{"id":428,"date":"2008-12-03T11:39:21","date_gmt":"2008-12-03T19:39:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=428"},"modified":"2008-12-05T14:41:33","modified_gmt":"2008-12-05T22:41:33","slug":"central-pillar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/central-pillar\/","title":{"rendered":"Central Pillar?"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was nice of Andrew Sullivan to link to us<\/a>.\u00a0 (I’m not being facetious:\u00a0 It was nice of him<\/em>. Thanks, Andrew.) I’ll take issue with his description of National Review<\/em> as a “central pillar of theoconservatism,” though.<\/p>\n

National Review<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 yes, and NRO, too\u00a0\u2014 have always let me say exactly what I think, sometimes to the extreme vexation of individual editors. They edit stuff, of course:\u00a0 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<\/em>\/NRO well over at the lighter end of editorial authoritarianism.\u00a0 My first venture into anti-creationist writing<\/a> appeared in NR<\/em>, at their invitation.<\/p>\n

A magazine lives by its personality. The personality of National Review<\/em> remains, to the best of my perception, as Bill Buckley established it:\u00a0 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).<\/p>\n

Theoconservatism\u00a0\u2014 I take this to mean the phenomenon described in Damon Linker’s book<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 is an ideology. Like all ideologies, it seeks to “own” everything good:\u00a0 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,\u00a0\u2026\u00a0everything. 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<\/em> was notorious for placing the origin of everything\u00a0\u2014 automobiles, planes, modern architecture, nuclear physics, indoor plumbing\u00a0\u2014 in the Homeland of the Proletariat. Irreverent Soviet intellectuals had a stock joke about it:\u00a0“Russia\u00a0\u2014 home of the elephant!”<\/p>\n

I never found Bill Buckley at all that way inclined. He was the opposite of an ideologue in every way.\u00a0 He had a life, for example. \u00a0The only time he took issue with anything I wrote was when, on NRO in 2006, I owned up<\/a> 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<\/a>, which I later did, though with no discernible effect on my soul.<\/p>\n

As for being careful: I’ve never been careful about anything.\u00a0 That’s why I’m so damn poor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was nice of Andrew Sullivan to link to us.\u00a0 (I’m not being facetious:\u00a0 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\u00a0\u2014 yes, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[9],"tags":[35,36],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=428"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":506,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428\/revisions\/506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}