It was great to hear from you again after so long. I guess you are in Berkeley these days, is that right? I did not get a chance to read your report, but noticed this post about Hegel on your blog. Did you know that I teach Hegel? And I actually wrote an essay that explains this connection between the neo-cons and Hegel. As you guessed correctly, the connection is bogus. Here is a link to my essay – http://www.permanent-revolution.org/essays/end_irony.pdf
Hope you are well and good to hear from you. And oh yes I am still involved with WBAI and it is just as crazy as ever.

Alex Steinberg

Thanks for both of your posts, the one you didn’t like and this one.

It was great to read your first one last Sunday. I was actually visiting my mother for dinner, who is not remotely a conservative… and she suggested that we watch the Fox News bio on Buckley. I was surprised, since my mother’s politics are more progressive, but had a sort of “warm fuzzy feeling” towards Buckley.

On the one hand, this warm, fuzzy feeling was for a media sensation from youth, like I have a warm, fuzzy feeling for Madonna and Michael Jackson (or for David Hasslehoff, but only as Knight Rider.) On the other hand, there was stuff about 1956 and the early 60s, stuff I didn’t really understand (because my mother wasn’t explaining it well and it certainly wasn’t on the Fox News bio.) And there were things about how Buckley and The National Review cats could definitely appeal to the wider non-WASP “White Race”, pushes that were going to come to shove in post-WW2 assimilation that someone had to articulate– from what my mother said, early, 1950s “patriots” and what we’d now call conservatives were more successful than leftists in challenging anti-Semitism anti-Catholicism, and focusing anti-Communism towards the Soviet Union and away from the tradition of the Palmer Raids.

Anyway, this is all from a brief chat with my mom, and comes with no citations or authority… But, a few such chats with 60-70-80 year olds might be much better than reading Francis Fukuyama, go for it… It might be interesting to hear how they perceive the transformations in the meaning of the words “liberal” and “conservative” since the 1950s.

So, as a general conclusion, I think the question of Buckley and National Review as the founders of what became the Neocon movement does not deserve rethinking. It might be more interesting to consider Buckley as part of the complicated process of American assimilation, the becoming/production of “Americans.”

yours,
Lex

PS: A minor word note: punctated equilibrium IS evolution.