National Review (1955–)

Conservative magazine founded by William F. Buckley Jr. in 1955 as the institutional vehicle for the new postwar conservative movement; the principal venue in which postwar American conservatism was constructed as a coherent intellectual-political project; the institution at the center of the wiki’s fusionist consolidation, JBS case study, Iberian admiration, and post-2016 fragmentation.

Why It Matters Here

NR is the institutional spine of mid-20th-century American conservatism. Most of the wiki’s pre-2010 thinker pages route through it:

William F. Buckley Jr. — founder, editor, public face 1955–2008
Frank Meyer — senior editor, fusionist architect
James Burnham — senior editor, Cold War strategist, Iberian-admirer-in-chief
Willmoore Kendall — founding senior editor (departed acrimoniously)
L. Brent Bozell Jr. — early NR contributor, before the Triumph break
Russell Kirk — long-running contributor and “Mr. Conservative” presence
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn — European correspondent for nearly four decades
Thomas Molnar — Catholic-traditionalist contributor

The wiki’s structural reading: NR in its first thirty years was substantially more Catholic, more European-traditionalist, more Iberian-admiring, and more hierarchically anti-democratic than the standard fusionist self-portrait suggests. The post-1991 fusionist NR (post-Buckley, under Lowry from 1997 and contemporary editors) is a substantially more domesticated institution than the 1955–1990 magazine.

Editorial History

Founding (1955)

Buckley founded NR with $400,000 of his father’s money plus contributions from a small donor circle (notable: J. Howard Pew of Sun Oil; the Volker Fund). The famous mission statement: “It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.” The magazine’s institutional purpose was to consolidate a postwar conservative coalition out of the remnants of pre-WWII anti-New-Deal conservatism, anti-communist Cold War militancy, and Catholic-traditionalist intellectual currents.

Fusionism Era (c. 1960–1991)

Frank Meyer joined as senior editor in 1957; In Defense of Freedom (1962) supplied the canonical fusionist synthesis. The 1964 NR-published What Is Conservatism? anthology was the institutional benediction of fusionism. NR published Goldwater-era movement texts and underwrote the Goldwater nomination ideologically.

The JBS Case

Per Dallek 2023, the Buckley/NR relationship to the John Birch Society was substantially more accommodationist than the standard “Buckley purged the Birchers in 1962” narrative claims. Buckley repudiated Robert Welch specifically while courting Bircher rank-and-file; NR continued to feature Bircher-adjacent contributors (Clarence Manion, et al.) for years. The wiki’s Counterrevolution thesis depends in part on this NR continuity-with-fringe rather than expulsion-of-fringe finding.

Iberian Period

Per Iberian Vistas: from the late 1950s through the 1980s, NR was the principal American-conservative venue for sympathetic-to-laudatory coverage of Franco and Salazar. Burnham’s 1975 Franco obituary (“our century’s most successful ruler”) and Jeffrey Hart’s 1973 “Great Guernica Fraud” essay are wiki-specific load-bearing artifacts. The Iberian thread effectively closed by 1990 as Spain liberalized.

Post-Cold War (1991–2016)

The Cold War cement that had held the fusionist coalition together dissolved. NR’s institutional response was to retain the fusionist self-understanding while gradually shedding its more European-traditionalist contributors. By the 2000s the magazine was considerably more libertarian-economic and considerably less Catholic-traditionalist than its 1960s self.

The 2016 Schism

January 21, 2016: NR published “Against Trump” — a multi-author symposium organized by Rich Lowry explicitly opposing Trump’s nomination. Contributors included Glenn Beck, David Boaz, Brent Bozell III (son of the Triumph founder), Mona Charen, Ben Domenech, Erick Erickson, William Kristol, Dana Loesch, Yuval Levin, Michael Medved, Edwin Meese III, Russell Moore, Michael Mukasey, Katie Pavlich, John Podhoretz, R.R. Reno, Thomas Sowell, and Cal Thomas. The symposium is the wiki’s clearest institutional artifact of the fusionist consensus breaking publicly with the Trump-MAGA moment.

The post-2016 trajectory: NR lost subscribers and some contributors to the new MAGA-aligned outlets (American Greatness, American Affairs, Compact); other contributors (R.R. Reno, prominently) migrated toward postliberalism and away from NR’s house line. The institution survives but is no longer the center of conservative intellectual gravity it was 1955–2000.

What NR Means in the Wiki

NR functions in the wiki as a historical institution rather than a contemporary one. The wiki’s contemporary New Right runs through American Affairs, Compact, American Greatness, American Mind, First Things, and the Postliberal Order Substack — NR’s flagship-of-the-conservative-movement role has substantially passed to American Mind (Claremont Institute) for the right-Straussian current and to First Things / Postliberal Order for the postliberal current.

The wiki’s structural use of NR:

It is the baseline against which the contemporary fragmentation is measured
Its historical coverage of Franco/Salazar/JBS supplies the wiki’s continuity-with-fringe evidence
Its 2016 “Against Trump” symposium is the cleanest institutional artifact of the fusionist break

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