National Review , Congress and the American Tradition , and Suicide of the West

This chapter explores how, in 1955, James Burnham helped cofound with William F. Buckley the National Review (NR), a conservative magazine with a strong anticommunist and free-market slant. Burnham agreed to become a senior editor at National Review, and he became its second-most-important figure for the next twenty-three years. His columns usually denounced liberals, communists, and other pundits. Burnham continued to spread themes he had preached in his three anticommunist works: war raged and the Cold War had to be won. Burnham never saw American and Western involvement in foreign parts of the world as forms of imperialism because they countered Soviet imperialism. He asserted that those who did were duped by communist propaganda. For the Machiavellian, the ends always justified the means because in the geopolitical arena, only power restrained power. The chapter then looks at Burnham's Congress and the American Tradition (1959) and Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism (1964).