From a Small Magazine in 1955 to a Movement Press That Reshaped the Debate

In 1950, one of the most respected literary critics in America looked over the landscape and announced that liberalism was the only intellectual tradition left standing in the country. Conservatives, he said, did not really have ideas. They had what he called irritable mental gestures. That is a bold thing to write about a movement that went on to win the White House with a former actor, recast the Supreme Court and rewrite the tax code. It is the sort of prediction that ages like milk in a hot car.

What happened between that confident obituary and the movement's triumphs is a story of printing presses. Nobody gave conservatives a newspaper or a magazine or a seat at the editorial table. They built their own, usually with little money and a stubborn belief that ideas win when somebody puts them in print. This is the history of that press, told in order, with what each outlet did for ideas and for the party.

The problem: a movement with no megaphone

Picture the landscape at the end of World War II. The big dailies in the large cities leaned one way. The broadcast networks were in their infancy and cautious about opinion. The magazines that shaped the elite conversation shared a general outlook, and the universities were heading in the same direction. A conservative who opposed the New Deal, distrusted centralized planning and worried about the Soviet Union might find a sympathetic columnist here or there, but he could not find a home.

Here is what makes the later story so impressive. These early conservatives did not whine about the situation, or at least not only. They looked at the map and decided that if they could not get into the room, they would build another room. That is the first conservative contribution to the American press: the idea that a movement can make its own platform.

1944: Human Events

The earliest of the great movement publications was Human Events, founded in Washington in 1944 by a small group that included Felix Morley, a former editor of the Washington Post who had left the paper, and Frank Hanighen. Henry Regnery, a Chicago businessman who would soon found his own publishing house, helped finance the weekly. It started as a four-page newsletter that opposed what its founders saw as the expansion of government power during and after the war.

What did it do for the cause? Three things.

1. It gave conservatives a weekly reading habit. Subscribers could find, in one place, the analysis that the daily papers did not provide.
2. It put conservatives in print in Washington. The paper's readers included people inside the government.
3. It spawned a publishing house. Regnery's book list became a pipeline for conservative authors who could not get a hearing from the big publishers.

That last point is easy to overlook. A magazine gives you opinions. A book list gives you a library.

1955: National Review

If Human Events was the beginning, National Review was the arrival. William F. Buckley Jr., a twenty-nine-year-old Yale graduate who had already written a book attacking his own university's drift from the principles it claimed to teach, founded the magazine in 1955. The first issue came out on November 19. Buckley raised the money from investors who believed in the project and gathered a staff that was remarkable by any standard.

Consider the roster. James Burnham, a former Trotskyist who had become a thinker on the Cold War. Frank Meyer, a former Communist who would argue that the conservative case for freedom and the conservative case for virtue belonged together, an idea later called fusionism. Willmoore Kendall, a political theorist. Whittaker Chambers, whose testimony in the Alger Hiss case had made him famous, joined a couple of years after the launch. Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind, wrote for it as well.

In the opening statement of purpose, Buckley wrote that the magazine "stands athwart history, yelling Stop," at a time when no one was inclined to do so. It is one of the great opening lines in the history of American opinion journalism, and it had a function beyond style. It told readers that the magazine was not going to apologize. It also, with a wink, announced that conservatives understood how they looked to the rest of the world.

What did National Review do for ideas? It gave an uneasy coalition a common language. Free-market economists, traditionalists who loved order and virtue, and anti-communists who cared about the Cold War did not always agree about much. The magazine gave them a table where they could argue in public and in print. In the early 1960s it also practiced a form of quality control, as Buckley used its pages to argue that the movement had to separate itself from conspiracy theories and from the leadership of the John Birch Society. You may judge how well that worked, but the idea that a movement should police its own edges has value.

What did it do for the party? It became a training ground. The vision of the 1964 Goldwater campaign, which lost badly and still built the movement that won later, came out of the intellectual climate the magazine helped create. For more on that, read William F. Buckley Stood Athwart History and Then Built a Movement and From National Review to the Sharon Statement and How the Movement Took the GOP.

The editorial page of the Wall Street Journal

Not every important conservative voice was a movement magazine. Some were inside big, successful institutions. The editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, which operates separately from the paper's news staff, was a steady voice for free markets all through the twentieth century. Vermont Royster ran it from 1958 to 1971. Then Robert Bartley took over as editor of the editorial page in 1972 and ran it for three decades, winning a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 1980.

Under Bartley the page became a main engine of supply-side economics. It gave space to economists and writers who argued that lower marginal tax rates would encourage work, saving and investment. The page championed the idea over many years, long before it had a champion in the White House. In 1981 President Reagan signed a major tax cut that embodied some of what the page had been arguing, and you can read about the details in reagan's 1981 tax cut and the quiet end of bracket creep.

What did it do for ideas? It showed that the case for markets could be made in plain English, in short editorials, to busy readers in business. What did it do for the party? It gave Republican candidates and staffers a daily brief on how to explain economic policy to voters. The page also represents a different model from National Review: not an upstart against the establishment but a conservative voice inside a mainstream institution. In 2007 News Corporation acquired the paper's parent company, Dow Jones, but the editorial page kept its general outlook.

1982: The Washington Times

Washington in the early 1980s had one dominant daily newspaper. In 1982 a second one appeared. The Washington Times was launched on May 17, 1982, and its backing came from the Unification Church, founded by Sun Myung Moon. Its first editor was James Whelan. The paper's stated aim was to offer the capital a daily with a different editorial outlook from the one it was used to.

I do not want to hide the controversy. The paper's ownership drew criticism from the start, and that scrutiny was fair. Readers had every right to ask who owned the paper and what influence that ownership might have. The paper's defenders replied that its news and opinion coverage should be judged by what was printed, and that it provided something Washington lacked: a conservative daily read by people in government.

What did it do for ideas and for the party? It gave staff on Capitol Hill, in the administration and at think tanks a paper that took their side of the argument seriously. It also gave young conservative journalists a place to learn the trade, which matters more than it sounds. A movement without newsrooms has pundits. A movement with newsrooms has reporters, editors and a bench.

1995: The Weekly Standard

By the mid-1990s the movement had won the Congress and, with the 1994 election, taken control of the House for the first time in forty years. It needed a magazine for a new moment. William Kristol and Fred Barnes launched The Weekly Standard in 1995, backed by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, with the first issue appearing that September.

The magazine's contribution was sharp, short, policy-minded argument. It was fast and often combative, aimed at the people who ran the party's policy shops and congressional offices. It pressed for a muscular foreign policy, took part in the debates over welfare reform and the role of government, and served as a place where conservatives argued with one another in public.

It also shows something that every movement discovers. Outlets rise and fall. The magazine stopped publishing in December 2018, and its closure came after years of intra-movement disagreements that were visible in its own pages. A conservative should not mourn the cycle of outlets too much. Competition is how the movement stays honest. When one voice closes, another begins. If you want to see what came after, The Internet Broke the Gatekeepers, and the Right Was Quick to See It tells the story of the online wave.

The smaller outlets that mattered

The big names are not the whole shelf. Buckley took his argument to television in 1966 with Firing Line, a long-form interview show that proved audiences would sit still for an hour of civilized disagreement, which is more than you can say for most of what passes for debate now. In 1967 R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. started a monthly at Indiana University that became The American Spectator, a magazine with a taste for needling the powerful. Think of it as the movement's court jester, with the license to say what the serious people were too dignified to say.

Add the regional papers, the church bulletins, the small newsletters and the direct-mail letters that kept donors informed, and you see the real picture. The conservative press was never one thing. It was a hundred small bets, and enough of them paid off.

What the press did for the movement

Step back and look at all these publications together. There is a pattern.

• They made conservatism respectable as an intellectual tradition. The critic who said conservatives had only irritable gestures was wrong, and the shelf of magazines and books proves it.
• They created careers. A young writer who could not get into the established papers could write for a conservative magazine and then go on to a think tank, a campaign or Congress.
• They created a shared vocabulary. When people talk about fusionism, supply-side economics or peace through strength, they are using terms that these publications helped spread.
• They held the party accountable. The press is not the party's mouthpiece. Many of these outlets criticized Republican presidents and members of Congress sharply. A movement press that only cheers is just a fan club.

That last point deserves its own moment. A healthy conservative press tells Republicans when they are wrong. That is how the movement keeps its principles in the face of power. If you want to read about moments when Republicans and their allies disagreed in public, see The 1964 Goldwater Campaign Lost 44 States and Won the Future.

The objection: did a conservative press just create an echo chamber?

Here is the strongest version of the criticism. A movement press, the critic says, tells its readers what they already think, rewards agreement and punishes dissent. Readers who only consume friendly outlets become more certain and less informed. It is a fair point, and the right has to take it seriously.

Let me answer it in three steps. One, the movement press began as a response to an echo chamber. The early conservative publications existed because the mainstream outlets of the day did not reflect a large section of the public. Two, a competition among outlets is better than a monopoly in any direction, and the number of conservative outlets has meant constant argument within the movement. Three, the cure for an echo chamber is the reader. If you read the strongest opposing arguments, you know the other side's case better than the people who only read their own. A good reader is a better defense than any editor.

The bottom line

• Conservatives built their own press because the established outlets did not reflect their views. Human Events in 1944, National Review in 1955, the Washington Times in 1982 and The Weekly Standard in 1995 each filled a gap.
• The Wall Street Journal editorial page showed that a conservative case could also be made from inside a mainstream institution, especially on economics.
• A movement press does three things for a party: it supplies ideas, trains talent and holds the party's feet to the fire. The best of it does all three.
• Read widely. Subscribe to at least one outlet that makes you uncomfortable, and use it to sharpen your own case.
• If you want to change the debate, start something. Every publication on this list began with a few people, a small budget and a conviction.