When NR was important to me

Spencer Warren writes:

Did you like NR and Buckley at any time, say in the sixties or seventies?

LA replies:

By a strange fate my eyes never fell on an issue of NR until the early 1980s. If I had discovered it in the ’60s or ’70s, I would have become a conservative back then. I did like NR in the ’80s. It was one of several influences and experiences at that time that converted me in the early ’80s to conservatism. Before that, there were many non-liberal things about me, but not conservative political concepts. I had been a big Ayn Rand fan (though never a follower of her philosophy) in my teens. I had a great love of Yeats starting from age 20, and a big part Yeats was his evocation of aristocracy and tradition. Nietzsche was very important to me and I had studied him in depth in the late ’70s (which was also when I came to see his fatal errors along with his genius). I was conservative by temperament, always attracted to old and traditional things, not liking change. I remember saying to someone in the late ’70s that I would probably be a conservative, if I knew any conservative thinkers, but I didn’t think there were any, conservatives were just businessman types. Also, politics was not a primary interest for me at that time and I was not “seeking” in that area. But as soon as I came upon NR it clicked with me.

That was also the period when I liked Buckley. I found his personal part of the magazine engaging and gallant and humorous. I liked his affectionate tributes to friends who had passed away. He provided conservatism with an appealing human face.

But back in the 1960s when I saw him on tv I couldn’t stand him, he had the weirdest, most off-putting personality and mannerisms. Also, he seemed like a homosexual. To me, then, he was the opposite of an appealing human face of conservatism. Then in the mid 1990s I bid farewell to NR, ending my subscription, not because I was against the magazine, but because I felt it was mediocre and just didn’t stand for enough, as I explained in a letter to Buckley at the time when he sent me a form letter asking why I was ending my subscription.

So, there was a long period of not liking Buckley and not knowing NR, then several years of liking him and it, then a long period of becoming increasingly critical of him and it. But there was that period in the ’80s when NR was important to me.

Also, see this account at Powerline by Jeffrey Hart (who recently has turned left) of the young Buckley debating at Harvard, pre-NR, already a star.

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Spencer Warren writes:

You said in your 1996 letter to Buckley:

If NR does have a genuine raison d’etre, it is to nudge the Republican party a bit to the right, a cause NR has pursued with admirable consistency and devotion. But has not experience shown this to be a futile and debilitating enterprise?

If Buckley and O’Sullivan did not respond to your thoughtful, incisive letter, that is further evidence of their lack of seriousness.

Alan Levine writes:

Your comments about WFB have been just; the most tactful thing I can think of to say about the man is that he has really been dead for many years.

I cancelled my subscription to NR in, I think, 1986.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 29, 2008 12:40 PM | Send