Poplar Forest: Jefferson's Retreat Home

Thomas Jefferson's Monticello is known the world over and graces the face of the nickel. But most would be surprised to learn about Poplar Forest, Jefferson's retreat home.

Jefferson visited Poplar Forest several times a year, staying a fortnight to a month at a time.

"I write to you from a place 90 miles from Monticello, near the New London of this state, which I visit three or four times a year, & stay from a fortnight to a month at a time. I have fixed myself comfortably, keep some books here, bring others occasionally, am in the solitude of a hermit, and quite at leisure to attend to my absent friends.”
-Thomas Jefferson

The home is used for education, archaeology, tourism, and has been undergoing restoration since 1986. This is an exceptional American destination. Visit Poplar Forest online at http://www.poplarforest.org

First Principles of a Free and Humane Society

Check out http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.com

Thinking in the long term, harnessing biases, perplexion and development

How did conservatism go from suffering an "embarrassment of riches" in October, 2003 to its currently, mostly discredited state? Let's begin with WFB.

William F. Buckley Jr.:

William F. Buckley Jr. and National Review

In the early 1950s, in fact, the conservative movement could claim only a few publications and fewer organizations. Conservative victories, wrote William F. Buckley Jr., were "uncoordinated and inconclusive" because the philosophy of freedom was not being expounded systematically in the universities and in the media. A new conservative journal was needed, he argued, to combat the liberals, to compensate for "conservative weakness" in the academy, and to "focus the energies" of the movement.

In the first issue of his new magazine, National Review, Buckley sounded the clarion, averring that conservatives lived, as did all other Americans, in "a Liberal world." National Review would not submit but would stand "athwart history yelling Stop!" confident that "a vigorous and incorruptible journal of conservative opinion" could make a critical difference in the realms of ideas and politics.

National Review, then, was not simply a journal of opinion but a political act which, like the publication of Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind, shaped the modern conservative movement.

Lee Edwards, Ph.D. is the leading expert on the History of the Conservative Movement and is currently the Distinguished Fellow in Conservative Thought at the Heritage Foundation. This is what Edwards says regarding Buckley's role as the "Founder of the Movement":

When I am asked how important Bill Buckley was to the conservative movement, I can think of only one reply: Would there be the earth without the sun?

On October 23, 2003, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute celebrated its 50th anniversary with a star-studded gala. The program concluded with a presentation of the Hoeflich Lifetime Achievement award to William F. Buckley, Jr. An ISI Honors Fellow from Yale presented the award to Buckley. His remarks were impressive:

Truth may have always been on the conservative side, but as the conservative side has always known, to quote from God and Man at Yale, “The truth does not always vanquish and can never win unless it is promulgated.” For American conservatism to succeed, it needed not truth, but rhetoric, a rhetoric capable of capturing the attention of people otherwise uninterested in listening. How happy then that the conservative movement had William F. Buckley, Jr. His rhetoric performed what Richard Weaver called “the cure of souls” by turning the establishment’s hauteur against itself. But ironic periphrasis, arch understatement, and surprising deployment of familiar and of course unfamiliar words, Buckley convinced his opponents that he knew something they did not and what’s more, that he intended to keep the secret from them. Thus did he waken their minds to the possibility that liberalism is not the philosophia ultima but just another item in the baleful catalogue of modern ideologies.

In June of the following year when Buckley decided to relinquish control of National Review, the New York Times began an article titled "National Review Founder Says It's Time to Leave Stage" this way:

In 1954, when Ronald Reagan was still a registered Democrat and host of ''General Electric Theater,'' the 28-year-old William Frank Buckley Jr. decided to start a magazine as a standard-bearer for the fledgling conservative movement. In the 50-year ascent of the American right since then, his publication, National Review, has been its most influential journal and Mr. Buckley has been the magazine's guiding spirit and, until today, controlling shareholder.

Tonight, however, Mr. Buckley, 78, is giving up control. In an interview, he said he planned to relinquish his shares today to a board of trustees he had selected. Among them are his son, the humorist Christopher Buckley; the magazine's president, Thomas L. Rhodes; and Austin Bramwell, a 2000 graduate of Yale and one of the magazine's youngest current contributors.
...

By virtue of his relative youth, Mr. Bramwell is the most notable of the five trustees. ''I wanted somebody who is very young and very talented,'' Mr. Buckley said. ''One likes to think in the long term.''

A former officer of the Conservative Party of the Yale Political Union, Mr. Bramwell began writing for National Review two years ago as a Harvard law student.

Less than a month later the Times ran an article "Young Right Tries to Define Post-Buckley Future," which quoted a recently married Sarah Bramwell.

In May the Philadelphia Society, a prestigious club for conservative intellectuals, tapped Sarah Bramwell, a 24-year-old Yale graduate and writer, to address the views of the young right at its 40th-anniversary conference. ''Modern American conservatism began in an effort to do two things: defeat Communism and roll back creeping socialism,'' she began. ''The first was obviated by our success, the latter by our failure. So what is left of conservatism?''

...

Mr. Buckley recently chose Sarah Bramwell's husband, Austin Bramwell, 26, as one of five trustees of National Review. Mr. Bramwell, a clerk for the federal appeals court in Denver and an alumnus of the institute's programs, declined to comment because of his job at the court.

Mr. Nelson [ISI's vice president of publications] said young conservatives' greatest challenge might come from their predecessors' success. ''Buckley started the conservative movement athwart history, yelling 'stop,' '' he said, ''but there has been a subtle shift in the conservative movement's view of itself, from history's opponents to destiny's child.''

''We have a lot of conservatives who reflect the values of the mainstream culture,'' he continued. ''There are polls that show younger-generation conservatives trust the government much more deeply than their parents did.''

The increase in federal domestic spending under President Bush would have been ''unimaginable'' to conservatives a few years ago, he said, and so would foreign policies like the invasion of Iraq.

Doubts about the justification for the war are a common theme among young conservatives. ''Many conservatives, especially since Sept. 11, believe that a major, if not the major, calling of conservatives today is to articulate and defend a certain brand of international grand strategy,'' Ms. Bramwell argued in her address to the Philadelphia Society. ''I believe this view to be not only mistaken, but quite possibly harmful to the conservative movement.''

Still, Ms. Bramwell, who now works as deputy press secretary for Gov. Bill Owens of Colorado, said in an interview that she nonetheless supported the war in Iraq as a chance to advance United States interests in the Middle East.

The article ended in this way:

Ramesh Ponnuru, 29, a prolific writer for National Review, complained that the Republican party had been focusing on social issues because limited government did not have as big ''a political payoff.''

''There is a serious possibility that the libertarian wing of the conservative movement goes off in its own direction, either breaking off or allying with the Democrats,'' he said.

Mr. Buckley, however, said he was unperturbed. ''The sweep of the Soviet challenge was what I call a harnessing bias, and now that harness has come apart,'' he said. ''But I don't think the threads are by any means abandoned.'' He added: ''There has never been a movement that doesn't go through this perplexion and development.''

That was the state of the conservative union in 2004.

After the midterm elections of 2006, the aforementioned Austin Bramwell wrote this in the American Conservative magazine, below are the first and last paragraphs. Please read the whole article HERE:

Until recently, it has been almost impossible for me to speak candidly about the conservative movement, for it was my strange fate to serve as director and later trustee of the movement’s flagship journal, National Review. Earlier this year, at William F. Buckley’s request, I resigned both positions. I can therefore now declare what perhaps has oft been thought but never, at least not often enough, expressed.
...
Whatever its past accomplishments, the conservative movement no longer kindles any “ironic points of light.” It has produced fewer outstanding books even as it has taken over more of the intellectual and political landscape. This trend will only continue. Worse, no reckoning will be made: they hope in vain who expect conservatives to take responsibility for the actual consequences of their actions. Conservatives have no use for the ethic of responsibility; they seek only to “see to it that the flame of pure intention is not quelched.” The movement remains a fine place to make a career, but for wisdom one must look elsewhere.

So that is (partly) how the conservative movement has been perplexed and developed in the past five years.

Let me close with this excerpt from an article by Donald Devine of the American Conservative Union Foundation:

It is now up to us to continue his struggle up from liberalism. When the moral and fiscal bankruptcy of the welfare state finally cannot be ignored any longer, people will seek another answer and someone must be there to propose the Buckley program. As he reminded us, no matter how fundamental the challenge, “despair is inappropriate for a culture as buoyant as our own.”

Thoughtful Conservatism

There's been talk of an anti-intellectual uprising in the conservative movement. The nomination of Sarah Palin confirmed this suspicion to conservatism's willful assassins.

The NYT Opinionator blog (yes, that's actually its name) discovered a rift among conservative intellectuals by way of the Washington Post editorial page.

First, Charles Krauthammer defends his vote for McCain in clear, prophetic wisdom that readers have come to expect. With regard to the so-called conservative intellectuals that do not support McCain/Palin, Krauthammer says he would"rather lose an election than lose my bearings." His opinion is an excellent assessment of the choice American voters face on election day.

The other evidence of a rift among conservatives was given by none other than a certified liberal, E.J. Dionne.

These conservatives deserve credit for acknowledging how ill-suited Palin is for high office, but what we see here is a deep split between parts of the conservative elite and much of the rank and file.

For years, many of the elite conservatives were happy to harvest the votes of devout Christians and gun owners by waging a phony class war against “liberal elitists” and “leftist intellectuals.” Suddenly, the conservative writers are discovering that the very anti-intellectualism their side courted and encouraged has begun to consume their movement.

The cause of Edmund Burke, Leo Strauss, Robert Nisbet and William F. Buckley Jr. is now in the hands of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity — and Sarah Palin. Reason has been overwhelmed by propaganda, ideas by slogans, learned manifestoes by direct-mail hit pieces.

Can't you hear the wishful thinking in his words? I certainly can.

Sarah Palin is intelligent and thoughtful, so was Ronald Reagan. Even William F. Buckley Jr., who had all the credentials of an intellectual never fit the description. Conservatives, in particular, and Republicans, in general, recoil from labeling oneself as an intellectual. Instead conservative leaders tend to be seen as "thoughtful" or "intellectual." Indeed, there is a need for thoughtful leaders and intellectual conservatives to distill and refine the conservative responses to the day's issues.

Conservatives are the inheritors of too great a tradition to lack an intellectual defensive and offensive line. There is much more to American conservatism than Sean Hannity and that must be articulated on all levels of thinking. During WFB's life, National Review was the standard bearer for thoughtful conservatism. NR remains at the forefront today but to a lesser extent.

A prescient quotation comes from an article entitled "Good-bye to All That" by Austin Bramwell, Nov. 20, 2006:

The movement remains a fine place to make a career, but for wisdom one must look elsewhere.

More on Bramwell and National Review to come.

The next conservative generation begins to come of age

How will the new mantle of the GOP and conservative movement handle itself? As the previous post concluded, we ought to act worthy of ourselves. We have inherited a land of opportunity and freedom and purpose. We dominate the world stage. But we face great challenges.

To better understand where we are today, let's divide the last seven decades into three generations of people. First, those who beat the Depression, won the Second World War, and gave coalesced to give rise to a conservative counter-revolution. Second, those who grew up in the modern American conservative culture while the USA shared the world stage with the USSR and big-government liberals, New Dealers, and communists fought to socialize the American economy. Third and most pressingly, the generation of 2008. People who were born or came of age during the Reagan years and are now just entering the adult world.

Generation 2008 is the post-Baby Boomers. The youngest person that cast a ballot for Reagan in 1980 was born and 1962 and is currently 46 years old. The youngest person to vote in 2008 was born in 1990 and is currently 18 years old. John McCain is 73 years old, but he came of age politically-speaking when he "enlisted as a foot soldier in the Reagan Revolution." McCain is at the top of the GOP ticket but will not have a long-term position in the party even if he serves 8 years as President.

Where does the conservative cause find itself today with Generation 08 at the helm? To figure this out, let's look at what happened half-way between now and the culmination of the conservative movement in the 1980s. 1) The USSR collapsed and 2) The socialist, welfare state in America was stopped and repudiated, but not untangled. And what has happened in the near past? Two of the grandest icons of the movement have died.

Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley Jr. passed away in 2004 and 2008, respectively. Even though Reagan had been ailing for years, his death brought a great nostalgia to the GOP. The man who made it "morning in America" again rode a wave of popularity that inspired a revolution. Ever since his death, there has been a harried frenzy to find "the next Reagan." There will never be another person exactly like Reagan; the GOP hurts its cause by spending time and energy postulating about a mythical reincarnation of RR.


Buckley and Reagan at the zenith

WFB died in 2008 and left an equally important, though less noticeable, emptiness in the conservative movement. If Reagan rode the conservative movement's white horse into the White House, Buckley fired the shot heard 'round the world. His God and Man at Yale through him into the national spotlight as a conservative counter-revolutionary. After causing a stir by identifying higher education as a proving ground for socialist and atheist propaganda, he started National Review with the mission of "standing athwart history yelling 'Stop!'" Then he moved to television with his debate talk show, Firing Line, which went on to become the longest running show of its kind. He also ran for Mayor of New York City and declared his first task as mayor would be to recount the votes. Clearly he was a personality with a piercing intelligence that disarmed enemies and attracted multitudes.

WFB was the renaissance man that validated the intellectual credentials of the conservative movement and enabled its acceptance to the mainstream. RR was the man who put thought into action and led the charge from the sidelines into the fray and came out victorious.

WFB and RR left us with a great tradition and opened many eyes to the wisdom of the Founding Fathers. They succeeded in a different time against different enemies but their principles are still our principles. And we need them now more than ever.

To close, examine the words B.C. Forbes, founder of Forbes magazine, said in 1953:

"What have Americans to be thankful for? More than any other people on the earth, we enjoy complete religious freedom, political freedom, social freedom. Our liberties are sacredly safeguarded by the Constitution of the United States, 'the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.' Yes, we Americans of today have been bequeathed a noble heritage. Let us pray that we may hand it down unsullied to our children and theirs."

He died the following year eight days before his 74th birthday.


B.C. Forbes

Quitting while we're behind?

Here is an October 2006 article by Christopher Buckley from the Washington Monthly. He clearly illustrates the grievances many conservatives had with the GOP in the 2006 midterm elections.

After reading the article, it's not hard to see where Christopher was coming from when he recently announced he would be voting for Barack Obama and then went on to leave the back page of National Review, the magazine his father founded.

LET'S QUIT WHILE WE ARE BEHIND
by Christopher Buckley
October 2006

“The trouble with our times,” Paul Valéry said, “is that the future is not what it used to be.”

This glum aperçu has been much with me as we move into the home stretch of the 2006 mid-term elections and shimmy into the starting gates of the 2008 presidential campaign. With heavy heart, as a once-proud—indeed, staunch— Republican, I here admit, behind enemy lines, to the guilty hope that my party loses; on both occasions.

I voted for George W. Bush in 2000. In 2004, I could not bring myself to pull the same lever again. Neither could I bring myself to vote for John Kerry, who, for all his strengths, credentials, and talent, seems very much less than the sum of his parts. So, I wrote in a vote for George Herbert Walker Bush, for whom I worked as a speechwriter from 1981 to ’83. I wish he’d won.

Bob Woodward asked Bush 43 if he had consulted his father before invading Iraq. The son replied that he had consulted “a higher father.” That frisson you feel going up your spine is the realization that he meant it. And apparently the higher father said, “Go for it!” There are those of us who wish he had consulted his terrestrial one; or, if he couldn’t get him on the line, Brent Scowcroft. Or Jim Baker. Or Henry Kissinger. Or, for that matter, anyone who has read a book about the British experience in Iraq. (18,000 dead.)

Anyone who has even a passing personal acquaintance of Bush 41 knows him to be, roughly speaking, the most decent, considerate, humble, and cautious man on the planet. Also, the most loving parent on earth. What a wrench it must be for him to pick up his paper every morning and read the now-daily debate about whether his son is officially the worst president in U.S. history. (That chuckling you hear is the ghost of James Buchanan.) To paraphrase another president, I feel 41’s pain. Does 43 feel 41’s? Does he, I wonder, feel ours?

There were some of us who scratched our heads in 2000 when we first heard the phrase “compassionate conservative.” It had a cobbled-together, tautological, dare I say, Rovian aroma to it. But OK, we thought, let’s give it a chance. It sounded more fun than Gore’s “Prosperity for America’s Families.” (Bo-ring.)

Six years later, the White House uses the phrase about as much as it does “Mission Accomplished.” Six years of record deficits and profligate expansion of entitlement programs. Incompetent expansion, at that: The actual cost of the President’s Medicare drug benefit turned out, within months of being enacted, to be roughly one-third more than the stated price. Weren’t Republicans supposed to be the ones who were good at accounting? All those years on Wall Street calculating CEO compensation....

Who knew, in 2000, that “compassionate conservatism” meant bigger government, unrestricted government spending, government intrusion in personal matters, government ineptitude, and cronyism in disaster relief? Who knew, in 2000, that the only bill the president would veto, six years later, would be one on funding stem-cell research?

A more accurate term for Mr. Bush’s political philosophy might be incontinent conservatism.

On Capitol Hill, a Republican Senate and House are now distinguished by—or perhaps even synonymous with—earmarks, the K Street Project, Randy Cunningham (bandit, 12 o’clock high!), Sen. Ted Stevens’s $250-million Bridge to Nowhere, Jack Abramoff (Who? Never heard of him), and a Senate Majority Leader who declared, after conducting his own medical evaluation via videotape, that he knew every bit as much about the medical condition of Terri Schiavo as her own doctors and husband. Who knew that conservatism means barging into someone’s hospital room like Dr. Frankenstein with defibrillator paddles? In what chapter of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom or Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind is that principle enunciated?

The Republican Party I grew up into—Dwight D. Eisenhower, William F. Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon (sigh), Ronald Reagan—stood for certain things. It did not always live up to its ideals. Au contraire, as we Republicans said in the pre-Dominique de Villepin era—often, it fell flat on its face. A self-proclaimed “conservative,” Nixon kept the Great Society entitlement beast fat and happy and brought in wage and price controls. Reagan funked Social Security reform in 1983 and raised (lesser) taxes three times. He vowed to balance the budget, and drove the deficit to historic highs by failing to rein in government spending. Someone called it “Voodoo economics.” You could Google it.
There were foreign misadventures, terrible ones: Vietnam (the ’69-’75 chapters), Beirut, Iran-Contra, the Saddam Hussein tilt. But there were compensating triumphs: Eisenhower’s refusal to bail out France in Indochina in 1954, Nixon’s China opening, the Cold War victory.

Despite the failures, one had the sense that the party at least knew in its heart of hearts that these were failures, either of principle or execution. Today one has no sense, aside from a slight lowering of the swagger-mometer, that the president or the Republican Congress is in the least bit chastened by their debacles.

George Tenet’s WMD “slam-dunk,” Vice President Cheney’s “we will be greeted as liberators,” Don Rumsfeld’s avidity to promulgate a minimalist military doctrine, together with the tidy theories of a group who call themselves “neo-conservative” (not one of whom, to my knowledge, has ever worn a military uniform), have thus far: de-stabilized the Middle East; alienated the world community from the United States; empowered North Korea, Iran, and Syria; unleashed sectarian carnage in Iraq among tribes who have been cutting each others’ throats for over a thousand years; cost the lives of 2,600 Americans, and the limbs, eyes, organs, spinal cords of another 15,000—with no end in sight. But not to worry: Democracy is on the march in the Middle East. Just ask Hamas. And the neocons—bright people, all—are now clamoring, “On to Tehran!”

What have they done to my party? Where does one go to get it back?
One place comes to mind: the back benches. It’s time for a time-out. Time to hand over this sorry enchilada to Hillary and Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden and Charlie Rangel and Harry Reid, who has the gift of being able to induce sleep in 30 seconds. Or, with any luck, to Mark Warner or, what the heck, Al Gore. I’m not much into polar bears, but this heat wave has me thinking the man might be on to something.

My fellow Republicans, it is time, as Madison said in Federalist 76, to “Hand over the tiller of governance, that others may fuck things up for a change.”

(Or was it Federalist 78?)

As is the case with Buckley in 2006 and 2008, the GOP left him. It left conservatism. What did it become? Turn on the boobtube and see for yourself. Bailouts and Campaign Finance Reform McCain followed by the Shining Knight of Socialism Barack Obama. All that's a topic for another day though. No matter who wins the election, the electorate is lurching to the left and their is little hope on the horizon for 2010. Something big must change on our side of the aisle. Of course, I'd prefer the Right to reform itself under a McCain/Palin administration. Who wouldn't?

Kathleen Parker of National Review comes to Christoph's defense in her article "The Buckley Son Rises":

So why did he do it?

Because he had to. It’s in his genes.

True believers of whatever stripe too often forget that the men and women who create movements are first and foremost radicals. Great movements are not the result of relaxing afternoons musing along the Seine but emerge from flames of passion ignited by injustice.

When WFB created the modern conservative movement, he didn’t call a neighborhood meeting and whisper, “Come along now.” He stood athwart history and yelled, “Stop!”

His son, though he customarily takes the more circuitous route to the revolution via satire, is now merely answering WFB’s original call to political activism. Paraphrasing Ronald Reagan, the younger Buckley said: “I haven’t left the Republican Party. It left me.”

In 1955, when WFB announced his new magazine and explained the reasons for it, he described conservatives as “non-licensed nonconformists”: “Radical conservatives in this country have an interesting time of it, for when they are not being suppressed or mutilated by Liberals, they are being ignored or humiliated by a great many of those of the well-fed Right, whose ignorance and amorality have never been exaggerated for the same reason that one cannot exaggerate infinity.”

Fast-forward half a century, and the old is the new.

With the world recoiling in squalor and vice, crisis and tumult, conservatism is left wondering what to do. Experience shows us that we have the best solutions but we're quickly losing our means of articulation and the apparatus of implementation at a political level. How did we get here? Read the next couple posts to get my take.

Charles Krauthammer provides the appropriate response to any doubting conservatives this year in his article "McCain for President."

Let me close with an appropriate rallying cry from an American patriot whom Ronald Reagan quoted in his first inaugural:

Our country is in danger, but not to be despaired of. On you depend the fortunes of America. You are to decide the important question upon which rest the happiness and the liberty of millions yet unborn. Act worthy of yourselves.

Dr. Joseph Warren, Boston, 1775