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February 26, 2008
William F. Buckley Jr., who founded National Review in 1955, can be considered the intellectual father to American conservatism. If Christian piety and anti-communism were Buckley's twin pillars of conservatism, then its other columns were opposition to the New Deal (welfare state) and nativism. Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind, traced an intellectual bloodline from Edmund Burke to the Old Right in the early 1950s, and it challenged the popular notion that no coherent conservative tradition existed in the United States and showed that liberalism was not the sole intellectual tradition in the United States. William F. Buckley Jr built on this tradition by standing athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no other is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.
Nativism lead to him into the swampland of racism athwarting the history of civil rights through strongly supporting the segregationist South. Consider, for example, this National Review editorial from 1957 (cited in Paul Krugman's recent book The Conscience of a Liberal):
The central question that emerges—and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalog of the rights of American citizens, born Equal—is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. …
National Review believes that the South's premises are correct. If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened. It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority. Sometimes it becomes impossible to assert the will of a minority, in which case it must give way; and the society will regress; sometimes the numerical minority cannot prevail except by violence: then it must determine whether the prevalence of its will is worth the terrible price of violence.
Buckley promoted the idea of fusionism, whereby different schools of conservatives, including libertarians, would work together to combat what were seen as their common opponents.
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He has a lot to answer for in creating the NR which is now the pole around which all the psycho-paths on the "right" congregate.