Right Face

At a meeting of conservative intellectuals in September 1963 in Rome, I argued the need for autonomous cultural organs on the Right— magazines, publishing houses, radio stations, international prizes—activities, in other words, that would go beyond mere reaction to leftist intellectual lucubrations. My colleagues in the American delegation—John Dos Passos, William Buckley, Willi Schlamm, and Henry Regnery—approved of the idea. After all, NR and Modern Age already existed in America, and Zeitbühne must by then have been a gleam in Schlamm’s eye.

The Right was then slowly emerging from its postwar slumber. The next 15 years were to witness its increasing assertiveness in both the United States and Western Europe, although it has taken notably different forms on opposite sides of the Atlantic. In America the interest in politics, science, and economics has overshadowed conservative cultural work. Too often, literature, art, religion, and history have been treated like stepchildren, with honorable exceptions like the Chronicles of Culture, based in Rockford Ill., and the excellent but apparently now defunct New American Review, based in Crawford, N.J. In Europe, the situation is reversed: politics play a subsidiary role, and conservatives (as they are called in Germany, Switzerland, and Scandinavia) and the Right (its name in Latin countries) have demonstrated their competence in literature and the arts, as well as in moral philosophy and religious thought.

TM

About the Author

Thomas Molnar

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William F. Buckley Jr.

John Dos Passos

Culture War

At a meeting of conservative intellectuals in September 1963 in Rome, I argued the need for autonomous cultural organs on the Right— magazines, publishing houses, radio stations, international prizes—activities, in other words, that would go beyond mere reaction to leftist intellectual lucubrations. My colleagues in the American delegation—John Dos Passos, William Buckley, Willi Schlamm, and Henry Regnery—approved of the idea. After all, NR and Modern Age already existed in America, and Zeitbühne must by then have been a gleam in Schlamm’s eye.

The Right was then slowly emerging from its postwar slumber. The next 15 years were to witness its increasing assertiveness in both the United States and Western Europe, although it has taken notably different forms on opposite sides of the Atlantic. In America the interest in politics, science, and economics has overshadowed conservative cultural work. Too often, literature, art, religion, and history have been treated like stepchildren, with honorable exceptions like the Chronicles of Culture, based in Rockford Ill., and the excellent but apparently now defunct New American Review, based in Crawford, N.J. In Europe, the situation is reversed: politics play a subsidiary role, and conservatives (as they are called in Germany, Switzerland, and Scandinavia) and the Right (its name in Latin countries) have demonstrated their competence in literature and the arts, as well as in moral philosophy and religious thought.