Friday, March 29, AD 2024 9:41am

An Example of Why National Review is Irrelevant to Modern Conservatism

I had to overcome Rush Limbaugh to become a conservative. Or at least overcome that image of Rush Limbaugh, which was always exaggerated. Years later, I would tune in and Limbaugh was a more relaxed, more light-hearted, nimble-minded, and obviously happier person than the rabble-rouser he was accused of being. Still, I haven’t met anyone who didn’t say dumber or meaner things than normal when filling up the demanding content maw of broadcast media for hours a week.

I would find my conservatism in books and magazines, not on talk radio. My English teacher gave me George Orwell to read. Public-spirited liberal family members bought me subscriptions to The New Yorker and Harper’s. A book of the best political writing from the 1990s introduced me to people such as Andrew Ferguson, Christopher Caldwell, and Tucker Carlson in The Weekly Standard, and Thomas Fleming or Bill Kauffman at Chronicles. The first “contemporary” political book that really lit me up was Roger Scruton’s mostly neglected The Meaning of Conservatism. It was a supple text defending a primordial Tory veneration of a mixed civilizational inheritance. It amounted to an unsubtle conservative critique of Margaret Thatcher. Scruton saw markets replacing institutions as the object of right-wing veneration and he resisted it. He began that book with his terms: “Conservatism is a stance that may be defined without identifying it with the policies of any party. Indeed, it may be a stance that appeals to a person for whom the whole idea of party is distasteful.”

Go here to read the sad and sorry rest.  Turning a look at a fallen giant of conservatism into a bashing exercise in navel gazing is exactly why National Review since Buckley died is to conservatism as mold is to bread.

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John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy
Friday, February 19, AD 2021 6:13am

The National Review has been dead to me and many others for years. It’s only surprising how quickly it changed after Buckley.

Father of Seven
Father of Seven
Friday, February 19, AD 2021 7:11am

Literally, I used to wait at the mail box and then read each copy cover to cover. I always began at the back and proceeded to the front. Hands down my favorite part was “Letters from Al”. Then, everything changed once William Buckley passed and I cancelled my subscription after I got tired of being insulted. I hadn’t thought about it at all again until it was in the news for being never Trump. That only confirmed the wisdom of my much earlier decision to part ways.

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Friday, February 19, AD 2021 7:45am

I estimate I subscribed to NR on and off for 15 or 20 of the past 50 years – none of the past 20. I never could gauge where they were.

They never were with Donald John Trump or me.

I liked Florence King’s writing and I think Larry Kudlow – one good, wonderful man – published economic stuff under a pseudonym.

I remember (infrequently when I wasn’t drinking) watching buckley and gore vidal on TV arguing with each other. buckley lost me when he didn’t reach across and strangle that lying commie [expletive-deleted].

It seemed they could never write a 5,000 word article when a 10,000 worder could be published.

Then, they would ask for donations . . .

Art Deco
Friday, February 19, AD 2021 8:18am

I used to follow MBD when he was still working wage jobs in the lower Hudson Valley and blogging on the side, ca. 2006. (My addled late-middle-aged head has forgotten the name of his blog, which he shut down after a few years). He’s maintained this too-cool-for-school pose for so long it’s gotten tiresome; he’s nearly 40 years old.

Have a gander at his obituary for Joseph Sobran, published in The American Conservative in 2010. If any draft of it was self-referential, the editor of The American Conservative insisted he excise those portions, something Richard Lowry, Jason Lee Steorts, and Charles CW Cooke did not do. (The three sentences he devoted to Sobran’s self-inflicted injuries enraged Thos. Fleming and others). Again, he’s nearly 40 years old and he’s been writing in public venues for 16 years. He shouldn’t have to be told that it’s an obituary and an obituary is about the subject, not the composer.

His conception of the last 30-odd years – that there’s been an ineluctable decay catalyzed and midwived by Limbaugh and manifest in Donald Trump – is simply asinine. Dougherty himself has long pretended that there’s some sort of beautiful state of mind and heart ruined by people actually working in starboard politics; he never specifies what it is other than it has something to do with Edith Wharton and liquor consumption. Any interest he ever had in policy was derived from ingesting the writings of a head case named Daniel Larison (who has Rod Dreher in the palm of his hand as well).

That someone would put Limbaugh in the same pigeonhole with Howard Stern is just stunning. Limbaugh, Stern, and Jean Shepherd had one thing in common – the ability to talk on the radio for 15 hours a week and keep it interesting for their audience. See Robert Stacy McCain on this (derived from his experience trying to fill in for Limbaugh): even if you have a lot to say and a practiced facility with words, doing this is exceedingly challenging. MBD never acknowledges the rare skill which goes into it and never acknowledges that Limbaugh produced the most elevated content of anyone who had that rare skill.

And, of course, Limbaugh was much more intimately acquainted with his listeners than NR has ever been with his readers, and was interested in what they thought and why. MBD, alas, has spent 15 years looking down his nose at people. You can see the result in this wretched obituary and in his response to his critics.

Dale Price
Dale Price
Friday, February 19, AD 2021 8:37am

I like Dougherty, but agree he has a couple of bad flaws in his writing: too self-referential, and a snobbery towards the “unwashed” who are, like it or not, the backbone of the right.

Buckley understood the politics of fusionism, and that while he was an aristocratic Ivy Leaguer with a love of sailing, he did not denigrate middle and working class Republicans. I am morally certain we can thank his Catholicism for that.

Which makes Dougherty’s quasi-WASP waspishness all the more disappointing. What the American right needs now in its leadership class (apart from a wholescale defenestration of corporate apologists) are shepherds, not scolds running through their latest soliloquy for their equally benighted peers.

Not everyone is going to be able to sit through a lecture on Scruton–and that’s just fine. But if you aren’t going to try to understand what motivates a person to devote three hours a day to a Limbaugh, or to pull the lever for Trump, you’re just another right-wing hipster.

And to use a metaphor that Buckley might have appreciated–the deck is awash with those right now.

Art Deco
Friday, February 19, AD 2021 8:38am

On ‘modern conservatism’. Starboard concerns have been remarkably consistent for decades. There have been some changes in circumstance to which to react, of course, and changes in emphasis. The starboard is not protean in the way the portside is. In re National Review and people like George Will, they simply stopped being interested in what street-level Republicans thought and felt. If Dougherty fancies 94% of all Republican voters have an affinity for what is manifestly gross, he ought to be in a different line of work, because there will be no constituency for his writing other than liberals who want emotional validation from twee soi-disant ‘conservatives’, and that’s not an honest way to make a living.

Art Deco
Friday, February 19, AD 2021 8:41am

Which makes Dougherty’s quasi-WASP waspishness all the more disappointing.

Dougherty’s guises and poses are not common among actual bluebloods in Upstate New York.

Art Deco
Friday, February 19, AD 2021 8:44am

The National Review has been dead to me and many others for years. It’s only surprising how quickly it changed after Buckley.

It began to decay about four years before Buckley died, I think because Lowry found it difficult to recruit people who had anything interesting to say. The influence of Jason Lee Steorts on the publication has been malign.

Jay Anderson
Friday, February 19, AD 2021 9:02am

“Still, I haven’t met anyone who didn’t say dumber or meaner things than normal when filling up the demanding content maw of broadcast media for hours a week.”

Or, apparently, the “demanding maw” of writing a column:

“The Republican Party? I agreed with the anti-abortion stuff and I didn’t see anything worthwhile in socialism, but I’d have been happy seeing Newt Gingrich and the Bushes tossed in a burlap bag with the Clintons and a dozen cats then dropped into the Missouri River.”

Nothing particularly “dumber or meaner … than normal” about that line, right?

Brian
Brian
Friday, February 19, AD 2021 10:03am

“In re National Review and people like George Will, they simply stopped being interested in what street-level Republicans thought and felt.”

Good comment Art. The political world has evolved so far beyond what National Review has to offer.

I’m 36. Haven’t subscribed since my 20’s. I used to devour each issue, starting at about the age of 14-15.

My philosophy has changed as my life occurred. At 18, I would have followed every idea in the magazine. Now, at double that age, what can I say?

I think the overriding fact of life today is that large, international corporations, most publicly traded, dictate most aspects of life. I am anti-corporatist, anti-consumerist.

The simple categories of right-left, conservative-liberal hold very little meaning to me.

Donald Link
Donald Link
Tuesday, February 23, AD 2021 7:27pm

NR still serves a somewhat diminished purpose. It is resolutely pro-life and economically conservative. Unfortunately it still carries the baggage of the WFB/Ayn Rand feud and thus tends to short circuit Libertarian ideas that have proved quite valid. Time for a new crew at that publication.

Art Deco
Tuesday, February 23, AD 2021 10:28pm

and thus tends to short circuit Libertarian ideas that have proved quite valid.

The problems at NR have flat nothing to do with WFB having declared Objectivism invalid and disagreeable. As for contemporary libertarianism, outside the ken of Objectivism, it’s a collecting pool of poseurs and fools.

Art Deco
Wednesday, February 24, AD 2021 11:11am

NR has announced that Charles CW Cooke, a libertarian who has been antagonistic to Trump but not in an obsessive or unqualified way, has relinquished his position as editor of their online edition. He’ll be replaced by Philip Klein of the Washington Examiner, who is inveterately hostile to Trump. I gather NR fancies their donation and endowment income will allow them to do without actual readers.

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