When he launched National Review 60 years ago, William F. Buckley Jr. famously declared an intention not to make history but to halt it. The magazine, he asserted, “stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” We conservatives know this old quip so well that we rarely stop to take it seriously. And we know, too, that simply stopping the Left was never the sum of Buckley’s ambitions, and could never be enough for us. But although it was not all that modern conservatism was born to do, defying the notion that the arc of history bends left has always been an important part of our mission on the right, and it matters today as much as ever.
In the era of NR’s birth, conservatives confronted a liberalism that was insufferably arrogant in a particular way: It took itself to be in confident possession of the only reliable vision of the future and so to be working merely to hasten its inevitable victory. In 1955, this conceit still carried the unmistakable stench of its Marxist origins, and so still hinted, if vaguely, at a belief in Historical forces (with a capital “H”) that possessed their own independent trajectory. An immense array of ponderous pseudo-philosophical paraphernalia was still employed in the effort to make the case for such forces seem profound. And serious conservatives at mid century devoted much energy to combating that lingering belief in determinism and the disdain it evinced for human liberty.
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