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Who Remembers Clinton Rossiter?
I was trying to baffle someone else at the conference, saying ‘Look, the thing you think conservatism should be is the thing the conservatives made a point of writing off in the 1950’s. You’re a neo-Rossiterian.’
...liberals, and the likes of David Brooks, often complain that conservatives have recently lost their way, turning radical. Oh, for the good old days when William F. Buckley could be counted on to write the crazies - the John Birch Society, and Ayn Rand - out of the movement, for the sake of preserving some modicum of sanity. ... The truth is that William F. Buckley wrote Rand out of the movement because she was an atheist, not because she was nuts. The trouble with the Birchers wasn’t that they were off the reservation but that they were perilously close to being on it. What Robert Welch believed wasn’t so different from what Buckley believed, but Buckley had the knack for saying it in a way that allowed, at the very least, for delicacy concerning more paranoid aspects and implications.
...
What liberals are hoping for, when they hearken back to the good old days, is not some of that good old Buckley non-craziness but something more like what Clinton Rossiter and Peter Viereck offered. But Buckley had the good sense to kill that off decades ago, since it was at odds with the spirit of the conservatism he wanted to champion.
Full review: crookedtimber.org/2012/09/29/who-remembers-clinton-rossiter
...liberals, and the likes of David Brooks, often complain that conservatives have recently lost their way, turning radical. Oh, for the good old days when William F. Buckley could be counted on to write the crazies - the John Birch Society, and Ayn Rand - out of the movement, for the sake of preserving some modicum of sanity. ... The truth is that William F. Buckley wrote Rand out of the movement because she was an atheist, not because she was nuts. The trouble with the Birchers wasn’t that they were off the reservation but that they were perilously close to being on it. What Robert Welch believed wasn’t so different from what Buckley believed, but Buckley had the knack for saying it in a way that allowed, at the very least, for delicacy concerning more paranoid aspects and implications.
...
What liberals are hoping for, when they hearken back to the good old days, is not some of that good old Buckley non-craziness but something more like what Clinton Rossiter and Peter Viereck offered. But Buckley had the good sense to kill that off decades ago, since it was at odds with the spirit of the conservatism he wanted to champion.
Full review: crookedtimber.org/2012/09/29/who-remembers-clinton-rossiter