The Cynical Idiocy of ‘National Review’ Conservatism

The New Center: Sohrab Ahmari’s Newsletter

A few months ago, my Compact cofounder Matthew Schmitz was flipping through a recent print issue of National Review — the steadfast organ of mainstream, “fusionist” conservatism founded in 1955 — and noticed something peculiar: Most of the ads interspersed through the magazine’s pages seemed to be hawking low-rent, semi-scammy junk products: colloidal-silver leg-relaxing gels, commemorative liberty doubloons, anti-aging pills, crank-science books, and the like.

Who, he wondered, formed the market for this stuff? And what did these ads tell us about the state of Buckley-ite “movement conservatism” — and about today’s America, which in many ways a product of the movement’s success? There was only one way to find out: to try to buy up all the products and services on offer in a single issue. We found the right man for the job in the British writer Sam Kriss.