It is fitting that William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of National Review and an instrumental figure in the creation of the post-war American conservative movement, was so fond of sailing. The pursuit involves maneuvering, assessing the prevailing winds, tacking, and, most important, knowing one’s ultimate destination. That many of sailing’s terms have passed into more common use, sometimes even when discussing Buckley and conservatism themselves — the late National Review editor Jeffrey Hart once referred to Buckley as NR’s “helmsman” — makes the metaphor more apt.
In figuring out what conservatism is and where it should be going, however, conservatives have sometimes found it easier to say what they are against rather than what they are for — which treacherous seas to avoid rather than which ports to seek out. In a 1963 essay, “Notes Toward an Empirical Definition of Conservatism . . . Reluctantly and Apologetically Given,” Buckley archly offers as a definition that of Richard Weaver: “a paradigm of essences toward which the phenomenology of the world is in continuing approximation.” He then recounts two contemporaneous instances of defining conservatism by the negative: rejections of the anti-communist conspiracist John Birch Society, and of the objectivism of Ayn Rand. Figuring out what conservatism is has often required debating what it is not — or shouldn’t be.
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