Standing athwart history, yelling Stop. Liberals Are Fools!
http://www.nationalreview.com/flashback/buckley200406290949.asp
June 29, 2004, 9:49 a.m.
Publisher's Statement
Standing athwart history, yelling Stop.
By William F. Buckley Jr.
EDITOR'S NOTE: This appeared in the first issue of National Review, on
November 19, 1955.
There is, we like to think, solid reason for rejoicing. Prodigious
efforts, by many people, are responsible for NATIONAL REVIEW. But
since it will be the policy of this magazine to reject the hypodermic
approach
to world affairs, we may as well start out at once, and admit that the
joy is not unconfined.
Let's face it: Unlike Vienna, it seems altogether possible that did
NATIONAL REVIEW not exist, no one would have invented it. The
launching of a conservative weekly journal of opinion in a country
widely assumed to be a bastion of conservatism at first glance looks
like a work of supererogation, rather like publishing a royalist
weekly within the walls of Buckingham Palace. It is not that, of
course; if NATIONAL REVIEW is superfluous, it is so for very different
reasons: It 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.
NATIONAL REVIEW is out of place, in the sense that the United Nations
and the League of Women Voters and the New York Times and Henry Steele
Commager are in place. It is out of place because, in its maturity,
literate America rejected conservatism in favor of radical social
experimentation. Instead of covetously consolidating its premises, the
United States seems tormented by its tradition of fixed postulates
having to do with the meaning of existence, with the relationship of
the state to the individual, of the individual to his neighbor, so
clearly enunciated in the enabling documents of our Republic.
"I happen to prefer champagne to ditchwater," said the benign old
wrecker of the ordered society, Oliver Wendell Holmes, "but there is
no reason to suppose that the cosmos does." We have come around to Mr.
Holmes' view, so much that we feel gentlemanly doubts when asserting
the superiority of capitalism to socialism, of republicanism to
centralism, of champagne to ditchwater - of anything to anything. (How
curious that one of the doubts one is not permitted is whether, at the
margin, Mr. Holmes was a useful
citizen!) The inroads that relativism has made on the American soul
are not so easily evident. One must recently have lived on or close to
a college campus to have a vivid intimation of what has happened. It
is
there that we see how a number of energetic social innovators,
plugging their grand designs, succeeded over the years in capturing
the liberal intellectual imagination. And since ideas rule the world,
the ideologues, having won over the intellectual class, simply walked
in and started to run things.
Run just about everything. There never was an age of conformity quite
like this one, or a camaraderie quite like the Liberals'. Drop a
little itching powder in Jimmy Wechsler's bath and before he has
scratched himself for the third time, Arthur Schlesinger will have
denounced you in a dozen books and speeches, Archibald MacLeish will
have written ten heroic cantos about our age of terror, Harper's will
have published them, and everyone in sight will have been nominated
for a Freedom Award. Conservatives in
this country - at least those who have not made their peace with the
New Deal, and there is a serious question of whether there are others
- are non-licensed nonconformists; and this is a dangerous business in
a Liberal world, as every editor of this magazine can readily show by
pointing to his scars. Radical conservatives in this country have an
interesting time of it, for when they are not being suppressed or
mutilated by Liberals, they are being ignored or humiliated by a great
many of those of the well-fed Right, whose ignorance and amorality of
never been exaggerated for the same reason that one cannot exaggerate
infinity.
There are, thank Heaven, the exceptions. There are those of generous
impulse and a sincere desire to encourage a responsible dissent from
the Liberal orthodoxy. And there are those who recognize that when all
is said and done, the market place depends for a license to operate
freely on the men who issue licenses - on the politicians. They
recognize, therefore, that efficient getting and spending is itself
impossible except in an atmosphere that encourages efficient getting
and spending. And back of all political institutions there are moral
and philosophical concepts, implicit or defined. Our political
economy and our high-energy industry run on large, general principles,
on ideas - not by day-to-day guess work, expedients and
improvisations. Ideas have to go into exchange to become or remain
operative; and the medium of such exchange is the printed word. A
vigorous and incorruptible journal of conservative opinion is - dare
we say it? - as necessary to better living as Chemistry.
We begin publishing, then, with a considerable stock of experience
with the irresponsible Right, and a despair of the intransigence of
the Liberals, who run this country; and all this in a world dominated
by the
jubilant single-mindedness of the practicing Communist, with his
inside track to History. All this would not appear to augur well for
NATIONAL REVIEW. Yet we start with a considerable - and considered -
optimism.
After all, we crashed through. More than one hundred and twenty
investors made this magazine possible, and over fifty men and women of
small means invested less than one thousand dollars apiece in it. Two
men and one woman, all three with overwhelming personal and public
commitments, worked round the clock to make publication possible. A
score of professional writers pledged their devoted attention to its
needs, and hundreds of thoughtful men and women gave evidence that the
appearance of such a journal as we have in mind would profoundly
affect their lives.
Our own views, as expressed in a memorandum drafted a year ago, and
directed to our investors, are set forth in an adjacent column. We
have nothing to offer but the best that is in us. That, a thousand
Liberals
who read this sentiment will say with relief, is clearly not enough!
It isn't enough. But it is at this point that we steal the march. For
we offer, besides ourselves, a position that has not grown old under
the weight of a gigantic, parasitic bureaucracy, a position untempered
by the doctoral dissertations of a generation of Ph.D's in social
architecture, unattenuated by a thousand vulgar promises to a thousand
different pressure groups, uncorroded by a cynical contempt for human
freedom. And that, ladies and gentlemen, leaves us just about the
hottest thing in town.
WM. F. BUCKLEY, JR.
--
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best
he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and
not make messes in the house.
Robert Heinlein
.
|
