What National Review has always been for is limited government, authentic federalism, limited spending, a strong national defense, a respect for cultural pieties, civility and civil order, religious freedom, the Constitution properly construed, and mostly just leaving people alone, as well an understanding that to be free first you have to be born.

It’s been some thirty years since I’ve called myself ‘a Conservative’, by which I would mean a person of the party of Ronald Reagan. These days, when pressed, I simply say ‘I’m conservative’. The change was a process, not an event. The reason for it—from noun to adjective—is three-fold.

First, I’ve come to hate—that is, really despise—ideology: for example, I could never withhold an opinion (as an ideologue does) until I found out what the Conservative stand was. (That check-your-brain-at-the-door pseudo-think is for liberals.)  Second, closely related to the first, is my hatred of movements, the progeny of ideology. The third reason is the simplest: The party of Reagan no longer exists.

The exception to this noun-to-adjective switch—and really not an exception at all—is religion, religious belief being about dogma in the first place and its embodiment being a movement by definition. Moreover, as a Catholic I, speaking for myself, can attest to the fact that this one movement should be enough for anyone. I know: here many will say, that’s the problem, a confusion of socio-political ideology with religion, with all its cults, saviors, heresies, indoctrinations, excommunications and the like. Socio-political ideologies simply will not stay in their lanes.

Lately, and even adjectivally, we have seen much lexical confusion, not to say misappropriation. No dictionary helps, but there are beacons that can still light the conceptual path: among the non-religious ones The Spectator, The New Criterion, The Claremont Review, The Imaginative Conservative, and Quillette come readily to mind. They are strong but do not have the pedigree of the one I knew first and that first lit—indeed helped forge—the early path.

So, since memory is identity, lately I delved into old issues of National Review, issues old enough to pre-date my switch from noun to adjective. I’ve been reading the magazine for sixty years… almost: I dropped my subscription several years after William Buckley departed, picking it up again when the editors disowned Donald Trump for, among other reasons, not being a true Conservative or, in my mind, conservative. (What he is is for others to say.)

I first came to NR as a seventeen-year-old not having heard of conservatism, let alone thinking of myself as of its ilk. I came to see, and still do, that, given a certain hierarchy of values, being conservative is simply to conform to common sense and Natural Law. But I wondered what I could learn (or be reminded of; after all, Dr. Johnson tells us that people need to be reminded more often than instructed) from my ground-level experience during those tender years.

Now, this meditation is not about Conservatism (let alone the ex-President), that-ism being the sure indication of a movement. Rather it is about being conservative, which I think of as a pre-disposition towards that hierarchy I’ve mentioned: for example (and to vastly over-simplify), that freedom matters more than equality. Along the way, Burke, Kirk’s conservative mind, Nash’s history, and Nisbet’s philosophical inquiry helped, of course, but as dispositive as they were, none was ground level. Here I immediately was reminded that no hot topic was overlooked. There was nothing dodgy about NR.

Like many people I tend to get lost in the old: memories, museums, bookstores, newspapers, magazines. (Even as a child: is that part of being conservative?) In this case, fortunately, I was limited by the very small collection of old NRs that I had saved, not least because they went back to my beginnings, where I once again encountered an all-star roster, including Frank Meyer, Russell Kirk, James Burnham, Hugh Kenner, Guy Davenport, and Kurt Vonnegut. I learned that Meyer and Burnham had been Communists, the former a flame thrower, the later an influential analyst of the dynamics of socio-cultural and international structures. (His biography by my former colleague Daniel Kelly is a page-turner.) Kirk (no sentimentalist: that was for the Left) wrote with genuine heart. Heavy hitters all.

Along with these was Jeffrey Hart, another take-no-prisoners thinker whose “Re-Birth of Christ” (included in a special edition of the magazine under that name; it ought to be re-published) introduced me to C. S. Lewis and so changed my life. From them all I learned that policy is not the only differentia separating Left and Right. Sentimentalism is another (if you feel strongly, especially exhibitionistically, you must be right), along with smugness, self-righteousness and a view of human nature: No, I would argue, all people are not ‘basically good’, Shmendrick.

NR writers were rarely mere Abstractionists. Rights matter, but actual human beings matter more, so let us understand the proper order of things, from nation to culture to society to communities to families, and thence to the basis of it all, the individual, who is no abstraction. A reader would discern the pattern in every section of the magazine, from The Week in Review to Books, Arts and Manners. One could skip about and find even the ads interesting. (In my case one for The Conservative Book Club made a difference, by offering, for example, Thomas Molnar’s foundational Utopia: The Perennial Heresy).

Many others populated the several mansions of the magazine, including Buckley’s family. Aloise Buckley Heath’s Christmas letters were side-splitting, not only with humor (a hallmark of the magazine, especially in The Week in Review and much of what Buckley wrote) but with warmth, too. Above all, though, was intellectual enrichment. I would read other journals – The New Republic, The New York Review of Books – but none provided the excitement of engagement as did NR which, as counter-cultural as it was (and remains), had to be better: tougher, more cogent, more supple and, yes, more entertaining, all unapologetically.

I must pass over many names, many journalistic devices (the Trans-o-Gram, which I thought absurd, and the annual index to that year’s content, as well as the robust letters section, now missing). Even many controversies mean nothing now, except for the principles at stake. (Buckley on Saul Alinsky is a must-read.) Already I’ve gone on longer than planned, but not so long that I will let slip by five items that remain momentous in my memory and still kindle admiration.

The first of these was NR’s rebuke and dismissal of the John Birch Society (October 19, 1965). Buckley always cleaned his own house, a lesson to those who have come after him. The second was the Special Election Issue dealing with the candidacies of Abraham Beam, John Lindsay, and Buckley for Mayor of New York City. Buckley left behind only ashes, though Lindsay was elected on the Liberal line. Buckley’s The Unmaking of a Mayor remains a classic of political reportage (and Clare Booth Luce’s review a masterstroke, but do get your hands on Buckley’s “statement to the press,” wherein he eviscerates the claim that he was responsible for Beame’s loss).

The third was an editorial arguing to give Japan the Bomb (November 19, 1965), an argument still urgently resonant. The fourth was the Tenth Anniversary Issue (November 30, 1965), with a photo array the splendor of which was exceeded only by its intellectual stellatum (including Steve Allen and Theodore H. White among other liberal attendees). The intellectual history in this issue alone warrants republication as a book.

The fifth remains the saddest: a memorializing (November 1, 1966), on its tenth anniversary, of the failed Hungarian revolution of 1956. We would not see its like again until . . . well, we would see too much of its like, in Viet Nam and Afghanistan. Who now knows of our craven inactivity? Ah, of course, the enemy does.

In a nutshell, I found the anti-narcissistic, anti-solipsistic, anti-exhibitionistic, anti-collectivistic, and, above all, anti-communistic flavors (the only good Commie was, and remains, a dead one) that already tumble within my palette and still do. And I learned that all these toxins came, and still come, from the Left.

That’s a lot of ‘antis’, I know. What NR was for is limited government, a strong Tenth Amendment (that is, authentic federalism), limited spending, a strong national defense (including of the West), a respect for cultural pieties, civility and civil order, religious freedom, the Constitution properly construed, and mostly just leaving people alone (another anti-, in this case social engineering), as well an understanding that to be free first you have to be born.

I find reminders of how intellectually thrilling it was, when I was young, as I recovered nugget after nugget: ideas, policies, names, engagements and especially arguments (my pedagogical meat). That was then, and so it remains, with this caveat: NR (thankfully) no longer seems as tied, if tied at all, to the GOP: it could say the party left it, as Reagan had said of the Democrats. (No matter: I have never been much of a Party person.)

I would encounter this mass intellectual muscle, wit and learning long before I published some nine pieces in my favorite magazine. (Many seamlessly edited, and thereby improved, by the late Linda Bridges, a dear friend and a colleague from the New York C. S. Lewis Society, the founding of which she midwifed.) That I am somehow among them is deeply gratifying. That the magazine has sustained its integrity, with a daunting continuity of mission, tone, and bedrock value, is even more so. A reliable beacon indeed.

Dr. Johnson was right.

James Como’s most recent books are C.S. Lewis: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press) and Mystical Perelandra: My Lifelong Reading of C. S. Lewis and His Favorite Book (Winged Lion Press).

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The featured image is a photograph of William F. Buckley taken on May 28, 1969, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.