Up from Kookery

By Matthew Continetti

Thursday, December 19, 2024

 

In 1990, when he stepped down as editor of National Review, William F. Buckley Jr. gave an interview to the Washington Post. For 35 years and 2,750 issues, Buckley and his magazine had commented on politics, culture, economics, and foreign policy. In columns, essays, and books, and on television, Buckley had assailed the liberal establishment, influenced a president, and promoted arguments crucial to the demise of the Soviet Union. Yet his greatest achievement, Buckley told the Post, was the “absolute exclusion of anything antisemitic or kooky” from the conservative movement.

 

The job was not easy. Buckley’s war on the conspiratorial mind-set prevalent in some quarters of the Right (and Left) lasted for decades. And victory was never total. The antisemites and conspiracy theorists had their own organizations, their own publications, their own corners to retreat to whenever Buckley anathematized them from postwar conservatism. The belief that secret forces, including Jews, work from within to undermine America is perennial. It can burst forth, with no warning, at any time.

 

Yet Buckley knew that his task was worthwhile. To indulge antisemites and conspiracists was not only wrong as a matter of fact; it was also a moral failing. Buckley saw that the vitality of his movement depended on its ability to earn respect in the consolidated academic and media apparatus of mid-century America. And there was no way that would happen if liberal gatekeepers could dismiss conservatives out of hand as bigots and paranoiacs.

 

This latter point is often misunderstood. Buckley did not keep conservatism respectable out of deference to liberalism. On the contrary: He wanted to forge a conservatism worthy of self-respect. Only a political paradigm cleansed of logical and ethical impurities — a “hygienic conservatism,” as Buckley put it — would attract young minds and remain durable.

 

As a new generation of conservatives confronts resurgent antisemitism and widespread conspiracism, it is worth remembering that Buckley’s opposition to these corrosive inclinations was based on his devotion to truth and his love of country. These traits, anchored in religion and patriotism, can also inform our response to contemporary political unreason, despite a fractured media landscape and the absence of towering figures such as William F. Buckley Jr.

 

The story of how Buckley confronted and expelled antisemites and conspiracy theorists from National Review therefore offers lessons for the current moment. That story is neither linear nor tidy. It begins with the acknowledgment that among Buckley’s inheritances from his father was a casual antisemitism. Yet Buckley’s experiences in the Army during World War II and in college disabused him of this prejudice. When he entered public life, with the publication of God and Man at Yale in 1951, Buckley was an opponent of antisemitism. And he was offended by, and eager to rebut, the slander that American conservatism was a form of fascism or Nazism.

 

The passionate anti-communism behind postwar American conservatism attracted men and women of all faiths. Historian George Nash observes that five of the 31 names on the masthead of NR’s first issue, published in November 1955, were Jewish. Though the magazine in its first decade was critical of the State of Israel, Buckley made sure that no antisemitic copy appeared in its pages.

 

This policy distinguished NR from another journal on the right. “When it became clear, in 1957, that the direction The American Mercury was headed was anti-Semitic,” Buckley wrote later, “I ruled, with the enthusiastic approval of my colleagues, that no writer appearing on the Mercury’s masthead, notwithstanding his own innocence on the subject, could also appear on National Review’s.” Buckley’s quest to banish antisemitism from the conservative mainstream would endure for much longer than the Mercury, which put out its last issue in 1981.

 

The John Birch Society, however, was a different sort of beast. The organization, named after a missionary who was killed by Chinese Communists, had exploded in size and influence since it was founded, in 1958, by candy manufacturer Robert Welch. At its height, the society had between 60,000 and 100,000 members, including some of the most prominent conservative businessmen in America. They were organized into secret cells of no more than 20 people.

 

The John Birch Society was popular. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona said that “every other person in Phoenix” belonged to it. Nor were those people, in Goldwater’s striking phrase, “cactus drunks.” According to the senator, the Birchers were among the “highest cast of men of affairs.” Among them, as Alvin Felzenberg notes, was a businessman who had been instrumental in publishing Goldwater’s best-selling manifesto, The Conscience of a Conservative, in 1960.

 

Most Birchers joined the group because they wanted to fight communism. Welch, however, used his platform to promote increasingly unhinged theories. In 1961, Welch estimated that communists controlled 50 to 70 percent of the country. Welch charged that none other than President Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander of Allied forces during World War II, was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy,” writes Felzenberg. And Welch dismissed hostile coverage of his outlandish views as “Communist inspired.”

 

The backdrop for Welch’s accusations was the Cold War. Ever since the Yalta Conference in 1945, when the Allies granted the Soviet Union a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, communism had advanced at freedom’s expense. Europe was cleaved by the Iron Curtain. In 1949, mainland China fell to Mao Zedong’s People’s Liberation Army. The following year, communist North Korea invaded South Korea — and the United States fought to a stalemate along the 38th parallel. In 1956, America watched from the sidelines as the Soviets brutally put down an anti-communist uprising in Hungary. The Soviets reached space by launching Sputnik in 1957. Then, in 1959, Fidel Castro overthrew the Batista regime in Cuba and aligned himself with the USSR. During it all, evidence mounted that communists had infiltrated the U.S. government.

 

The only way Welch and his followers could explain the West’s irresolution and retreat was that it had been betrayed from within. “Scrubbed down,” Buckley wrote, Welch’s position was that “one may reliably infer subjective motivation from objective result.” In other words, if Eisenhower fails to stop Soviet tanks from crushing protesters in Budapest, it is because the president is a communist agent.

 

The logic is absurd, of course. “Ike’s not a communist,” Russell Kirk famously said. “He’s a golfer.” Yet the idea that bad outcomes are always and everywhere the consequence of treacherous activity is powerfully seductive.

 

Such was the case when the conservative movement was taking shape in the early 1960s. Goldwater was the national leader of a youthful and grassroots rebellion against the welfare state and weakness in foreign policy. Buckley was the intellectual star who helped create the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), the Young Americans for Freedom, and the New York Conservative Party. Both men drew from the same base of supporters as did Welch. And both men feared that a conservatism entangled in the candy man’s conspiracies would lack broad appeal.

 

Yet they had to tread carefully. If they denounced the Birchers, they would be denouncing much of their base, and many of NR’s readers and subscribers. No reasonable person wants to be a captive to his audience — but he also does not want to lose it. Thus when Buckley first criticized Welch in 1961, he took pains to separate the leader of the Birch Society from its membership and to treat that leader with respect.

 

It didn’t work. The problem only grew worse. In 1962, Goldwater invited key conservatives to the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach. On the agenda: developing a strategy to counter the Birchers. Goldwater recognized that some members of the Birchers were kooks, but he resisted the idea of denouncing the group in public. Russell Kirk offered that if he were asked about the Birch Society, he would say that Robert Welch was a “loony” who “should be put away.” Buckley decided to revisit the topic in National Review.

 

The editorial he wrote, headlined “The Question of Robert Welch,” remains a classic of opinion journalism. Welch’s conspiracies, Buckley argued, were “damaging the cause of anti-Communism” by associating that cause with crank assertions divorced from reality. What’s more, Buckley challenged the notion that no one should attack his own side. “There are,” he wrote, “bounds to the dictum, Anyone on the right is my ally.”

 

National Review was deluged with angry letters. One correspondent accused Buckley of serving the Left by criticizing the Right. Not so, Buckley replied:

 

It was precisely my desire to strengthen the ranks of conservatism that led me to publish the editorial. Our movement has got to govern. It has got to expand by bringing into our ranks those people who are, at the moment, on our immediate left. . . . If they are being asked to join a movement whose leadership believes the drivel of Robert Welch, they will pass by crackpot alley, and will not pause until they feel the warm embrace of those way over on the other side, the Liberals.

 

That was not how others on the right saw it, however. In the aftermath of Buckley’s editorial, NR lost donors. Its circulation sank. A board member resigned. The hate mail poured in. “No stopping these bastards,” Buckley told senior editor James Burnham.

 

Some historians have recently argued that Buckley never “expelled” the Birchers from the conservative movement. After all, the argument runs, Birchers continued to be active in politics, to participate (often discreetly) in mainstream conservative activities, and to support their society, which exists to this day. “No single conservative leader had the power to ‘excommunicate’ the Birch Society,” wrote Matthew Dallek in Politico in 2023.

 

Well, yes. But what of it? This revisionist approach misunderstands Buckley’s decisions and downplays his courage. He wasn’t looking to be pope — he’d have been the first to say that there is only one at a time. Buckley was declaring, instead, that his conservatism would be free from conspiracies that reflexively assume that one’s fellow Americans are acting not just in bad faith but in the worst faith. Buckley was staking a claim for a conservative alternative to the woolly fringe, an alternative more promising because it happened to believe things that were true.

 

Buckley’s conservatism thus grew in prestige as the Birchers faded into the background. Buckley and National Review advocated a balanced conservatism, tethered to the truth, amid the chaos of Vietnam, the student movement, urban riots, Watergate, and stagflation, and despite sniping from the margins. Buckley was taken seriously, or at least given a hearing, at the highest levels of politics and society.

 

Conservatism was not only about standing athwart history, yelling Stop. It was also about standing for a principled, sound, lucid defense of Western civilization, the Constitution, free enterprise, individual freedom, and personal responsibility. This very idea of conservatism is among the things Buckley meant to conserve. That is why, in a 1968 interview, he could say that the conservative movement had been “effective in the sense of defending defensible positions and not being associated with the kook Right.”

 

Circumstances have changed dramatically since Buckley’s encounter with the John Birch Society. The Soviet Union is no more. Antisemitism endangers Jews once more. Information technology and social media breathe new life into conspiracies. The rise of nationalism and populism has altered the landscape of the American Right. Conservatives who spoke with the authority of a Buckley or a Kirk or a Goldwater are gone.

 

Yet Buckley’s idea of American conservatism remains. And in a world where everyone who has a smartphone is a writer, editor, and publisher, it is up to us as individuals to promote that idea — truthfully, powerfully, hygienically — while steering clear of crackpot alley.