An editor’s life is interesting, because you get to see what goes on in the rest of the paper, but it is also tiring. For lack of reporting and engagement with life outside the paper, one’s intellectual capital is not replenished and rapidly trends toward zero. After the ritual seven years I returned to writing.

Of course, there are editors and then there are editors, and luckily for me the magazine world is quite different from that of a newspaper, let alone the NYT. But I know the feeling Wade describes. It takes effort to buy back intellectual capital after a week of putting ideas in other writers’ hands (and heads) and rewriting other people’s prose. By the end of a day, the last thing one wants to do is read any more nonfiction. Instead I’ve lately turned to Gore Vidal’s Julian and Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies and Sword of Honor trilogy. My trip to the bookstore last night netted two volumes of Wodehouse and a recent novel by Ian McEwen — though it also took in books by James Kilpatrick, William Safire, and Tony Judt, so I’m not altogether getting away from the realm of fact.

[A]ll the enduring institutions which human societies have attained have been reached, not of a set design and forethought of some group of statesmen, but of that unbidden and uncoerced consequence of many thoughts and wills in succeeding generations, to which, as it obeys no single guiding hand, one may give the name of ‘drifting.’

The sentiments could be those of an Old Whig such as Burke. In fact, the words belong to the quintessential 19th-century Tory, Lord Salisbury, as quoted in David Steele’s biography.

Do you want to join a Washington journalism team that’s advancing a smart, independent voice on the Right?

The American Conservative is looking for an online editor. The magazine is already expanding its website, which will re-launch this winter as the nation’s premier online hub of traditional conservatism. If you are the right editor for this job, here’s what you’ll be doing: Managing and growing The American Conservative’s web presence, overseeing online content (assigning, editing, and writing articles and blog posts), planning/producing the homepage on a daily basis (aggregation, multimedia creation, comments curation, and overseeing staff bloggers), developing and executing the web strategy (including social media, search, referral traffic, and e-newsletters), and monitoring analytics.

The ideal candidate will have some experience in online journalism and a passion for engaging with a dynamic community of serious readers, plus:

* Eagerness to work tirelessly in a small but ambitious team (the position will report to magazine’s editor)
* Superb writing and editing ability
* Strong communication and organizational skills
* Love of considered, lengthy journalism as well as an appreciation of horse-race politics
* Excellent news/opinion judgment
* A background in intellectual conservatism and keen understanding of The American Conservative’s unique sensibility.

This position is based in our Arlington, Virginia office. To apply, please email your resume, cover letter, and writing sample to: apply@amconmag.com.

MR: Will the failure of Borders change the way the book business thinks of books?

RN: What does a person do when they want something to read? One of the big mistakes that often gets made in publishing is we focus a lot on price. We focus on how much a book costs and we decide whether it’s worth it or not. Now we’ve got a lot more books that are absolutely impoverished. The reality is that people’s decision-making process has a lot more to do with time than with money. It’s 15 hours in the inside of your head. Books are so cheap compared to the hours of entertainment they provide. The problem is, do they provide entertainment? Is it in fact a book you want to read? If after four hours you hate it, what most people say is “I can’t believe I spent fifteen dollars on this.” But what they really mean is “I can’t believe I just wasted four hours of my life on this.”

MR: Red Lemonade allows people to view free of charge complete manuscripts of books you have for sale. You’ve mentioned that having access to the full text online will help readers make up their minds and commit to buying a hard copy. This view differs from a general reluctance of publishers to post complete works online.

RN: Exactly. With the vast majority of books, the problem that most people have is they don’t know whether it’s going to be worth their time to read it. There are a tiny handful of books, in the case of each person, where they can be sure they want to read them. The reality is that I don’t think, in fact, there are a huge number of people reading our books for free online that have made a decision about whether to buy it. I mean there is probably a small number that are doing it for that reason and that number may increase, but I believe the number is smaller than has occurred to people because publishers refuse to do it. But what we’ve very clearly demonstrated by putting it for free online is that reading the book online has absolutely no negative impact on sales. Why in fact would it?

In many respects we’ve got a real Stockholm Syndrome around the model of publishing as it’s existed up until now. We just take for granted that it is the way it is because that’s a good way for things to be. And when something diverges from it we look for proof as to why it should diverge. But I’m interested in trying to reframe questions. Why do we think that a person won’t buy a print book because in theory they could read it for free online? What is it that people are buying? What is it that people want? In many respects what people want is to read it on their own terms, so in many cases, people don’t want to have to read it on a screen. Then the other thing is that people want to feel like they are spending money. It is their way of feeling good about themselves. It is their way of voting for something with their dollars.

The full interview is well worth your time.

Al-Qaeda then overreached as badly as the Bush administration had, however, and as the organization’s violence against other Muslims escalated — something for which the leader of the affiliate in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was upbraided by Ayman al-Zawahiri — the prospect of setting off an anti-Western chain reaction across the Islamic world vanished. As a brilliant new book by Jason Burke,The 9/11 Wars, shows, local factors in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere trumped the region-remaking agendas of the neoconservatives and al-Qaeda alike. The Arab Spring, triggered by neither bin Laden nor Washington, is an ironic bookend to the wars of 9/11.

Goading Us Into War

The terrorist’s most effective weapons are not bombs and guns or even the knives and airplanes that were used in Tuesday’s attack. The terrorist’s real arsenal is fear, confusion, anger, and paranoia. Effective terrorists know psychology and sociology — human nature — even better than they know ordnance. Tuesday’s atrocities have been called an act of war and compared to Pearl Harbor. It is a comparison which the perpetrators of the attack must have anticipated.

Anyone tactically brilliant enough to hijack four planes simultaneously and turn them into living bombs is going to be equally brilliant strategically and will understand what the reaction to his actions will be. The strikes against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were not intended to get America out of the Middle East, they were intended to get America into war.

Whenever Americans have been attacked abroad a familiar pattern has emerged. The American people will not accept casualties. Vietnam demonstrated this, as did Somalia, as did NATO’s operations in Serbia which were designed to avoid American casualties at all costs. When Americans are killed abroad, Americans at home respond by demanding to “bring our boys back home” and by questioning the propriety of our activities abroad.

The American character has always been deeply skeptical of foreign entanglements. Just consider George Washington’s famous farewell address. So great is this popular “isolationism” that there’s only one reliable way to defeat it — attack America at home. Pearl Harbor is the proof. America would not have entered World War II without being attacked first. Even Franklin Delano Roosevelet, who greatly wanted to enter the war, had had to promise during his 1940 campaign that America would not get in, unless attacked at home.

Is it reasonable to think that Osama bin Laden or anyone else would kill thousands of Americans on American soil without considering the consequences? Terrorists look at a big picture. They have to understand how their actions, which serve no immediate military purpose, can affect their enemy. The terrorists behind the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Tuesday knew what the reaction would be. They were too smart not to.

The Islamic world is sharply divided along several lines, between “moderates” and “extremists” as well as Sunnis and Shi’ites. On top of that the usual internal power plays go on behind the scenes of Islamic countries as much as anywhere else. There’s good reason to think that lust for power is at work here at least as much as ideology. There is, for example, a faction of the Saudi royal family which is more hard-line than King Fahd and would like to replace him. Whether this faction is really ideologically anti-American or simply sees anti-Americanism as a tool to use against Fahd is irrelevant. It’s worth remembering that Osama bin Laden, for all the talk about his ties to the Taliban, has ties to his native Saudi Arabia too.

The Taliban have good reason not to provoke the U.S. They are still fighting a civil war for control of Afghanistan. They stand to lose everything if the U.S. and our “friends” the Russians get involved. But it’s easier to shoot a more cruise missiles at Kabul than to risk antagonizing “friends” like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

If Osama bin Laden is behind this — and really it must go far beyond one man, however wealthy he may be — then what he expects to accomplish is clear. He wants to polarize the Islamic world, and indeed the whole world. Whoever is behind this wants America to react by going to war, which will put pressure on hard-line factions throughout the Middle East and Central Asia to side with the anti-Americans, even if they would prefer to remain neutral.

War will exert pressure on regimes like Kin[g] Fahd’s to distance themselves from America, in trade as much as militarily, and to become more amenable to hard-line factions within their borders or else face internal revolt. By polarizing the Islamic [community] what the Osama bin Ladens of the world really achieve is to enhance their factional power. In order [for that] to work, however, America must act precipitously against the Islamic world in general, and one or two scapegoats in particular. The bigger America’s reaction the better chance bin Laden has of succeeding, and of course to provoke a really big reaction he had to commit an extraordinarily great atrocity. He has done his part and now he expects us to do ours.

We must not let the terrorists outsmart us. We must not react the way they want us to. Let’s think before we react. How would bringing back the draft, as Stanley Kurtz has opportunistically urged, prevent this? How will beefing up airport security stop terrorists armed only with razors and the bluff of having a bomb? How will “troops on the ground,” presumably in Afghanistan, solve anything — did it work for the Soviets in 1979?

A committed terrorist will always be able to kill innocent people, to fulfill his tactical objective. But terrorism will fail in its strategic objective if we do not react as expected. If we do not do what the terrorists want they will have failed in their mission and will have that much less reason to expect terrorism to work in the future.

The terrorists behind Tuesday’s attack want war. By all means we should punish those directly involved, but we must not give them the war they want. These terrorists have attempted to discredit the peace party in the Islamic world, to polarize that civilization for the advantage of the war party. The peace party in America must stand firm in the face of both the terror and of accusations of disloyalty from our own countrymen. That is what will foil the ambitions of the terrorists whose real goal is war and the power that war always brings to the wicked.

This essay originally appeared here on 9/14/2001.

Hobbes is certainly right that disorder is undesirable; but the dangers of an unchecked sovereign far exceed the discomforts of the state of nature. Hitler, Stalin, Mao–the historical record teaches an unmistakable lesson. Hobbes had constantly in mind the need to avoid the passions of civil war; but the English Civil War, after all, was not an example of his state of nature. Rather, two competing sides struggled to obtain sovereignty. It is the existence of a powerful state, not its absence, that leads to war and massacre.

There’s plenty of truth here, but the 20th-century totalitarians may not provide quite the case against Leviathan that they appear to do. Hobbes might well observe that the conditions that gave rise to Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were those of weak sovereignty and outright civil war. (In the case of Weimar Germany and Kerensky’s Russia, violence by brownshirts and Bolsheviks had the character of a low-intensity civil war.) A sovereign following the authoritarian playbook would have crushed the radicals, but the German and Russian states were too feeble to break the factions. That’s not the same thing as the state of nature, but it’s something Hobbes would have understood quite well. In these instances, as in the English Civil War, you can’t really say there was already a powerful state over which the opposing sides were warring because a powerful state would not have been subordinated to factional disputes in the first place. Leviathan doesn’t tolerate competition.

Once a Hitler or a Lenin or Stalin had gained power, however, wasn’t the result the kind of strong state that Hobbes always wanted? Not exactly — what Hitler, Lenin/Stalin, and Mao created were leviathans of a kind unimagined by the philosopher from Malmesbury. They created party states, which combined the very worst elements of leviathan and civil war. That is, they had all the power of leviathan, but retained the mentality of factions. How strange this was is suggested by a story told about Italian far-right philosopher Julius Evola. At one point, il Duce or one of his underlings asked Evola why he hadn’t joined the Fascist Party proper. Evola replied that the continued existence of the party proved the failure of fascism. After all, if the state had become all and absorbed all lesser allegiances, how could there be such a thing as a “party,” which, as the word indicates, represents a partial or special interest?

We Americans are often taught in school that parties are a natural and benign feature of popular government. They represent disagreements, even very intense ones, but avert civil war. Trouble is, as Donald Livingston reminds us in his essays on David Hume, not all kinds of parties are so benign. Parties of “interest” merely try to exploit their countrymen; these, say Hume, are “the most reasonable, and the most excusable.” Parties of “affection” — “founded on the different attachments of men towards particular families and persons” — might seem nearly extinct in the 20th and 21st centuries, though demagogic Caesarism and nationalism share some traits with this older sort of faction. (“We are apt to think the relation between us and our sovereign very close and intimate,” Hume observes, “And when a man’s good-nature does not give him this imaginary interest, his ill-nature will, from spite and opposition to persons whose sentiments are different from his own.”)

Parties of “principle” are something else again: they insist upon bringing an intransigent world into conformity with abstract principles through the use of state power. Hume cites religious conflicts as examples of clashes between parties of principle:

Two men travelling on the highway, the one east, the other west, can easily pass each other, if the way be broad enough: But two men, reasoning upon opposite principles of religion, cannot so easily pass, without shocking; though one should think, that the way were also, in that case, sufficiently broad, and that each might proceed, without interruption, in his own course. But such is the nature of the human mind, that it always lays hold on every mind that approaches it; and as it is wonderfully fortified by an unanimity of sentiments, so is it shocked and disturbed by any contrariety. Hence the eagerness, which most people discover° in a dispute; and hence their impatience of opposition, even in the most speculative and indifferent opinions.

As Livingston argues, however, within Hume’s own lifetime parties of principle were becoming more philosophical than religious. Conflicts between ideological parties in the modern world are bitter: the absolutism of supposedly rational principle does not permit accommodation. People who reject the party’s principle are at best in need of re-education — particularly of the Maoist sort — and at worst, if their very existence is contrary to the principles of the party, they must be removed from the body politic or killed outright. Kulaks were contrary to the principles of Soviet Communism; Jews to the principles of Aryan Nazism.

For Hobbes, the benefit of leviathan is that the monster puts an end to factional struggle. Small-scale insurrections might still occur, certainly riots and crime would not go away, but organized, institutionalized groups competing with one another to seize the state are forbidden in Hobbes’s design. That means even religion must come entirely under the control of the state in all its public aspects. The party state, however, doesn’t draw the line where Hobbes does — it continues to behave as a faction even after it has attained supreme power. And indeed, the structure of the party state reflects this: to hold high rank in the Nazi or Communist Party in Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia was at least as good as, and often better than, holding high rank within the offices of the state. The party is a government over the government — a faction over the state.

Is it the case in such circumstances that the state itself is the primary problem, or is the state merely the instrument, even the victim, of a greater evil? In practical terms it makes no difference, but there’s a philosophical distinction to be explored. Hobbes might not accept that Communist Russia or Nazi Germany were wholly realized states at all — it might be argued that they were weak states overawed by parties or indeed no true states at all but only armed factions vastly more powerful than their opponents. (It’s interesting to note that the USSR ultimately collapsed when a traditional branch of the state, the army, defied a Communist Party junta.)

None of this should soften one’s view of state power and brutality. But there are times when a strong traditional state is preferable to the ravages of ideological factions — this is what William Lind was getting at when he wrote a while back that we have a great interest in seeing the state survive in the Middle East. (He may or may not be right about that, but this is his reasoning.) And ideological faction is itself a potentially deadly danger. James Madison, of course, argued that “Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires” and “it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.” Drawing on Hume’s “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth,” Madison thought he found a solution to the problem of checking faction without circumscribing liberty in the notion of large republic led by a representative political elite. He was horrified to see, however, that factionalism emerged anyway in the young not-so-United States.

Luckily for us, factions of interest — and typically, factions of not very different interests — have tended to overshadow factions of principle over the past 200-odd years of U.S. history. But that might not always be the case.

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.

He was an exemplary man, and he took part in many of the controversies and political battles of his time. He served on the National Council for the Humanities in the 1980s, when the panel was sharply divided between traditionalists and neoconservatives, and he even had a hand in writing the constitution of Michigan while he was at the University of Detroit. The Rock River Times has an obituary here.

Update: There’s a good interview with Stanlis on Burke and Frost here.

“My notion of a Whig, I mean of a real Whig (for the Nominal are worse than any Sort of Men) is That he is one who is exactly for keeping up to the Strictness of the true old Gothick Constitution.”

– Sir Robert Molesworth, Preface to Francois Hotman, Franco-Gallia (as cited in Trevor Colbourn’s The Lamp of Experience.)

Not every proto-libertarian in the 19th and early 20th centuries welcomed the liberal label. Albert Jay Nock, for one, blasted an editorial written by his friend Oswald Garrison Villard — editor of The Nation — welcoming Nock’s publication, The Freeman, to the club of “liberal” periodicals:

The Freeman is not a liberal paper; it has no lot or part with liberalism; it has no place in the field of liberal journalism and cannot pretend to seek one. That field, indeed, is so competently served by the Nation itself and by the New Republic that it would be a superfluity, not to say an impertinence, for the editors of this paper to think of invading it. The Freeman is a radical paper; its place is in the virgin field, or better, the long-neglected and fallow field, of American radicalism; its special constituency, if it ever has any, will be what it can find in that field. Hence, readers of the Nation, if ever they do this paper the honor of picking it up, must not be misled by Mr. Villard’s quick and characteristic generosity in bestowing upon it a distinction to which it has no right.

Nock explained the philosophical difference:

The liberal believes that the State is essentially social and is all for improving it by political methods so that it may function accordingly to what he believes to be its original intention. Hence, he is interested in politics, takes them seriously, goes at them hopefully, and believes in them as an instrument of social welfare and progress. He is politically minded, with an incurable interest in reform, putting good men in office, independent administrations, and quite frequently in third-party movements. The liberal forces of the country, for instance, rallied quite conspicuously to Mr. [Theodore] Roosevelt in the good old days of the Progressive party. The liberal believes in the reality and power of political leadership; thus, again, he eagerly took Mr. Wilson on his hands at the last two elections.

The radical, on the other hand, believes that the State is fundamentally antisocial and is all for improving it off the face of the earth; not by blowing up officeholders, as Mr. [Mitchell] Palmer appears to suppose, but by the historical process of strengthening, consolidating and enlightening economic organization. The radical has no substantial interest in politics, and regards all projects of political reform as visionary.

Nock is not playing Humpty Dumpty here, and even before the progressive turn in American liberalism led figures like Villard from strong anti-statism toward domestic inventionism, there were differences between radicals and liberals, though not necessarily differences of the kind Nock limned. The term “radical” had been sometimes annexed to, sometimes in contention with the terms “liberal” and “Whig” in British politics since the late 18th century. If you look up this sense of “radical” in Wikipedia, you’ll see a great deal about electoral reform and the Chartists. Those were signal issues, but it would be a mistake to think of 18th-century radicalism merely as a movement for democracy. It’s conventionally said that Whigs and radicals together made up the new 19th-century Liberal Party, but strains of radicalism distinct from their liberal surroundings remained.

Moreover, the term “liberalism” came to signify something that anti-statists wouldn’t like rather earlier than many of today’s libertarians think. Already in 1884, Herbert Spencer was warning about liberalism becoming the “New Toryism.” In a note added when the essay was collected, he remarked that while the old Tories were still bad, he could imagine liberals and conservatives (Tories) switching places entirely some time in the future:

A new species of Tory may arise without disappearance of the original species. When saying, as on page 16, that in our days “Conservatives and Liberals vie with one another in multiplying” interferences, I clearly implied the belief that while Liberals have taken to coercive legislation, Conservatives have not abandoned it. Nevertheless, it is true that the laws made by Liberals are so greatly increasing the compulsions and restraints exercised over citizens, that among Conservatives who suffer from this aggressiveness there is growing up a tendency to resist it. Proof is furnished by the fact that the “Liberty and Property Defense League,” largely consisting of Conservatives, has taken for its motto “Individualism versus Socialism.” So that if the present drift of things continues, it may by and by really happen that the Tories will be defenders of liberties which the Liberals, in pursuit of what they think popular welfare, trample under foot.

But it’s not even the case that Whig and Tory — to the extent they can even be taken as precursors to liberal and conservative, a complicated and controversial question in its own right — were stable terms in the 18th century. Spencer cites Lord Bolingbroke’s characterization of what those terms originally meant:

The power and majesty of the people, an original contract, the authority and independency of Parliament, liberty, resistance, exclusion, abdication, deposition; these were ideas associated, at that time, to the idea of a Whig, and supposed by every Whig to be incommunicable, and inconsistent with the idea of a Tory.

Divine, hereditary, indefeasible right, lineal succession, passive-obedience, prerogative, non-resistance, slavery, nay and sometimes property too, were associated in many minds to the idea of a Tory, and deemed incommunicable and inconsistent in the same manner, with the idea of a Whig.

Spencer uses these lines as evidence that this is what old Whigs and Tories really did stand for, though the Tory Bolingbroke’s language is carefully hedged — these are the meanings commonly “associated” with the terms up to Bolingbroke’s time. And Bolingbroke goes on to say that in his day whatever older significance the terms had, they had now been changed:

These associations are broken; these distinct sets of ideas are shuffled out of their order; new combinations force themselves upon us; and it would actually be as absurd to impute to the Tories the principles, which were laid to their charge formerly, as it would be to ascribe to the projector and his faction the name of Whigs, whilst they daily forfeit that character by their actions. The bulk of both parties are really united; united on principles of liberty, in opposition to an obscure remnant of one party, who disown those principles, and a mercenary detachment from the other, who betray them.

The important distinction for Bolingbroke in 1733 is not between old Whigs and Tories, but between what he calls the Court Party and the Country Party — both of which include both Whigs and Tories of different kinds.

We could plunge deep into British history from here. Instead, I’ll make two general points: first, while there is a genealogical connection between Whiggism, liberalism, and libertarianism, the bloodlines are hardly unmixed or without bastards in each generation; and second, there is a recurrent problem when a faction that professes to be the party of liberty, whether it calls itself liberal or conservative or something else, takes control of the state and then comes to be opposed by another faction that claims to speak for liberty. For a time, the new faction can assert itself to be the true Whigs or real liberals, but pretty soon the confusion that results creates a pressure for a change of names. At that point, the new anti-statists might lay claim to an old label, such as conservative, or invent a new one, such as libertarian. Famously, when Friedrich Hayek was confronted by a situation in which “liberal” had been appropriated by social democrats and “conservative” had been taken by Russell Kirk, he tried to recover the “Old Whig” persona, but that didn’t catch on.

Whether attempts to reclaim the word “liberal” will catch on is an open question. As the essays by Spencer and Bolingbroke show, there is always a struggle to conceptualize the history and language of faction.

I remain skeptical about all of this: even if it’s true that books produce that feeling among readers in general, and not just among a subset of hard-bitten bibliophiles, will a younger generation that has grown up with electronic reading devices feel the same way? And do feelings usually trump economic considerations? The comparison I’ve drawn in the past is to poetry: in part for economic reasons — poetry can pack more meaning into fewer words, and hence fewer pieces of vellum or man hours of copying — poetry was once exalted and popular (at least among the relatively few people who were literate). Now, in an age when expansive expression is encouraged by cheap paper and even cheaper pixels, poetry is relegated to a very narrow commercial niche, and the form itself has arguably decayed as it has lost currency. Poetry still claims to make an appeal to feeling that prose cannot match, but it turns out that vanishingly few people are willing to pay for that feeling.

Gordon is realistic about what economics and technology will wreak:

Physical books will surely become much rarer in the marketplace. Mass market paperbacks, which have been declining for years anyway, will probably disappear, as will hardbacks for mysteries, thrillers, “romance fiction,” etc. Such books, which only rarely end up in permanent collections either private or public, will probably only be available as e-books within a few years. Hardback and trade paperbacks for “serious” nonfiction and fiction will surely last longer. Perhaps it will become the mark of an author to reckon with that he or she is still published in hard copy.

… One technology replaces another only because the new technology is better, cheaper, or both. The greater the differential, the sooner and more thoroughly the new technology replaces the old. Printing with moveable type on paper reduced the cost of producing a book by orders of magnitude compared with the old-fashioned ones handwritten on vellum, which comes from sheepskin. A Bible—to be sure, a long book—required vellum made from 300 sheepskins and untold man-hours of scribe labor. Before printing arrived, a Bible cost more than a middle-class house. There were perhaps 50,000 books in all of Europe in 1450. By 1500 there were 10 million.

He should give up hope that appearing in print will be the mark of the serious author. How long has it been since the ability to versify was the mark of a serious author? About 200 years. As mass-readership books — “romance fiction,” etc. — go out of print, the demand for books in general shrinks, and the remaining books that are produced will cost much more. As the price rises for serious books, demand can be expected to fall further. Even “serious” authors are interested in being read as widely as possible — I get lobbied regularly by authors who want their magazine articles to appear online. There’s little reason to think that 20 years from now serious authors will demand that their work appear in print: indeed, just as poetry fell prey to self-indulgence on the part of poets once it ceased to be audience-oriented, so the last holdouts in print can be expected to be the vain and cranky. That too will exacerbate the plight of book.

What would stave off extinction is for books once again to become affordable; while wood pulp may never be as cheap as electrons, books could be more affordable than they are now. But all of the institutional economics of the publishing industry point in the other direction: as the market shrinks, publishers will raise prices, producing a death spiral.

I don’t take pleasure in writing any of this: my home and office are lined with books, and as others get out of pulp, I’ll continue to acquire more of it. But wishful thinking and idle invocations of fireplaces — how many readers actually have one of those? — won’t save publishing.

But there’s a bigger question beyond whether or not pulp will survive: what about the book as a form? Here there are reasons not only to be unsentimental but perhaps to toast extinction. The book is simply the wrong format for many literary works, and its decay creates at least the possibility of a better form arising.

Think about biography. Is the typical popular biography at book length, some 200 to 400 pages, really superior to a far shorter biographical essay by, say, John Morley? Is longer inherently better? The Hellenistic poet Callimachus thought not: he’s famous, among other things, for the maxim “mega biblion, mega kakon” — a great big book is a great big evil.

The market for big books has long crowded out other literary forms, in particular the essay. Yes, you can have books of essays, but there are fewer and fewer of those: publishers hate them because they don’t sell. But a long-form essay, of the length that Morley used to write may be the most suitable form for popular non-fiction of many kinds. I can’t be sure of that; perhaps the readers really do demand 200 pages of content, in any format, and not 100 or 85. But I suspect the economics and mechanics of the book market have much to do with the relative neglect of the essay. The Victorian essay is too long for most magazines, but too short to justify the expense of publishing as a standalone book. Devices like the Kindle and iPad make the form economical again for the first time in a century — at least, economical as far as the medium is concerned. There’s still the problem of whether the form can provide enough revenue to make it worth a writer’s time.

But look at what’s happening to album sales as a parallel case: most iTunes sales are of individual songs, disaggregated from albums. An essay is not a disaggregated chapter of a book, but it’s the literary analog of a pop-music single. The ideal length for such a piece of writing is something that will only become clear over time; magazine articles are probably too short to seem like worthwhile standalone purchases, unless they sell for just a few cents. But essays could sell for substantially less than electronic books and still seem like discrete, satisfying products. It may also be more enjoyable to read something essay-length, rather than book-length, on an e-reader.

I like the essay as a form, so this is an avenue of speculation down which I’m always happy to wander. But quite apart from whether the essay could be the successor to the book, there’s good reason to think something other than book-length narrative will emerge as the preferred form for electronic texts. At least, I can’t see a reason beyond the constraints of the physical medium and the structure of the publishing and retail industries why every topic worth writing about at length must be worth writing about at a length of 100,000 or so words. (Consider this, too: a Morley essay is something one might re-read several times over the years. Even a reasonably good nonfiction book is something most people are only going to want to read once — there are exceptions, but how many?)

The decline of the physical medium of the book is a great shame, but the rise of formats other than the 200-page tome for serious nonfiction holds great potential. Many of the better sort of nonfiction books would be better still shorter, and too short can’t be short enough for the worse sort of nonfiction, the politicians’ and actors’ autobiographies. Take a look at the New York Times hardcover bestsellers list and you can’t help but see a brighter side to the death of print.

There’s a good deal of irony in the contrast between the free-spending “conservative” Reagan and the frugal “liberal” Jimmy Carter, who as Diggins rightly notes “was as antistatist as Reagan” and accomplished much of the federal deregulation—removing entry barriers in air travel, trucking, and other fields—for which Reagan would sometimes receive credit. While both the left and the right have made Reagan out to be a great scourge of government power, Diggins demonstrates that the president’s rhetoric was more anti-statist than his actions. Reagan’s conservatism, too, was not what his admirers and detractors often claimed that it was; the religious right flourished in the 1980s, but Reagan—a divorced, socially tolerant movie star—hardly embodied it. Both Carter and Reagan’s successor as governor of California, the former seminarian Jerry Brown, were much more traditionally Christian (and more fiscally parsimonious) than Reagan, who “opened the American mind to optimism and innocence, leaving it closed to sin and experience.” Reagan, a believer but not much of a churchgoer, “seemed to offer a Christianity without Christ and the crucifixion, a religion without reference to sin, evil, suffering, or sacrifice.”

Read on.

A reader on @TAC thinks I’m too kind to Reagan in the Buckley review. The litany of bad policies and personnel choices under Reagan is lengthy: the federal government grew and the executive branch became more secretive and less accountable; the neoconservatives gained a permanent foothold in the GOP; Reagan’s judicial appointments were often flawed; the U.S. pulled out of Lebanon but became more enmeshed in Third World proxy warfare; the drug war escalated; etc. For the case against Reagan, see Murray Rothbard, as well as Peter Hitchens’s TAC review of The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World.

On the other hand, while conservative movement hacks regularly overestimate Reagan’s contribution to the end of the Cold War, his critics continue to underestimate that contribution. A relative of mine who was no admirer of Reagan interacted with Eastern Europeans quite a bit in the late ’80s and early ’90s. The Poles and Czechs and East Germans certainly did feel a debt to Reagan, even to the point of naming their children after him. He was the first American president in a generation who did not equivocate about the evils of socialism and the Soviet empire. The nations of what had traditionally been Central Europe had seen their sovereignty signed away by Roosevelt and Truman at the Yalta and Potsdam conference. Reagan seemed to repudiate those concessions.

He did so without starting World War III or, what was a greater risk, eliciting a Soviet crackdown. He took fire from the neoconservatives and movement cons for his negotiations with Gorbachev — which were not always as friendly as they are popularly remembered as being — but Reagan successfully de-escalated the Cold War in Europe while giving moral support to the captive nations. That Reagan did both of these things is astonishing: had anyone else been in office, the one should have undermined the other. Think of Gerald Ford asserting in debate with Jimmy Carter, “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.” Republicans could, as Nixon did, “go to China,” but in doing so they appeared to be surrendering the moral high ground. Reagan was firm and flexible in exactly the right proportion, and it was no accident. He genuinely believed that communism was evil — a term that doesn’t carry much weight in realpolitik — and he genuinely believed that people longed to be free and were basically good. The former was a conservative belief, the latter a liberal one. Both proved to be indispensable at the moment when he was president. (I should note, by the way, that Peter Hitchens’s piece in the March 2011 issue of The American Conservative is essential reading, especially for those who think that history had a simple happy ending once the Soviet empire fell — the corruption and post-communist forms of despotism that took root throughout much of the former USSR after 1991 attest to the darker side of history.)

At home as well, Reagan accomplished an historical remoralization — not in the sense of renewing morality, but in restoring morale. That has entailed a mixed legacy: Americans, especially conservatives, began to reaffirm markets over Great Society (if not New Deal) planned and the country became more entrepreneurial. We entered a new era, one in which the dominant political tones would be those of neo-liberal economics. Cutting taxes and growing the economy came to take precedence over creating new government services — at least, rhetorically they did. In practice, Leviathan continue to grow during Reagan’s years and afterward, and new kinds of economic insanity flourished, above all the now pathological Republican belief that economic growth is a freedom-preserving panacea. Reagan was not, in fact, as much of a neo-liberal as his epigones — as Jeff Riggenbach has pointed out, he was actually more of a protectionist than the presidents on either side of him. But even if Reagan’s policies had a Buchananite tinge to them, the worldview that predominated on the right after the Reagan era was one of free-trade agreements and open borders. And beneath this neo-liberal veneer, neo-imperial foreign-policy views proliferated, thanks to the neoconservatives that Reagan brought to government and to the exceptionalist and democratist rhetoric Reagan himself employed. On the other hand, it should be remembered that Reagan also had Buchanan and other traditional conservatives in his administration. The president hardly handed power directly to the neoconservatives.

Reagan’s foreign policy in Europe and toward the USSR was a success of world-historical proportions — again, not because he brought down the Berlin Wall or the Soviet Union, but because he encouraged the Europeans who did tear down the wall, and he avoided the grandiose military-strategic blunders of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon (as well as Bush, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama). His foreign policy elsewhere was mixed, but again not catastrophic, which is actually saying a lot. At home, his policies were also mixed and he sowed seeds that would bear terrible fruit in the Great Recession. Letting those seeds grow into entangling weeds, though, is something for which Clinton and Bush II deserve more reproach. Reagan was the right man for his time and place; the trouble is that once he had left office his Emersonian optimism was turned into a hard and cynical neo-liberal statism by his successors, both on the right and in the Oval Office.

You can catch an earlier interview of mine with the Daily Bell here. There’s also this radio interview with Jack Hunter from last week — a commenter says its from my Glenn Beck range, presumably because it references the progressives. Beck is half-right about the progressives, for what it’s worth. (Gottfried tackles his wrong half here.)

Somewhat to my surprise, I stumble into 2011 with three or four essays of mine in bound form. There’s the new piece “Willmoore Kendall, Man of the People” in The Dilemmas of American Conservatism, three previously published items in the invaluable antiwar reader ComeHomeAmerica.us, and a personal piece originally from LewRockwell.com in Walter Block’s anthology of libertarian autobiographies, I Chose Liberty.

Next month I’ll be delivering a paper on Kendall’s and M.E. Bradford’s views of Lincoln — with excursions into Jaffa, Strauss, and Richard Weaver — at the ninth annual Abbeville Institute scholar’s conference. This year’s gathering takes place in Wilmington, N.C., and has as its theme “The South and America’s Wars” — specifically, Southern opposition to those wars. Student scholarships may still be available.