Reid Buckley: America needs a better Right than the GOP can provide
Way back in the early 1950s, when I was in my twenties, a favorite pastime was to take the first sentence of that day's lead editorial in the New York Times and, putting the newspaper aside, deduce the rest of the commentary. If I was unable to draw that deduction from the first sentence, I went to the second sentence. If I failed again, I betook myself outside and chopped half a cord of wood in expiation of my obtuseness.
The acceptable thinking of those days—the conventional wisdom; the Walter Lippmanesque by way of Ed Murrow liberal cant—was so predictable that it was easy, young and callow as I was, to anticipate at breakfast what that evening, at cocktails, the earnest pillars of society in my flossy northwestern Connecticut town would be pontificating. They seemed all to have graduated from Princeton or Dartmouth, from Smith or Vassar or Sarah Lawrence. They wore Bendels and Bergdorf. The pearl necklace and the regimental striped tie were their signatures. Oh, their solemnity! How avid their desire to be respectable. They could oooh and aaah over a Picasso yet fail to gain a single insight into the evils of modernity. They could listen to the Fifth Symphony of Shostakovich and learn nothing about Joe Stalin. I fled to Spain.
This is what I fear establishment thinking among conservatives is becoming. Dull. Derivative. Predictable. Lacking in zip and sting and mordancy—in the agenbite of inwit. And sometimes also emptied of libertarian principle.
We conservatives have our own New York Times, our own cathedral of acceptable right-wing wisdom, the Wall Street Journal. Paul Gigot is the latest in a distinguished line of chief editorial writers, and he is almost always informative. During the dispiriting demarche of the George W. Bush administration, moreover, he displayed the sterling virtue of holding the feet of Republicans in the Congress to the fire of conservative principles, which that unprincipled breed of nincompoops didn't enjoy, and for which they paid in 2008. But scanning the editorial pages of the WSJ or papers from the several erudite conservative and libertarian fonts, I often feel that I can play the old game: I can foretell from the first couple of sentences where that editorial or op-ed or conservative think-tank essay is going—what tried and true and trite right-wing lessons can be gleaned from it. Reading the National Review and American Spectator issues on the electoral defeat this past fall impresses one with how so many good, well-meaning, and intelligent commentators are able to miss the point.
I cry within myself, where is the inspiration? Where is the audacity? And I wonder often whether the young radical today reading conservative publications does not suffer from the tedium that suffocated me as a young man reading the liberal press....