Balancing Act

After decades of complaining about media negligence, conservatives now find themselves accepted and even welcome in the pages of respectable magazines. You can hardly pick up a major magazine any more in perfect confidence that you won’t find in its pages an essay by some articulate figure of the Right: George Will, Walter Berns, Kevin Phillips, Milton Friedman, Ernest van den Haag, R. Emmett Tyrrell. Some of the kinkier ones even carry D. Keith Mano. The New Republic frequently features a senior editor of national review, Jeffrey Hart. Now that is assimilation. This is only a sampling, but happily suggestive of the shades of conservative thought and style that now find a receptive audience among editors and readers alike.

I haven’t mentioned the so-called neo-conservatives—Banfield, Kristol, Sowell, Wilson—who have contributed to this situation by constituting a sort of missing link between the “vital center” and the formerly isolated Right. But the real key to this new success has been the internal vitality of the right wing itself, which has, even in its ostracism by the media, conducted its conversation with a civility that bespeaks its self-assurance in the relevance of its insight and its faith that, sooner or later, it would be listened to by fair-minded men exasperated with the pretensions of liberalism and socialism. I think of the gatherings, frequently consisting of only a few dozen people, of the Philadelphia Society, the Mont Pelerin Society, and the Center for Constructive Alternatives.

JS

About the Author

Joseph Sobran

After decades of complaining about media negligence, conservatives now find themselves accepted and even welcome in the pages of respectable magazines. You can hardly pick up a major magazine any more in perfect confidence that you won’t find in its pages an essay by some articulate figure of the Right: George Will, Walter Berns, Kevin Phillips, Milton Friedman, Ernest van den Haag, R. Emmett Tyrrell. Some of the kinkier ones even carry D. Keith Mano. The New Republic frequently features a senior editor of national review, Jeffrey Hart. Now that is assimilation. This is only a sampling, but happily suggestive of the shades of conservative thought and style that now find a receptive audience among editors and readers alike.

I haven’t mentioned the so-called neo-conservatives—Banfield, Kristol, Sowell, Wilson—who have contributed to this situation by constituting a sort of missing link between the “vital center” and the formerly isolated Right. But the real key to this new success has been the internal vitality of the right wing itself, which has, even in its ostracism by the media, conducted its conversation with a civility that bespeaks its self-assurance in the relevance of its insight and its faith that, sooner or later, it would be listened to by fair-minded men exasperated with the pretensions of liberalism and socialism. I think of the gatherings, frequently consisting of only a few dozen people, of the Philadelphia Society, the Mont Pelerin Society, and the Center for Constructive Alternatives.