Re: us.

The Making of the American Conservative Mind: National Review and Its Times, by Jeffrey Hart (ISI, 394 pp., $28)

FIFTY years ago last autumn, William F. Buckley Jr. launched a "journal of opinion" for "radical conservatives." National Review, he announced in its opening issue, stood "athwart history, yelling Stop." Fifty years later, his daring venture had not only defied the tides of history but had altered their course.

How did this happen? Like many another little magazine, National Review could easily have foundered on the shoals of ideological disaster. It could have become a voice of carping irrelevance, the plaything of an isolated sect. Instead, it grew to refine and then to redefine the mainstream of American public life. In The Making of the American Conservative Mind, Jeffrey Hart aims to tell us why.

In many ways Hart is ideally equipped for this task. A reader of National Review since its inception, and one of its senior editors since 1969, he has both observed and participated in its development. Along the way he has come to know nearly all the intellectuals who put their imprint on its pages. His appraisals, in this book, of such men as Russell Kirk, Frank Meyer, Willmoore Kendall, and James Burnham are astute and illuminating. For these alone his book should not be missed.

The Making of the American Conservative Mind is not a formal, scholarly history. Part chronicle, part memoir, it might best be described as a rich, discursive meditation on National Review's encounter with the world. How Buckley's magazine dealt with the John Birch Society, Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and much more: All are part of HaWs kaleidoscopic narrative.

His book is, however, a meditation with a theme. For Hart, National Review's half-century of public engagement conveys a lesson. There is, he avers, a moral to the story. As Hart sees it, the history of National Review is a "Quest Narrative: the quest for a politically viable and thoughtful American conservatism." In pursuit of this objective, he says, the magazine has repeatedly oscillated between an "ideal right-wing Paradigm and realistic Possibility." Time and again it has been forced to choose between ideological purity and what Buckley called "the politics of reality." This enduring tension between Idea (or desire) and Actuality was related, in HaWs telling, to another question: Just what kind of journal of opinion did National Review aspire to be--the voice of a backwater "bayou" or a guide for the national "mainstream"? Did the journal wish to convert the liberal Establishment it steadily assailed or to destroy it and replace it with something else? Did it hope to speak to an educated elite or to the "silent majority"?

In shaping the magazine's outlook and message, no one (save Buckley) was more crucial, according to Hart, than James Burnham. Readers of National Review know Burnham as the magazine's foreign-policy guru and author of a regular column on "The Third World War" (i.e., the Cold War). But as Hart demonstrates, the former Trotskyist's influence at the magazine was even greater than those roles might suggest. Tirelessly he pushed it, both in style and substance, toward the "mainstream," and away from what he deemed to be dogmatic posturing. Quietly and persistently he lobbied for what Hart calls "prudential," "flexible," and "strategic" conservatism, in opposition to the stubborn, sectarian "utopianism" of some of his colleagues. At a time when many at NR were ardent Goldwaterites, Burnham pined for Nelson Rockefeller for president. The feisty journal never went that far, but Burnham succeeded (says Hart) in convincing Buckley that National Review, to be influential, must always maneuver within sight of the political center.

Burnham is clearly Hart's hero, a man he hails as "indispensable" to National Review's success. Not surprisingly, Hart examines the magazine's encounter with "actuality" through Burnhamite lenses. He argues, for instance, that National Review was quite wrong about its early bete noire, Dwight D. Eisenhower, whom the magazine refused to endorse for reelection in 1956. Relying upon recent revisionist historical scholarship, Hart lauds Eisenhower as a model of "prudential conservatism"--and as one of the three most successful presidents of the 20th century. Similarly, he interprets National Review's obstreperous defense of Joseph McCarthy as an early episode in the magazine's "recurrent struggles between wish and reality."

More controversially, Hart bluntly accuses the contemporary right-to-life movement--an integral part of conservative reality since the 1970s--of "utopian," even "Jacobinical" tendencies. Invoking the sainted name of Edmund Burke, he asserts that a complete ban on abortion in America will never happen. The Roe v. Wade decision, he says, and the "women's revolution" that preceded it reflect "a relentlessly changing social actuality" that simply cannot be revoked by legal fiat. The women of America, he opines, "will not surrender control of their reproductive capacity."

Curiously, Hart, a Roman Catholic convert, never really addresses the morality of abortion. Instead, he offers William James's "philosophy of experience" as "a sounder guide to morality" than natural-law thinking and appears to counsel accommodation to putatively irreversible social trends.

Summing up his excursion through National Review's history, Hart asserts that the magazine taught American conservatives "how to think"--that is, how to argue their case in the arena and avoid the pitfalls of doctrinaire "utopianism." On the whole he is proud of the magazine's extraordinary achievements. It courageously resisted the "hard utopianism" of the Communists and the "soft utopianism" of the liberals. It defended the validity of the nation-state and the need for national defense. It championed free-market economics and successfully subverted socialist orthodoxy.

But Hart is critical, too, and worried. Over the years, in his opinion, National Review has neglected aesthetic issues and conservation of the natural environment. Above all, he is dismayed by what he regards as a rising tide of unconservative ideology and sentiment on the American right--a tide embodied, for him, in the "hard Wilsonian" foreign policy of George W. Bush and the idealistic fervor of his Evangelical allies.

This leads us to the moral of Hart's story, which erupts with muffled fury toward the end of his book. "Ideology," he warns, "is always wrong because it edits reality and paralyzes thought." Wilsonianism, he adds--whether "hard" or "soft"--is "a snare and a delusion" in foreign policy and "far from conservative" in spirit. And Protestant Evangelicalism--a crucial element in today's conservative coalition--he deems inherently "antitraditional" and not reliably conservative at all. About the faith-driven "actuality" of contemporary conservatism Hart, the disciple of Burnham, is an unhappy man.

In part his discomfiture illustrates how profoundly the landscape of American conservatism has changed since 1955. In National Review's first 25 years, conservatives were a defiant minority comprising three elements: libertarians, traditionalists, and Cold Warriors. Since 1980 two more have come aboard: the neoconservatives and the interfaith Religious Right. During National Review's second quarter-century, intellectual conservatism has become more majoritarian and less "aristocratic" in its self-understanding, and more hopeful, even ambitious, in its bearing. Meanwhile conservative institutions, activists, and culture warriors have proliferated from the Beltway to the blogosphere. Although National Review remains highly influential in this new environment (and increasingly so through National Review Online), its original role as the movement's tutor and counselor--its Burnhamite role--is no longer uncontested. And Burnham-style "strategic" conservatism--so dominant during the magazine's "outsider" years--has given way to a politics of greater expectations.

What, then, should we make of Hart's interpretation of NR's first half-century? Certainly the tug-of-war between ideals and "actuality" has been one theme in National Review's history, and one worth pondering during our current discontents. As a corrective to ideological hubris, Hart's morality tale is instructive. But prudential conservatism teaches more than one lesson. "The politics of reality," unchecked, can be a snare. Realism itself can become a confining ideology. Adjustment to "actuality" carries its own peril in a too-easy assumption that the future must always resemble the present.

Hart extols Ronald Reagan as a prudent conservative, and Reagan certainly was not reckless. But he was also an optimistic, proactive, and quintessentially idealistic conservative, determined to alter the reality of the Cold War. And he did.

American conservatism at its Reaganite best is a combination of impulses--of realism and idealism, of prudence and hope, of worldly sobriety and faith-based aspiration. If National Review can keep this reality in focus, it will have much to teach us during its next 50 years.

But first, let us pause and enjoy Hart's spirited stroll down Memory Lane.

Mr. Nash is the author of The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945.