William F. Buckley Jr. by Lee Edwards

Author:Lee Edwards
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Institute

MUGGED BY REALITY

A series of events in the late 1960s and early 1970s jolted a small but influential group of old-fashioned liberals—mostly Jewish and residing in New York City—and forced them to move out of their no longer comfortable Democratic digs. The happenings included the 1972 presidential nomination of ultraliberal George McGovern; the seeming willingness of modern liberals to let Vietnam and any other nation under siege fall into the hands of the Communists; the refusal of prominent Democrats to fault the United Nations for its virulent anti-Israel rhetoric; and the revolution in sexual and social relations that produced what the liberal critic Lionel Trilling called the “adversary culture.”

In Irving Kristol’s memorable phrase, neoconservatives were liberals who had been “mugged by reality.” They attacked the radicals as despoilers of the liberal tradition. Kristol called for a return to the “republican virtue” of the founding fathers and invoked the idea of a good society. He endorsed the notion of a “moral and political order” and conceded that the idea of a “hidden hand” had its uses in the marketplace.58 Confronted with reality, the founder of neoconservatism did not merely endorse but embraced conservative principles and practices.

Mainstream conservatives warmly welcomed Kristol and his friends. Buckley set the tone by declaring that Kristol was “writing more sense in the public interest these days than anybody I can think of.” The two men had gotten to know each other at a monthly luncheon group called the Boys Club, organized by Buckley and the New York liberal intellectual Richard Clurman. Harvard social scientists Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer noticed they were being treated in National Review “with a much higher level of intellectual honesty” than in liberal journals.59 Buckley recognized the formidable brain power of the neoconservatives and their ready access to the mass media, attributes which would serve the conservative movement well.

In the early 1970s, as NR approached its twentieth anniversary, there were grumblings that its editor-in-chief had become so great a celebrity that he was growing indifferent to the course of the magazine and the conservative movement he had founded—charges that had little merit when one considers his frenetic schedule of TV programs, newspaper columns, lectures, and editorial involvement in National Review. It was at this moment that Buckley published an intriguing and too-little-known work, Four Reforms: A Guide for the Seventies.

In just 128 pages, the author proposes solutions for four of the most persistent problems in modern America—welfare, taxes, education, and crime. Regarding welfare, he first suggests that “the burden of the nonprofessional work done on behalf of the aged” be done by high school graduates who would voluntarily donate one year of service before going on to college. He then proposes a series of governmental reforms including the appropriation of federal funds for social welfare only to states whose per capita income “is below the national average.”60 In his New York Times book review, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then ambassador to India and later a safely liberal U.S. senator from New

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