Bill Buckley Conservatism Is Dead

Fifty years ago this year, Murray N. Rothbard offered his thoughts on National Review, the flagship magazine of American conservatism, which had commemorated its tenth anniversary in late 1965.

He went on to tell the full story in The Betrayal of the American Right, at once an intellectual history and a memoir.

Murray’s primary complaint: what had once been a movement skeptical of or opposed to overseas adventurism and empire-building had now, under the influence of editor Bill Buckley, come to be defined by those very things.

In Buckley’s infamous formulation, it would be necessary to erect a “totalitarian bureaucracy” within our shores in order to battle communism abroad. The implication was that once the communist menace subsided, this extraordinary effort, domestic and foreign, could likewise diminish.

With the advent of National Review, these increasingly isolated voices would be silenced and marginalized. Even the heroic John T. Flynn, whose anti-FDR biography The Roosevelt Myth had reached number two on the New York Times bestseller list, was turned away from National Review when he tried to warn of the dangers of a policy of military interventionism.

Fifty years after Murray’s article, the situation at National Review is far worse. The magazine has become more enthusiastic for foreign interventions as those interventions have become more ridiculous and self-defeating.

In the old National Review, moreover, it was still possible from time to time to encounter discussions of controversial questions, perhaps most notably the legacy of Abraham Lincoln. Frank Meyer, Willmoore Kendall, and (most famously) M.E. Bradford took on the pro-Lincoln Harry Jaffa in its pages. Such a thing is unthinkable today, given the magazine’s yearning for mainstream respectability. It was Jaffa’s role, says fellow Straussian Charles Kesler, to make clear “what respectable conservatives should think about Lincoln.”

And what a surprise: what respectable conservatives should think about Lincoln just happened to be what respectable left-liberals thought about Lincoln.

Looking back on the careers of Murray, Buckley, and National Review, it’s hard not to point to a striking comparison. Who today reads the long-forgotten books of Bill Buckley, or holds conferences discussing his thought? Where is the cadre of college students devoting themselves to devouring the works of Buckley?

I think we know the answer.

Meanwhile, interest in (and foreign-language translations of!) Murray’s work only continues to multiply. Austrian economics is flourishing, with the number of academics working in an expressly Rothbardian tradition growing every year. Meanwhile, the texts of Rothbard are being consumed voraciously, indeed more than ever before, and especially by bright young minds seeking out something more intellectually satisfying than the stale platitudes of official “liberalism” and “conservatism.”

Murray, with a Columbia University Ph.D. and a body of work of extraordinary quality, quantity, and scholarly significance, spent much of his academic career laboring in obscurity, refusing to say either what the Keynesians of the left or the military interventionists on the right wanted to hear. But today, over 20 years after his death, Mr. Libertarian is the undisputed intellectual godfather of the ongoing libertarian renascence among bright American students. The handful of National Review‘s young followers, whose idea of fun is listening to a Mitt Romney speech at CPAC, do not similarly impress.

Bill Buckley, on the other hand, spent his life in the spotlight. And he policed the conservative movement to ensure it was sufficiently respectable, its positions well within the ideological limits set out by the left-liberals he professed to despise. But while Buckley may have been a prominent figure during his lifetime, he essentially died in obscurity, despite enjoying every establishment advantage one could ask for.

There is a lesson here.

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