David Gordon

William F. Buckley, Jr.: The Maker of a Movement. By Lee Edwards. ISI Books, 2010. 223 pages. Originally published at LewRockwell.com.

Lee Edwards has written a very useful book. He is a longstanding conservative activist and intends to celebrate William F. Buckley as the founder of the political movement to which he adheres. For Edwards, Buckley’s "vision of ordered liberty shaped and molded and guided American conservatism from its infancy to its maturity, from a cramped suite of offices on Manhattan’s East Side to the Oval Office of the White House, from a set of ‘irritable mental gestures’ to a political force that transformed American politics." (p.191) But this book discloses a great deal that supports Lew Rockwell’s verdict that the "‘conservatism created by William Buckley . . . gave us the most raw and stupid form of imperial big government one can imagine.’" (p.175) Edwards, by the way, calls Rockwell an "ultralibertarian," in the same way leftists used to call those on the Right "ultraconservatives."

Buckley, Edwards tells us, began as a follower of the libertarian Albert Jay Nock; and Nock’s disciple, Frank Chodorov, guided his early writing. (To Edwards, Nock is an "archlibertarian." Whether there is a difference between "arch" and "ultra," Edwards does not disclose.) Edwards mentions Nock’s "radical antistatism" but he tells us next to nothing about the views of Nock and his great follower. From Edwards’s account, one might imagine that Nock wished merely to curtail the New Deal. In fact, of course, Nock condemned the "political means," i.e., the State, as of its nature predatory. Edwards also ignores completely Nock’s views on foreign policy. Nock opposed militarism and interventionism and his Myth of a Guilty Nation was an early revisionist classic.

Under Discussion: Why Are Jews Liberals? By Norman Podhoretz. Doubleday (2009), 337 pages.

Norman Podhoretz has provided us with a remarkable case study of monomania. The question that the title of his book poses needs to be expanded if the author's meaning is to emerge, and it is only then that one can grasp the author's fixation. What Podhoretz wishes to know is why American Jews vote in overwhelming numbers for leftwing Democrats, when in his view it goes against their interests to do so.

If this is what Podhoretz means, a further question at once arises. Why does he think that it is contrary to Jewish interests to support liberal Democrats? At first, the answer appears to be that it's detrimental to the economic welfare of Jews for them to act in this way: