Dan and I
I landed in America in 1983 and my first shack was the top floor of an Upper East Side brownstone.
An American couple with kids out of the nest graciously offered it to me for the symbolic 200 bucks a month. Prominent folks with roots in my starting country fixed it for me so I’d have a power start.
It was a power node alright. My host was a Princeton professor, his brother was JFK’s speechwriter, I mentioned them in the Intro. Two blocks west by Madison Avenue was a co-op whose occupants refused Richard Nixon as a tenant when he and his ailing Pat sought a pad near NYC hospitals. A block up north from that post-HUAC clash, modern patrician William F. Buckley Jr. had a duplex filled to the gills with transatlantic accent and power airs. More heads of state you could rub shoulders with at his soirees than at the UN headquarters a short ride downtown, society columnists raved.
It was the time of his life for Buckley as his pal and keen student of National Review was doing two terms in the White House.
Buckley was the father of so-called modern American conservatism, the greatest American loser-idea of the second half of the 20th century. On the face of it, this “modern” American conservatism seemed like a well-adjusted meme. It surpassed the Old Right’s isolationism, allowing the country to kick the worldwide Communism’s butt. It fought the infiltration of America’s power elite by the Reds during the FDR reign. It embraced economic libertarianism, morphing it into Reaganomics in time. Last but not least, it purged antisemitism and antisemites from mainstream American conservatism, or as one prominent Jewish American put it: “It opened up the conservative movement to Jews, by kicking out the haters.”
In terms of ideas though, this “modern” American conservatism didn’t create anything lasting, taking most of its lift from opposing so-called liberalism, a known trollop bedded by a horde of political creeds. Putting America back on her feet by quarreling with an ideological hooker while the country’s constitutive human stock was being biologically debased – you’d think America would come up with something a lick better at such a momentous destiny twist. She didn’t.