> 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.
Big biz (from my admittedly worms-eye view as a hired hand) is intensely conservative in the real sense of the word; they're very cautious about rocking the boat. The smaller guys tend to be less risk-averse and hungrier. It makes sense to me that they would have been pressing harder for a more rapid rollback, and the big boys only started to get on board once it became clear that there would be no significant pushback from the public. It also agrees with my memory of the period -- seemed like it was little suckerfish like shopping-mall developers who constituted the shock troops of Goldwaterism and later, the most energetic components of the Nixon coalition and the early boosters of Reagan.
> The
> conservative revolution was invented and hawked by intellectuals.
Not to be captious, but I think we confuse ourselves by adopting this trope of "conservative revolution". Even "counter-revolution," though hallowed by usage, seems a bit of a misnomer. Any time the public gets riled enough to extract some concessions from the elites, the latter will start taking back what they've given up as soon as they can. Some elements are bound to be more eager and aggressive than others, of course. But for all of them it's ineluctably part of their nature. Taking, and then taking more and still more until they're brushed back, is their essence.
Even on the purely intellectual/ideological plane Buckley always seemed to me like a premature proto-Fascist, his movement little more than a rather precious cult. Doug's image of the Yale undergrads sipping port in their wing chairs made me laugh. There were guys like that at U of Chicago, too, who collected first editions and pretended to read Plato in Greek.
But the guys who really made reaction a respectable thing for intellectuals were the neo-cons, who seemed to me at the time to be selling a very different product. Maybe there are more continuities than I realize, not knowing the literature all that well. And certainly the "movement" liked to claim a pedigree, as many people do, and Buckley's was one of the artifically patina'ed ancestral portraits on the oak-stained plywood wainscoting.