I still subscribe to National Review and I still visit the site daily. It is more habit than interest these days. The magazine goes unread until they pile up and I thumb through them in one sitting. Charles Cooke is interesting from time to time. Andrew Stuttaford is often good when he writes about Europe. Kevin Williamson is the best writer they have left, which speaks to how bad it is now. They have run off most anyone with talent and something interesting to say.

Anyway, I was trying to read this from Jonah Goldberg and I kept thinking about how dreary National Review is these days. Part of it is me. My views have changed as I have grown older. It is just a part of getting older. But, the world has changed too. In the 1980’s, Bill Buckley was a rock star, of sorts. The main reason is a new generation was ready to push back against the Baby Boomer liberals. To be a young right-winger in the 1980’s was a lot of fun, even if the ideology did not always make sense.

Today that brand of conservatism feels about as exciting as disco. Reading Jonah’s column, I was thinking about how many times I’ve heard the same argument from the Conventional Right. There’s nothing wrong with it, other than the fact it was a reasonable response to the Left in 1950. Given where we are as a culture, the value of gentling tapping the brakes on the Progressive drive to the abyss is lost on me. I mean, what’s the point?  The time for debating this stuff is long ago in a foreign country.

For some reason I was reminded of when John O. Sullivan was shown the door by Bill Buckley. I had vague recollections of it being another case where Buckley canned the guy most thought was set to take over for him. I went looking and this is the best I could find, which is a column with lots of quotes from the article I must be recalling. Buckley could never figure out how to close the show that was his life. Like all men, he struggled to turn control of his project over to someone competent.

Given the shabby state of the conservative movement Buckley built and the sorry state of his signature achievement, he was foolish to try and leave a legacy. It is ironic in a way as he saw what happened to Henry Luce and his magazine empire after his demise. He was friends with John M. Olin, who bankrolled a lot of early conservative enterprises. Buckley surely knew that the best course was to shut it all down and let the next man build his own thing, outside the shadow of Buckley and his project.

Maybe it will not matter much. There does seem to be a gathering storm of dissident writers and publications out there on the Internet. Taki Mag has become a must read among anti-liberals. Bloggers like Steve Sailer promote dissident ideas. Still, it would be better if there was not this hollowed out entity claiming to represent the opposition to the Progressive orthodoxy. In the end, Buckley’s vanity may end up causing more harm to the causes he championed than the good he did as a leader of the Right.