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.”