‘National Review’ seems collectively incapable of seeing that it is no longer standing athwart history but is instead mostly athwart rank-and-file conservatives. NR is more liberal echo than conservative choice these days, and I don’t see any sign of recovery.
“Every young writer, I imagine,” wrote Ross Douthat, “has their first intellectual magazine, whose essays and articles are devoured all the more greedily for being slightly over one’s head. Mine was First Things.” That journal played an important role for me, too, especially theologically, but among political magazines National Review was the first one that really captivated me. During high school study hall, one could get a pass to go to the library. As a freshman, I would go down there and read various periodicals, starting with the newest issue of William F. Buckley’s magazine. The late eighties were still the time of the founder’s presence and the glory of Ronald Reagan who had declared “I got my job through National Review.” I kept reading it even through periods of mild college liberalism and have subscribed for many years to the print edition and enjoyed NRO’s blog, The Corner. I’ve even written a few pieces for the magazine over the years, something I have been proud enough to include in my writer’s bio.
Yet, like a great many conservatives I know, my love for the magazine has pretty much evaporated. I don’t look at The Corner anymore unless something is linked to it. Alas, too often I regret what I read. Though the print edition is still coming, I didn’t renew it myself. Somebody must have gifted it to me, a fact for which I am not very grateful.
What’s wrong with NR? No publication is problem free, and there are plenty of episodes in the history of a magazine that has been going for sixty-five-plus years that were regrettable. Many friends of mine think the magazine went bad in the early 2000s when it supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. That may well be. Though I was more of a neo-conservative who supported both conflicts at the time, David Frum’s attack on anti-Iraq War conservatives, titled “Unpatriotic Conservatives,” was especially irritating as I had a high degree of respect for a great many of the people he attacked, especially the journalist Robert Novak. To run this kind of oddly personal attack in the magazine of “the conservative movement” struck me as insanity.
Later, when Mark Steyn, the wittiest and most perceptive writer in the magazine and on the website at the time, was ejected and effectively disowned after lawsuits by Michael Mann concerning a blog post Mr. Steyn wrote, I was again seriously irritated. How does this manifest any kind of conservative principle? How does it manifest a “standing athwart” anything, much less history, as its founder famously declared it to be doing? It seemed less like the approach of a Happy Warrior (Mr. Steyn’s back-of-the-mag column’s title) and more like the approach of a group that lets lawyers run the show. Mr. Steyn himself agreed, writing in 2015 about the lawsuit based on a 270-word blog post:
There are times when I wish I had the same kind of co-defendants I had in my free-speech wars in Canada: “Maclean’s,” unlike “National Review,” is a dentist’s waiting-room mag not an ideological mission, but they and I were as one in our fight not just against the Canadian Islamic Congress but against the now repealed Section 13. By contrast, “National Review,” for whom I wrote for a decade and a half, are offering the curious and fainthearted defense that they were never my publisher but merely an “interactive computer service provider” to which I had the access code…. They’re a court filing or two from claiming they’re Lufthansa and I’m Andreas Lubitz—just some crazy guy who locked himself in the NR cockpit.
Rumors circled that Mr. Steyn might have been difficult to deal with. Maybe so, but principled conservatives would have worked through that.
I stuck with them, however. The point where the NR plane started to seem like it was heading downward was when the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision, declaring a right to have one’s same-sex union recognized as a “marriage,” was handed down. Literary editor Mike Potemra, a wonderful if somewhat eccentric guy, celebrated this decision on the website, as did managing editor Jason Lee Steorts—who might be a libertarian but is not really conservative and who declared that arguments that failed to satisfy his understanding took on “the air of an insult.” The three-legged stool of foreign-policy conservatives, free marketeers, and social conservatives seemed to be sagging quite a bit.
It was during the Trump era, however, that NR really lost its way. I was initially NeverTrump, but it was the magazine’s “Against Trump” issue that started me on the path to thinking that he might be worth supporting. I didn’t do it in 2016—just barely. Out of despair induced in part by NRO predictions of how badly he was going to be beaten, I thought there was no point. When he won, I began to question the objectivity of NR’s predictions. When Mr. Trump began to actually do many of the things the “movement” talked about, I noticed that NR’s editors kept their distance. It seemed less a matter of his performance than of his not having gotten his job through them—in fact, against their advice.
They seemed to become suckers for every accusation against him. The Russian Collusion story? They had to take it seriously even long after it proved to be nonsense. The Covington Catholic story based on edited video? Several of the editors jumped on that one, too, writing horrifying pieces about that bad Sandmann kid and his classmates that, like “Russian collusion,” turned out to be much ado about bad behavior by other people. While other writers in conservative media had already identified the disastrous character of Andrew Cuomo’s handling of COVID-19 in April 2020, NR writers were still writing as if he were a decisive, successful leader on the issue. Many also contributed support for lockdowns. Writers bashed Hungary and Poland despite the fact that these countries are fighting off the kind of woke progressivism that NR supposedly opposes.
Even after parting ways with the most fervent and obsessive anti-Trumpers, Jonah Goldberg and David French, the magazine still seemed to be operating in a kind of fantasyland in which a Trump loss would probably be very good for the country—or at least not that bad. Sure, there were a few pro-Trump writers, but most of the regulars—Ramesh Ponnoru, Jay Nordlinger, Michael Brendan Dougherty, Rick Brookhiser, Rob Long, Ross Douthat, Kevin Williamson—were all anti-Trump. There was a curious disconnect in much of their writing. Sure, the Democrats are getting crazy, but what could go wrong? Writer Dan McLaughlin wrote an endless Hamlet-like piece about why it was actually sensible to vote for Mr. Trump but how he wasn’t doing it because of… well, it wasn’t exactly clear why. There was often the hint that really what we need is to get rid of Mr. Trump and get back to some pristine version of “conservatism” that didn’t include him or any of the populist concerns that he brought to the fore. Mr. Trump was ruled out-of-court for not being Buckleyite, while the people at Buckley’s magazine ignored their founder’s own rule of supporting the most viable rightward-leaning candidate.
Post-Trump, of course, we live in a country where public intellectuals talk about using counterinsurgency measures against conservatives; Democrats are attempting to censor television channels that do not preach their gospel; executive orders command that bathrooms and locker rooms for women be open to men who believe they are women; Attorney General nominee Merrick Garland argues that attacking federal buildings at night, as Antifa has done, is not domestic terrorism and refuses to say whether illegally entering the country is a crime; and executive orders reverse rules that kept China out of our power grid and forbade critical race theory.
That little list is just off the top of my head. If I thought for a few minutes more, I could probably get a few more paragraphs of apocalyptic news. NR’s Alfred E. Neuman 2020 political stance seems even more ridiculous and destructive now than it did during the election season. What could go wrong? We’re not even one hundred days in, and that question has been answered many times over.
The piece that for me encapsulated NR’s decline was Michael Brendan Dougherty’s column posted the day after Rush Limbaugh’s death. Mr. Dougherty sniffed that he found his conservatism “in magazines and books, not on talk radio” and “had to overcome Rush Limbaugh to become a conservative.” Mr. Doughertty was and is a Roger Scruton man! While making a sensible point about the need to appeal to different parts of the conservative movement, Mr. Dougherty revealed the problem with the way he thinks when he noted that “too much dramatized retching and sniffing at populism among the bow-tie wearing, Edmund Burke-quoting intellectual weirdos that make up conservative intellectuals will drive the dittoheads into rebellion or into political non-participation.”
There are lots of Edmund Burke-quoting intellectual weirdos who like Rush Limbaugh and other popular and populist figures. Those weirdos, among whom I count myself, do not have control of the conservative movement such that not following our lead is “rebellion.” We understand that political questions are often intellectual but the best answers to which can be provided by obnoxious New York real estate moguls and ordinary folk far from the world of ivory towers, think tanks, and New York magazines. I know it was non-intellectuals who first pointed out to me the strengths of Donald Trump and the weaknesses of many Republican figures.
Most conservatives would rather be governed by the first 2000 names in the phone book than the staff at Bill Buckley’s magazine. National Review seems collectively incapable of seeing that it is no longer standing athwart history but is instead mostly athwart rank-and-file conservatives, even those of us who like Roger Scruton. Small intellectual magazines always depend on donors who believe that they will be influential with the right people. But to be influential, they have to have some popular base. At 50,000 subscriptions, The Weekly Standard’s funders decided that they were no longer worth bankrolling. NR had about 170,000 subscriptions a decade ago and is down to about 75,000 subscriptions now.
I don’t see any sign of recovery. Rich Lowry tweets articles from The Weekly Standard’s online successor The Bulwark. The magazine keeps hammering away at Donald Trump, claiming falsely that he wanted Republican officials to “throw the election to him.” Their writers seem more bothered by his claims of election malfeasance than they are by the policies and personnel of the Biden administration. And they keep accepting media falsehoods—such as the one that Officer Brian Sicknick was killed by a fire extinguisher on January 6—without investigating them. While Andrew McCarthy did finally write an article about the phony story, he initially said that Sicknick was “murdered” in the course of his urging a conviction of Mr. Trump in the second impeachment case. Meanwhile, there was never any editorial about, or deep-dive into, the story of Parler being forced off-line by a joint effort by big tech’s giants.
NR is more liberal echo than conservative choice these days.
It would be great if another generation discovered an intellectual and lively conservatism in National Review as I once did. But absent radical surgery to recover their position athwart history—and I think it will require replacing most of the staff—new generations will only find the magazine in the history books.
Author’s Correction: I was contacted by a representative of National Review who graciously did not argue with me about my institutional judgments but informed me of inaccuracies in two parts of my essay. On a minor note, there was only one NR piece, by Nicholas Frankovich, attacking Nick Sandmann and the Covington kids. It was later taken down. I looked back at the history and found that editor Rich Lowry did not write an article but tweeted approvingly of the Catholic Diocese of Covington and Covington Catholic High School apology that assumed the media narrative: “A necessary and appropriate apology.” A second tweet admitted things weren’t as bad as they seemed but claimed the “obnoxious, dumb, and disrespectful behavior of the teens needed an apology regardless.” He later deleted these tweets, but then-NR senior editor Jonah Goldberg retweeted Lowry’s original take. Thus, though there were several public comments assuming the false media narrative by NR editors, only one appeared on the magazine’s webpage.
The other correction has to do with my understanding of NR’s relationship with Mark Steyn. I wrote that Steyn was “ejected and effectively disowned” by NR. According to NR: 1) Mark Steyn was the one who decided to retain his own counsel in the Michael Mann case—at NR’s expense; and 2) Steyn was not an employee of NR but was at the end of his three-year contract in 2014 when the legal case was in its early stages. He was offered another contract to which he did not respond. Thus, whatever one thinks of the legal strategy which NR later took up, my account of its beginnings was inaccurate.
Though I stand by my judgments about the direction of the magazine, I apologize for these mistakes in facts.
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The featured image is a photograph of William F. Buckley, Jr. attending the second inauguration of President Ronald Reagan, 21 January 1985. This image is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Agree on all points. Excellent exposition.
100% agree. Before Trump NRO was top 8 conservative must read. But I haven’t gone to it in a long time. Goldberg, Lowry, et al…pathetic.
As a longtime traditional conservative, I would maintain that the one big error by the author and by almost all commenters here is that NR somehow went bad with Trump, or over the 2000s. The fact is that NR was gone by the mid-1990s, morphing into a neoconservative-establishment rag.
While these leanings ran through their writings, one obvious red flag was that NR devoted the entire 1990s to attacks on Pat Buchanan. It started with arguably justifiable–though unnecessary–attacks for some statements that could be seen as anti-semitic. But it morphed into vicious attacks purely for supporting precisely those policy positions that Donald Trump was later elected on. Such policy attacks culminated in NR’s senior editor issuing an edict that, henceforth, Buchanan — and by implication all ACTUAL conservatives — would be considered “no longer conservative” by the magazine. The neocons’ triumph was complete. (I was already done with NR long before this happened.)
The sad thing is that a great many people continued to think highly of NR through this and beyond.
I had nearly the same experience with NR in the 80s. Mental tennis with a grand slam caliber of contributors. WFB obits were a strange fascination. I modeled all my condolences since after his kind turn of a phrase. I risked ridicule from a senior officer in the Navy for my subscription arriving on deployment. As authors one by one became excommunicated from NR after WFB stepped down, I was done donating. It’s as if a swarm of Edsel Fords had descended onto the staff.
Thank you, keep up the good work.
I have always enjoyed National Review and continue to look forward to receiving it. It may be that there is a difference between what is posted on the online portion (which I don’t read) and in the print issue, but I consider NR still to be solidly conservative and always a pleasure to read.
It is not solidly conservative by any reasonable standard. If you think it is, then you are not solidly conservative. That’s fine; you can have whatever politics you wish. But the magazine is a disgrace.
Is DJT “solidly conservative”?
DJT is not “solidly Conservative’, he is by nature a “populist”, however, when looking for the best policies to address situations that need to be address he fines Conservative policies work best.
I reluctantly had to give up on NR when… Kevin Williamson, compared Donald Trump’s two sons to the two psychopathic sons of Saddam Hussein.
We discovered Buckley in late 60s. A life raft for young drowning newly weds! Was an exciting few decades. So few people seemed to worry about the ideas & ideals we found important. Buckley kept us sane……National Review and then Firing Line.
We drifted away when Buckley seemed to lose heart. When NR seemed more interesting in printing a magazine than in the ideal it had supported.
Spot on.
Well done, Mr. Deavel. Keep up the good analysis.
Superb article! I grew up on Bill Buckley and National Review. That was in the 80s and 90s. I can’t put my finger on what happened in the 2000s but I did lose interest. It wasn’t the Iraq War for me. I supported it. Perhaps there were just too many conservative magazines on the market by then that watered down the importance of any single one. But I still went over to NRO – the online branch – for many years. That is, until they went full bore NeverTrump. Not only was I turned off by the end of the first year of Trump’s presidency, I was vehemently opposed to them. I have completely shut them off for some three years now. Unless there is a complete turnover of editors they are incorrigible. I’d hate to pull the plug on such a historical magazine but with this crew, yeah, pull the plug.
I have my own story.
Long story short, Buckley was a great man. If I wrote him to take issue on something, he read what I wrote and if persuaded, changed his mind.
I love Rich Lowry, but NR has become small minded and left Buckley’s reasonable philosophical conservatism.
These days NR disappoints.
I began subscribing in 1969, was a contribute and cruiser.
I no longer read it.
Interesting article.
All spot on. The only key episode you left out was their defenestration of John Derbyshire. NR has been in decline for a good 2 decades now (ever since NRO started to overtake the print mag really, and it was dominated for years by Goldberg and K-Lo, quite an intellectual decline from the mag’s beginnings), and is beyond repair now. All of these ConInc legacy organs are fit for the trash heap. The American Conservative will be joining them soon, as it has also been in decline for a couple years. Like NR, they’ve been deep in the tank for the mainstream Covid and election narratives of the past year, and seem more interested in garnering praise from their liberal media peers as the alleged “reasonable right.”
WHY? As a paying NR subscriber I have been asking myself “why?” Why do so many at the NR hate DJT? Why would they rather have a POTUS whose stance (and actions) on the issues that matter most to NR is much worse than DJTs? Why would K. Williamson rather have an abortionist as POTUS than stomach DJT who actually supports Williamson’s most passionate issues?
“Why”?
Because they are not conservatives.
Some of them are liberals, the “right wing” of the Left, whose real goal is merely to slow down the advance of the Left and make it easier for the rubes to swallow Leftist policies. (Goldberg straight up admitted this in his most recent book, whose title he stole from a far greater man and whose contents he largely borrowed from Steven Pinker.)
The rest of them are mere grifters, men without real principles who have found comfortable sinecures playing the role of the Washington Generals of American politics.
Thank you for capturing my cloudy “feelings” about NR and sketching them into clear thoughts.
Our house has several subscriptions to differing conservative magazines. NR was our first and longest running. For me, NR jumped the shark when it jumped aboard the legalize pot train. And when Mark Steyn’s pieces no longer graced the pages, I realized there were only one or two voices I regularly sought. I was also disappointed that Mr. Trump’s presidency received a treatment more CNN and NPR than a robust criticism, cheering, and conversation from a premiere conservative magazine.
Is almost like NR has decided to act like a rebellious teenager, with no cohesive vision or principle.
A couple of years ago, my husband added the Washington Examiner to our mailbox. It arrived like a breath of fresh air. I appreciate not agreeing with everything written, but is lovely to have the feeling the people writing do not actively look down their noses at my family and I and American Christian conservatives at large.
Great writing, wit, analysis, appreciation and a love for our country, our future and roots – make any publication shine.
Which is why I read Imaginative Conservative and share it with family and friends. Your reflection here – is my reminder to contribute to the work here.
Thank you!
Thank you!
While I feel Rich Lowry attempted to have it both ways by worrying that insulting Trump and his supporters would kill readership yet he didn’t want to totally back Trump either. Luckily the staff had an open forum to voice their own opinion.
It seems however that the author took offense that National Review is not populist or Trumpist enough for his taste. Mr. Trumps populism will never need an intellectual voice be it a think tank or opinion magazine because of his distaste for science, credentialed experts and his acceptance of alternate facts.
No, the author — and a great many other people — are saddened and angry that NR no longer supports conservatism at all.
Robert:
The great blurring of our time is the accepted belief that populism is an extension of Conservatism yet the differences are great. But then again you missed the point I was making in the last sentence
Mandy, I’m glad to see that I’m not the only one who read this article in this way.
I do not understand the accusation that NR is liberal. That’s not necessarily the author’s claim, but it is the claim of some responses. Not agreeing with Trump (or not liking him) doesn’t make one liberal. Actual viewpoints are liberal or conservative. I find it unhelpful to accuse people of being liberal who hold no liberal viewpoints.
I also strain to equate Trumpism/Populism with Conservatism. There is some overlap, but also distinct differences. I think a more beneficial article would be to compare traditional conservatism with Trumpist conservatism. To actually look at the differing ideas would be helpful, although I recognize that’s a very different article.
“Populism” is a completely amorphous political concept if it can include everyone from Minnesota’s old Farmer-Labor Party to Donald Trump, with William Jennings Bryan (a Christian pacifist) somewhere between. When the pundits and poobahs use the word populism to describe Trump, it is just to find an alternative expression for democracy. The intelligentsia love the word “democracy”:but don’t like it in practice when it delivers a result with which they disagree.
Trump governed in a way that was quite conservative. He cut taxes, got rid of regulations, and appointed conservative judges. Where he differed from the conservative establishment was on trade and immigration. Doctrinaire free-traders and doctrinaire open-borders (e.g., the Koch interests, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce) opposed Trump virulently on these points. It never seemed to occur to them that conservatism is not rigidly ideological but rather is a philosophy of prudential government.
An absence of trade barriers is theoretically consistent with a laissez-faire economic approach – but is it prudent to allow the wholesale offshoring of American manufacturing to China, which is not only an economic rival but also a geopolitical adversary, and a Communist dictatorship that is the world’s worst abuser of human rights? Open borders, again, may be consistent with the free movement of goods, capital, and labor – but it is prudent to disregard the cultural effects of admitting vast numbers of ignorant, illiterate, illegal aliens from countries that have very little in common with the historic America nation?
The NeverTrumpers were political actors who cloaked naked self-interest under a veil of high principle. The “free traders” sought either their own gain or the gain of Red China at the expense of the American people,. The open-borders crowd sought either cheap labor and pliable future voters, or were engaged in a kind of Ellis Island schmaltz about their ancestors from the shtetl. Those that were not acting in bad faith were nurturing a delusional and wildly imprudent filiopietistic nostalgia.
The most conservative president of the twentieth century was not Ronald Reagan but Calvin Coolidge. Under Coolidge we saw the Federal income tax cut to a top rate of 25%, the enactment of the Fordney-McCumber tariff that protected the domestic market for American manufactured goods, and the Immigration Act of 1924, which set strict caps on immigration as a whole, and established quotas by national origin to assure that the immigrants admitted were culturally compatible with the native-born population. The nineteen-twenties roared because of these pieces of legislation.
“Trumpism” is nothing but an updated version of the politics of Calvin Coolidge. It is not a personality cult, NR;s vapourings to the contrary. What we might more appropriately call Trumpo-Coolidgism is an authentic strain of American conservatism, and I hope we will see more of it.
“Where he differed from the conservative establishment was on trade and immigration” …. I think that is hard to say …. Free Trade/Fair Trade IS a conservative value, but when our government tax policies ends up taxing US domestic goods, and permits foreign good to enter the USA tax free, and there is not balance of payments require (we trade goods of equal value) that is not what conservatives are for! And when it comes to CHINA, there are various type of Wars, some are fought with guns and bombs, others with trade ….. Trump choose to fight China on the field that best enable us to win …. TRADE! Trump was trying to redirect our survival goods back to the USA or at lease to friendly nations …. Conservatives are not afraid of a ‘HOT WAR”, but we would rather win without a HOT WAR ….
Thank you. Your comment is the most coherent and informative of the lot.
I have never commented here, but having found the article, I just had to read some comment (as is part of the zeit geist now, I think).
And I have nothing to add now, except to say I don’t need to add anything after reading M. Crawfurdmuir’s post. They are me. Thank you, M. Crawfurdmuir, and sorry to offend anyone who thinks I should not have raised my hand to say thank you.
The author of this article quite rightly pointed out a number of issues aside from Trump (whose presidency, rise and decline figure only scantly). There’s the support of legalizing drugs, cheering for the corruption of marriage, sneering at Limbaugh’s death, their hasty and wrongheaded rebuke of the Covington Catholic kids.
NR has taken to the view that standing athwart evidently means slowing the drift which is not actually undesirable unless the current flows too quickly.
As for you, Mandy, you give the game away when you cite the authors “distaste for science” and “credentialed experts”. What is science? Is it whatever a scientist says or is observable facts obtained through rigorous study? For instance, I’ve been told that when Dawkins says there’s no God that it’s “science”. As for credentialing, you’ll have to forgive the justified doubt of everybody whose spent even a modicum of time observing “credentialed experts” because those handing the credentials seem quite corrupted and those who they credential are happily indoctrinated and playing along with the system as long as it doesn’t eat them. Am I to be impressed with Anthony Fauci when he tells me to skip Easter dinner with family but encourages people to “hook-up” with strangers on Tinder? How about when he tells us we need economic stimulus: is that science?
NR’s “corrections” are incorrect on both counts.
See Mark Steyn’s deposition re National Review: https://www.steynonline.com/documents/11106.pdf
Yep. In addition to its many other problems, NR and its writers have developed a nasty habit of dishonesty in recent years.
Case in point: Goldberg was loudly proclaiming in 2017 that NR’s anti-Trump stance had been hugely successful, with the website seeing higher traffic than ever before. At the very time he was saying this, anyone could go on Alexa and see that NRO had dropped 2000 places in Internet traffic ranking since early 2016.
Excellent piece!
National Review was my first political/intellectual magazine subscription. However, I’m now one of the 95,000 or so subscribers who has fled from the publication. I do, however, still have some respect for Kevin Williamson. (His piece, “A People Prepared,” still strikes a chord in me, and I reread several key quotations from that piece during the Christmas season). But it was the “savior complex” of David French — floating the idea of running for president against Trump — that served as the final bout of acid reflux I would suffer from National Review in print or online.
Excellent piece.
I grew up with Buckley, Reagan, and National Review. Subscribed to it in 1988, the same year I voted for the first time.
My subscription ran out in 2018. I will never renew it. The sight of NR now brings me only loathing and disgust at what it has become.
This did not happen by accident. The entirety of the profession “conservative movement” — the network of magazines and websites and think-tanks which is often called Conservatives Inc — has degenerated over the last three decades into an impotent, intellectually vacant, morally obtuse grift whose sole purpose is to fleece the rubes so as to supply comfortable sinecures for the mediocre, petty, Twitter-addicted frauds who inhabit it.
Mr. Deavel,
Thank you for a very fine piece, which gave substance to some general feelings I’ve had about NR, but never developed them specifically. I, too, have let my subscription lapse, and have no intentions of renewing. I am sad at the unraveling of a once fine publication.
But don’t forget that NR is not all politics. The book reviews, articles on intellectual history, Jay Nordlinger’s pieces on classical music, the humorous columns, etc., are all first-class – some of the best writing out there, in my opinion.
That used to be why I continued to read the Daily Standard and the WSJ…
In conversation with an apparently well-educated and well-bred woman from Texas a year ago. We were both visiting Washington, and the conversation turned to Trump. “Well, thank God we’ve got a junk yard dog for a President. He may not be what you want — former State Department and all — but he’s what we need!”
Not really much to reply given the constrained social setting.But how do people like her think one can properly run an enormously complex system like the USG effectively with an ill-educated, self-centered, vindictive buffoon with a short attention span — dislike for reading extended briefs — and running a White House with a constant churn of subordinates, who leaked against him at an unprecedented rate. (And these were his people?) And it’s not as if there weren’t at least a few other qualified Republicans who might have been chosen. But of course, we must be saved from the Deep State, i.e., intelligent people who have devoted careers to trying to advance good administration and (at the Pentagon, and State, and, yes, at the CIA) promote the national interest, irrespective of the party in power. I’m all for the judges and the pro-life gestures. But there were alternatives to the very stable genius. Perhaps the real problem isn’t that Trump was president. Perhaps the real problem is that the Republican party and our disfunctional and increasingly corrupt system put him there.
Heh-heh. The stable genius makes the zombie look like, well, the walking dead….and you own it! Amazing.
“ we must be saved from the Deep State, i.e., intelligent people who have devoted careers to trying to advance good administration and (at the Pentagon, and State, and, yes, at the CIA) ”
Are you referring to the “good” corrupt folks at the Democratic controlled FBI and DOJ? Or the Obama infused military brass at the pentagon that spent more energy on critical race theory than on checking China’s rise in power?
If there is one (of many) things that Donald Trump has done for this country, it is to demonstrate how utterly and hopelessly corrupt the entire Washington corridor is. I had no idea how horribly corrupt our federal bureaucracy has become until Donald Trump. From FBI agents getting away with spying on Trump to Pharmaceuticals holding Covid vaccines so It hurts Trump’s election chances, the future for our country is bleak. And now with rampant voter fraud and millions at the border to replace the less woke members of the Dem coalition, we’re [in trouble]. I’d take DJT’s personality shortcomings and his style of governance over Biden and his agenda any day of the week, and twice on Sunday.
Bravo! This article detailing NR’s decline mirrors my own history, experiences and ultimate disappointment in National Review. For over 20 years I was a subscriber and read the magazine from cover to cover rarely skipping over an article. National Review always felt like a trusted friend who offered reassurance. I tie their decline to their anti-Trump obsession. Like the author, I too started out anti-Trump, however, I quickly became a supporter and grew more fervent in my support as President Trump governed as the most conservative and fearless president since Ronald Reagan. I am saddened that National Review is now more akin to Mother Jones magazine and doesn’t seem to care about it’s death spiral. I pray that once great institution can be revived and reformed. Until then they will just continue to stand atwart history bending over for the Left.
Pretty much agree with all this. I never had a NR subscription but would wind up buying 3-6 editions a year at books stores and faithfully followed National Review Online. Since 2015 or so, not so much. Two particular incidents alienated me:
1. The U-Haul/Ponnuru Disconnect: There are numerous critiques of Kevin D. Williamson’s expose’ on poor Whites in Appalachia. Although the faults they point out are valid, I had no qualm with KDW’s articles or his conclusion that these folks just need to put on their big boy pants and head out to where there are jobs or get a marketable education. What did grind my gears was at about the same time KDW’s now infamous U-Haul works were being printed, NR published a Ramesh Ponnuru article advocating for more “full ride” scholarships for minority students. Again, Ponnuru’s article was fine in isolation but I found it troubling this crew would tell one cohort to bootstrap themselves to success (a natural conservative constituency at that!) while advocating to drop more largess on a class of people who may come into the conservative fold in the next century!
2. NR’s Post Obergefell Re-Orientation: After the USSC discovered a gay marriage right there was a brief flurry of NRO articles criticizing the decision and a couple negative mentions of the Obama Administration’s over the top celebrations of their victory. After a couple days it was as if the National Review scribblers breathed a sigh of relief it was all over and they could get to the really important matters such as….capital gains tax cuts!
Since then I’ve become more disappointed and estranged from National Review. I haven’t purchased anything from them in over 5 years and only occasionally peek in at NRO if I can get a freebie!
Very interesting take on the plight at NR. Amusing to hear an author admit they enjoyed writing over one’s head presumably to indicate a far higher level of sophistication, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.
Mr. Deavel is on the mark regarding the direction of NR. NR started getting wobbly during the Bush years, I presume because the team adjusts philosophically to the leading conservative in power. When Trump gained power, the ultra uppity NR couldn’t support a guy who with a billion dollars, sounds more like a guy from across the tracks. New generations come into a publication and adjust to the left just as the nation has. We can thank all those liberal institutions of higher learning for teaching our best and brightest to sound ultra intellectual, yet spout utter nonsense.
Thanks for the history of what’s been going on with National Review. In college in the early 1960’s I dismissed it as “too conservative”, as I was a Radical Leftist then. Donald Trump’s speeches during the 2016 convinced me to vote for him, and since then I have discovered that “conservatives” (Tucker Carlson, Ann Coulter, Rand Paul, etc.) make much more sense than today’s leftists and are the bulwarks of our country’s freedom.
Good article.
We will (probably) need a decade or so before we acquire the perspective necessary to understand fully the causes of the rise of Trumpism and the new Republican Pary, the decline of the old Republican Party , and the rise of the Revolutionary Democrat Party (“RDP.”) The cause of NR’s self-inflicted demise is tied to all three of those political and cultural forces.
Pending that historical perspective, I agree with the commenter who argues that Trumpism best resembles a return to the federalist politics of Calvin Coolidge and that NR flatly rejects that heritage. To which I would add the arguments that NR failed to perceive the rapid rise of the RDP and, despite compelling evidence of the existential threat of the RDP, badly misjudged the capacity of the old Republican Party to counter that threat, both misjudgements due, no doubt, to a combination of hubris and careerism.
It is stunning to see so many at NR expressing an almost panicked surprise at the RDP. Still, none have have Col. Nicholson’s insight to reflect, “What have I done?”
Bill Buckley would be ashamed of Rich Lowry, sad too. My wife and I met him, he was a very humble gentleman, with incredible wisdom and superior wit. Mr Lowry would have been gone a long time ago if Mr Buckley were still alive. Mr. Lowry has none of those attributes, sadly. NR is not standing athwart anything remotely conservative. The NR stand on President Trump is something Mr Buckley would never support or condone. Their stand on Rush Limbaugh would sadden Mr. Buckley as well. Mr Buckley regularly brought a priest to say mass on the NR cruises too. Mr.Buckley would never say, or print such anti-Christian words before or after Mr. Limbaugh’s death. How very sad!
Finally someone has described, far better than could I, why I cancelled my NR subscription last Fall. Like Mr. Deavel, I somehow continue to receive the magazine even after cancelling; perhaps they hope for a change of heart. Then the magazine arrives, I look briefly for any articles of interest and, usually finding none, toss it directly in the recycle bin. NR is dead to me.
I gave up on National Review a few years ago. They are not worthy of a subscription.
Great article. You might have also mentioned the exiling of John Derbyshire, one of the best writers NRO had. Derbyshire’s act of heresy was an article (The Talk: Nonblack Version) that was published in another online magazine. Had it been published in NR, it would’ve been the best thing NR published in at least a decade.
It is a great sin to paint the mirror image of the “acceptable” color script on anything. Derb did it with relish and was promptly let go, presumably because NR didn’t want to stand that brashly athwart.
In the words of WFB, “cancel your own G—— subscription.”
It is a shame and continues to dumbfound me the need for some populists to demand that conservatives give up their principles and become Democrats with a thirst for power instead of maintaining a constitutional order and move the country in a conservative/libertarian direction. It is not National Review that has gone sour. It is people like David who hopefully as Lincoln observed is fooled some of the time……I hope not all of the time.
Brian, please elaborate on the conservative principles you refer to, and how Trump deviated from them?
They do have Victor Davis Hanson Podcast, by far the best and only thing I care to learn from that is NR related..
This article captures my sentiments about 90%. I started reading NR in 1972 and either subscribed or bought it at the news stand ever since. It, along with Human Events, defined what it was to be a “movement conservative.” But it has now fallen apart. Like the author, I did not renew but the magazine has continued to come for the last two months anyway. I am happy to see it go the way of The Weekly Standard. I long to ask the writers to tell me about their interview with the Fulton County Elections Director. I’ll bet they never talked to this person or to any of the witnesses to voter fraud. They just mouth the platitude that it didn’t happen, just like the liberals, and expect me to forget what I personally observed in intently following the returns in the key states on election night. The magazine has not mentioned the Time magazine article confirming that a cabal did plot to “reinforce” the election. The magazine has not discussed the year long effort by Democrats to change the voting laws in key states in contravention to our constitution. I too, noticed that it calls the Jan. 6 incident an armed insurrection and has failed to correct the false claims that five people were killed in the “storming.”
My thanks to the author for amplifying the dissatisfactions that prompted me months ago to remove National Review from my list of bookmarked publications. Believing in second chances, after reading your piece I took the occasion to revisit the site. I doubt I’ll do it again soon. I long since lost my appetite for whinging conservatism and leading from behind. Their cabal of mediocrities and too-busy Poloniuses have far too much of the Kurt Schleicher about them. The concept of government of the people, by the people, for the people has long been lost on them.
Here”s some news for conservatives: There is no such thing as a conservative “movement.” The only political movement in the U.S. is on the Left. Antifa and BLM have a movement. They DO things. They take action. They have donors who support activism, in the courts, and in the streets. Conservatives, by contrast, do not actually DO anything. Conservatism in America is only a network of web sites.
A, the good old days, like some here I was turned on to WFB back in the late 60s. My steelworker dad, who loved Bill Buckley said, “You need to see this guy who’s going to be on Carson tonight. He’s the real deal!” Of course since my dad recommended him, I didn’t watch, but a few years later I was a subscriber to his magazine and an avid reader of all things Buckley. On a brief holiday visit to NYC I went up to the NR offices. The great man wasn’t there, but Ms. Bronson let me into his office and 5he boardroom. I sat in his chair!
I subscribed to NR for over 20 years, but gave up as the last century came to a close. It was shocking and disheartening to witness NR becoming an establishment rag.
What a bunch of stale weenies!
My problem with NR goes al the way back to a review they did of a Bob Dylan, circa 1980.
They labeled Dylan a communist based on the fact that he wrote a song about Mozambique which was semi-communist at the time. Dylan’s whole schtick is based on him being ideologically agnostic, even while liberals forever claim him to be one of their own. I decided NR was simply out of touch and living in the 50s.
Oddly, I have read a positive article about Dylan in NR many, many years later but the damage was done.
I have moved on…
What you miss, is that Trump broke conservatism in the US.
We no longer have a unified ‘right wing’ political movement.
We have a conservative movement, and a populist movement, both of whom hate each-other more than they dislike the Left.
Josh Hawley has more in common with Bernie Sanders than he does with Ben Sasse – and apparently likes it that way.
People who refer to themselves as ‘conservative’ (but who are really Trumpy populists) are now saying the same stuff about Iraq and Afghanistan that Cindy Sheehan did, and sound more like Howard Dean or John Edwards when they talk about the economy than *any* Republican ever should.
The problem is, neither group has enough votes to win on it’s own… Which means the Left wins by default…
The “populist” side of the conservative movement (80%) very much dislikes the left more than the “conservative” side of the conservative movement (20%). The real shame is that the converse is not true….and that’s where NR has gone astray.
If you are going to be upset about the Steyn case, at least be truthful about how bad Steyn’s defense has been:
“Steyn, when questioned during his deposition in the case, admitted that at the time of his writing he had never read any of the investigations by the American agencies, which he called ‘that bewildering array of acronyms beginning with “N”.'”
. . .
“In his new motion, Mann argues that the defendants’ positions in the case have been weakened significantly because their own witnesses declined to testify that the Penn State scientist committed scientific misconduct or fraud.”
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/07022021/michael-mann-defamation-lawsuit-competitive-enterprise-institute-national-review/
We don’t need instruction on how to lose gracefully. National Review no longer serves a useful purpose.
I place National Review’s decline further back than most commenters here.
I began subscribing near the end of the 1960s. I looked forward to writings by Frank Meyer, James Burnham, Russell Kirk, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (with whom I later became friends), and Buckley himself.
I remained a subscriber for a long time but let my subscription lapse well before the younger Bush became president. It wasn’t the influx of neo-conservatism that decided things for me. The chief problem was Buckley himself. It was he who led a slow move away from the conservatism of the magazine’s first three decades. There’s no point now in trying to parse why, but that’s what happened.
The change was evident in Buckley’s newspaper columns, where he became lazy. Back then, he wrote two columns weekly, He seemed to lose interest in them or in the conservatism of old–maybe both. A clue to how little thought he then put into his columns was found in the opening catchphrase of many of them: “Regarding X, a few observations . . .”
As the columnists and editors I first came to know gradually retired or died off (or were sacked, such as Joe Sobran), their replacements, in every case that I can think of, were people of lower caliber, both intellectually and as wordsmiths. The magazine ended down a notch. In later decades it declined further, as the replacements of the first generation were replaced by yet another generation.
Bill was fooled by the social climber into believing Rich would carry the Torch. Big mistake. Rich fired everyone worth reading.
On the plus side Rich got Rich and achieved the status of DC insider he always craved.
They lost me with their Never Trump issue. Jonah Goldberg and David French have a clinical antiseptic powerless conservatism that fails to address everyday issues that affect people. Kevin Williamson writes clickbait that gets removed because of its outlandishness. Anything written by Rich Lowry or The Editors is guaranteed to put me to sleep dues to its Caspar Milqtoast qualities. I go to Nationalreview.com to learn what not to believe.
The magazine keeps hammering away at Donald Trump, claiming falsely that he wanted Republican officials to “throw the election to him.”
It’s not a false claim. Here’s the Republican, conservative, Trump-supporting Arizona House speaker’s account:
https://www.azleg.gov/press/house/54LEG/2R/201204STATEMENT.pdf
Excerpt:
This week, Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, and others representing President Donald Trump came to
Arizona with a breathtaking request: that the Arizona Legislature overturn the certified results of
last month’s election and deliver the state’s electoral college votes to President Trump. The rule
of law forbids us to do that.
Yes, I discovered Wm. F. Buckley and NR while in high school and was a loyal print subscriber UNTIL the “Against Trump” fiasco. They did their LEVEL BEST to elect Hillary Clinton.
After that, I want them OUT OF BUSINESS. They are nothing but grifters, a-grift in the sea of inhumanity of the Upper East Side and Beltway putrid “establishment”.
Pity poor Wm. F. Buckley. His legacy is ruined by [them]. He made a horrible choice with Lowry….
Conservatives? They’re leftists now who did their LEVEL BEST to elect Creepy Joe.
OUT OF BUSINESS.
I started reading National Review in 1975. Conservatism then was viewed as, ahem, Neathanderthalic. But it was just the opposite. It was irreverent, urbane, funny, well written, and not just about politics. Human Events was more of a tabloid type publication for conservatives that was more news oriented than NR. Its editor, Stan Evans, was a superb intellect. The WSJ editorial page gets an honorable mention as the only other widely read paper that espoused a conservative philosophy. But NR was the trailblazer. Then along came The Alternative (the precursor to The American Spectator), Commentary, and the rise of neo-conservatism that put Reagan in the WH. Then the explosion of alternative media that gradually made NR irrelevant. For an excellent history on this topic, one should read George Nash’s history of conservatism post 1945 (I read it but cannot remember the exact title).
Agreed, if you read National Review, you must ignore “The Week,” which tells the views of the editors and most recently was the first 12 pages of the magazine — unless there is a picture of a pretty girl, and you can look at that.
The lead article by Kevin Williamson about Minneapolis recently was good background for understanding progressivism and Minneapolis.
James Lileks, who writes the humor column “Athwart,” and appears in the middle of the magazine, is reliably funny, good, common sense humor, makes you laugh.
David Mamet in his column in the back of the magazine is worthwhile.
The David Hitchens retrospective by Neal B. Freeman is quite worthwhile.
So NR’s editors, those who write, should leave. Those who choose worthwhile authors from outside should stay and do that.
All sniffing against the American people should be a trip to the door.
I think that this article is excellent. I resubscribed about a year ago and then unsubscribed a few months later. The author I most appreciated was and is Kyle Smith. I would gladly follow his writings anywere
Bill Buckley’s obvious blueblood aristocracy was endearing both because it was so effortless and because he was so unfailingly good-humored. The efforts of the entire rogue’s gallery of self-important and self-anointed “real conservatives” to demonstrate endlessly their disdain for the crude and uncultured Donald Trump and all of us toothless yokels who misguidedly cheered his victory and continue to support him, are ugly, petty, petulant, mean-spirited, and an affront to the memory of WFB.
They only have a handful of good writers left. I didn’t vote for Trump either time, but they were so behind the curve with the pre-election lawsuits by the Democrats, it was really discouraging. For them to say there was no voter fraud, parroting the mainstream media who never investigated it, was pathetic. 2020 was the worst year ever to be a whistleblower, at least in my lifetime in this country.
On virtually every issue accept abortion, there really is just one party nowadays. Both spend like there is no tomorrow.
Maddy Kearns is great!
I heartily agree. NRO has spawned, and remains on very friendly terms with, rabid Never-Trumpers. Many of the writers and editors there (MBD and Dan M. especially) seemed to especially relish twisting the knife in Trump’s back hoping to distance themselves from ‘Trump-The-Barbarian’ and remain morally and intellectually superior to the ‘deplorable Neanderthals’ who might still support Trump. They tended to approach the election as just another theoretical bull session in which real-world consequences would not accrue, or if they did, would somehow be far more acceptable than enduring the cretinous Trump’s antics for four more years.
Well… here we are. We now have a president who staffed his entire administration with Obama holdover ideologues, who is actively subverting the law re. immigration, who is enabling Iran, fighting Israel, blowing out spending IOT bail out the leftist states, ruling by diktat ( EO’s which Biden used to claim were the tools of a dictator), ending the filibuster, pushing for the end of 1A and 2A rights, eliminating any means of improving election integrity, etc. etc. etc. All of these consequences were easily foreseen by even the most casual observer of politics yet for the NRO writers and staff, when push came to shove, they clearly preferred this outcome and these consequences to being associated with Trump. Worst of all, who are the ‘fair-minded’ counterparts on the left? Which leftist outlet allowed harsh criticism of Biden? The answer is, “There are none.” Biden didn’t even have to campaign. No tough questions, even during debates. So, every leftist media outlet attacks Trump 99.9% and Biden 0% while the NRO piles on and attacks Trump 50% of the time as well. And these are supposed to be the defenders of conservatism??
So, like the author of this article, I ended my subscription to NRO. I’m not a Trump support (I have a hard time trusting in any person enough to blindly follow them) but I am a realist. Trump was the best and only choice I had to stop all of the craziness and dangerous policy that is now crashing down on us and is quickly speeding the collapse of the fundamental nature of our country, our God-given liberties, and our economic viability.
Now, when I see a link to an NRO article that rails against what Biden’s policies are doing to the country, all I can think is, “You guys helped make all this possible…! What did you think was going to happen???”
Signed,
Nattering Neanderthal
This article reflects my feelings about NR, over the years it has lost it’s soul …… a similar fate seems to have over taken “the Economist” magazine ….. once it seems like a modern day magazine edited by Adam Smith (1776), but it seems to have wondered of course….
It’s not and never has been a conservative magazine, but I feel the same way about “The Stranger”. It was always liberal, but it didn’t used to be quite so partisan. It used to be an independent thinking, liberal/socialist publication that was as quick to criticize the emissions standards of the Port of Seattle with respect to trucking as whatever the Republicans were doing, and also highlighted the often forgotten role of manufacturing, transportation and other blue-collar physical economy in our American prosperity. It held real, honest, deep discussions about things like the effect that zoning regulations have on the availability of affordable housing. When Trump got elected though, they completely lost the plot and just became yet another nauseating Democrat rag assimilated by Nancy Pelosi.
There is an alternative outlet:Chronicles. Fearless,compelling,and surgically adept at identifying the cancers eroding our freedoms.
Thanks for this piece together. Your analysis and writing (as amended) are spot on.
Your reminiscences about cherishing the dead tree NR copies in high school really resonated with me. As a politically aware, conservative HS student in the early 80s, I had a subscription to the magazine and would devour each new issue pretty much the moment it landed in my mailbox. One article in particular still makes me smile when I think of it. It listed and briefly described 26 principles of conservatism. I felt like the author was reading my mind or at least was a soul mate. I still remember my dad’s shocked face when I excitedly told him about the article and suggested he read it.
5-10 years ago, I loved reading Jonah Goldberg and David French. And Kevin Williamson.
Then, something happened.
Trump has a way of testing people, bringing out their true character. I don’t like what’s been revealed about JG, DF, and KDW. Nor NR. I have been a subscriber for years but will not be renewing.
Your high school crush on NR was the same as mine, only mine began in 1969. My subscription started in 1974 and ended roughly in 2000. I found NR had lost its edge and had become a narrow cast vehicle. It seemed to be a vanity project for a few writers who wanted to be TV humorists. They spent too much time on the fluff of debating with other media and not on substantive issues. Oh well.
Wait… National Review was supposed to be conservative? This is the first I’d heard of this.
Steyn was hard to work for but you like Robert Novak? Novak wasn’t called the Prince of Darkness because he was a prince.
I said there were “rumors” that he was hard to work with. I don’t know him and people who do tell me the rumors are false. Re: Robert Novak, yes, he was a tough nut. He had a late-in-life conversion to Catholic Christianity that did, I hear, soften him.
NR banned John Derbyshire when he revealed his rational and moderate racism. What happened to free speech at NR?
Well done – you have captured my thoughts exactly. I stuck it out with the kids at NR out of loyalty to Bill but their “Never Trumpism” and cover providing for the intellectually bankrupt Republican Party has made the magazine unreadable. I read the book reviews and into the trash.
In the immortal words of Bill Buckley I am “cancelling my own damn subscription”.
I reread this today because my sadness at the destructive fumblings of the current administration, coupled with my irritation at liberals’ ignorance of reality and facts about the fumblings, have made me fearful and in a constant rage.
I was a loyal contributor to, reader of, and cruiser with National Review since I first subscribed to the magazine in 1969.
I have taken issue with many editorial choices since 2008 but still felt loyal.
When Trump showed up, I was wary, like most conservatives. But he has proven to be very good for our side and, boy, do I miss him today. I actually love him. When I see TV programs reviewing his style, i laugh and love him all the more. He did so many good things any conservative should celebrate. To criticize him when the alternative was unacceptable was irresponsible in the highest.
My official break with NR came early in 2020 when the magazine decided to insult Trump in The Week (anonymously) over Covid. I searched previous issues to try to find antecedents for the insults and found none. Yet The Week made it seem like common knowledge. That began my separation from a magazine and an institution that I had cherished for more than half a century
What a loss. But alas it was NR’s fault.
Hello David. I just now discovered your article about NR. It is still most timely as I have been pondering renewing my long-expired subscription to the magazine. Your writing convinced me otherwise. They’re dead but just don’t know it. To put NR in theological terms “the glory has departed”. Thank you for a fine article,
Excellent article which I agree with completely. I discovered National Review in college and was a subscriber for 30 years. The magazine just became totally gutless and more concerned about looking righteous to all the best people than it cared about fighting for truth, conservatism and our beloved Republic. A sad ending for a once great institution.