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National Review

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National Review ("NR") is a conservative political magazine founded by author William F. Buckley Jr. in 1955. The magazine is based in New York City and published biweekly.

Although the print version of the magazine is available online to subscribers, the free content of the magazine's online web-site is essentially a new and separate publication, with its own articles and blogs that do not usually appear in the print version.

Contents

Origins and the conservative movement

National Review was founded in 1955. Prior to its existence, the conservative movement was a largely unorganized and scattered collection of individuals who shared the philosophy but did not associate or categorize themselves in any formal manner. Conservatism as a political force was impotent and nearly non-existent. Although President Calvin Coolidge had been a business-oriented leader, the laissez-faire philosophy he embraced fell out of the favor following the The Great Depression in 1929. After Franklin Roosevelt defeated Herbert Hoover in the 1932 election, the country tilted to the political left, turning to government to solve the crisis. The Democratic Party controlled the political landscape, and the Republicans assumed the role of an almost permanent contrarian minority. Pockets of the "Old Right" began to sprout up across the country, but they were disorganized and uninified. They "belonged to no movement, shared little that could be called a political program, and, as a group, if they voted at all, they did so the way a man in a blindfold shoots a gun at a crowd"http://www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg200510270832.asp. This group included "traditionalists" (T. S. Eliot, George Santayana, and Russell Kirk), "monarchists" (Seward Collins), "southern agrarians" (Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, Richard Weaver), "anarchists" (Albert Jay Nock), the objectivist Ayn Rand, and "isolationists" (Charles Lindbergh).

By 1955, the Republican party had effectively marginalized its few conservative members. Although a few Republican leaders, such as Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, led the charge against government bloat and Roosevelt's New Deal, the party was still firmly in the camp of the liberal "Eastern Establishment." The moderates nominated Dwight D. Eisenhower, a center-right Republican who supported the New Deal. Eisenhower won in 1952, and with the death of Senator Taft, conservatism in America had no identiable leader. That same year, academic Russell Kirk published The Conservative Mind.

National Review takes shape

Soon things were to change in American politics. A young Ivy League graduate from Yale published a critique on his alma mater for its abandonment of its founding principles. The book was entitled, God and Man at Yale and the author was William F. Buckley Jr., the son of a Texas oil man who had brought his children up with classical educations in the Catholic tradition. Buckley was a star at his University on its debate team and for his editing of The Yale Daily News. Upon graduation, Buckley first toured the country debating Liberals for The Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (later ISI) and began dreaming. He at first tried to purchase the conservative newsletter Human Events, but was turned down.

Buckley ended up meeting with Willi Schlamm, the ex-communist editor of The Freeman. The two would spend the next two years raising 300,000 dollars (most of which came from Buckley’s father). The weekly was to be called National Weekly (the existence of a magazine already holding that name as a copyright prompted the change to National Review); the statement of intentions read:

''Middle-of-the-Road, que Middle of the Road, is politically, intellectually, and morally repugnant. We shall recommend policies for the simple reason that we consider them right (rather than “non-controversial”); and we consider them right because they are based on principles we deem right (rather than on popularity polls)…

The New Deal revolution, for instance, could hardly have happened save for the cumulative impact of The Nation and The New Republic, and a few other publications, on several American college generations during the twenties and thirties….''

On November 19th, 1955, Buckley’s dream would take shape. Buckley would assemble an eclectic group as his writers: traditionalists, Catholic intellectuals, libertarians and ex-communists. They included: Russell Kirk (the traditionalist author of The Conservative Mind who admired Edmund Burke and refused to drive cars), James Burnham (an ex- Trotskyist), Frank Meyer (ex-communist), Willmoore Kendall (ex-communist and Yale Professor of Political Philosophy), L. Brent Bozell, and Gary Wills. (Whittaker Chambers, (a Communist-party defector and former Time senior editor known for exposing Alger Hiss as a traitor, was also invited to join the new magazine at its founding; Chambers declined at the time, but finally became a senior editor of the magazine a few years later.)The magazine’s founding statement (written by Buckley) stated:

Let’s Face it: Unlike Vienna, it seems altogether possible that did National Review not exist, no one would have invented it. The launching of a conservative weekly journal of opinion in a country widely assumed to be a bastion of conservatism at first glance looks like a work of supererogation, rather like publishing a royalist weekly within the walls of Buckingham Palace. It is not that of course; if National Review is superfluous, it is so for very different reasons: It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no other is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.

Buckley’s National Review would adopt what would be called by Frank Meyer as “fusionism,” combining the individualism of Classic Liberalism with traditional Christian moral values. This brand of Conservatism would become what is today a major political force. National Review would go on to help ignite the political career of Barry Goldwater. Buckley and others involved with the magazine would take a major role in the “Draft Goldwater” movement for the Presidential election of 1960 and ultimatly his nomination in 1964. Buckley helped found The Young Americans for Freedom youth organization and then used National Review as a vehicle to promote the growing Conservative movement throughout the country. After the Goldwater defeat in 1964, the failure of the Vietnam war, and the Nixon adminstration. National Review magazine continued to as a lone voice for American conservatism.

National Review’s accomplishments

After the debacles the Republican party faced in the 1960s and again in the 1970s, Buckley and National Review continued to champion the idea of the conservative movement taking hold of the Republican Party. This dream would take political shape through one man: Ronald Wilson Reagan. Reagan, who had been a lifetime subscriber of National Review, first became involved with politics during the Goldwater Presidential campaign. National Review supported his challenging President Gerald Ford for the Republican Nomination in 1976 and then again in his successful campaign in 1980. The magazine became one of the leading voices for Supply-side economics,The Strategic Defense Initiative, and supporting Reagan in his fight against the Soviet Union. During the 1980s, the magazine would also give voice to the growing concerns of Americans with the Welfare state. Many of these concerns would go on to become part of the Welfare reform of the 1990s. The magazine also was one of the loudest critics of President Bill Clinton.

Fifty years after its founding, National Review is considered by some to be one of the United States' most politically influential publications. It is widely quoted by television and radio commentators of varying political stripes, who either reference articles as points for establishing arguments or take issue with what is found within the magazine's pages. Columnist George Will (whose own career began in earnest when he served as National Review's Washington editor, before becoming a syndicated columnist) has called National Review the most influential journal of opinion since World War II: the roster of those who are known to have followed the magazine include many prominent conservative politicans, entertainers, and intellectuals such as President George W. Bush,Vice President Richard Cheney, Henry Kissinger, Governor Jeb Bush, Governor Haley Barbour, Representative Henry Hyde, Senator John Kyl, Senator Rick Santorum, former speaker of the house Newt Gingrich, Governor Bill Owens, Senator Jim Talent, Representive Mike Pence, Former secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, Robert Bork, Thomas Sowell, Milton Friedman, Charles Murray, Allan Bloom, Harry Jaffa, Tom Wolfe, Rush Limbaugh, John Stossel, Pat Sajak, Charlton Heston, Tom Selleck, and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

The magazines current editor-at-large is Rich Lowry . Many of the magazine's commentators are affiliated with conservative think-tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, which often leads to shared viewpoints between the magazine and such organizations. National Review has maintained strong support for the current War in Iraq. It strongly supports the current Bush administration and has been critical of its opponents. Yet the magazine has also at times criticized the Republican-controlled congress.

There has been increasing opposition in recent years from some conservative circles towards NR's policy stances, especially with regard to the magazines support for programs deemed "un-conservative."

National Review Online

A popular feature of National Review is the web version of the magazine, National Review Online ("NRO"), which includes a digital version of the magazine, with articles updated daily by National Review writers, and conservative blogs. The Online version is called NRO to distinguish it from the paper magazine (referred to as "NRODT" or National Review On Dead Tree.) The site's editor is Kathryn Jean Lopez, known to the NRO community as "K-Lo". The website gets around a million hits per day, more than all of the other conservative magazines combined. Each day, the site posts new content comprised of conservative and neo-liberal opinion articles. It also features 12 weblogs:

Finances and critics

As with almost all American up-market magazines of opinion, National Review has never turned a profit in all its years of existence. The magazine stays afloat by donations from subscribers and black-tie fundraisers around the country. The magazine also sponsors cruises with National Review editors and contributors as lecturers.

The magazine has faced criticism from many Liberals as well as Conservatives. Paleoconservatives such as Pat Buchanan, and others at The American Conservative criticise it for not being truly "Conservative," in that it does not support protectionism and Isolationism, policies linked with the Taft Conservatives of the 40s). Paleocons believe National Review now to be a Neoconservative magazine. Jeffery Hart, a longtime editor of the magazine, has critized the magazine for becoming too “utopian." In 2005 Hart published a book entitled, The Making of the American Conservative Mind: National Review and Its Times. In his book, Hart laments the Eastern Conservatives, who are almost nonexistent in the party. Hart argues that National Review and conservatives in general, should have supported Nelson Rockefeller in his run for the Presidency in 1964. He argues that the only way to have formed a lasting conservative coalition was to have included Eastern Republicans. Instead, Hart argues that conservatives turned their back on Rockefeller and have abandoned conservative principles to become a Southern liberal party best exemplified by George W. Bush. Hart (like many conservatives) states that Bush is not a real conservative, and rather should be compared to the populist William Jennings Bryan.

Notable current contributors

Current contributors to National Review magazine, National Review Online, or both:

Notable past contributors

Trivia

National Review is featured in a dry comedic scene in the 1977 movie Annie Hall, starring Woody Allen and Diane Keaton. When Allen visits Keaton's New York City apartment, he sees that Keaton has copies of both National Review and Rolling Stone magazines in her apartment. The following scene transpires:

External link

 

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All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.

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