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An unintentional eulogy of the conservative movement
ABC has a series coming out this fall called Brothers & Sisters, in which Calista Flockhart, late of Ally McBeal (a name immortalized in a VFR discussion about an alternative strategy to tame the Muslim world), will play a conservative newspaper pundit. Asked to describe Flockhart’s character, the show’s producer, Ken Olin, the star of the 1980s series Thirty Something, said, “She’s not Ann Coulter. She’s not insane.” Writer Jon Robin Baitz added, “I think she’s a thoughtful conservative. She’s ideologically, in some respects, very much in mind with the older parts of the party, the sort of Eisenhower Republican, the William Buckley conservative.” Got that? “Eisenhower Republican” and “William Buckley conservative” have now been merged into a single, acceptably tame and civilized category, contrasted with the “insane” conservatives we have today, typified by Ann “Tanktop” Coulter. Of course, when the conservative movement started in the 1950s, it was as a protest movement against Eisenhower Republicanism, which had failed to challenge the liberal premises and policies of the New Deal. Buckley’s National Review even declined to endorse President Eisenhower’s VP Richard Nixon for president in 1960, saying he was too liberal. Yet now the conservative movement that Buckley started, standing athwart history yelling “Stop,” has become as dull and respectable as Pat Nixon’s Republican cloth coat. As a further ironic note, adding to Buckley’s respectability from a liberal point of view, he recently said that to deport illegal aliens from America would be “as wrenching as the uprooting of the blacks from Africa 300 years ago.” Further, under Buckley’s editorship of NR, that magazine was silent about the mass immigration that is changing America into a Third-World country; it was only under his successor, John O’Sullivan that NR began to speak out strongly on the National Question. Buckley, after oh-so-briefly flirting with a serious immigration restrictionist position himself, turned around and fired O’Sullivan, returning the magazine to a state of complete silence on the immigration issue for several years. By contrast, President Eisenhower took decisive and effective steps to remove illegal aliens from the U.S., a measure that Buckley now considers a crime worse than the slave trade.
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