CHAPTER ONE

THE
CONSERVATIVE
REMNANT

Albert Jay Nock was one of those rare people who physically resembled his philosophy. He was tall, dignified, and courtly. His white hair was full and his mustache neatly clipped. When he went out, he wore a cape and carried a walking stick. His style had everything to do with his substance; he was all of a piece. He was also one of a kind, a unique American species, a self-made aristocrat.

Nock was filled with apparent contradictions. He was an Episcopal minister who gave up his collar and disdained organized religion; an exponent of traditional values and free love; a defender of high culture and an obsessional anti-Semite; an anarchist who despised the masses. He was also a good writer and editor. His autobiography, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, conveyed an elegant and elegiac tone about the triumph of the all-too-common man. At the age of sixty-five, still in the full bloom of his literary powers, Nock described himself as “a senile Tory.”

In 1937, with Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal triumphant, Nock published an essay entitled “Isaiah’s Job,” commending the calling of prophet. The masses, he argued, have been a hopelessly benighted group since the prophet’s career opened up around 740 B.C. Posed against the masses is a tiny group of gentlemen and scholars who tend the flame of civilization. Borrowing from Isaiah and Matthew Arnold, the nineteenth-century English critic, Nock called this group “the Remnant.” “There is a Remnant there that you know nothing about,” Nock wrote in his version of what God really said to Isaiah. “They are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each one rubbing along as best he can. They need to be encouraged and braced up, because when everything has gone completely to the dogs, they are the ones who will come back and build up a new society. . . .”¹

Yet, scanning the scene, Nock failed to detect a prophet who would lead the Remnant out of its cloisters. As World War II approached, Nock himself descended deeper into his hysterical anti-Semitism.

“It was thought that the battle was over,” said William F. Buckley, Jr. In the beginning, back when Ronald Reagan was a “near-hopeless hemophilic liberal” (as he later described himself), conservatism was a deviant subculture. It was barely conscious of itself as a Remnant. And conservative intellectuals, those who might take up “Isaiah’s job,” were rare birds.

“It was implicitly denied that one could be conservative and rational, with the single exception of Senator Robert Taft, who was concededly brainy but thought of as an ideological automaton,” said Buckley. “At the intellectual level the only people heard from were the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers. They were treated as eccentrics. Nobody ever thought there was a body of learning there or that there lay ahead of the liberals a period in which empirical data would do a lot to demoralize their basic convictions.”

The conservative intellectual movement built up force in successive waves. First, the conservatives were isolated, even from each other. In the second wave, with the founding of the National Review, they had a center. And, finally, with the establishment of think tanks, they achieved a stable institutional base.

The history of modern conservatism does not fit a conservative theory of history. Its story bears little resemblance to those of European conservatives. The native variant is not rooted in a landed gentry, in noble customs and tradition. Rather, it is a typically American story of discontinuity and self-invention. Many conservatives have convinced themselves that they are restoring the past, but the past was not kind to them. Nothing demonstrates this more clearly than the difficulty of their political odyssey. Despite their insistence that America is by nature a conservative country, they have had enormous trouble gaining a foothold. They are so haunted by the past that they still have the desperate fear that they may be sent back to the deep freeze. Even after Reagan’s two landslides, they harbor the psychology of outsiders.

Conservatives did not share the vocabulary of New Deal liberalism. Like Communists, they had seen through it. Since nobody outside the Remnant shared their sectarian history, their rhetoric was exclusive. To succeed they had to become an expansive movement. The leap from first principles to politics required the aura of deep scholarship. Conservatives needed to justify their actions by learning beyond the liberal mainstream. Yet they constructed their institutions on their idea of the Liberal Establishment, usually interpreting its actions as the result of a grand design, or at least of conscious planning. Some conservatives had a vision of the opponent as a conspiracy, run by the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group, and Harvard University. Almost everything from foreign policy to reviews of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s or John Kenneth Galbraith’s latest books was seen as part of an overarching scheme. But most conservatives tended to agree with the more sophisticated account offered by William F. Buckley, Jr., who wrote:

You need not be taken in by the solemn whisper that the Establishment has a president, an executive committee, a constitution, bylaws, and formal membership requirements, to believe that there do exist people of varying prestige and power within American Liberaldom; that we speak here of the intellectual plutocrats of the nation, who have at their disposal vast cultural and financial resources; and that it is possible at any given moment to plot with fair accuracy the vectors of the Establishment’s position on everything.²

In the cold gray dawn of conservatism, just a handful of people, divided roughly into three ideological groups, attempted to halt the express train of liberalism. These figures represented distinct schools of thought, which thirty years later would be expressed as the mythology of Reaganism. Free-marketeers wanted to restore an austere marketplace, freed of the confounding mechanisms of the welfare state. Repentant ex-Communists, who had penetrated every concentric circle of the Inferno and seen its terrible heart, preached against the demonic power of the State. And cultural conservatives located philosophical ancestors in order to place a rootless American conservatism on the green branch of a venerable family tree.

The ex-Communists turned conservatives had once believed that the Russian Revolution was the brilliant sunrise of a new age. The Cold War was their personal dramaturgy. They underwent a complete political transformation and yet remained the same. Communists like Frank Meyer, who became a National Review editor, changed from true believers into true believers. They became crusaders against what had been the object of their passionate devotion. Still, they retained their desire for total victory. And their opinion of liberals remained remarkably constant. As Communists they had believed liberals were too “soft” to seize the Winter Palace and (depending on shifts in the party line) that reformism was an obstacle. As ex-Communists they believed liberals were “soft” on Communism and that their reformism demonstrated that they were in league with it “objectively,” to employ the proper word from the Old Left lexicon. The ex-Communists brought to the nascent conservative cause ingrained habits of doctrinal hair-splitting and compulsive manipulation. They were always eager to engage in periodic purges, reading someone out of the “party” in order to purify it. Whether as Communists or as ex-Communists, they maintained the belief that the apocalypse was near (“‘tis the final conflict”). They were always in a state of full mobilization: Red Alert.

In the 1940s and early 1950s, four signal events lit the bonfire of conservatism, awakening each of these groups. These events demonstrated that there were individuals willing and able to articulate the conservative case. Three of them involved representatives of the different schools of thought: Friedrich von Hayek, a free-marketeer; Whittaker Chambers, an anti-Communist; and Russell Kirk, a cultural conservative. The fourth event was the emergence of William F. Buckley, Jr., and he would provide an instrument to unite the disparate factions.

The first happening occurred just a month after FDR won his fourth term of office in 1944, when the University of Chicago Press published two thousand copies of a book, The Road to Serfdom, by an obscure Austrian exile living in England, Frederich von Hayek. He argued in favor of the free market and that “planning leads to dictatorship.”³ Unexpectedly, his book became a popular success in America and Europe. Reader’s Digest condensed it for its readers and the Book-of-the-Month Club distributed more than a million copies. Hayek lectured extensively in the United States and appeared on the serious radio discussion programs. The Road to Serfdom was generally conceded to be the first intellectually respectable defense of free-market doctrine to have appeared in decades.

Hayek was a living remnant—an expatriate classical liberal. When he was born in Vienna in 1899, the Hapsburgs still ruled the Austro-Hungarian Empire. All the trappings of feudalism, including monarchy, were contemporary; socialism, too, was a vital force. The upper middle class, the common origin of Austro-liberals, championed laissez-faire economics and believed that order and progress would follow naturally. The historian Carl Schorske, in his magisterial Fin-de-Siecle Vienna, wrote:

Far from rallying the masses against the old ruling class above . . . the liberals unwittingly summoned from the social deeps the forces of a general disintegration. Strong enough to dissolve the old political order, liberalism could not master the social forces which that dissolution released and which generated new centrifugal thrust under liberalism’s tolerant but inflexible aegis. The new anti-liberal mass movements—Czech nationalism, Pan-Germanism, Christian Socialism, Social Democracy, and Zionism—rose from below to challenge the trusteeship of the educated middle class, to paralyze its political system, and to undermine its confidence in the rational structure of history.⁴

And all of these tumultuous events occurred at the turn of the century. Hayek came to maturity after Austro-liberalism was already in ruins, already a fossil. He transported this doctrine with him to England and eventually to America, where, after World War II, he secured a position, through connections in the nascent Counter-Establishment, at the University of Chicago. But even in Austrian terms, he was not representative of his time; he was part of the debris of an obliterated European culture. Still, he had the attraction of a perfectly preserved museum piece.

Hayek claimed that there was once a golden age of laissez-faire, “the abandoned road,” which led to the enduring ideals of Western civilization. His account of the glorious free market in England, however, did not mention the “dark satanic mills,“ mass poverty, or working-class discontent. His version of the Industrial Revolution was indifferent to Charles Dickens’s version, much less Frederich Engels’s The Conditions of the English Working Class in 1844. “There was nothing natural about laissez-faire,” the economic historian Karl Polanyi instructed in The Great Transformation. “Just as cotton manufacturers—the leading free-trade industry—were created by the help of protective tariffs, export bounties, and indirect wage subsidies, laissez-faire itself was enforced by the state.”⁵ Yet Hayek cast a romantic haze over the period, a past he wished could be revived.

Hayek’s American appeal lay mostly in his advocacy of what appeared to be the old-fashioned native virtues of hard work and individualism. But he did not think in American terms at all. To the Austro-liberal, laissez-faire economics would unshackle the bonds of feudalism—a breathtakingly revolutionary act. Whatever feudalism existed in America, however, was dispatched by George Washington long ago. Hayek’s conservatism, consisting of a desire to conserve and extend the free market, had its source in the memory of a distant land. America wasn’t what he had in mind.

Hayek, in fact, believed that the twentieth century was a mistake. He wanted progress, but yearned for a lost world, the age of fabled individualism. “Though we neither can wish nor possess the power to go back to the reality of the nineteenth century, we have the opportunity to realize its ideals—and they were not mean,” he wrote. “We have little right to feel in this respect superior to our grandfathers; and we should never forget that it is we, the twentieth century, and not they, who have made a mess of things.”⁶

In Britain, in 1945, during the election campaign, Hayek served as an adviser to Winston Churchill. At his instigation Churchill asserted that a “Gestapo” would be necessary to install the Labour Party’s welfare state. Many Tories believe that this statement helped Churchill lose the election.

Hayek did not say where “the abandoned road” back to competition would lead in America. And who were “our grandfathers”? Should we go back to those proud individualists—the agrarian populists—who fought the industrial monopolists and the Republican Party? Or perhaps to the “New Freedom” of Woodrow Wilson, the president advised by Louis D. Brandeis to break up concentrated wealth in order to restore a free market? These traditions were not remarked upon by Hayek. To him, America was terra incognita. Still, his rendering of free-market doctrine struck a responsive note.

In 1948, another event occurred that advanced the conservative cause. When the ex-Communist and senior editor at Time, Whittaker Chambers, told the House Un-American Activities Committee investigators that he had been part of a Soviet espionage ring operating within the American government, post–New Deal liberalism was shaken to its foundation. He identified a former highly placed State Department official, Alger Hiss, then president of the Carnegie Endowment, as his co-conspirator. Hiss and Chambers could not have been less alike. Hiss was the impeccable Eastern Establishmentarian: his career began as the law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes; he was an ardent New Dealer; he had personal grace and social connections. Chambers seemed to be a character drawn from Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed. (Appropriately, Dostoyevsky was among his favorite writers.) The rumpled and heavyset Chambers was suicidal and conspiratorial. He passed himself off under numerous false identities, and led a furtive life as a homosexual.

Hiss’s ordeal put a “generation on trial,” according to the acute British observer Alistair Cooke.⁷ Ultimately Hiss was convicted of having given perjured testimony. Chambers’s baroque version of subterranean Washington during the days of high liberalism, a capital crawling with Soviet spies and complicit New Dealers, seemed vindicated. Shortly before his death, Chambers wrote: “The Hiss Case was an epitomizing drama. It epitomized a basic conflict. And Alger Hiss and I were archetypes. That is, of course, what made the Hiss Case . . . what gave the peculiar intensity to the struggle.”⁸

Liberals had little interest in Chambers’s conversion or his philosophical beliefs, but were obsessed with Hiss’s crisis. Chambers, meanwhile, emerged from the case as a towering hero to conservatives in need of an icon. By casting clouds of doubt over the patriotism and integrity of the New Deal, he had created an opening for the right. On January 25, 1950, Alger Hiss was sentenced to prison. (And on February 9, a little-known senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, claimed to possess a list on which were inscribed the names of 205 Soviet spies in the State Department, which he described as “thoroughly infested with Communists.”)

In 1952, Chambers’s 808-page confessional, Witness, was published—a riveting statement of the ex-Communist position, lushly detailing Chambers’s experiences in the Communist underground, his revelation of its perfidy, and his decision to inform. To him, the struggle with Communism was a religious crusade against the Antichrist. He saw darkness or light, demonic power or God, as the only choices. The battle of Armageddon was imminent. “The last war,” he wrote, “simplified the balance of political forces in the world by reducing them to two. . . .”⁹ And he explained his defection as the consequence of a stark moral judgment: “A Communist breaks because he must choose at last between irreconcilable opposites—God or man, Soul or Mind, Freedom or Communism.”¹⁰

While Chambers chose Freedom, he was fatalistic about Communism’s ultimate triumph. In his transformation from secret agent to “witness,” his feelings about the revolution changed, but his belief in its inevitability did not. “The total situation is hopeless, past repair, organically irremediable,” he wrote in a letter to his friend, William F. Buckley, Jr.¹¹

Chambers believed, along with the Italian ex-Communist writer Ignazio Silone: “The final conflict will be between the Communists and the ex-Communists.” In Witness he wrote, “No one knows so well as the ex-Communist the character of the conflict, and of the enemy, or shares so deeply the same power of faith and willingness to stake his life on his beliefs.” In this climactic battle, he had no hope that conservatives would be of much use. “In the struggle against Communism, the conservative is all but helpless. For that struggle cannot be fought, much less won, or even understood, except in terms of total sacrifice. And the conservative is suspicious of sacrifice; he wishes first to conserve. . . .”¹²

While conservatives were “helpless,” liberals gave comfort and aid to “the enemy.” In fact, liberals were an aspect of “the enemy.” The nature of liberalism itself was precisely what permitted Communism to flourish in dark corners. Chambers wrote:

I saw that the New Deal was only superficially a reform movement. I had to acknowledge the truth of what its more forthright protagonists, sometimes unwarily, sometimes defiantly, averred: the New Deal was a genuine revolution, whose deepest purpose was not simply reform within existing traditions, but a basic change in the social, and, above all, the power relationships within the nation. It was not a revolution by violence. It was a revolution by bookkeeping and lawmaking. In so far as it was successful, the power of politics had replaced the power of business. This is the basic power shift of all the revolutions of our time. This shift was the revolution. . . . Whether the revolutionists prefer to call themselves Fabians, who seek power by the inevitability of gradualism, or Bolsheviks, who seek power by the dictatorship of the proletariat, the struggle is for power.¹³

From this insight, Chambers adduced “how it happened that so many concealed Communists were clustered in Government, and how it was possible for them to operate so freely with so little fear of detection.” The answer was that liberals and Communists shared “common ends.” And liberals, while they “sincerely abhorred the word Communism“ were “unable to distinguish Communists from themselves.”¹⁴ This gave the Communists the opportunity to burrow deep into the recesses of government. By taking the witness stand and by writing Witness, Chambers not only discredited “the enemy” but helped establish a new conservatism.

In 1953, a small conservative press published a limited run of a book, The Conservative Mind, by an unknown writer named Russell Kirk. After a favorable review appeared in The New York Times, Time magazine editors gave the volume to their former book editor, Whittaker Chambers, and requested his judgment. He portentously declared it “the most important book of the twentieth century,” according to historian George H. Nash.¹⁵ On July 6, 1953, Time’s entire book section was devoted to Kirk and his book.

The Conservative Mind was crucial in establishing the cause as a valid intellectual enterprise. It offered a genealogy of conservatism, an eclectic array of sources ranging from John Adams to the sour English novelist George Gissing. To Kirk, the fount of conservatism was Edmund Burke, stalwart of tradition and scourge of revolution. If one tampers carelessly with the present, the past is desecrated and the future imperiled.

Kirk described himself as having a “Gothic mind, medieval in its temper and structure.”¹⁶ Accordingly, this self-styled American medievalist referred to his residence in Mecosta, Michigan, as his “ancestral home.” He was militantly antimodern, even attacking the automobile as a “mechanical Jacobin.”¹⁷ He believed that “a divine intent rules society” and that civilized society requires “orders and classes.”¹⁸ But he was no champion of capitalism, which he regarded as akin to Communism:

The culmination of liberalism, the fulfillment of the aspirations of Bentham and Mill, and of the French and American democratic spokesmen, it is also the completion of capitalism. It is communism. Rockefeller and Marx were merely two agents of the same social force. . . . ¹⁹

In his quest for historical legitimacy, Kirk ransacked the past for acceptable precedents. He did not believe the Chamber of Commerce– style Babbitry of the 1920s had much to recommend it. He saw the go-getting Republican ascendancy as the decadent corruption of the true conservative spirit:

The principle of real leadership ignored, the mortal objects of society forgotten, practical conservatism degenerated into mere laudation of “private enterprise,” economic policy almost wholly succumbed to special interests—such a nation was inviting the catastrophes which compel society to reexamine first principles.²⁰

To Kirk, businessmen were not the natural stewards of virtue, but money-grubbing philistines. “In the whole American nation,” he wrote, “perhaps there are not a hundred important businessmen who take an intelligent interest in the problems of modern society.”²¹ They could not be the leaders of a new conservatism.

Kirk’s dream was neo-feudal. He wished for an aristocracy to rule over a traditional culture. His elite—gentlemen and scholars—would defend values, not interests. Their status would derive from class and personal cultivation; they would conserve civilization against the onslaught of the masses demanding cheap and shoddy goods.

Kirk believed the conservative “great tradition” was sanctified by God, but failed to note when “divine intent” had settled on his heroes. When, for example, did the Founding Fathers become sacred leaders and cease being revolutionaries? He yearned for a preindustrial aristocracy in a country that had summarily executed feudalism, and he demanded tradition in a society whose imperative was change. Unfortunately, from Kirk‘s point of view, there was no Duke of Omnium here, but only Duke Snider and the Duke of Earl.

Kirk, moreover, rebuked democracy where the “great tradition” holds that “all men are created equal.” He exalted a class hierarchy in the interest of moral values. And he did not appeal to reason, the Enlightenment virtue esteemed by the Founding Fathers, but worshiped the noble customs of imagined bygone days. He wanted to conserve society, yet the society he described wasn’t America. His paradise more closely approximated the distant feudal kingdom that von Hayek, the Austro-liberal, had revolted against.

The novelty of The Conservative Mind aptly illustrated the lack of any conservatism with which Kirk could readily connect. He wanted to be part of an organic community, but his own alienation proved how far America was from his vision. Yet his book provided for the first time a scholarly backdrop against which the conservatives could see themselves doing honor to philosophical fathers.

Von Hayek, the philosopher of an Old World that had vanished; Chambers, the ex-Communist whose fatalism was out of step with perennial American optimism; and Kirk, the cultural conservative whose lineage was a swirl of arbitrary parentage, all awaited the figure who could lead the Remnant out of the wilderness. That figure would make his startling entrance onto the stage in 1951, when twenty-six-year-old William F. Buckley, Jr., published a precocious tract entitled God and Man at Yale, lambasting the faculty of his alma mater for perpetuating atheism and collectivism. He urged Yale alumni to break “the superstitions of ‘academic freedom’” and restore the proper teaching of religion and individualism.²² He raised the banner of tradition against the American tradition of liberal education. Thus Buckley’s career was launched.

He stepped into the breach in a politically numb time. Everything about him was well denned when almost everyone else lacked definition. Conventional Democrats and Republicans were battling over which party best represented the dead center. “The struggle these days, if that is the word for it, is toward blandness; toward a national euphoria. . . . Dwight Eisenhower is the proper instrument of such an age,” Buckley wrote in Up from Liberalism.²³

The election of the first Republican President in twenty years, in 1952, did not provoke an ecstatic conservative revival. Americans were weary of Depression and war. Dwight Eisenhower, the former commander of the Allied forces, seemed to be a perfectly benign caretaker, his confident smile projecting paternal reassurance. Despite his worshipful praise of private enterprise, he was more the consolidator of the New Deal than the leader of a conservative departure; he had no intention of bringing about the restoration of the world before Roosevelt. He was, above all, a manager, who had so proven his mettle in the army that Roosevelt handpicked him to coordinate the Allied forces in Europe. Then the Eastern Republican Establishment, at the direction of Thomas Dewey, made him a presidential candidate. He liked and trusted his businessmen, kept the Foreign Service in charge of the State Department, and warned against Asian land wars and “the military-industrial complex.” He had no use for the conservative intellectuals, even as adornments. He may not have known they existed. Eisenhower’s two-volume presidential memoir, Mandate for Change, makes not a single reference to “conservatism.”²⁴ About the labels “liberal” and “conservative,” he remarked during his retirement: “I have never found anyone who could convincingly explain his own definition of these political classifications.”²⁵

Buckley himself took on the task of defining conservatism. He wanted to revive the free market and forge a moral community. To him, Communism was the essence of evil—the Antichrist. Buckley was also a cultural conservative who wanted a country of Gothic buildings and stained-glass windows. He took the impulses of conservatism and offered a unifying principle. Buckley was distinctive in that he fit into no particular box. Perhaps most important, he knew how to stand in the spotlight.

Buckley’s father, William F. Buckley, Sr., was an oil wildcatter and market speculator, a poor Irish Catholic boy from a small Southwest Texas town who became a multimillionaire. He was not a bland corporate manager. He was as fervently reactionary as he was devoutly religious. He wanted his children, growing up on the Great Elm family estate in Sharon, Connecticut, to possess both intellectual depth and cowboy daring.

At Great Elm, Albert Jay Nock made impressive appearances as the man who came to lunch. Young Buckley, then in prep school, was taken with Nock’s style and his notion of the Remnant. It was from Nock that he first learned that there was an opening for the job of prophet.

There were other important influences on Buckley—among them Yale political scientist Willmoore Kendall, an ex-Trotskyite turned conservative—but perhaps no one made a more profound impression on Buckley after his graduation from college in 1950 than Whittaker Chambers. His anguish and commitment, erudition and faith, attracted Buckley, who became one of his great defenders and friends. He often quoted Chambers on political strategy. “To live,” Chambers wrote, “is to maneuver. The choices of maneuver are now visibly narrow. [But] a conservatism that cannot find room in its folds for the actualities is a conservatism that is not a political force, or even a twitch: it has become a literary whimsy. Those who remain in the world, if they will not surrender on its terms, must maneuver within its terms.”²⁶

One day, Willi Schlamm, “an old friend of Chambers in the hard anti-Communist cell at Time, Inc.,” according to Buckley, appeared on the doorstep of Great Elm.²⁷ Schlamm was a Viennese expatriate, an ex-Communist and ideological adviser to Henry Luce, founder of Time, Inc., for whom Chambers had also worked. Schlamm had once almost persuaded Luce to launch a conservative intellectual journal as one of his stable of publications. Naturally, Schlamm would be editor, but Luce changed his mind, and Schlamm, seeking a financial angel for his magazine, came to William Buckley, Sr. He found Bill, who had boundless enthusiasm, intellectual poise, fame after the publication of God and Man at Yale—and his father’s money.

At the same time, the small journal founded by Nock, The Freeman, the only conservative magazine in the field, was folding. The editorial staff split over the career and tactics of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Some cheered his rise; others deplored it. (Buckley, incidentally, was a cheerleader. In 1954 he published a defense of McCarthy, coauthored with L. Brent Bozell, entitled McCarthy and His Enemies.) The staff was also rented by the 1952 presidential campaign. Some supported Robert Taft as the only possible conservative standard-bearer, while a few liked Ike. The Freeman did not survive these controversies. With its demise, there was not a single conservative journal left in America.

Buckley began raising funds throughout 1954 for the projected National Review. His father gave him $100,000. “It was tough going,” Buckley said. He discovered that businessmen generally were unreceptive to the renovation of conservatism. “They were demoralized as a result of being tainted by the New Deal as denizens of a dark underworld. They struggled very much to be liberal.” In his search for money, Buckley approached Herbert Hoover, an almost forgotten and forlorn figure who, said Buckley, “liked the notion of a fairly high-brow journal speaking out for conservative values.” Hoover, moreover, provided introductions to his friends, who provided some money. Thus Buckley raised $300,000, enough for a beginning.

The first issue of National Review appeared in 1955, in the wake of The Freeman’s collapse. It used the same typography, layout, and printer as The Freeman, but was wholly new. Gathered around Buckley were free-marketers, ex-Communists, and cultural conservatives. Quite purposely, there were no “modern Republicans” of the Eisenhower persuasion on the masthead. (When National Review was in embryo, Buckley wrote to a former comrade of John Reed and Leon Trotsky, Max Eastman, who had turned conservative: “I intend, in an early issue, to read Dwight Eisenhower out of the conservative movement . . . our principles are round and Eisenhower is square.”)²⁸ If any of the eminences surrounding Buckley (who turned thirty shortly after National Review’s debut) thought they would dominate him or the journal, they soon discovered that they were mistaken. Buckley had a matchless combination of verve and editorial ability. Also, he emphasized, “I had the advantage of owning all the stock in this company. There was never any question of who ran the organization. It’s amazing how many fights are avoided when you have total control.”

In the lead editorial in the first issue, Buckley advanced the concept of the Remnant—the last defenders of the old values against modern liberal decadence. The magazine, he wrote, “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.”²⁹

National Review’s first effect on history was to alter the chemistry of the conservative intellectual scene. “The magazine had an evangelistic and didactic function,” said Buckley. “It brought a sense of community that had been lacking. The idea of a congregation wasn’t realized until the formation of the National Review.”

Liberal intellectuals did not initially greet the magazine and the ideological currents that coursed through it with much respect. In an early review, the influential critic Dwight Macdonald dismissed National Review writers as “scrambled eggheads” and the journal itself as “the voice of the lumpen-bourgeoisie.”³⁰ Buckley referred later to such depictions of conservatives as “hobgoblinization.”

But there were more serious assaults than Macdonald’s on the legitimacy of conservatism, assaults that gave Buckley and the National Review editors and writers the opportunity to defend their cause and establish its intellectual integrity. In 1955, the same year that National Review appeared, three significant books were published that classified American conservatism as, in turn, an impossibility, an impracticality, and a pathology. The historian Louis Hartz, in The Liberal Tradition in America, argued that American liberalism was “natural,” and that the absence of feudalism meant the inevitable fall of Federalism, slavery, and socialism.³¹ Just as there was no class-conscious proletariat in the European manner, there was no aristocracy; these exceptions were the rule, the logical outcome of liberalism’s dominance. “The ironic flaw in American liberalism,” wrote Hartz, “lies in the fact that we have never had a real conservative tradition.”³²

The political scientist Clinton Rossiter, in Conservatism in America, echoed Hartz’s premise. The subtitle he appended to his book’s 1962 edition was The Thankless Persuasion. Rossiter was a “modern Republican” attempting to provide justification for his creed. And he condemned the new conservatives as self-defeating:

What disqualifies our Conservatives finally as suitable advisors in the realm of political ideas is the depth of their contempt, sometimes outspoken and always ill-concealed, for Liberalism. . . . The trouble is that they are too “real,” that they have become so passionately attached to the resurgent tradition of Conservatism that they find themselves in a state of all-out war with Liberalism—and thus, in fact, with the American tradition.³³

Rossiter didn’t believe that those clustered around National Review fit the definition of true conservatism. He suggested that “a large wing of American conservatism, of which Buckley is the most eloquent and persistent voice, is not at all content to be simply and intuitively ‘conservative’. . . its settled aim seems to be to restore a past rather than to conserve a present.”³⁴ The only way Rossiter could see conservative intellectuals making a practical contribution to politics was through an alliance with the corporate managers. “American conservatism must, first of all,“ he wrote, “enlist and serve the interests of American business or abdicate responsibility for the future of the Republic.”³⁵

The third important critique published that year was an anthology entitled The New American Right, in which the leading liberal sociologists of the day attributed conservative political isolation to a reactionary status anxiety. Conservatism, they pronounced, was the last gasp of village values against modern culture. “Today,” wrote Daniel Bell, “the politics of the radical right is the politics of frustration—the sour impotence of those who find themselves unable to understand, let alone command, the complex mass society that is the polity today.”³⁶ He considered the right “outside the political pale, insofar as it refuses to accept the American consensus.”³⁷ Seymour Martin Lipset stated that “it is extremely doubtful that the radical right will grow beyond the peak of 1953–54.”³⁸

Buckley answered such criticism in the pages of National Review and, in 1959, in Up from Liberalism, his most sustained argument. He believed that liberalism was dominant not because it was “natural,” but because of a weakening of fundamental American values. “I think the attenuation of the early principles of this country has made America vulnerable to the most opportunistic ideology of the day, the strange and complex ideology of modern Liberalism.”³⁹

About democracy Buckley was ambivalent. “The democracy of universal suffrage is not a bad form of government; it is simply not necessarily nor inevitably a good form of government. Democracy must be justified by its works, not by doctrinaire affirmations of an intrinsic goodness that no mere method can legitimately lay claim to. . . . The commitment by the Liberals to democracy has proved obsessive, even fetishistic.”⁴⁰

As for “modern Republicanism,” Buckley wrote that its “historical destiny . . . was to stay a radical impulse for a year or two, in exchange for a considerable erosion of the conservative position.”⁴¹

He then took on the main criticisms of conservatism. First he summarized Hartz’s argument—“Conservatism does not exist”—describing this interpretation as one of the typical liberal “techniques of indoctrination.” Then he noted that another way to view “conservative dissent” was to label it a “pathology . . . a lowering political force that threatens to ring in a new Dark Age.”⁴²

Still, Buckley felt no need to offer an elaborate platform. Conservatism was a defense of values, not a political party. “It is not the single conservative‘s responsibility or right to draft a concrete program—merely to suggest the principles that should frame it. . . . Call it a No-Program, if you will, but adopt it for your very own. I will not cede more power to the state.”⁴³

But one thing conservatism could do was fight Communism. Buckley presented the Cold War as an Oxford Union debate in which the West was losing points. “Liberalism cannot teach Mr. Eisenhower to talk back effectively to Mr. Khrushchev, but conservatism can, and hence the very urgent need to make the conservative demonstration.”⁴⁴

Buckley may have wanted to restore the aristocracy of “the good, the rich, the well-born” (a definition offered by Federalist leader Fisher Ames). But he joined the only aristocracy really permitted in America when he became a celebrity.

His mastery of the infant medium of television was crucial in gaining conservatism a popular hearing. Buckley well understood that style served substance. “This was a period,” he said, “in which it was supposed a conservative couldn’t survive a confrontation with a liberal face-to-face. You‘d make your arguments for rich people and run out of arguments. A few collisions had a tremendous effect. People on campus raised their eyes with new-found respect. I’ve always thought the panache of Keynes carried him farther than his facile arguments.” Buckley was a champion debater. Television was an ideal podium for his sharp skills. “My own personal experience came terribly dramatically,” he said. “After 1953, I never went anywhere unrecognized because of television. Those who matured in the 1950s were more keenly aware that television is an indispensable part of evangelization.”

By 1953, Buckley was one of the first political television stars, perhaps the first who was not an elected official. He was outrageous yet insouciant, a hot message and a cool image. And in 1966, when Buckley’s intellectual variety hour, Firing Line, went on the air, conservatism was established as a regular listing in TV Guide. The now-famous Buckley image was commonly taken for the essence of his philosophy.

But fame didn’t temper his convictions. Rather, he used his personal renown to cover the conservative movement with the mantle of respectability. His acerbic elegance was in the service of the movement. In 1952 he became the first president of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the first national conservative student organization. In 1960 the founding meeting of the Young Americans for Freedom was held under his auspices at his Great Elm estate. In 1965 he ran for mayor of New York City on the Conservative Party ticket, winning about ten percent of the vote and in the process securing the new party as a force to be reckoned with in New York politics. And, of course, he provided an opening wedge in the press by establishing the first really successful conservative syndicated column. His example inspired a host of successors, from Patrick Buchanan to George F. Will.

Before Buckley, there was no common designation for people on the right. (Robert Taft, the old standard-bearer of the Republican right, had always referred to himself as a “liberal.”) National Review, with an assist from Russell Kirk, was largely responsible for giving the believers an identity as “conservatives.” (Ironically, neither von Hayek nor Chambers accepted this label.)

By becoming “conservatives,” they drew upon intellectual resources beyond the American tradition, which they extolled as true Americanism. The cultural conservatives desired a fixed order of traditional values, which in Europe was sanctified by that most un-American institution, the Church establishment. The anti-Communists, though they dreaded the leviathan state, encouraged the building of a permanent and expansive national security state. And the “conservatives” assumed a continental belief in an absolute free market to an extent never before assumed in America, where the Grand Old Party was the party of the national government—the party of tariffs, land grants, and railroad subsidies.

The “conservative” label enabled conservatives to gloss over their incoherence by providing a convenient rubric under which to file everything. Identification as “conservative” also gave the conservatives a self-consciousness as a movement aspiring to power.

The discovery of an identity in the 1950s was followed in the 1960s by the discovery of politics. Some National Review editors urged immersion in electoral politics, while others veered toward more radical schemes. These fierce controversies raged mostly on the polemical plane and within the magazine’s editorial offices. William Rusher, the publisher, believed that a principled conservatism might flourish within the Republican Party and perhaps even take it over. He was the first National Review figure to turn this thought into practice, casually hitting on the notion of a Draft Goldwater for President movement one day over lunch. In short order, using his contacts among veterans of the Young Republicans, a conservative activist network known as “The Syndicate,” he helped field a Goldwater organization. Nobody at the magazine took his politicking very seriously until it was breathlessly reported in The New York Times.

With the Goldwater campaign, Buckley’s mayoralty race, and Reagan’s 1966 gubernatorial campaign, an immense process of political education of both the public and the conservatives themselves was set in motion. Reagan was an important figure in that he could make the conservatives’ abstractions vivid in ordinary minds; he could turn the ideology into the mythology. Through his political skills, conservatism overcame the elitism of the Remnant and began to present itself as populism reborn. By 1980, conservative political activists numbered in the thousands, and political action committees were disbursing millions. But without the overwhelming sense of purpose, the movement’s material resources would have lacked concentrated force. Conservatism’s greatest political asset was conservatism, the intellectual capital bequeathed by the Remnant.

Behind Reagan and his alluring rhetoric stood the Counter-Establishment, which was vouchsafed the task of maintaining the power of the ideology. By 1980 the Counter-Establishment had grown from the Remnant into a vast apparatus of think tanks, journals, and institutes. And hundreds of its cadres, schooled in the movement’s extra-party organizations, were recruited to serve in Reagan’s Washington as a governing elite.