On Feb 29, 2008, at 11:26 AM, Michael Smith wrote:
> On Thursday 28 February 2008 22:22:17 Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>> [Buckley] was pretty influential.
>
> I wonder. Isn't this a little like thinking that the guy on
> the surfboard is creating the wave?
>
> Don't you think there was a pretty general move on the
> part of the American elites to retrench and recover lost
> ground after WWII -- which was interrupted and even to
> some extent reversed during the Sixties, and then resumed
> the revanche as soon as possible? Buckley seems pretty
> epiphenomenal to that.
>
> His particular brand of quixotic, attitudinizing, Catholic
> lumpen-intellectual wankery seems like a pretty far cry,
> too, from either the type of Protestant born-again religious
> militancy that the Republicans depend on so heavily, or the
> eminently practical corporate freebootery that
> constitutes the real substance of modern "conservatism".
Like Reagan, WFB straddled the traditionalist and libertarian wings of conservatism. Back when I was in the POR, they were always in opposition. The libertarians cooked up speed in their dorm rooms, and the traditionalists drank port while sitting in leather wing chars. Etc. Buckley managed to unite the two, promoting TradVals at the same time as he hawked what William Appleman Williams called "laissez nous faire." Both RR and WFB managed this impossible feat through their personal charms, or what some people thought were their personal charms.
One of the many things I learned reading Sidney Blumenthal's fine book on the rise of the counter-establishment was that the business class came late to a right-wing political agenda in the 1970s. Buckley had a hard time raising cash for the launch of NR; big biz just wanted to get along, not rock the boat in the 1950s. (Small biz was another story.) Even into the 1970s, business elites held back until pretty late in the decade. Blumenthal quotes Walter Wriston as saying that his kind were very skeptical of Reagan for a long time - it wasn't until late in the decade that they came around. The conservative revolution was invented and hawked by intellectuals. And a lot of the agenda they sold emerged from the gang around Buckley and NR.
Doug