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The great conservative crackup: what National Review wrought
Washington Monthly, May, 2006 by Jacob Heilbrunn
The Making of the American Conservative Mind By Jeffrey Hart Intercollegiate Studies Institute, $29.00
To prove your conservative bona des these days, you have to begin by denouncing conservatism. To the delight of many liberals, a flurry of conservative writers and think-tankers at places like the Cato Institute and the Nixon Center are doing just that, condemning George VC. Bush for being, among other things, a "redistribution Republican" (George E Will), a "socialist" (Andrew Sullivan), and an "impostor" (Bruce Bartlett). Now add Jeffrey Hart to the list of aggrieved accusers.
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Hart, a professor of English at Dartmouth College and former speechwriter for Richard Nixon, has unimpeachable conservative credentials. He has been a regular contributor to National Review since the 1960s. His son Ben Hart was an editor at The Dartmouth Review and a leader of what the Heritage Foundation billed as a "Third Generation" of new conservatives in the early 1980s. A Burkean conservative, Jeffrey Hart has weighed in primarily on cultural issues, lamenting what he sees as the corruption of American arts and letters. But like NR founder William E Buckley Jr. ("insurrectionists in Iraq can't be defeated by any means that we would consent to use"), he is also a critic of the Iraq war. In a March 11, 2005, letter to The Dartmouth Review, for example, Hart took aim at Bush's selling of the war: "You do not have to get eyesore burrowing in the archives to find astonishing patterns of deception"
Now, in The Making of the American Conservative Mind, Hart chronicles the emergence of the right and National Review's role in shaping it. His story begins in the 1950s and ends with the current Bush administration. By turns dyspeptic, melancholy, and ruminative, Hart casts a surprisingly detached eye on his subject. This is a book about a path not taken. It is also one of the most important and idiosyncratic meditations in recent memory about the conservative movement.
But the word is that the staff of National Review is less than pixilated with this work. It's not hard to see why. Hart seems to suggest that the original project of creating a responsible conservatism has gone badly awry--and that the younger crowd at NR bears some of the blame. Buckley once quipped, after Garry Wills, Joan Didion, and John Leonard had decamped, that he hadn't realized that he was "running a finishing school for young apostates" But what happens when one of the headmasters begins to express doubts about the enterprise?
As Hart reminds us, the notion that there was even such a thing as an American conservative mind seemed absurd on its face in 1955, the year when National Review was launched. Conservatism was thought to be a negligible force, hovering somewhere in the narrow frequency band between the Goldwaterites and the Birchers. And such marginalization felt like validation for conservatives, since it demonstrated the immense, implacable power of the liberal establishment, k also left them free to give up thoughts of electoral success and to focus instead on conspiracy theories about Dean Acheson being a communist agent. The immortal Murray Kempton rather snootily summed up the thinking at the time: "The New American Right is most conspicuous these days for its advanced state of wither."
Initially, William F. Buckley Jr. fell into the extremist camp as well. Having penned the polemic "God and Man at Yale," Buckley was a hot commodity on the far right. And the political pedigrees of the men who joined with Buckley to found National Review were, if anything, even more radical. Editor William Schlamm, a brilliant Central European intellectual, had once been a communist. Editor James Burnham, one of the most significant and neglected figures of the conservative movement, was a former Trotskyite. Other highly educated former communists, including Whittaker Chambers, also floated around the fledgling conservative movement. There is an inherent attraction among intellectuals for extremist positions-witness Christopher Hitchens lurching from youthful Trotskyism to his own very personal version of neoconservatism.
The magazine was lively from the start. As Buckley knew full well, few things are more exhilarating than standing on the intellectual ramparts in the face of jeers. Many of the articles amounted to intellectual declarations of war, and contributors included men such as Yale's Wilmoore Kendall, who was noted for writing out his lectures in green ink, railing against plebiscites, and favoring a return to a fundamentalist reading of the U.S. Constitution that foreshadowed the rise, decades later, of the Federalist Society. Saul Bellow would later say of Kendall that he had "made some of the most interesting mistakes a man could make in the twentieth century."
But the fight wasn't just with the world at large. Internecine disputes could get similarly heated: When conservative eminence Russell Kirk published an essay called "Mill's On Liberty Reconsidered," NR editor Frank Meyer, who correctly saw it as a scathing attack on himself, responded with "In Defense of John Stuart Mill" Such disagreements were, according to Hart, inevitable, because NR was beset from the start by a contradiction. "Did Buckley want to reform the Eastern Establishment," he asks, "or did he want to destroy and displace it?" In Hart's view, Buckley tended more and more towards reformation rather than destruction.
