Secular Right

It was nice of Andrew Sullivan to link to us.  (I’m not being facetious:  It was nice of him. Thanks, Andrew.) I’ll take issue with his description of National Review as a “central pillar of theoconservatism,” though.

National Review — yes, and NRO, too — have always let me say exactly what I think, sometimes to the extreme vexation of individual editors. They edit stuff, of course:  if you don’t want to be edited, don’t take up writing for a living. In my very considerable experience of freelance journalism, though, I’d put NR/NRO well over at the lighter end of editorial authoritarianism.  My first venture into anti-creationist writing appeared in NR, at their invitation.

A magazine lives by its personality. The personality of National Review remains, to the best of my perception, as Bill Buckley established it:  a broad-minded and literate conservative magazine with a strong line on national defense and a Catholic coloration. It was never, and so far as I can see still is not, the vehicle for an ideology, certainly not a religious ideology. Among the earliest contributors there was at least one atheist (Max Eastman) and one Jewish agnostic (Frank Chodorov).

Theoconservatism — I take this to mean the phenomenon described in Damon Linker’s book — is an ideology. Like all ideologies, it seeks to “own” everything good:  the Constitution, the Founders, art, science (it’s often fun to watch theocons fall over their feet as they try to claim credit for the Enlightenment, and then, a page later, blast it as the worst development in human history), conservatism, … everything. That’s what ideologies do. They are ravenous for credit. Every good thing that ever happened has to be shoe-horned into their formulas. The old Soviet Encyclopedia was notorious for placing the origin of everything — automobiles, planes, modern architecture, nuclear physics, indoor plumbing — in the Homeland of the Proletariat. Irreverent Soviet intellectuals had a stock joke about it: “Russia — home of the elephant!”

I never found Bill Buckley at all that way inclined. He was the opposite of an ideologue in every way.  He had a life, for example.  The only time he took issue with anything I wrote was when, on NRO in 2006, I owned up to some mild anti-Catholic sentiments. Bill’s manner was one of gentle reproof with an overtone of mild amusement. He made some point about John Paul II the substance of which, I am ashamed to say, I have forgotten; but I remember thinking it was a good point, revealing that I didn’t know as much about JPII as I’d thought. He terminated the brief exchange very cordially with a diffident suggestion that I read his own book of apologetics, which I later did, though with no discernible effect on my soul.

As for being careful: I’ve never been careful about anything.  That’s why I’m so damn poor.