National Review ( NR ) is a biweekly magazine founded by the late author William F. Buckley, Jr. in 1955 and based in New York City. It describes itself as "America's most widely read and influential magazine and web site for Republican/conservative news, commentary, and opinion." Although the print version of the magazine is available online to subscribers, the free content on the website is essentially a separate publication.
Origins
Prior to National Review' s founding in 1955, some conservatives believed that the American Right was a largely unorganized collection of individuals who shared intertwining philosophies but had little opportunity for a united public voice. They also wanted to marginalize what they saw as the isolationist views of the Old Right.
At the time several major magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post , The American Mercury and Reader's Digest were generally conservative and anti-communist, as were a number of newspapers including the Chicago Tribune and St Louis Globe-Democrat . Also, Human Events and The Freeman preceded National Review in developing Cold War Conservatism in the 1950s.
During the Eisenhower years, many American intellectuals considered President Calvin Coolidge and the Laissez-Faire economics philosophy he was perceived to have practiced preceding the The Great Depression anachronistic. After Franklin Roosevelt defeated Herbert Hoover in 1932, they believed that the country had tilted permanently leftward — and soon turned to government to solve the country's socio-economic problems. As the Democratic Party gained control of the political landscape, the Republicans assumed the role of an almost-permanent contrarian minority.
Anti-FDR forces, known today as the Old Right, had sprouted up to oppose the New Deal. This group included traditionalists (followers of T. S. Eliot and George Santayana), traditionalist southern agrarians (Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, Richard Weaver), libertarians (H.L. Mencken, Albert Jay Nock, Frank Chodorov), and anti-interventionists (John T. Flynn, Garet Garrett, Robert R. McCormick). This group influenced both the early National Review and modern paleoconservatism, which emerged in the 1980s in opposition to neoconservatism.
The Republican Party had effectively marginalized its remaining conservative members by the 1950s. Although a few Republican statesmen such as Senator Robert Taft of Ohio maintained a rear-guard action against the growth of the state during Roosevelt's New Deal, the party was firmly in the camp of its relatively liberal and pro-government Eastern establishment. The moderates in 1952 nominated Dwight D. Eisenhower over Taft for the Presidency, a popular centrist Republican who publicly supported most of the New Deal. Eisenhower won in 1952, and with the death of Senator Taft, conservatism in America was left with few identifiable leaders.
History
Early years
In 1953, Russell Kirk published The Conservative Mind , which sought to trace an intellectual bloodline from Edmund Burke to the Old Right in the early 1950s. This challenged the popular notion that no coherent conservative tradition existed in the United States. A young William F. Buckley, Jr. was greatly influenced by it.
Two years before, Buckley published God and Man at Yale , criticizing his alma mater for its abandonment of its founding principles. Buckley, a Skull and Bones secret society member, champion debater and former editor of The Yale Daily News , soon rose to national prominence. After a short stint in the CIA, he toured the country debating for The Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (ISI), contributed to The American Mercury , and soon decided to start his own magazine.
Buckley first tried to purchase Human Events , but was turned down. He then met Willi Schlamm, the ex-communist editor of The Freeman ; they would spend the next two years raising the $300,000 necessary to start their own weekly magazine, originally to be called National Weekly . (A magazine holding the trademark to the name prompted the change to National Review .) The statement of intentions read:
Middle-of-the-Road, qua Middle of the Road, is politically, intellectually, and morally repugnant. We shall recommend policies for the simple reason that we consider them right (rather than “non-controversial”); and we consider them right because they are based on principles we deem right (rather than on popularity polls)...The New Deal revolution, for instance, could hardly have happened save for the cumulative impact of The Nation and The New Republic , and a few other publications, on several American college generations during the twenties and thirties.
On November 19, 1955, Buckley’s magazine would take shape. Buckley assembled an eclectic group of writers: traditionalists, Catholic intellectuals, libertarians and ex-Communists. They included: Russell Kirk (the traditionalist admirer of Burke and author of The Conservative Mind ), ex-Marxists James Burnham, Frank Meyer, and Willmoore Kendall, L. Brent Bozell, and Gary Wills. Whittaker Chambers, the Communist-party defector and former Time editor who had given the key congressional testimony against Alger Hiss in the latter's espionage hearing, was also invited to join. Chambers initially declined, but eventually became a senior editor. In the magazine’s founding statement Buckley wrote:
Let’s Face it: Unlike Vienna, it seems altogether possible that did National Review not exist, no one would have invented it. The launching of a conservative weekly journal of opinion in a country widely assumed to be a bastion of conservatism at first glance looks like a work of supererogation, rather like publishing a royalist weekly within the walls of Buckingham Palace. It is not that of course; if National Review is superfluous, it is so for very different reasons: It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no other is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.
National Review aimed to make conservative ideas respectable, in an age when the dominant view of conservative thought was expressed by Lionel Trilling in 1950:
In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation... the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not... express themselves in ideas but only... in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.
Buckley attacked Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, as part of his efforts to build a respectable conservative movement:
Mr. Buckley's first great achievement was to purge the American right of its kooks. He marginalized the anti-Semites, the John Birchers, the nativists and their sort.
Buckley and Frank Meyer also promoted the idea of fusionism, whereby different schools of conservatives, including libertarians, would work together to combat what were seen as their common opponents.
National Review promoted Barry Goldwater heavily during the early 1960s. Buckley and others involved with the magazine took a major role in the "Draft Goldwater" movement in 1960 and the 1964 presidential campaign. Buckley also helped found Young Americans for Freedom; it and National Review spread his vision of conservatism throughout the country.
The early National Review faced high-profile defections from both left and right. Garry Wills broke with NR and became a popular liberal—yet still religious—commentator. Buckley’s brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell Jr., who ghostwrote The Conscience of a Conservative for Barry Goldwater, left and started the short-lived traditionalist Catholic magazine, Triumph in 1966.
After Goldwater
After Goldwater's defeat by Lyndon Johnson in 1964, Buckley and National Review continued to champion the idea of a conservative movement, which was increasingly embodied in Ronald Reagan. Reagan, a longtime subscriber to National Review , first became politically prominent during Goldwater's campaign. National Review supported his challenge to President Gerald Ford in 1976 and his successful 1980 campaign.
During the 1980s NR called for tax cuts, supply-side economics, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and support for President Reagan's foreign policy against the Soviet Union. The magazine criticized the Welfare state and would support the Welfare reform proposals of the 1990s. The magazine also regularly criticized President Bill Clinton. It first embraced, then rejected, Pat Buchanan in his political campaigns. A lengthy 1996 National Review editorial called for a "movement toward" drug legalization .
Current editor and contributing writers
The magazine's current editor is Rich Lowry. Many of the magazine's commentators are affiliated with think-tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute. Prominent guest authors have included Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and Sarah Palin in the online and paper edition.
Nat
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