>> I think you're right that the Nation probably would have had a lot of
>> criticism of Truman. But that's because Truman was viewed as a
>> shocking and unexpected regime shift away from Roosevelt's liberalism.
>
> I think that's completely comparable to a Republican's attitude toward
> Eisenhower, who was parachuted in on the party in what was (rightly)
> seen as an elite coup against Robert Taft.
I disagree, I don't think it's comparable. Eisenhower was not some foreign growth that had attached itself to the party from the outside. The NR crowd believed the Republican Party had grown increasingly rotten since Alf Landon. Before Ike there had been Dewey and before him Wendell Willkie. It was a whole wing of the party, based in the Northeast but with satellites in every state where big-city influence was a factor. It was a whole movement: "Modern Republicanism," with its own mouthpieces, like Arthur Larson.
> I think Bush and Obama are completely comparable.
But what about those links Doug posted? That 2003 NR editorial said, baldly, something to the effect that George W. Bush is not a real conservative. The Nation would never run an editorial saying flatly that Obama is not a real progressive. According to Doug, there's even some kind of tacit in-house rule about it.
> Another good comparison would be the Nation under LBJ and the
> National Review under Nixon. My suspicious (based on zero evidence) is
> that by the end of those regimes, the Nation would have been more
> critical than the NR even though the NR originally viewed Nixon as
> almost their defining enemy.
In August 1971, the NR sponsored a declaration of "Suspension of Support" for Nixon signed by Buckley and 10 other luminaries of the right. (The trip to China, wage and price controls, etc.) They ended up endorsing Nixon in 1972 based on the argument that while Nixon was horrible, a state of emergency existed due to the threat of McGovern. William Rusher, the publisher, wrote a dissenting editorial saying Nixon should not be endorsed; under his tenure the conservative movement has "all but vanished" (or words to that effect). I think the dissenting edit actually ran in the mag, though I'm not sure.
Anyway, I think this misses the point. Nobody's saying the progressives of *1967* were a disgrace compared to their counterparts on the right. The argument is that progressives of *2009* are a disgrace compared to their counterparts on the right.
SA