Erick Erickson is sad. He is eloquently sad, lovingly and pugnaciously sad. He leans against the bar of the Old Home Sample Room, the most gilded and urbane saloon in Macon, Georgia, and requests the bartender to join him in "The Good Old Summer Time," the waltz of the day--and to join him as well in fond remembrances of when National Review was pure.
Erickson also quotes Sinclair Lewis (though not Gantry), hence my plagiaristic variant.
His latest, as always, is worth the read. It is his commonplace mixture of bad history and worse conclusions. It begins by reminding us:
In William F. Buckley’s mission statement for National Review, written in 1955, he did not mention winning elections. That’s not to say it is unimportant, unneeded, or unwanted. But it was not mentioned.
This lapse was principally the result of conservatism having been, at the time of NR's inauguration, in a pitiable state of muddled division. Social conservatives were intensely wary of the libertarian faction, and in both camps there squatted the supremely anti-communist. The ultraconservative base was splintered to the point of electoral impotence--and it was that which Buckley intended to remedy, through an ideological fusion. ("Reason within tradition" was, as I recall, how Buckley's chief and former Trotskyite strategist, Frank Meyer, put it.) In short, first things first.
Erickson's dismissal of Buckley's underlying intent in establishing NR is, of course, for a purely Ericksonian purpose: to keep the flagging tea-party lunacy flying. Elections? Pshaw. Majorities? Harrumph. Erick is made of more piously heroic stuff.
Still, he is sad--so sad that some in conservatism seem to understand that a permanent minority won't get them very far.