Posted on 10/08/2005 1:05:14 PM PDT by neverdem
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October 06, 2005, 7:55 a.m. Publisher’s Statement Standing athwart history, yelling Stop.
EDITOR'S NOTE:National Review is celebrating its 50th anniversary this week. Throughout the week, NRO will be running pieces from the archives to help take a trip down memory lane. This piece appeared in the November 19, 1955, issue of National Review.
There is, we like to think, solid reason for rejoicing. Prodigious efforts, by many people, are responsible for NATIONAL REVIEW. But since it will be the policy of this magazine to reject the hypodermic approach to world affairs, we may as well start out at once, and admit that the joy is not unconfined.
Let's face it: Unlike Vienna, it seems altogether possible that did NATIONAL REVIEW not exist, no one would have invented it. The launching of a conservative weekly journal of opinion in a country widely assumed to be a bastion of conservatism at first glance looks like a work of supererogation, rather like publishing a royalist weekly within the walls of Buckingham Palace. It is not that, of course; if NATIONAL REVIEW is superfluous, it is so for very different reasons: It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.
NATIONAL REVIEW is out of place, in the sense that the United Nations and the League of Women Voters and the New York Times and Henry Steele Commager are in place. It is out of place because, in its maturity, literate America rejected conservatism in favor of radical social experimentation. Instead of covetously consolidating its premises, the United States seems tormented by its tradition of fixed postulates having to do with the meaning of existence, with the relationship of the state to the individual, of the individual to his neighbor, so clearly enunciated in the enabling documents of our Republic.
"I happen to prefer champagne to ditchwater," said the benign old wrecker of the ordered society, Oliver Wendell Holmes, "but there is no reason to suppose that the cosmos does." We have come around to Mr. Holmes' view, so much that we feel gentlemanly doubts when asserting the superiority of capitalism to socialism, of republicanism to centralism, of champagne to ditchwater of anything to anything. (How curious that one of the doubts one is not permitted is whether, at the margin, Mr. Holmes was a useful citizen!) The inroads that relativism has made on the American soul are not so easily evident. One must recently have lived on or close to a college campus to have a vivid intimation of what has happened. It is there that we see how a number of energetic social innovators, plugging their grand designs, succeeded over the years in capturing the liberal intellectual imagination. And since ideas rule the world, the ideologues, having won over the intellectual class, simply walked in and started to run things.
Run just about everything. There never was an age of conformity quite like this one, or a camaraderie quite like the Liberals'. Drop a little itching powder in Jimmy Wechsler's bath and before he has scratched himself for the third time, Arthur Schlesinger will have denounced you in a dozen books and speeches, Archibald MacLeish will have written ten heroic cantos about our age of terror, Harper's will have published them, and everyone in sight will have been nominated for a Freedom Award. Conservatives in this country at least those who have not made their peace with the New Deal, and there is a serious question of whether there are others are non-licensed nonconformists; and this is a dangerous business in a Liberal world, as every editor of this magazine can readily show by pointing to his scars. Radical conservatives in this country have an interesting time of it, for when they are not being suppressed or mutilated by Liberals, they are being ignored or humiliated by a great many of those of the well-fed Right, whose ignorance and amorality of never been exaggerated for the same reason that one cannot exaggerate infinity.
There are, thank Heaven, the exceptions. There are those of generous impulse and a sincere desire to encourage a responsible dissent from the Liberal orthodoxy. And there are those who recognize that when all is said and done, the market place depends for a license to operate freely on the men who issue licenses on the politicians. They recognize, therefore, that efficient getting and spending is itself impossible except in an atmosphere that encourages efficient getting and spending. And back of all political institutions there are moral and philosophical concepts, implicit or defined. Our political economy and our high-energy industry run on large, general principles, on ideas not by day-to-day guess work, expedients and improvisations. Ideas have to go into exchange to become or remain operative; and the medium of such exchange is the printed word. A vigorous and incorruptible journal of conservative opinion is dare we say it? as necessary to better living as Chemistry.
We begin publishing, then, with a considerable stock of experience with the irresponsible Right, and a despair of the intransigence of the Liberals, who run this country; and all this in a world dominated by the jubilant single-mindedness of the practicing Communist, with his inside track to History. All this would not appear to augur well for NATIONAL REVIEW. Yet we start with a considerable and considered optimism.
After all, we crashed through. More than one hundred and twenty investors made this magazine possible, and over fifty men and women of small means invested less than one thousand dollars apiece in it. Two men and one woman, all three with overwhelming personal and public commitments, worked round the clock to make publication possible. A score of professional writers pledged their devoted attention to its needs, and hundreds of thoughtful men and women gave evidence that the appearance of such a journal as we have in mind would profoundly affect their lives.
Our own views, as expressed in a memorandum drafted a year ago, and directed to our investors, are set forth in an adjacent column. We have nothing to offer but the best that is in us. That, a thousand Liberals who read this sentiment will say with relief, is clearly not enough! It isn't enough. But it is at this point that we steal the march. For we offer, besides ourselves, a position that has not grown old under the weight of a gigantic, parasitic bureaucracy, a position untempered by the doctoral dissertations of a generation of Ph.D's in social architecture, unattenuated by a thousand vulgar promises to a thousand different pressure groups, uncorroded by a cynical contempt for human freedom. And that, ladies and gentlemen, leaves us just about the hottest thing in town. WM. F. BUCKLEY, JR.
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http://www.nationalreview.com/flashback/1955200510060755.asp
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Pure poetry in motion.
That was a fine sentiment in 1955 when it was assumed by many that the future would be socialist if not communist. It was necessary and important to fight that future. But today, when the future looks to be more or less democratic and more or less capitalist it's harder to see "standing athwart history" as the answer. There are plenty of things worth fighting against and fighting for and much to worry about, but I don't get a sense that the future is quite a monolithic and threatening as it may have appeared to be in 1955.
And that would be because, over the years, in some part, National Review has helped change things -- tilting the balance in our (conservatism's) favor.
All hail Wm. F. Buckley, Jr.!
I'm glad you're so sanguine. I see a recalcitrant left here and abroad, the islamofascists who are making common cause with the latter and the Chicoms who consider everyone else barbarians.
And it took 50 years for conservatives to finally start fighting back. Congratulations on your anniversary, NRO.
Command economies and economic levelling don't look so much like the wave of the future as they did in the 1930s or 1970s. That's a major difference between how things were then and how they are now. There still are socialists, but the true believers in government ownership and management of the economy are comparatively few and far from achieving anything in the US, at least as things look right now.
Some people will see a nefarious combination of Islamists, American leftists, the EU and China at work in the world today. But to contrast this "alliance," if that's what it is, to what existed in the Cold War years is to see how shaky and loose it is. One can't realistically see one hand behind it all, as many of us did in previous decades behind the Soviet military, Communist parties in other countries, and left-wing fellow travellers.
What Buckley was saying in 1955 was that there was a real connection between Communism, liberalism, and atheism. That made some sense at the time and would make more sense later on. Things are different now, though.
Liberalism or social democracy in the US and Europe, Islamicism in the Middle East, and China's growing economic, demographic, technological, and military power may all be threats, but they don't point in the same direction, as Buckley's enemies appeared to. They're all things the US has to cope with, but they pull in very different directions.
Today's National Review champions modernity in the Middle East in a big way and reminds us that we are at least in part products of the Enlightenment. They certainly aren't "standing athwart history yelling 'Stop'!" So far as the Near East is concerned we're all more or less "liberals."
Now if the consequences of modernity, enlightenment, affluence, and markets in the West aren't all good, that's an indication of how complicated things are now. Things now are more complicated than they looked to Buckley 50 years ago. It's harder to assume that markets and traditional morality are always going to line up on the right side and command economies and immorality on the left.
It's also more difficult now to assume that there's a centuries long battle going on between liberalism and conservatism as absolute and inimical principles. Whatever side one lines up with on political questions today, the US looks like a result of how liberal and conservative, secular and religious principles have interacted over time.
Sometimes, people do win battles, even if only temporarily. Communism is dead for at least a generation. That means that the nature of political conflicts in our era is different from in Buckley's younger days, though conflicts continue and people love to play the old tunes.
The attractiveness of Communism for the self-styled intelligencia comes from the attractiveness of a "planned economy" to one with the conceit to visualize himself as being in the planner class
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