To stand athwart history is not merely to defend the status quo; it entails discarding its most injurious elements without jettisoning history’s timeless lessons.
To stand athwart history is not merely to defend the status quo; it entails discarding its most injurious elements without jettisoning history’s timeless lessons.
S ixty-six years ago, an upstart public intellectual founded this publication with a rallying cry. National Review, William F. Buckley wrote in 1955, “stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.” This was, and still is, a noble calling, especially at a time when so few are willing to stand athwart an ascendant progressivism that seems intent on erasing all social mores and extinguishing our nation’s rich cultural heritage and dynamism.
But Buckley’s conception of conservatism was far from the caricature described by The American Conservative associate editor, self-proclaimed “Catholic-integralist,” and former National Review intern Declan Leary. Buckley was waging a direct challenge to the preeminent ideologies of his day, domestic liberalism and international communism, which saw their success as the inevitable culmination of the historical process. National Review was founded to derail these seemingly ineluctable dogmas.
In Leary’s telling, however, this effort was merely “a great commission to do nothing loudly” and “a birdbrained strategy.” Using a recent speech by Florida senator Marco Rubio as a point of departure, Leary tries to besmirch this esteemed publication. His derogatory attacks reflect the ideological fragility of the “New Right” movement to which he has claimed allegiance.
Leary’s misrepresentation of Rubio’s speech consists mostly of sins of omission. The address was given at an event put on by American Compass, a market-skeptical conservative think tank founded by National Review contributor Oren Cass. Leary presents Rubio’s speech as one of few “glimmers of hope” in an otherwise supposedly desolate landscape for a conservative movement stifled by deadweight legacy institutions. But, Leary himself admits:
Much of the content of Wednesday’s lecture—the demand to reorient political economy around human reality and toward the common good; the need to adjust American economic strategy in light of Chinese ascendance—retreads territory that Rubio has covered amply in recent years.
For those who care to look, any of these ideas can be found in the pages of National Review. For example, one might start with the special issue on China, released last year. Rubio himself made “the case for common-good capitalism” here. The piece engendered a lively debate, but that is something this publication has never shied away from.
Longtime readers also know that National Review spotlighted Rubio when he was a long-shot senatorial candidate back in 2009. He was no “darling of the GOP establishment” when he faced off against big-money-backed Charlie Crist, the then-Republican governor of the state. It’s nice to see that Leary has finally caught wind of his potential. Better late than never.
One could be honest about National Review’s record on these subjects, or one could elide it in favor of a deceptive narrative about this publication and its mission. To a great many passersby, that mission might seem like a fool’s errand, and those who opposed this project from its inception have been intent on smearing it as such, or something more pernicious, for decades.
These detractors do not all hail from the political Left. Beyond the Gore Vidals of the world, time and time again, a class of neo-reactionaries arises demanding that the conservative movement cast off the “yoke” of the ossified fusionist “marriage of convenience” between fiscally prudent, socially traditionalist, and anti-communist forces consummated by Frank Meyer.
Leary is now auditioning for a role in this long-running theater. But it is worth correcting his insincerity upfront. Take his description of post-war conservatism as “an unholy union between traditionalists whose guru was Russell Kirk and weird Ayn Randian market nihilists: men who wore capes and women who wore pants.” Setting aside this peculiar fashion statement, Leary ought to know that National Review and Ayn Rand are not exactly known for their mutual affection. Between Whittaker Chambers’s savaging of Atlas Shrugged and Rand’s put-down of Buckley that he was “too smart to believe in God,” Buckley-style conservatism and Randian Objectivism haven’t exactly been engaged in a love affair.
To its credit, the common-good philosophy of the New Right could never be mistaken for Randian. Instead, it should be understood as social-organizational principles that seek to enable people to attain fulfillment through familial and communal obligations. Insofar as government intrusions into the market and civil society are done pursuant to these objectives, common-good proponents are willing to entertain such intrusions.
On its face, this view seems fairly innocuous. Conservatives ought to be attentive to the plight of working families and not cede every cultural sphere to the Left. The issue for nationalist-populists who promote the common-good paradigm is the stubborn fact that Republicans and conservatives already do this.
Peer back into the world of past neoconservatives, and you’ll see a theme that extends through George W. Bush’s Compassionate Conservatism, Arthur Brooks’s Conservative Heart, and the Reformocons’ Room to Grow. The notion that conservative intellectuals are unconcerned with lifting people out of poverty is ludicrous. Well before national conservatives showed up, there were plenty of people on the right who wanted to restructure government programs so that they remain solvent and do the jobs they’re supposed to do instead of locking the poor in a state of dependency and centralizing ever more power with the national government. And the idea that the GOP hasn’t campaigned on social issues is laughable to anyone who’s ever ventured outside NatCon2. Look at the ads Mitt Romney was running in 2008, or the decades of prominence that social conservatives and their aims have had in the conservative coalition.
That’s not to say the Republican Party can’t improve. Social policy is essential, and we have to remind ourselves to apply conservative principles to today’s challenges, not the problems of the 1980s. But very few voices among the common-good Right are serious about doing this work. Instead, they’re mired in protectionism, isolationism, and industrial policy, all of which have repeatedly failed to produce their intended outcomes and lack popular support, especially among the MAGA faithful. Most Republican voters didn’t support Trump because he wanted to restore parity in our trading relationships or re-shore manufacturing. They supported him because he is the personification of a middle finger to political correctness. They still support low taxes, deregulation, and a muscular foreign policy.
The truth is that the common-good Right isn’t interested in making the conservatism more amenable to the downtrodden, in channeling the Kirkian sentiments of Pat Buchanan’s 1992 Republican National Convention address, or even in confronting China. If it were, its preeminent voices wouldn’t be bashing the neoconservative wisdom of Irving Kristol’s Two Cheers for Capitalism or “Pornography, Obscenity and The Case For Censorship.” Nor would they be so supportive of the Chinese Communist Party.
What the New Right wants is power for itself. But lacking actual political acumen, many of its leading lights and institutions have cast their lot with quixotic (or worse) schemes such as “national divorce,” or John Eastman’s twaddle about overturning the 2020 presidential election. It’s much easier to read a deus ex machina into the Constitution than to actually advocate what you purport to care about.
As Leary himself suggests, a movement that can’t do politics has no hope in taking the “reins” of history. He might want to do some self-reflecting. Politics necessitates statesmanship, not just performative gestures. One cannot simply conjure up a mandate for a minoritarian agenda. The New Right may have failed its initial test, but Buckley’s conservatism has actually had a great deal of success, albeit its fair share of defeats as well. But Leary would never think to attribute some of them to those on the right who gave up on America in favor of, say, Francoist Spain or Orban’s Hungary.
Leary has lost the plot. To stand athwart history is not merely to defend the status quo; it entails discarding its most injurious elements without jettisoning history’s timeless lessons. The times may be different, but Buckley’s rallying cry remains sound. Leary might struggle to grasp this fully, calling instead for a conciliatory, passive effort simply to “guide” history. But those who dare to yell stop have no such trouble.