Posted by
Daniel Crandall on Wednesday, May 28, 2008 3:50:06 PM
Conservatives concerned about America's Leeward cultural drift often wonder how to get the pro-America, pro-military, anti-moral relativism, pro-tradition, etc., etc. message out to the public. It is nice to see that at least one modern conservative archon knew that it took more than polemics.
Michael Knox Beran, in his review of William F. Buckley Jr's final book, titled
Flying High: Remembering Barry Goldwater, writes,
If Ronald Reagan figured out how to make conservatism appealing to a
large audience through television, Buckley did something similar in his
books. In the Blackford Oakes spy novels, he mocked the moral
relativism of Graham Greene and John le Carré, which by the 1970s had
become standard fare. The Oakes books reached readers who would never
have picked up God and Man at Yale.
Conservatives should keep the Blackford Oakes novels in mind the next time they sit down to write one more non-fiction cultural critique. And if fiction isn't Hugh Hewitt's, Dennis Prager's, Michael Medved's, Laura Ingraham, Glen Beck's, etc., etc., ad nauseum, then conservatives should support those who are attempting to move the culture through the arts - folks like
Robert Ferrigno,
John Ringo, and
Vince Flynn.