Brian Doherty, in the course of a review (not yet online) of Jeffrey Hart’s The Making of the American Conservative Mind for Reason, argues that the history of NR demonstrates “how hewing too doggedly to an acceptable centrism can weaken real effectiveness, even while creating a surface appearance of success.”

Even on an issue that burns in the magazine’s Catholic soul, abortion, it keeps its shirt buttoned to the top: A recent cover story by Ramesh Ponnuru about the rise in American pro-life sentiment managed to censure South Dakota for actually stepping so far outside the deliberate sense of the American people as to outlaw abortion entirely; he calls its action “a foolish repudiation of a successful incrementalist strategy.” (One can imagine, in 2025, a Ponnuru manqué in NR’s pages soberly explaining to some firebrand politician that infant cannibalism has become a settled part of the deliberate-sense consensus of the American people and must be handled gingerly.) . . . .
Eisenhower. . . was sure that no party would ever speak of ending Social Security and live; thanks to ideological groundwork laid by “off-the-reservation” radical libertarians, the idea is now a real part of the policy debate. . . .
Lasting political change of any sort, whether good or bad. . . starts on the radical fringe before it rules the center.

The thesis is simplistic, and the examples are ill-chosen.

Successful social and political movements require both radical advocates and pragmatic deal-makers. Writers and politicians have different roles to play. A writer may advocate “radical” goals while also criticizing politicians for setting back those goals by acting too hastily.

In the case of my comments on South Dakota, my criticism was not based on some Willmoore Kendall-ish theory about the “deliberate sense” of the American public. It was primarily based on a straightforward ability to count to five on the Supreme Court. It is a criticism of a strategy, not a position, and it is couched explicitly in those terms (“a foolish repudiation of a successful incrementalist strategy”).

“Ending Social Security,” meanwhile, is not, in fact, a real part of the policy debate. Creating private investment options within Social Security is. If you looked hard enough during the debates of 2005, you could find real “‘off the reservation’ radical libertarians” complaining that Social Security should be abolished rather than transformed to include personal savings accounts. They could have kept making their radical argument for four decades and they would never have “ruled the center.”

Elsewhere in the article, Doherty conflates the difference between radicalism and pragmatism with the difference between libertarianism and conservatism. The reason NR and Reason generally disagree about such matters as the Patriot Act is not that writers for the former are playing some inside game that the latter aren’t. It is because of longstanding ideological disagreements — the same disagreements that led NR and various libertarians to disagree about President Clinton’s anti-terrorist legislation.

One last point. I’m sure a great case could be made that NR has tilted too far this way or that at various points over the last fifty-one years. But I think it puts too much faith in intellectuals to assume that the failure of NR to see certain of its goals realized — such as a reduction in the scope of the federal government — can be attributed to their mistakes. We could have done a much better or more “radical” job, and the government may very well have stayed at roughly the same size.