Reason’s magazines Brian Doherty, reviewing the latest by left-wing intellectual Eric Lott and Jeffery Hart’s history of National Review, points out some important lessons for libertarians. Brian finds Lott’s weakness a refusal to attempt to fashion a realistic strategy for achieving his political goals, or even bother to consider if his goals are realistic in the first place.

No one could ever accuse National Review of not taking political reality into account. In fact, Hart’s book illustrates how conservatives went to the opposite extreme of Lott: losing their way by becoming exclusively focused on short term gains. The result is a conservative movement which nominally holds power, but has lost sight of, abandoned, or is simply incapable of achieving, any of the goals for which it initially sought power:

“If, as Bismarck said, politics is the art of the possible, then what is possible can and will shift. To be an intellectual force in creating that shift you have to be willing to step boldly outside the existing consensus. National Review has remained respectable and, as such, has been a great success in terms of circulation and shaping an active political movement. But the modern state and the modern-liberal values of regulation, taxing, spending, and loosening of certain social restrictions (while creating new ones) have continued their march to dominance, even if the National Review team had the victories of Ronald Reagan becoming president and Buckley being published in The New Yorker.Standing ultimately not for any firm ideological viewpoint but for some version of the “most conservative electable candidate” led the magazine to a bizarre combination of success and impotence. Even as NR’s Ponnuru acknowledged, in defense of Bush, that the GOP has never really been serious about cutting government spending (so why gripe at Bush about it?), he wrote that defeat for Bush would be a “crushing blow” for the “organized conservatism” that is his audience. The Bushism that the magazine too often bows down to these days—defending his administration’s peccadillos and power grabs, mostly standing by him through some of the biggest expansions of domestic spending in the magazine’s history—stands for little recognizable in the magazine’s ideological tradition. As Hart acknowledges, that’s true even in matters of religion. Bush’s modern evangelical Christianity is distinct from the creedal and traditional Christianity-with-authority of NR’s Catholic roots.

Back in 1965, James Burnham wrote in NR that it was absurd for the right to try to fight Medicare. Forty budget-busting years later, NR’s man Bush has expanded the program to impossible proportions. While NR’s editors complain about that on occasion, it won’t lead them to abandon their “most conservative electable candidate.” What seems more realistic not in short-term political terms but in recognition of mathematical and economic facts: Burnham’s respectable centrism or the radical libertarianism that says such programs were illegitimate and disastrous?

Lasting political change of any sort, whether good or bad—from emancipation to woman’s suffrage to Social Security to the inevitable end of Social Security—starts on the radical fringe before it rules the center. A healthy intellectual discussion should not be restrained by toeing a middle line. As Eric Lott’s bizarre views prove, being radical isn’t the same as being right. But NR’s history suggests that being a politically realistic centrist doesn’t simply mean compromising on little things. Ultimately it makes you incapable of offering a true alternative to a status quo that can range from unmanageable to evil. NR’s past positions on de jure segregation as well as de facto segregation, and its typical embrace of and shilling for GOP pols who pay little but lip service to any conservative principle nowadays other than endless war, show what those who attack radicalism too often forget: the impotence of realism.”