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Entry: Buchanan & Lukacs--Getting Personal Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/buchanan_lukacs_getting_personal#28575 Post contents: I like Chronicles, post there all the time, and have been to the last three John Randolph Clubs, but we do need a paleo magazine that is more overtly political. TAC is certainly overtly political, but it has become, over time, less overtly paleo. And more niche anti-war. And it probably helps if that magazine is located near the Beltway, if not inside it. If for no other reason than to prove to the rest of the Beltway crowd that we do exist and we are real, normal people. (Perhaps this is inherently corrupting. I could be convinced. But if we are entirely out crying in the wilderness, then that is what we are going to seem like, wilderness dwellers.) The problem with niche political magazines these days, as I understand it, is that the economics just don’t work out, thanks in part to the internet and sites like this. You need a big money backer or backers or a Foundation. (Perhaps there is a magazine waiting to spring out of the Ron Paul campaign. Revolution Magazine, anyone? This could work if it avoided clichéd and reductionistic libertarianism and sought to keep traditionalists in the fold.) I would not abandon TAC. I would just accept that it is what it has become. An anti-war conservative, realist foreign policy magazine. I think the choice of Lukacs as reviewer was wrong and disrespectful of Buchanan. But it seems to me some of the anger has been displaced and is out of proportion and unhelpfully personal. Why has this not been a discussion about TAC instead of Lukacs? The discussion of Lukacs has been, it seems to me, a bit of a surrogate for some other issues and fault lines - nationalism, anti-anticommunism, Churchill and WWII in general. Read the last two threads by Thomas Fleming at Chronicles. The attacks on Lukacs are not being accepted well in some quarters. And this whole thing threatens to damage what little of paleoconservatism that you could call a coherent “movement.” (Bad word, I know, but you know what I mean.) Here is my question re. TAC. TAC had to know what kind of a review they would get from Lukacs. It seems like bad editorial policy to commission a review when you know it will be either good or bad. So was this a conscious attempt to distance themselves from their founder so it would no longer be “Buchanan’s Magazine,” or was it a sort of intrapaleo publicity stunt or something else? (I guess clueless and thoughtless are options.) If it was a publicity stunt, I think it has backfired. If it was the former, it has worked. Sent at: 2008 12 02