I don’t agree, for reasons that the “Firing Line” episode below ought to make clear. But that didn’t stop me from hatching a plan when I worked for the Paul campaign in 2008 to net WFB’s endorsement. He had said some encouraging things about Paul, so I leaned on a friend of mine whom Buckley had begun to cultivate as a protege (he had many) to lobby for his imprimatur. We never went through with it, for the very good reason that WFB was failing fast — this was in mid-February, and Buckley died Feb. 28. If he had recovered, though, we would have put to the test whether his frustrations with conservative movement he had done so much to build would have led him to make a revolutionary endorsement.

It should be noted, though, that at the height of his prestige WFB was reluctant to support insurgent conservative candidates. In 1964, James Burnham had convinced him that Goldwater simply couldn’t win in November, which led Buckley to the brink of throwing National Review‘s support behind Nelson Rockefeller in the Republican primaries. If Goldwater lost in California, Buckley decided, NR would call for him to drop out. Bill Rusher, Bill Rickenbacker, and others were prepared to tender their resignations, though in the event Goldwater pulled through and Buckley relented.

Despite all that, there’s some reason to think WFB was getting more unconventional toward the end. Asked by Corey Robin in 2001 what kind of politics a young 21st-century William F. Buckley would embrace, he replied, “I’d be a socialist. A Mike Harrington socialist. I’d even say a communist.” He was mostly joking, but the remark suggests he was aware of how stale movement conservatism had become.

Between being competitive in these races and a rather favorable climate developing for the 2010 midterms, the GOP might seem to have floated out of its doldrums without liquidating its leadership or examining at all seriously what went wrong during the Bush years. But there’s something in the offing that should worry the Republican establishment a bit: the party still looks to have little in the way of a future, with younger Americans leaning heavily Democratic and “liberal.” Where there does seem to be activist energy and passion on the young Right, it’s in the Ron Paul camp, which the GOP still prefers to ignore. A few months ago I took a look at this subject in the mag put out by Young Americans for Liberty. That piece, “The Battle for America’s Youth,” is now online here. The youth vote won’t be a big problem for the GOP in 2010 because chances are very few young people will bother going to the polls. But in the decades to come, the cohort that voted strongly for Obama in 2008 is likely to continue to vote Democratic, which will have larger consequences once they start going to the polls more regularly as they age. The GOP won’t be able to offset that trend by rallying around the dead-end politics of George W. Bush, even repackaged in the shape of Sarah Palin. Any success the party enjoys in the near term only postpones the reckoning that must come.

Over the past 40 years, the trend among young political activists has been the same: The young Left has fought the older generations of the Right (perhaps because it’s simply more fun), with no thought to their emerging antagonists, focusing attention instead on people whose influence and power will naturally wax and wane (i.e., they’ll die soon.) The young Right, oppositely — since the days of Goldwater onward — has insisted on confronting the young Left in a no-holds-barred battle for future generations of influence. This strategic difference goes far toward explaining the inevitability of the Reagan Revolution and, to a lesser extent, the success of George W. Bush.

Young Americans for Liberty is, as of now, a fledging organization (though I counted 168 campus chapters nationwide on their website). But it has my vote for the right-wing student organization likeliest to effect genuine realignment within the Republican Party as we enter the era of bank takeovers and public option health care reform. Now economic issues, not foreign policy matters, have taken center stage in American politics. Many conservative young people, who will be responsible for whatever realignment takes place, seem utterly uninterested in obsessing about terrorism and foreign policy matters; the Ron Paul line works just fine for them. Ron Paul is, at least from my calculations, a rambling reactionary. But there is a modest chance he — and not Mssrs. Obama and McCain — will emerge as the transcendent figure from the 2008 presidential race.

This is a good place to mention that the third issue of YAL‘s official publication, Young American Revolution is out now and includes articles be Jim Antle, Justin Raimondo, Glenn Jacobs (WWE’s Kane), former Rep. John N. Hostettler, and yours truly, as well as young talents such as Bonnie Kristian, Kelse Moen, George Hawley. Subscribe by joining YAL (if you’re under 40) or donating $50 or more (if you’re an older American for liberty). Help take the campuses, and the country, back from the militarists of the Right and the centralizers of the Left — and the centralizers of the Right and militarists of the Left, for that matter.

Las Vegas is Disneyland, only with hookers. I didn’t see any on the street, but they were advertised heavily — the roadside bins where in other cities you can pick up real-estate brochures contain catalogs of girls in Las Vegas. Lining one sidewalk on the Vegas strip was a gauntlet of (presumably) illegal immigrants in neon-green T-shirts handing out cards advertising various demimonde establishments to passersby, few of whom took any interest. The tourists from the Midwest and Japan come for the tacky hotels and the city’s other, more lucrative vice. There are even slot machines in the airport.

Hard-bitten fiscal conservative that I am, I didn’t gamble, although a friend of mine tells me you can get pretty good odds against the house — a little under 50/50 — if you know what you’re doing in craps. FreedomFest itself had some interesting programs, including an always-rousing Campaign for Liberty event with Ron Paul and the absolutely packed sessions of the Liberty editors’ conference. There was standing-room only at Liberty‘s panel on anarchism vs. limited government, which featured Mark Skousen (for minarchism) and David Friedman and Doug Casey (anarchists both, with moderator and Liberty editor Stephen Cox giving Skousen some assistance — Skousen’s intended co-panelist didn’t show). The main sessions of FreedomFest included a great debate on abolishing the Fed, with Tom Woods and Gene Epstein of Barron’s wiping the floor with the pro-Fed John Fund and Warren Coats. (Catch it on C-SPAN this weekend.) While I didn’t gamble, I did fork over some cash at the Laissez-Faire Books table for a copy of Felix Morley’s Freedom and Federalismand the Morley-edited Essays on Individuality (which includes a superb essay by John Dos Passos on individualism in English literature).

In St. Louis the following weekend I looked around my alma mater, Washington University in St. Louis, which is always attractive in the summer but is starting to feel claustrophobic with all the new buildings hemming in the hilltop campus. The economic collapse and decimation of the university’s endowment should put the breaks on any more of that that for a while. I got some good bargains in the campus bookstore, picking up the Transaction edition of Peter Viereck’s Metapoliticsand a copy of Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter,as well as a Michael Walzer book that reminds me how much I despise egalitarian liberals. The things Walzer sees as defects in society — like hierarchy — I consider virtues in much need of restoration.

Now I’m back in D.C. and the new TAC is out, which means I have time for blogging again.

American Conservatism: Thinking It, Teaching It:

This class began today with the assignment of the first paper — on fusionism — the handing out of an Ayn Rand selection from The Virtue of Selfishness, and a short discussion of her life and work. Then we began a lively, focused discussion carried over Tuesday about the different takes on libertarianism by Frank Meyer and Murray Rothbard. Rothbard’s principled libertarianism, castigated as libertine by Meyer, is attractive to many of my students, including some of the liberals, because his style is modest and direct and his argument seems consistent — any state intervention is coercive, from taxation to the military draft, from censorship to drug laws. Meyer, on the other hand, argues that liberty must be a means but not an end, that it must serve the good, the quest for virtue. Rothbard unashamedly counters that libertarianism isn’t concerned with “what a person does with his or her life,” which he sees as “vital and important but … simply irrelevant to libertarianism.”

Allen Ginsberg once told Norman Podhoretz, “We’ll get you through your children!” Turns out it’s not only the left-wing kids who reject neoconservatism, but a great many liberal and non-liberal students alike are turning to Rothbardianism. Ron Paul, of course, has done much to popularize a vision close to Rothbard’s, and the new Young Americans for Liberty continues this work. Along a parallel front, I get reports from other campuses telling me that a traditionalism akin to that of the Front Porch Republicans is taking hold in place of the neocon Right. No doubt there’s selective bias here — the young Rothbards and Bill Kauffmans are still outnumbered by College Republicans, and it’s the relative rarity of the former that makes them stand out to people like me. But I do think the anti-imperial Right (or post-Right) is growing while neoconservatives fail to reproduce. The neos still have the money, though, and the institutions of the conservative movement. It’ll be a hard fight yet to dislodge them, but youth, and therefore time, may be on our side.

You can get a sense of the how the younger generation feels about Meyer from this piece by George Hawley. I would like to offer a strong apologia for Meyer, who by all accounts was a marvelous individual and a man of great learning. But I have to agree that those qualities don’t come through very well in his manifesto In Defense of Freedom.Perhaps tellingly, I paid tribute to Meyer in the title of this essay — but the spirit of the piece is Rothbard’s.

I recommend Lyons’s book,by the way. He was an old New Left professor at Stockton College in New Jersey who came to appreciate serious libertarianism and traditionalist conservatism (especially that of Peter Viereck) through teaching courses on the intellectual history of the Right. His book is an account of one such seminar, along with a number of essays reflecting on what he taught. Having put together a couple of conservative and libertarian syllabi, I found it very stimulating, Lyons’s occasional lapses into political correctness notwithstanding.

P.S. Here’s Rothbard’s generous but critical take on Meyer.

You can also check out an electronic version of the first issue, which includes my essay on the future of the youth movement that coalesced around Ron Paul, here.

The inconvenience of hunting and pecking to write-in Paul and Goldwater led me to disregard my own advice further down the ballot. Rather than writing in Pat Buchanan for Senate, I went ahead and voted for Bill Redpath, the Libertarian candidate, and I voted for the Independent Green, whoever it was, for Virginia’s 8th District Congressional seat. (I did, however, write in Mr. Buchanan for the Arlington School Board. There were only two candidates running for two seats, and I wasn’t about to approve of either of them.) As I say in my TAC article, there’s nothing wrong with symbolic voting — it’s symbolic organizing that libertarians and traditional conservatives ought to stay away from.

Why vote at all, when your ballot is statistically worthless? I vote because it feels good to check “No” next to every bond issue, tax hike, and referendum to increase government power. My vote isn’t decisive even in those municipal questions, which of course have a much smaller electorate, but the more people who vote to oppose further government debt and spending, the better the odds that those measures will fail, as they should. And even if they don’t, it’s psychologically pleasant to say “No” to taxes and spending.

1.) The “paleo” coalition lives. From the late ’80s until the mid-’90s, there was a great deal of crossover between Paul’s supporters and those of Pat Buchanan. There was also a short-lived attempt at a meeting of minds between the Mises and Rockford Institutes. The coalition never fully gelled at the theoretical level,which is not surprising given the philosophical differences at stake, but on the more practical plane it never really went away — the debacle of Buchanan’s 2000 Reform Party run notwithstanding. In the 1990s, Paul-style paleolibertarians often supported Buchanan. And now Paul himself is supporting the candidate of a party that was founded, in part, to give Buchanan a vehicle with which to make a third-party run in 1992. (Which he chose not to do.)

2.) There are hazards for Paul in endorsing Baldwin. I’ve been surprised at the amount of pushback from Paul supporters who disapprove of the endorsement — they’ve been quite vocal in the comments sections of all libertarian blogs that have noted the endorsement. Paul’s multi-party, unity platform press conference of a few weeks ago had the advantage of appealing to all segments of Paul’s base: antiwar conservatives, libertarians, and decentralist liberals. The rightist elements of the Paul coalition are very happy, in general, with the Baldwin endorsement, but many libertarians and Paul supporters on the Left have reservations about the Constitution Party’s hardline religious tendencies. Thus, reinforcing the old paleo coalition (or its 21st-century analog) may come at the expense of the broader coalition that rallied to Paul during his Republican run. I don’t think that broader coalition will simply evaporate, but the Baldwin endorsement evidently has alienated at least a few RP supporters.

3.) Both the unity press conference and the Baldwin endorsement have repercussions for the Campaign for Liberty, even though CFL is not directly involved in either. (The press conference was put on by the Liberty PAC, Paul’s announcement of support for Baldwin is a personal endorsement. CFL legally cannot endorse candidates.) The hardest task facing CFL as it is currently organized is to get grassroots Ron Paul activists to concentrate their efforts on the major parties rather than splintering off into the third parties. There’s nothing necessarily contradictory about supporting a third-party candidate in the general election but working within the major-party system during primaries and on issue campaigns. But the message is mixed, and there are many people in the grassroots who would already rather focus on third parties.