. He was way ahead of even Reagan, although reagan had been a conservative way back, nobody was calling it that really.
Bob Novak > Pat Buchanan > Joe Sobran > David Duke
Sobran used to be really interesting, back in the 80's, when I first started reading NR. Then he got loopy. Maybe he has a brain tumor.
That particular movement was informed by the Populist/Progressivist movement best represented y William Jennings Bryan and Bob LaFollette, respectively.
There is such a thing as Hamiltonian federalism as well as a Jeffersonian school.
Sorry, Joe. You don't get to monopolize the discourse.
(2) Mr. Sobran is one of those crackpots who believes that William Shakespeare could not possibly have written his own plays and that they were the work of a nobleman writing in secret with the help of an extensive crew of conspirators that honeycombed the Elizabethan stage world.
He's become a nutter.
The America First Committee was comprised of people who believed that we should only fight a war if America's vital interests were threatened. It was bipartisan, but essentially conservative in nature. One of the founders at Yale was Gerald Ford. The best known member was Charles Lindbergh. Other members were Col. Robert McCormick, another prominent conservative. The group disbanded itself after Pearl Harbor, and most of the younger members joined the military. A decent history can be found here:
http://www.etherzone.com/2001/raim080101.shtml
I agree that the America First Committee (which has not existed in 63 years) should not dominate the discussion. I posted this article because I also believe that the empire-building neo-cons who are willing to get us into any war they can should not dominate the discussion either.
Yes, it was awesome! I believe he was responding to Vidal's calling him a "crypto-fascist." "Pinko queer," I believe his expression was.
Wasn't that on the old Johnny Carson show?
http://kronykronicle.com/1968/BV4.html
There's the link. Scroll to the bottom until you see the little tv screen thingy, and press play.
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