One of the first things I learned about conservatism, way back in the before times, was that William F. Buckley made conservatism respectable. In the 1980’s, Buckley became a rock star, riding the wave of enthusiasm for Ronald Reagan. Like a lot of young men in that age, I was caught up in it. Being a conservative was suddenly cool and everyone credited Buckley for making it possible. It was hard to argue with the claim. Bill Buckley was a charming, intelligent and sophisticated guy. Who would not want to be like Bill?
The part that no one seemed to notice back then, at least not the people involved in the conservative movement, was that the whole point of the thing was to make the people in it respectable, as judged by their alleged opponents. Pretty much the only thing they really cared about was being seen as respectable. It’s why guys like George Will were not fans of Ronald Reagan initially. They worried that his earthy sense of humor and popularity with normal people would not go over well with their friends on the Left.
A big part of being respectable, at least in modern politics, is drawing the line between yourself and those who are not respectable. In the 80’s, when conservatism was booming, no one thought much about all the people that had been read out of the conservative movement in order for guys like Bill Buckley to be respectable. That was the thing though, by the 80’s, conservatism was nothing but drawing lines between the respectable and the unacceptable, in order to be in good standing with the Left.
That all came to mind when I read this post by the Asness Chair in Applied Liberty. It is the typical flip-flopping equivocation that is a Jonah Goldberg column. If there are two sides to an issue, he will find a way take four sides, all in the same post. Reading one of his columns is like watching a fish flop around on the deck. The basic point of the column is that he fears conservatives have not been vigilant enough in policing that line between themselves and the people the Left finds offensive. Thus the Alex Jones fiasco.
His follow up column is a call to war for his fellow conservatives. Well, it’s more like a long love letter to Bill Kristol and the other paranoids of the neoconservative cult. He provides a long bit of mythology about Buckley and his fights with the anti-Semites. The reader is obviously supposed to make the connection between those long dead bogeymen from the 1950’s and the bogeymen currently haunting conservatism. In Goldberg’s telling, his generation of conservatives are facing the same challenge as Buckley did 70 years ago.
The amusing part is how Goldberg keeps trying to connect himself to guys like James Burnham and Whittaker Chambers. Maybe being the Asness Chair in Applied Liberty is going to his head. In reality, it is just another example of the intellectual hollowness of Buckley Conservatism. Chambers was a man of great courage and integrity. Burnham was a brilliant thinker whose ideas are still relevant today. Jonah Goldberg is a feckless airhead. He would have been laughed out of the room by conservatives of their day.
That aside, there’s a weird cargo cult vibe to all this. The so-called conservatives don’t even bother to think about the arguments coming from the right. They don’t even pretend to know about them. There was not a single mention of the alt-right in National Review until Hillary Clinton mentioned them. Instead, they carry on as if it is 1955 and they are fighting a heroic battle against the John Birch Society. Goldberg’s post has the feel of a man hoping he can make it all go away just by performing all the old rituals.
It really is weird reading this stuff, given where we are now. These guys could be excused for living in the past when the GOP was right there with them. Five years ago, they had no reason to listen to their critics. Times were good and the living was easy. Now, after their audience has abandoned them and Trump is in the White House, their stubborn adherence to a defunct set of arguments is weird. The National Review crowd should be writing their columns while wearing leisure suits and listening to disco.
The thing is, there are two types of conservatives. There are those who seek only to maintain the status quo, regardless the current laws, morals and behavior norms. Then there are the those who believe there is transcendent moral order that corresponds to the natural order. The Buckleyites were always of the first type. The reason they opposed the Left was they feared losing their place at the table. It’s the same reason they oppose the emerging national populists. They’re old men who fear change.
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Rubber cucky takes a bath?
Ramzpaul had a joke awhile back, something about how when the left starts trying to ram through trans-marriage, Goldberg will speak up against this change, saying it will violate the sanctity of gay marriage. There are some guys on the mainstream right (not Goldberg) who I believe are semaphoring (in a very guarded way) their openness to the idea that maybe the people to their right aren’t wrong about everything. If someone writes an article saying, “The alt right’s fear of white minority status and genocide, based on farm murders in Zimbabwe and South Africa, is ridiculous and unfounded,” you’d… Read more »
When I was a young man I worked with a middle-aged Jewish guy named Henry. He was one of those Mel Brooks sort of guys that everyone liked. One day at lunch I asked him about our boss going on the wagon. He was a classic Irish drinker, doing a classic Irish thing by giving up booze in his middle years. I figured Henry would have some funny quips. He said “When Jews get old we become more Jewish. When the Irish get old, they stop being Irish.” Goldberg is a couple of paces behind David Goldman on the journey… Read more »
Sorry, but Buckley always seemed like a jerk to me.
Yeah, he was. Even long after I’d become disenchanted with the left, the National Review crowd still left a bad taste in my mouth. Still, he wasn’t entirely wrong to do what he did, either. The left had the zeitgeist at their back, and had become the arbiters of public morality. Largely, they still are. Perhaps there was another way forward for the right, but at this point that’s just Monday morning quarterbacking. As they say, politics is the art of the possible. Yeah, Buckley was a cuck, but let’s remember how badly NR was burned for supporting segregation. Being… Read more »
The first of those two posts by Asness Chair has the following line: “Meanwhile, my National Review colleague David French, a prominent First Amendment lawyer ….”
Obama was a “constitutional scholar.” Credential inflation is a late phase feature.
Buckley was Buckley. There was always that part of him that followed the First Rule of Yalies (and now vegans)—Thou shall inform the listener that you went to Yale within the first five minutes of any conversation. I’m inclined to be a little easier on old Bill. Just old enough (a bit more than Z) to remember when Buckley was one of very few choices on menu. Still recall picking up a copy of “The Jewelers Eye” and thinking “who is this guy?” So for me he was the “ferryman”. By the time Reagan came along, I was already on… Read more »
Ha! By the time Reagan came along, I had already read Wilmot Robertson’s “The Dispossessed Majority” and had subscribed to “Instauration” magazine. I was waiting on the other side locked and loaded.
“Who?”, said Wisner’s Wurlitzer and Operation Mockingbird, as they did business with Martin Luther King, Elijah Muhammid, Whitey Bulger- and William Buckley.
“Respectable conservatives” always talk of finding the common middle ground as a way of seeming intelligent that they can see both sides of an argument.
However there are far too many issues where there is no middle ground to take, like on illegal immigration, crime etc
As many have said basically the “conservatives” have just conceded to parts of the leftists plans for the last 50 years.
Their goal is not to preserve any sense of conservative values whatsoever. The whole point of National Review is to maintain the post-WWII NATO dominated order, this matters even more than cutting taxes on the rich. Buckley was a CIA guy, his project was to ensure that the Right does not return to the traditional foreign policy of the US, as laid down in Washington’s Farewell Address.
Buckley got me to Derb, and Derb took me over. So I can’t whack WFB too hard.
But NRO’s “gatekeeping” is a little silly in the internet age. It’s like a city in ruins, Vandals and Goths running around smashing everything, and they’re still protecting their lonely gate, even though the wall that the gate used to be in has already been smashed to pieces.
NRO is really just a trophy of the left now, a former formidable enemy which is now just one of the harem girls.
“To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.”
The Left loves it some National Review. Everything they publish is the shriek of a loser. It’s sweet music to the leftist ear, and if NR were ever faced with actual extinction, I bet Soros would cut a check just to keep the music going.
Since my g-g-grandad worked for Uncle Billy I’ve always preferred his take… “My aim, then, was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. Fear is the beginning of wisdom.”
“Pretty much the only thing they really cared about was being seen as respectable.” What is respect? Dictionary says it means a high or special regard, or to esteem. That’s a little high-brow for me. I’d like a more practical definition on the order of “Don’t fuck with that guy/group.” Respect should have a component of wariness to it. Getting invited to the right parties in NYC or the Beltway isn’t a sign of respect, its just what the Left is willing to pay those of the Right who don’t stand in their way. The Left knows mainstream conservatism is… Read more »
Good column but I can sum it up in few words
It’s all vanity without virtue
I didn’t dislike Buckley but I always thought of him as a pretentious windbag. My father graduated from Yale magna cum laude with an Economics degree and did NOT talk with an affected accent like somebody had shoved a broom-handle up his ass.
I liked Reagan, liked Pete DuPont, Milton Friedman, and Barry Goldwater. I was suspicious of Bush and was proven right.
Buckley’s brother nor his sister had an accent. Funny huh?
Buckley was the classic arriviste. I always had the impression that he very badly wanted to be a White Shoe WASP.
Yes, as an actual Winthrop WASP, that part was always funny. But his willingness to correctly address Gore Vidal as a “queer” and threatening to kick his ass on a national broadcast will always endear him to me.
In my 20s I absorbed NR cover to cover. Sans internet it was the only game in town, and reading it WAS counter-cultural. When I was a WH staffer (of the military variety) during the Clinton years, I did my part my leaving old copies of NR in the AF1 seats of liberal staffers. I even remember seeing Sandy Berger reading one, not that it did him any good, useless & bumbling oxygen-thief that he was. Ultimately I have to credit WFB for making good arguments (rhetoric); and it was NR that introduced me to the legacy of Whittaker Chamers… Read more »
“The National Review crowd should be writing their columns while wearing leisure suits and listening to disco.”
Now that almost approaches the realm of poetry. Juvenal would have approved.
They’re still hoping to go to the Playboy Club.
VDH is the only National Review writer I still read. I think he may be their only writer who doesn’t live in the Imperial City or a leftist enclave – and the only one there who understands Trump’s appeal. When he leaves, they can just shut the place down.
Reading his latest – VDH has a good time making fun of our Ivy League idiot overlords.
VDH has a problem with Southerners for some reason. Just sayin’.
Yeah, Drake, VDH really gets it on the Ivy League crowd, and on Trump’s appeal, unlike cucks like David French, whose recent Freudian Slip, on a key part of the Jeong issue, shows us a way to present Trumpist etc. thought to Normies, as being utterly *realistic* about the state of US culture (contrasted with cucks etc., who hide from clear tho brutal realities). At https://www.National Review.com/2018/08/sarah-jeong-twitter-controversy-anti-white-racism-exists/ , French spat out the following whopper: “There’s NO realistic scenario, where ‘the tables are turned’, and black Americans visit on white Americans a reverse version of the worst aspects of American history.”… Read more »
“The National Review crowd should be writing their columns while wearing leisure suits and listening to disco.”
Killshot.
I always hear this stuff about “being acceptable on the DC cocktail party circuit.” I reckon it’s true, and based on that, when I’m dictator, I’m bringing back the full panoply of manners. E.g. Derb somewhere quotes Bertrand Russell quoting Gladstone: “This is a very good port they have given me, but why have they given it me in a claret glass?” Since nobody in America has manners anymore — Buckley did, give him that — we’ve replaced all the argle-bargle about which wine goes in which glass with ruthless ideological conformity.
Buckley purged all the relevant and talented writers right before NR and Buckley himself became irrelevant.
I wouldn’t know anything about the goings on of NR or even Goldberg if it wasn’t for Z’s writings here. Over two million bucks from some guy named Asness eh. They truly are an incestuous bunch. The position was probably created as an advance for future favors.
I stopped calling myself a conservative a year or so ago, in large part because Donald Trump made it so obvious that famous conservatives are talkers and not problem-solvers. Conservatives do little more than TALK about how the country is going in the wrong direction, but when some can-do person steps up to the plate and vows to FIX things, the dunces in the Beltway country club unite in confederacy against him. Sarah Palin showed up as John McCain’s VP, and the lapdog media spent years ridiculing her until she finally stepped down from politics. Donald Trump shows up and… Read more »
Welcome to the Dissident Right!
I fear change. I look at the trash people flooding into my country and I fear for its future. I look at liberals telling their daughters to embrace their vices and abandon their virtues and I fear for them too. Now their men are doing the same with contemptible practices like ‘game’ and ‘pick up artistry.’ I watch the collapse of the mass media and I fear we have no voice in official channels. Watching the tech giants move against unofficial channels like Oytube, Twatter and Fecesbook is no cause for comfort. To tell the truth I would rather not… Read more »
We’re the White Russians.
Kulaks today, zeks tomorrow.
The only thing I want to hear from the commentariat toadies is “Alex Jones (Richard Spencer, Louis Farrakhan. . .) is a United States citizen with all the attendant rights and privileges accruing to that status.” Spare me the virtue signalling and the tacit approval of de-platforming. Isn’t there even one cuck with a spine?
Another way to split conservatives into two groups is by differentiating between those who are sincerely committed to conservative principles and those who are mere careerists of the popular movement. George Will and the National Review crowd seem not to give a damn about anything aside from their own status. I suspect the same of Ben Shapiro as well. It’s legitimate conservatives versus Conservative, Inc. Would the careerists ever risk their good fortunes by going out on a limb to defend some higher yet controversial value? It’s doubtful in a lot of cases. Yet another way to split conservatives is… Read more »
That’s why I love reading Taki himself. He gives such delicious dish, reminiscing about the lost High Age. Plagiarized from Kunstler’s Clusterfuck Nation, despite it’s loony virtue sniffers: “That’s what happens when you opt for multiculturalism as your number one political principle. Why can’t the solution be like in old New York city with its Little Italy, China Town, and so on? Why was that not considered multiculturalism? It seemed to work well for all, no? …there are no shared values and can’t be in a system of ‘multiculturalism’. We have been tearing down those ‘shared’ values for 2-3 generations… Read more »
Yeah, Alzaebo, Kunstler’s site has its virtue sniffers, but he’s *very* good at speaking to *Normes*, and some of his commenters are at times quite gripping, e.g. Volodya and FincaInTheMountains.
Multiculturalism is a code word.
Goldberg’s father-in-law was Paul Gavora (d. 2018). His incredible story here:
https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/newsminer/obituary.aspx?n=v-paul-gavora&pid=189118987&fhid=39890
Paul had nine children and worked his butt off. He built a business empire in Alaska. His daughter (at 38) married Jonah (at 32), and they only have one (1) kid.
What disappointment he must have felt when his daughter told him she was marrying Jonah. What disappointment when his daughter chose to write speeches instead of making babies and a home.
In regards to “Peisistratos”, Trump, in the most dangerous job in the world, is trying to play one group of billionaire donors against another group of billionaire donors. Conservative Inc. vs Globalist Left.
The problem is transparency, and borders.
These are vertically integrated groups, shrouded in the Cloud’s secrecy, operating above borders.
“Corporations bigger than most nations is the problem. Multi-nationals are the work-around to the Constitution. The Constitution restricts government, allegedly.” (Web comment)
How to counter this?
Who’s Church has the megaphone?
The Buckleyites told us that the status quo WAS the transcendant natural order.
Nature, though, disagrees with the Hive Mind.
The question, then, is this:
Will Nature’s God- “race”- supercede the multinational Cloud Hive?
As the Z says, Goldman realizes this, Goldberg does not.