In 1957, when I abandoned my career as a lawyer and accepted Bill Buckley’s invitation to become the publisher of his infant National Review, it had just 16,472 subscribers. The conservative movement barely existed, and the prospects for its survival were slim. A nominal Republican – Dwight Eisenhower – occupied the White House, but Congress was firmly in Democratic control and would remain there for nearly four more decades. Only seven years earlier, Lionel Trilling had observed, “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 there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.”
And yet, in 1964, with the nomination of Barry Goldwater for president, the conservative movement took control of the Republican Party and has never since relinquished it. Today, there is not only a Republican president serving his second term in the White House, but both the House and the Senate have been Republican for 11 years, and most major governorships are in Republican hands. Political victories are never complete, but there is simply no gainsaying the fact that conservatism is today the dominant viewpoint in American politics.
On Oct. 6, in Washington, D.C., National Review celebrated the 50th anniversary of its founding. As its publisher for 31 of those 50 years, I was on hand, and I hope you will forgive me if I dwell for a moment on that happy occasion, and its significance.
There was a meeting that morning, in the White House, at which about a hundred employees and friends of the magazine (which now boasts a circulation of 170,000, making it America’s biggest journal of opinion) heard short talks from several of its prominent admirers and its longtime owner and editor, Bill Buckley. Then President Bush dropped in to wish National Review a happy birthday and take Bill and his wife, Pat, off to lunch in the White House’s private quarters. That evening 800 people, in tuxedos and evening gowns, paid $500 a plate to attend a gala dinner in the cavernous National Building Museum, at which Rush Limbaugh presided over a 40-minute video presentation recalling some of the highlights of the magazine’s first half-century.
Clearly, a lot has happened in those 50 years. And, while it would be absurd to attribute the growth and success of the conservative movement to any single cause, it is surely fair to say that National Review had a lot to do with it. As George Will once put it, “It has changed first the ideas and then the politics and ultimately the policies of the most important nation the world has ever known.”
What explains the astonishing reversal in the positions of liberalism and conservatism since 1955? I think the key lies in Trilling’s emphasis on the importance of “ideas.” In 1950, as he correctly noted, there simply were no conservative ideas in general circulation in this country. Today, as Marty Peretz, the longtime owner and editor of one of liberalism’s great champions, The New Republic, recently lamented, it is the liberals who are “bookless” – who, that is to say, lack any vigorous new ideas in the realm of politics. The conservatives, through National Review and otherwise, launched a devastating and ultimately successful attack on the notion of Big Government, and passionately defended the principles of individualism and its economic formula, free enterprise. Tested in the arena, their ideas proved valid and prevailed.
It will be hard for the liberals to counterattack successfully, for it is not enough for an idea to be new and seductive. It must, at bottom, be true. And, if conservatives are right, their ideas are simply closer to the bedrock of reality than those of liberalism.
All honor, then, to Bill Buckley and the other editors of National Review, who analyzed America’s problems carefully and insisted upon responses to them that were not always popular, but had the supreme virtue of being right.
