-- Michael Smith <mjs at smithbowen.net> wrote:
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. ----------------- My response:
In fact there were certain similiarities between Buckley's group that was centered around National Review and the neocons. Buckley's original group featured a number of ex-leftists and ex-Marxists, including most notably people like Max Eastman and James Burnham. Neo-conservatism, likewise, was started by people who were ex-leftists or ex-liberals, like Irving Kristol or Norman Podhoretz, and they greatly respected Sidney Hook, who was an ex-Marxist (Hook had in fact been one of the first Marxists to get an academic chair in the US). Later on many of the necons could be found writing articles for National Review, indicating a certain degree of convergence between the two groups.
Jim F.
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