The Right Stuff

My bother is the biggest Bushie I know. He is one of those young libertarian-semi-social-conservative-non-religious-pro-defense kind of guys. He is also the kind of guy how would have pictures of Bush, Cheney, Reagan, and Nixon in his apartment. More or less he knows the history of the conservative movement but he is a little fuzzy on some of the ancient history (who isn't these days? I mean does any one really care if Robert Welch called Eisenhower a communist agent?) To expand his knowledge of the right I decided to get him the W F Buckly's novel, Getting It Right. The story is a classic boy, who happens to work for the John Birch Society, meets girl, who happens to work for Ayn Rand. Well After I bought it I thought about how little I know about that period, and I started to read it. The drama is alright, the boy-girl romance is natural and there are a lot of funny jokes at the expense of Ayn Rand. What does make to book so readable, however, is all the history of the republican party. It is amazing to think how different conservatism is now. And reading it I cannot help but think that I do not fit in with these old conservatives. Father Neuhaus always says, that he and many of the so-called neoconservatives never left the Democratic Party, but the Democratic Party left them. After they fought for civil rights (and against such conservatives as Thormond, Buckley, Welch) the future neocons where marginal by Roe v. Wade.

Any way getting back to the book. It gives a lot of insight into a movement that looked remarkably like a communist student movement in 1880's Paris in its early days. It is amazing that the right got over its fear of reds, and support for segregation to become the main public force in the nation. There is also much information about the great figures of early conservatism, and sometimes contemporary conservatives. Buckley not only puts himself in to the novel, but also Whittaker Chambers, Alan Greenspan, Ayn Rand, Robert Welch, Barry Goldwater, Ludwig von Mises all show up in the book in some way. And they show up in contexts not unlike this,

Only God could reproach Ayn Rand, and He does not exist. Aristotle might have tried it, but it would have been presumptuous, because Aristotle didn't get it all correct, wandering off into cosmology, inquiring into prime movers, etc., etc.