THE initial manifesto of national review famously declared that its posture would be that it “stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” In 1989 history stopped, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet Communism.
The fall of the Communist empire is surely a testimony to the foresight of William F. Buckley Jr., and also to the conservative coalition he and his magazine played so large a role in forming. This coalition united the Robert Taft heartland conservatives with Catholic intellectuals and with Jewish anti-Communists; its ranks were later swollen by neo-conservatives reacting against the anti-intellectual counterculture of the 1960s. This “conservative movement,” anything but isolationist, brought itself together in opposition to the strategic, economic and above all moral threat of atheistic Marxism. In 1980, Ronald Reagan became its spokesman and embodiment.
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