The Struggle, Then and Now
Buckley, William F. Jr.
"The Struggle, Then and Now" George Nash has done the best that could be done to chronicle the development of a...
...I join this happy company in paying tribute to you...
...There is no reason to suppose that the hordes will be stopped now, but every reason to suppose that the forces that stop them, if ever they mobilize to do so, will have been touched by that unbought grace of which the exegetes of Burke have reminded us...
...I feel differently in the company of men who have read Solzhenitsyn...
...There was, even before The American Spectator was founded, way back in 1950 a "conservative" alliance...
...There was formal and even spontaneous enthusiasm for Senator Taft, even among young people: but never any sense of romance...
...1 / NOVEMBER 1977 William F. Buckley, Jr...
...Is it not grace—most spectacularly celebrated in the final episode of Malraux's La Condition Humaine, when the older of the condemned men passes out his suicide pill to his two younger, frailer associates—that is the distinctive attribute of the movement now, as compared to then...
...He vested all that came before, all that George Nash wrote about, with a kind of unity which defined the struggle, even if it did not make self-evident the means of pursuing it...
...On the tenth anniversary of this journal there are grounds for rejoicing...
...Conservatives had a quintessential representative: William F. Buckley, Jr...
...The reasons for encouraging a private sector were wonderfully well known and advertised in the same classics to which we continue now to defer...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR VOL...
...Senator Robert A. Taft, whose strength derived from his integrity, his nimble (if less than profound) mind...
...To read these books is to undergo a sacramental experience...
...Could it be that the distinctive difference in the struggle, then and now, is that in the interim it has acquired grace...
...Not quite so cohesive as that which grew up in response to the excesses of Orwell's Big Brother, nor one whose members were bound to each other as men and women are bound who knew Gulag...
...in eschatology, unlike Communism...
...It was a legacy of inertial ideology from turn-of-the-century America...
...Probably because conservatism was thought of, even by its friends, as something of a desiccated competitor in lusty ideological wars that had dominated the century: lacking in system, unlike fascism...
...Today, we have the Gulag Archipelago, and A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich...
...It had a certain sense of obligation to the old virtues, but it was, as we think back on it, highly unexplicated...
...But something of a brotherhood, and that is one of the principal differences between the struggle, then and now...
...and in idealistic passion, unlike liberalism...
...Back in those days Whittaker Chambers wrote to me to warn that the hordes would not be stopped by fresh transcripts by Russell Kirk of the vaticinations of Edmund Burke...
...The Struggle, Then and Now George Nash has done the best that could be done to chronicle the development of a movement...
...It was lubricated by profitable—and exploitative—relations—between business and its clients, between farmers and the state, between whites and racial supremacy...
...It is a journal of joy, reminding us in every issue of the reasons to celebrate the zest of combat, the joy of righthinking, the pleasure of language...
...11, NO...
...is founder and editor of National Review...
...The American Spectator November 1977 5...
...Eliot: all of this happened, and suddenly—little by little—we felt that there was—a brotherhood...
...Several times in his book (The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945) he stresses that it is a movement he is talking about, and then, drawing copiously on his gifts for summary and contraction, he tells us what went into the mix: quite a gallimaufry, including economic distillations inspired by the Alpine air at Mont Pelerin, a prayerful reexamination of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, searching questions about the responsibility of Socrates for his own elimination, the revival of the great tradition by Leo Strauss, empirical studies of the work of regulatory commissions, high colonic examinations of the internal cancer of the West, lyrical tributes to the good life as, for instance, by Richard Weaver, swashbuckling marches through the tortured ranks of our stuttering social scientists, the reassertion of form and the rejection of formalism by T.S...
...Solzhenitsyn was the solvent...
...But the new wave—a kind of secular modernism—was sweeping it all away, mostly in the classrooms of America, where the struggle was seen if not exactly in Marxist terms (Marxist rigor was never appealing to Americans at large), at least in neo-Marxist terms—the catalyst of my book, God and Man at Yale...
...and a considerable political agility...
...In those days there was 1984, but it was fantasy...
...and First Circle—and by them we are annealed into a brotherhood, with a sense of mission marked by that grace which reminds us that, ultimately, we owe each other everything—even our private resources of self-destruction, of release...
Vol. 11 • November 1977 • No. 1
