Christopher Buckley, the author and son of the late conservative mainstay William F. Buckley, said in a telephone interview that he has resigned from the National Review, the political journal his father founded in 1955.
Mr. Buckley said he had “been effectively fatwahed by the conservative movement” after endorsing Barack Obama in a blog posting on TheDailyBeast.com; since then, he said he has been blanketed with hate mail at the blog and at the National Review, where he has written a column.
As a result, he wrote to Richard Lowry, the editor of the National Review, and its publisher, Jack Fowler, offering to resign, and “this offer was rather briskly accepted,” Mr. Buckley said.
I know that NR’s descent into a mere GOP mouthpiece is hardly news at this point, but still …
(Via.)
UPDATE: Via Conor, here is CB himself. Money quote:
While I regret this development, I am not in mourning, for I no longer have any clear idea what, exactly, the modern conservative movement stands for. Eight years of “conservative” government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance. As a sideshow, it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case.
UPDATE 2: And here is Rich Lowry.
Filed under: conservatism, media/culture
“GOP mouthpiece”?
Oh please. I don’t know if you read NRO or NR very often. But any honest fan of both knows that on any given issue, there is plenty of disagreement as well as varieties of opinion within and between the organizations of NRO and NR (and, yes, these are distinct). And both disagree with various ideas/proposals that originate in the GOP all the time.
Only by forgetting or ignoring the record can one compose your ending line with any integrity.
MD,
For every John Derbyshire or David Freddoso, there is a Jonah Goldberg, K-Lo, and an Andrew McCarthy; the rare exceptions go to prove the rule. “GOP mouthpiece” is dead right.
So you name 2 exceptions and 3 writers who “prove the rule”?
Look, there’s a big difference between being a party mouthpiece and being a partisan publication. The Daily Worker was a party mouthpiece, the National Review is a partisan magazine. The first expresses the views of the party, the second tries to shape the views of the party. If a writer for the Nation wrote a column supporting McCain they’d probably feel pressure to resign, but that wouldn’t prove that the Nation was a Democratic Party mouthpiece. It would just show that the magazine represents a range of ideological opinion and support for McCain lies outside that range.
As for Buckley saying that he has been “effectively fatwahed”, all I can say is that writers shouldn’t throw that word around, especially since the fatwah on Salam Rushdie is still in effect. Having Rich Lowry accept your resignation, however “briskly”, isn’t the same as having Rich Lowry offer a bounty of $2million to have you killed. It’s in the making of such fine distinctions that good writing consists. Buckley, a very good writer, should know better.
Peter:
Okay, so maybe “mouthpiece” was a bit strong (as, of course, was “fatwah” – though clearly that was meant tongue-in-cheek, however tastelessly). It’s hard to deny, though, that NR’s relationship to the GOP tends pretty close to the former of the approaches (expressing vs. trying to shape) you describe, and that very few of the policies they end up advocating are ones that differ very strongly from the party line. The comparison to The Nation is instructive, I think: Robert Dreyfuss is someone who seems to me to have been much more critical of Obama than Buckley or Frum have been of McCain, and they keep on publishing him (and his criticisms). At the very least this suggests that The Nation is less of a partisan “mouthpiece” than NR, right?
It may well be that NR is more partisan than the Nation. The comparison wasn’t meant to suggest parity on that issue, just to illustrate that the Buckley affair didn’t warrant the “mouthpiece” charge. And of course part of my point was that the mouthpiece charge is both stronger and more specific than you seem to have intended it to be.
So I’m certainly open to the suggestion that NR is a) more partisan than the Nation and b) too partisan for its own good as a journal of conservative ideas. I don’t read the Nation enough to make a judgment about a. I suspect that b is true, though not to anything like the degree that you and Adam01 seem to think. Perhaps my standards/expectations are lower. My impression may be skewed by the fact that I read (and listen to) Derbyshire more than most of the other writers.
There’s no precise way to measure partisanship of course, but I think that comparing the amount of criticism of the GOP and McCain found in NR with the amount of criticism of the Democrats and Obama found in the Nation wouldn’t be the best way to gauge partisanship. A better (though still far from perfect) test would be diachronic: how frequently does it happen that the GOP changes its policy and then the NR writers change theirs to match? Or to what extent can what the writers said about McCain before he got the nomination be reconciled with what they write about him after?
As for the particulars of the Dreyfuss/Buckley comparison, surely the reason that Buckley became persona non grata had much more to do with his endorsement of Obama than his criticisms of McCain? What do you think the fallout would be if Dreyfuss endorsed McCain?
Obviously that question had come to mind, but the natural problem was that it’s so outlandish a suggestion that it’s impossible to wrap one’s mind around it. Suppose, though, that Hillary Clinton had won the nomination and the election this year, turned out to be expectedly horrible, and then was challenged in 2012 by a dynamic Republican (Bobby Jindal, say?) with a less-than-horrible take on foreign and domestic affairs. If Dreyfuss pitched HRC overboard to endorse the Republican, I wouldn’t expect that he’d lose his gig.
I think the test you suggest for partisanship is a good one, but here’s another: How many GOP policies has NR supported that they wouldn’t have supported if they were the Democrats’ policies? I can think of one very recent suggestion – the bailout – whose plausibility is pretty hard to dispute.
Or again and more simply, how many times has the magazine dissented very strongly from the Republican orthodoxy? I’ll confess that I’m not in much of a position to say, though I’d be pretty shocked to see, e.g., the War on Terror get anything like the treatment that the War on Drugs got in 1996.
Then again, that probably has more to do with an ideological attachment to the WoT than anything else, which of course suggests that my frustration with NR (and NRO) is less a product of their “partisanship” than the fact that I disagree so deeply with so many of the policies (on war, on civil liberties, etc.) that they support. If they were predictably pro-GOP and the GOP were less awful, I wouldn’t be complaining nearly as much.
I’m only a casual reader of NR so we may have reached the point where neither of us is really in a good position to apply some of these more careful measures of partisanship.
Changing tack somewhat: If there’s one respect in which the NR’s decline is incontrovertible it’s the decline in the quality of the correspondence, which used to be full of querulous letters objecting to alleged infelicities of usage. William F. Buckley, Jr. would make a spirited defense of this or that obscure usage. A delightful selection of these exchanges were reprinted in Buckley’s The Right Word.
So my suggestion for how National Review can return to its former glory; require that at any given time at least half of its senior editors hold appointments in which they teach Shakespeare.
Now THAT is a good idea …
I’ll cop to not reading NR terribly much, but…the state of NR in general says a lot about the interplay between political philosophy/ideology and the actual practice of politics. Maybe I’ll try to elaborate on this later, but I think NR is a terrific example of how a philosophy can form the foundation for a political coalition but can and (if it is successful) will eventually be itself altered by the changing needs and makeup of that coalition.