THE NATIONAL REARVIEW: OBITUARY OF A CUCKSERVATIVE RAG

"How much for a copy of Cuckgasm?"

 by Colin Liddell

The National Review—which I will henceforth refer to by the more appropriate monicker of National Rearview—is like a forgotten great aunt whom you assume to be dead until you hear one day that she has broken out of her care home and has been caught wandering around in her nightie attacking postmen.

Yes, the old girl has found a way to remind you she is still alive – just in time for her imminent death. This is more or less how we should view the recent issue of National Rearview attacking Donald Trump. Rather than the "kingmaker" role the magazine is LARPing as, what we have here is an impotent and embarrassing incident at the tail end of its life, because unfortunately we don't shoot old mags like we shoot old nags.

But don't worry, apart from a bit of piss and vinegar, the postman, with the messages he was carrying, was not hurt, and neither was Donald Trump.

My first encounter with National Rearview was as a kid, when I watched the Woody Allen movie Bananas. There is a classic scene, where our pervy hero goes into a magazine shop and surveys the top shelf filled with trashy porn mags, among which the National Rearview makes an unexpected appearance. How prophetic was that? As that is exactly the position the rag craves for itself now – porny political clickbait. Although in 1971, when Bananas came out, this scene was a bit of a low blow, because Great Aunt Wilhelmina was then in her prime and was playing an important role in fighting global Communism.

Many in the Alt-Right, especially our Russian-friendly wing, tend to view William F. Buckley's cold warring with distaste, but the Cold War explains a lot about Buckley and even mitigates some of his reprehensible qualities, as I explained in my review of The Great Purge, the issue of Radix Journal published on the post-war Conservative movement. To quote myself:

"The question — and it is a serious one that is never directly addressed in Radix II, though often implied — is whether the betrayal of Conservatism is simply the effect, perhaps prolonged too long, of America’s rise to great power status and all the responsibilities and entanglements that this naturally involves?

Buckley’s creation of a New Right in the 1950s was essentially the unification, regimentation (hence the theme of constant purging), and globalization of the American Old Right, which prior to this was a diverse collection of beliefs with marked isolationist tendencies."

My point there was that the small-town, free-market, "muh freedoms" America that could safely exist and prosper behind the protective curtain of Britain's naval empire and the ambiguous balance of power in Eurasia, was ill equipped to fend off Soviet Communism, even the heavily mauled version that managed to crawl out from its existential struggle with Nazi Germany in World War II.

A respectable case could be made for the cultural centrism, big statism, overseas adventurism, and racial blindness of the National Rearview up to the end of the Cold War, but after that watershed the magazine quickly went off the rails of having any real purpose, existing rather in the same state as Britain after 1947, of having lost "an empire" but not yet finding a role.

It was this essential purposelessness that allowed the National Rearview to be co-opted for false purposes, and to simply become a mouthpiece for a Neocon globalism of the most toxic and pointless kind. The magazine's editorial offices became the place where intelligently stupid, preppy types sculpted twee little essays rationalizing and justifying the arrant absurdities of open borders, economic globalism, Middle Eastern Wars, and abstract American values that no one except concrete White Americans were interested in.

It is also tempting to see the National Rearview simply as a kind of dumb organism, selfishly seeking to prolong its worthless existence as its vital force ebbs away. For the last 25 years, its real role has been to bottom feed off new Democrat presidents. The graph below shows that the mag tends to do best whenever a new Democrat president gets elected.

Battle of the Cuckservative rags.

In the Clinton years the mag's circulation shot up, breaking the 250,000 copies-a-month mark. But after mid-term electoral successes for the Republican Party in 1994, NR went into steep decline, falling towards the 150,000 mark. The Neocon Wars of the early 21st century help stabilize things a bit, and then the mag enjoyed a new, but rather weak, uptick when Obama arrived on the scene, getting back to 200,000 copies. This graph only shows circulation up to 2010. Since then it has slid back down to around 150,000 copies, even with all the Leftist absurdities unleashed in Obama's final term.

A new Democrat President would obviously help prolong the life of this zombie publication, which is now dependent on donors. This is because its readership is made up of cuckservative types, who get their kick out of wringing their hands and feeling wronged and superior while their world burns around them, the sort who prefer ineffective moaning and pompous sneering to actual power. For this reason, we can assume that "the magazine"—viewed as a collective, unconscious entity—actually wants a Democrat to be elected.

The best case scenario for NR would be Hillary or Bernie in the White House. This would give their hacks another sad excuse to spill ink, wring hands, bemoan the present, and look back to an America that can no longer exist because they helped kill it.

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