Paul Gottfried writes: In a commentary, “Golden Days,” commemorating the 50th anniversary of National Review, Jonah Goldberg describes how his magazine’s founder dealt with ideological dissent:
“Buckley employed intellectual ruthlessness and relentless personal charm to keep that which is good about libertarianism, what we have come to call “social conservatism,” and what was necessary about anti-Communism in the movement. This meant throwing friends and allies off the bus from time to time. The Randians, the Rothbardian anarchists and isolationists, the Birchers, the anti-Semites, the me-too Republicans: all of these groups in various combinations were purged from the movement and masthead, sometimes painfully, sometimes easily, but always with the ideal of keeping the cause honest and pointed north to the ideal in his compass.[1]”
A few lines later, we learn the ideal that William F. Buckley assigned to his movement existed “only on paper,” that “conservative dogma remains unsettled, and that conservatism remains cleaved ideologically.” Nonetheless, the movement Buckley built was for Goldberg a breathtaking success—and had been achieved with minimal commotion.
E.J. Dionne, in a similar tribute in the Washington Post, NR’s putative adversary, proclaims that Buckley was not only a man of splendid parts but also one who had “determined to rid the right of the wing nuts. He was, to his everlasting credit, the scourge of anti-Semitism that had once infested significant parts of the right.”[2] Dionne blasted the strange conspiracy theories of the John Birch Society, which he applauds Buckley for unmasking. Unfortunately, little truth can be found in most of his remarks and no more than a sliver in Goldberg’s.
The NR staff devoted a special feature on October 19, 1965, to denouncing the Birch Society, but not for being anti-Semitic (of which there was scant evidence). The complaint was the Birchers did not support the war in Vietnam and had given up the struggle against Communism.[3] It’s worth noting that the best man at Buckley’s wedding, Revilo Oliver, was an outspoken anti-Semite, as well as a formidable classicist and Sanskrit scholar.[4] Oliver continued to write for Buckley’s publication well into the 1960s. Most of those expelled from his magazine and from Buckley’s movement were Jewish libertarians, like Ayn Rand, Frank Chodorov, Murray Rothbard and Ron Hamowy.[5] If the movement before Buckley’s interventions had been dominated by “anti-Semites,” his excommunications hardly amounted to a crusade against them. Goldberg’s mentor was especially hard on Jews who opposed his call for an accelerated struggle to overthrow the Soviet Empire. In Rand’s case, he turned against someone who was stridently atheistic.
Even more astonishing, although not likely to be challenged by the liberal-neoconservative media, is Goldberg’s suggestion that purges occurred in the conservative movement only quite rarely. To the contrary, they were frequent; one could say that they shaped the conservative movement.
English historian A.J.P. Taylor once observed, with regard to the Habsburgs, that “countries were episodes in the history of a dynasty.” In a like way, purges were episodes in the journalistic careers of those who led the conservative movement. And these expulsions took place so frequently that it may be helpful to divide them into different periods in accordance with the changing interests of movement elites. The purges did not all take place for the same reason, and identifying this complicated process with “fighting the scourge of anti-Semitism” is to indulge in fantasy.
“Being thrown off the bus” had implications beyond being kept from writing essays for National Review. As the conservative media empire took form, thanks largely to steady infusions of money each year from Australian benefactor Rupert Murdoch, being banned by one of its organs brought huge consequences. Someone banned from Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, or National Review, for example, would not likely be welcome in an affiliated movement publication or be put on FOX News, which enjoys the same sponsorship and represents the same ideology.
There are exceptions to this rule, as seen by the occasional appearance on FOX of Pat Buchanan, someone who is clearly offensive to NR and The Weekly Standard. But this exception may have been allowed because Buchanan is a widely read journalist. His occasional appearance on FOX may also be conditional on his not stirring the pot unduly on a channel run by neoconservatives and the Republican establishment. During his recent TV appearances, Pat (to my knowledge) has never contradicted his host, which may be why he is allowed to maintain his exceptional status.
There may be another reason for this status, namely that Buchanan had been removed from a Democratic rival channel, MSNBC. For years the directors of this channel had provided a berth for a figure of the Old Right; and it featured him on a regular basis, unlike FOX, which only permits Buchanan to participate in its discussions every now and then. Like other members of the Old Right, Buchanan was sent into limbo in the early 1990s for having ticked off Buckley’s esteemed New York friends.[6] A bad enough sin under the old order, this faux pas has proved even costlier under Buckley’s successors. His epigones may be driven even more than their master by desire for acceptance from mainstream journalists. The Heritage Foundation, The American Enterprise Institute, National Review, The Wall Street Journal, and other movement fixtures have had nothing to do with Buchanan for decades. They have carefully maintained their distance, although Buchanan’s books on politics and international relations have soared on the New York Times bestseller list.
For the less successful and less fortunate, however, being kicked off the bus has usually brought catastrophic results. The campaign of vilification that has accompanied marginalization has usually left its object socially and professionally ruined. Typical targets of this process were the Southern conservative M.E. Bradford and the populist journalist and critic of managerial democracy Samuel T. Francis. The elimination of Bradford as frontrunner for the National Endowment for the Humanities Directorship in 1981 and, 10 years later, the removal of Samuel Francis as the star columnist by the already neoconservative-controlled Washington Times followed a now-familiar course. Those condemned as outcasts by movement leaders suffered repeated journalistic attacks and were accused of being bigots rather than “conservatives.” Liberal journalists joined these campaigns and often seemed to be working in tandem with their neoconservative acquaintances, in order to drive “wing nuts” out of respectable conservatism. Printed assaults against the designated extremists were so devastating that their victims never regained standing as respectable writers.
Speaking as a minor target of such attacks, which operated in my case mostly surreptitiously, I noticed that my adversaries were working doggedly to isolate me. Mine, of course, was not a typical purge. Unlike others who were purged more dramatically, I never left a paper trail on such abrasive issues as Jews in the media. The recent decision of Intercollegiate Studies Institute to sever any connection with me as a writer did not arise because I was thought to be a “racist.” This action was taken because, through my leadership of the HL Mencken Club, I have associated myself with people who stress hereditary cognitive differences.[7] But in the 1980s, I fell out of favor for less ridiculous reasons. I was marginalized merely because I insisted too loudly that generic leftists had been permitted to take over the Right.
I had no illusion when neoconservatives slandered me to the administration at Catholic University of America, which resulted in my being denied a graduate professorship that was about to be offered to me, that the attacks would thereafter stop. After this incident, I was never again allowed to write for “movement conservative” publications. The editors of these, also not incidentally, refuse to review my books; and my name has scarcely appeared in a movement magazine after my rejection at CUA. One of the rare times it has was in David Frum’s wholesale denunciation of the non-aligned Right, “Unpatriotic Conservatives.” Here, he claimed that his friends had done nothing to harm me professionally, let alone to occasion my outbursts; indeed I had fabricated my narrative because I was a troubled person.[8]
My case was exceptional because aside from suggestions that I had taken leave of my senses, there was no campaign waged against me as an “anti-Semite” or “racist.” I held on to an academic post until I retired in 2011, although I might have obtained higher professional prizes, if neoconservatives had not weighed in against me, as I subsequently learned, at other institutions beside CUA. But I cannot claim that I was as badly battered as other exiles.
The more abused victims died within a relatively short time of their humiliation, emotionally as well as professionally crushed. Goldberg’s comment about people in his movement being pushed off the bus only from time to time borders on the puerile. the American Communist Party looked like a band of cloistered monks in comparison to the cannibalistic movement that Buckley founded, and which Goldberg continues to slobber over.