Interesting email from a reader:

Dear Jonah, Thanks for at least touching on the subject of what the old NR was like. I’m 22 years old and too often I read Sullivan spouting off about how the NRO crowd of today is a sadist group of Christianists (oh, how I hate that word) that are a disgrace to the conservative cause championed so long ago by great men like Mr. Buckley. Somehow I don’t buy that. Mr. Buckley has also gained a lot of respect by lefties (some, not all of course) all over the Internet as some type of ancient Conservative that they admire & wish the wingnuts of today were as open as they perceive Mr. Buckley to once be. I try to read through the NRO archives to read the old stories whenever I can. My local library even has almost 10 years of mags I check out from time to time. But are the new kids on the block (um, that’s you & the other youngsters at NRO) upholding the flag first waved by Mr. Buckley & his like? Or are you foraging a new path because the mission is different? (Fighting Communism v. Fighting Terrorism) Is Mr. Buckley admired by the left & Sullivan because he fought the good fight in a manner much different from you or is just a matter that Mr. Buckley is now the elder statesman of Conservatism & old age denotes wisdom by the young? BTW, I don’t buy that old age = wisdom. My Uncle Lou is 78 years old & he is as dumb as a sack of door knobs. But I love him just the same.

Me: First let it be said that nobody — and I really do mean nobody — reveres William F. Buckley as much as the people currently working at NR do. When there are disagreements with WFB, even when he is miles away from earshot, the conversation is always respectful, even reverential. Seriously.

Second, as to whether today’s NR is that different from the old NR. That is a very long conversation. The short answer is, it depends. Conservatism is different today than it was ten, twenty or fifty years ago — because political conservatism must respond to the actual world we live in (Rich and Ramesh’s cover story is very good on this point). I’ve found that most of the criticism against NR these days is from people who probably don’t read it now, and certainly didn’t read it then (there are, of course, exceptions to this observation). I think the important things about NR have stayed the same. It’s openness to debate within the conservative family, its wit, its conviction that movement conservatism must be relevant lest it become a debating society and a lot more have endured intact. Mr. Buckley doesn’t run the show the way he once did, but this is still his magazine in important respects.

Third, why do some on the left love Buckley? Partly for good reasons. The man has, and has always had, immense charisma and charm, in person, in print and on television. Many people fail to realize that WFB almost single-handedly erased the left’s carefully cultivated image of the conservative-as-bumpkin. So some of this is a mixture of nostalgia and fondness pure and simple for a man of integrity and accomplishment.

But, fourth, there’s also a cynical embrace of WFB by some quarters because he is a skeptic of the Iraq project and is critical of President Bush. The left often defines “honest conservatives” — Kevin Phillips, David Gergen, John Dean, David Kuo, Andrew Sullivan, even Pat Buchanan — by the extent of their agreement with the most pressing issues on the left today or their willingness to criticize conservatives-in-power. Hence, neocons were the nice guys on the right, just up and until the moment they gained power. Pat Buchanan used to make liberals wet their pants. But now that he’s a harsh critic of conservatives in power, he’s the last honest conservative in town according to people like Chris Matthews. And so on.

There’s a related tendency to try to use conservatives of the past as shaming idols for conservatives of today. I don’t mind too much when conservatives lament that we’ve lost our way from Reagan or Goldwater’s path. That’s what conservatives do, after all. But it drives me crazy when liberals and other non conservatives invoke conservatives of yesteryear as admirable and wonderful, when they would have (or did) despised and demonized the same conservatives if they were active today. Frank Foer laments that we have lost the spirit of Albert J. Nock, as if he wouldn’t ridicule any cape-wearing modern incarnations of Nockianism were they around today. Liberals — including Hillary Clinton and James Carville — outrageously try to claim Goldwater as a grandfatherly and enlightened fellow, when the entire liberal intellectual establishment tried to brand the man as a Nazi.

I could go on about this for hours, really. But Ramesh and I actually wrote a piece about this phenomenon last year and it touches on a lot of this as well.