In front of a train station magazine rack, I encountered Intercollegiate Review last week after a 40-year separation. The design had not changed, neither had the quality of its writing.These shots of nostalgia are overwhelming when they occur.
IR can be read in one sitting, this Fall 2008 issue running to about 60 pages. The content consists of long-form essays by professors you'll not have heard of, quite set in the old style of the early 1960s rather than in the childish punditry that fills up magazines today. If I want a meme, I have to dig it out and when I find it, behold the glow of a prizewinner.
The magazine has its own website; past issues are archived, any new issue is not online. It's a portal, so sister serials can be accessed at will.
Getting into the September 1965 issue, mainly Willmoore Kendall's essay, "How to Read Richard Weaver," I was intrigued by a footnote citing a 1965 article in Modern Age attacking Neoconservatives. Instant gratification: I popped over to the Modern Age archives on the same website and there was the article. This is how archives are supposed to work.
The Intercollegiate Review, as well as Modern Age, were/are outside of National Review's Conservative Movement: a haven for refuseniks of the Right. Kendall in particular is rich in his scorn for Bill Buckley's Movement project. The linked article, for instance inventories those Movement errors of which Richard Weaver never partook. Kendall renders them as (my paraphrasing):
(1) Upholding the "Liberal lie" according to which the American tradition is one of "individual rights"
(2) Erecting a "right wing ideology" in which government is "evil" and freedom is "good"
(3) Spreading the notion that the Left is winning, ergo conservatives are fighting a gallant "rearguard action" against superior forces
(4) Conceiving the struggle as a conquest from without as the Right seeks sway over a vast, inherently Left wing populace looking to sell itself to the highest bidder
(5) Cultivating an anti-intellectualism out of rejection that the best discussion will win and the best books will prevail
(6) Operating out of an economic and social identity as professional "Right winger" instead of out of the workaday world, out of an individual's natural sphere of competence and experience
(7) Confusing American tradition with what one likes in the American past rather than what men made into American tradition by their acts
(8) Collaborating with a Liberal establishment that keeps lists of acceptable and unacceptable conservatives; appearing on their programs, acting as selected spokesmen, presenting the respectable face of someone "who really agrees with us on fundamentals."
You can see how far afield this is from the content of your American Spectator, National Review, Weekly Standard, even American Conservative. And so you can see how necessary it is as well.
Good to see the strain alive. IR has even launched a new website: First Principles. May it thrive.
