Paul Gottfried
Note to the reader: Lest there be any misunderstanding about what follows, it may be useful to begin with some disclaimers. Nothing in this afterword is intended to be an endorsement of a particular political position. I am not writing as a political advocate for an ideologically restricted circle; I am not taking a position for or against race realists, economic libertarians, or the intensely anti-Communist foreign policy of National Review in the 1950s and 1960s. What I am trying to demonstrate is, first, the intolerance exhibited by the conservative movement toward its own dissenters, and second, the extent to which the media contributed to this behavior. Such an investigation seems warranted because the facts of this study have been concealed for decades.
In the winter and spring of 2018, conservative movement websites abounded with defenses of Kevin D. Williamson, a forty-five-year-old journalist who had been a regular contributor to National Review but who had also worked for Jeffrey Goldberg as a writer for the Atlantic. Williamson, a hulking giant of a man with a beard and bald head, presents himself as a libertarian but his métier seems to be serving up inflammatory prose. In 2016, he won applause from both Never-Trumpers at National Review and the left-liberal establishment by mocking Trump and even more ferociously Trump’s voters. In a memorable invective, he expressed contempt for the white working class that was tempted to support Trump and even wished them a speedy death. At this point Williamson won the affection of the mainstream media as well as that of National Review’s editorial board, which has been denouncing Trump regularly since he announced his candidacy for the presidency in 2016.1
Williamson obviously went too far, however, when he opined in a six-word tweet four years ago that women who aborted their unborn babies should be hanged. Although politically correct in other respects, Williamson has expressed strong opposition to abortion beyond the first trimester. Moreover, his tweet, which he insists we should not take literally, cost him his position at the Atlantic. Williamson’s firing unleashed a storm of denunciation not only from the National Review but also from other prominent conservative movement publications and websites. The mainstream Left, or those members of it who had fired Williamson, was allegedly suppressing open discussion of critical moral and social issues; and what happened to Williamson was thought to portend further attempts by the other side to stifle free speech and dissenting opinions.
What happened to Williamson could be compared to what had occurred a few years earlier at the publication that angrily rose to his defense. In 2012, about five and a half years before Williamson lost his job at the Atlantic, National Review editor Rich Lowry fired a star writer and editor, John Derbyshire, for expressing insensitive opinions on the Takimag website.2 Derbyshire had advised his children not to stop and assist black youths who were signaling that their car had broken down. Derbyshire, a respected mathematician and an exceptionally elegant essayist, was astonished at how quickly the conservative movement reduced him to an “unperson.”3 This firing, however, was only one of a multitude of such incidents, going back to the 1950s, in which National Review and other fixtures of the conservative movement empire had released and sometimes subsequently humiliated employees and former allies who had taken deviationist stands. It is astonishing how rarely this behavior received notice. Those whom the gatekeepers of the socially and professionally acceptable Right cast into perdition are expelled as “extremists.”
On the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of National Review in 2005, senior editor Jonah Goldberg presented the authorized account of how the magazine’s founder, William F. Buckley, had sanitized the postwar conservative movement. In the commentary “Golden Days,” Goldberg indicates the care with which Buckley scraped off the dross from what became a major political and cultural force in American life.
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.4
Whatever ideal William F. Buckley assigned to his movement, Goldberg proceeded to admit, existed “only on paper.” Further, “conservative dogma remains unsettled, and conservatism remains cleaved ideologically.” That said, the movement launched by Buckley was for Goldberg a breathtaking success—and one that had occurred with minimal commotion.
E. J. Dionne, in an equally lavish tribute in the Washington Post, proclaimed that Buckley was not only deserving of his friendship but also someone who had “determined to rid the right of the wing nuts.” The guiding spirit of National Review had evolved into “the scourge of the very anti-Semitism that had once infested significant parts of the right.” Dionne blasted the conspiracy theories of the John Birch Society, which he applauded Buckley for having helpfully unmasked. Unfortunately, these remarks contain little if any truth.5
For example, the National Review staff devoted a special feature on October 19, 1965, to denouncing the Birch Society, but not as an anti-Semitic operation (of which there was scant evidence). The editors excoriated the society for not supporting the war in Vietnam and thereby giving up on the struggle against Communism.6 As a point of information: the best man at Buckley’s wedding, Revilo Oliver, was an outspoken anti-Semite, as well as a formidable classicist and Sanskrit scholar.7 Oliver continued to write for Buckley’s publication well into the 1960s. Most of those who were expelled from his magazine and, more broadly, from Buckley’s movement in the early days were Jewish libertarians such as Ayn Rand, Frank Chodorov, Murray Rothbard, and Ron Hamowy.8 Although the conservative movement had once included “anti-Semites” such as Oliver, it seems overblown to describe Buckley’s excommunications as a crusade against bigotry. In fact, Goldberg’s mentor had gone after those who were identifiably Jewish but who opposed his crusade against the Soviet empire. In Rand’s case, Buckley turned against someone whose atheism offended him.
Even more astonishing is Goldberg’s suggestion that throwing allies off the bus occurred only rarely in the conservative movement. These critical junctures helped shape the movement that Goldberg is now defining. They were no more exceptional than the purges in the American Communist Party that National Review would have noted during its passionately anti-Communist days. Moreover, the expulsions took place with such regularity that it might be helpful to divide them into different periods in accordance with the changing interests of the conservative establishment.
Being thrown off the bus had implications for its target that went beyond not being encouraged to write essays for National Review. As the conservative media empire rose to prominence, thanks largely to steady infusions of money from such patrons as the Australian press baron Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers, banishment by one of its organs carried dire consequences. Someone banned from the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, or National Review would not likely be welcome at an affiliated movement publication or among the staff of Fox News, a channel that enjoys the same sponsorship as most of the rest of media conservatism. Whittaker Chambers’s acerbic judgment about conservatives that they fail to “retrieve their wounded” may not be harsh enough.
One figure who has never undergone total expulsion is Patrick Buchanan. This exception is understandable. Buchanan has been a widely read journalist since the 1960s and was a close friend of Republican presidents. His very limited appearances on Fox may have also been conditional on his willingness to be agreeable. During his most recent TV appearances, Buchanan (to my knowledge) never contradicted his host. This may have helped preserve his exceptional status for as long as it lasted.
There was another reason for the provisional tolerance accorded Buchanan. He lost a berth at a rival Democratic channel, MSNBC. Before that time, the channel’s directors accommodated him and featured him on a regular basis. He may have been tolerated there because like other members of the Old Right, Buchanan lost favor with the conservative movement in the early 1990s owing to his poor relations with neoconservative gatekeepers.9 The Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, National Review, Wall Street Journal, and other movement fixtures all gradually broke with Buchanan. This became the practice even while Buchanan’s books were soaring on the New York Times best-seller list.
For the less fortunate, however, expulsion has usually been catastrophic. The accompanying campaign of vilification has often left those it has targeted socially and professionally ruined. Typical victims 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 front-runner for the National Endowment for the Humanities directorship in 1981 and, ten 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 went from being conservatives to “bigots” sometimes overnight. Liberal journalists readily joined these campaigns and often seemed to be working in tandem with their neoconservative acquaintances, in order to rid respectable conservatism of “wing nuts.” Printed assaults against the designated extremists were so devastating that their victims never regained any standing as respectable writers.
My own professional history provides a minor example of such attacks. In my case, they were mostly surreptitious, although it became clear long in advance of my character assassination that my adversaries did not wish me well. Mine, however, was not a typical purge proceeding. Unlike others who suffered a comparable fate, I never left a paper trail on certain abrasive issues such as Jews in the media or American involvement in World War II. Although I have been stigmatized by the usual sources (quite implausibly) as an ally of white nationalists,10 this certainly was not the reason that I initially incurred the movement’s displeasure. In the 1980s, I made powerful enemies during the conservative wars waged in that period. I insisted too loudly that generic leftists had taken over the Right; and I compounded my sin by calling attention to the foolishness of the global democratic foreign policy that the movement’s new masters were imposing on their obliging servants.
I had no illusion about what would come next after neoconservatives slandered me to the administration at Catholic University of America, and I had to forfeit a graduate professorship that otherwise in all likelihood would have been mine. I never thought these attacks once they commenced would soon stop. After the incident at Catholic University, certain predictable afflictions followed. I could no longer place my writings in most “movement conservative” publications. The editors, also not incidentally, refused to review my books, and my name has rarely appeared in any authorized conservative magazine since the late 1980s. One of the few times my name did turn up in such a publication was in 2003, when David Frum, writing in National Review, identified me with the nonaligned Right as an “unpatriotic conservative.” According to Frum, his friends had done nothing to harm me professionally or to justify my outbursts. I had fabricated my narrative because I was a troubled person.11 My case was exceptional because aside from suggestions that I had taken leave of my senses, no campaign was waged against me as an “anti-Semite” or, until recently, as some kind of “racist.” And because I was a tenured academic, my ostracism did not affect me to the same extent that it did other targeted dissenters on the right. M. E. Bradford, Samuel Francis, and Joseph Sobran, all of whom died soon after their public humiliation, come to mind here.
Certain distinctions may be in order. Not all of those who were made to leave the bus suffered their fate for the same reason. In National Review’s early days, those whom Buckley expelled from his movement rejected his Cold War politics and usually called themselves libertarians. Misrepresenting these expulsions was easy enough because Buckley’s followers, like E. J. Dionne, collaborated in producing the authorized accounts of the events in question. Intellectuals and authors on the right rarely fell from grace for the official reasons, the ones that surfaced in the media. This became even more the case when the neoconservatives took over the conservative movement.
Undesirables thereafter fell into two camps. First there were the Southerners like M. E. Bradford and his followers, who made no apologies for the Confederacy and expressed misgivings about the civil rights revolution. Second were the critics of the aggressive liberal internationalist foreign policy associated with the neoconservatives. Those in the two camps coalesced for a time as a “paleoconservative” insurgency, and they were soon joined by libertarians of a socially traditionalist stripe, such as Murray Rothbard and, for a time, Lew Rockwell.12 The movement smeared all these dissenters as “anti-Semites.” Joseph Sobran, once senior editor of National Review, noticed the shifting meaning of “anti-Semite,” from someone who hates Jews to someone whom certain Jews in high places decided they didn’t like.
The journalists John O’Sullivan and Peter Brimelow became less welcome than they had been previously at National Review in the late 1990s for opposing Third World immigration. Commentary, the Wall Street Journal, Policy Review, and other publications that were close to the neoconservatives were strongly pro-immigration, and O’Sullivan and Brimelow, who had moved demonstratively in the opposite direction, were out of step. Pro-immigration advocates Linda Chavez and John Miller took to task Samuel Francis for his statements, made in response to an apology by the Southern Baptist Convention for their coreligionists’ onetime endorsement of slavery. Francis had correctly but imprudently noted that the Bible does not condemn slavery.13 Francis, a mainstream right-of-center journalist with a biting wit and distinctive literary style, went by the end of 1995 from being a nationally syndicated writer to a professional pariah. Chavez and Miller then found an ally a few months later in the reliable neoconservative author Dinesh D’Souza, who denounced Francis as an isolated representative of white racism, although D’Souza had borrowed from Francis and from the self-described “race realist” Jared Taylor passages for his book The End of Racism.14
Although he eventually found employment on the staff of National Review, Jason Richwine lost his job as a researcher at the Heritage Foundation because of the discovery of detailed references in his doctoral dissertation, approved at Harvard University, to the relatively low IQs of recent immigration groups.15 At the time of his firing and longtime blackballing by movement foundations and magazines, Richwine had not achieved any prominence in what has been euphemistically styled “the conservative policy community.” He was therefore expendable to the newly named director of the Heritage Foundation, Jim DeMint, a skittish Southern Republican. DeMint was not dealing here with a journalistic celebrity, for example, someone of the stature of Charles Murray, whose work included focusing in on the cognitive differences between ethnic and racial groups.
Yet nothing approaching Richwine’s fate befell the author of The Bell Curve, who has enjoyed the protection of the American Enterprise Institute, National Review, and Commentary. It is evident that the young Richwine was not in the same league as the far better connected Murray in terms of his value to the movement. Significantly, despite the fact that such conservative movement heavy hitters as Murray, Michael Barone, and Richwine’s collaborator at Heritage Robert Rector weighed in on his side, Heritage would not rescind its decision. The foundation’s directors were apparently convinced that Richwine was simply not worth a dogfight with those leftist journalists who had cornered him.
Much can be forgiven and even shoved down a memory hole for those who have influence. Although Norman Podhoretz as editor of Commentary inveighed for decades against gays, as documented by Gary Dorrien in The Neoconservative Mind,16 this did not prevent Podhoretz’s allies from attacking Patrick Buchanan as a “homophobe” in 1992. This transpired after Buchanan, speaking at the Republican National Convention, made reference to the lifestyles among some members of the opposition party. But this was no different from how neoconservatives had viewed gays a few years earlier. As late as 1984, the neoconservative hero Jeane Kirkpatrick, in an address before the Republican National Convention, sneered at the Democrats for their “San Francisco values.”17 Kirkpatrick’s gibe elicited resounding applause from neoconservative journalists. Homophobia, we may assume, was not the real cause for the animus against Buchanan. He is a harsh critic of the Zionist lobby and is perceived as an isolationist. As late as the spring of 1992, it seemed possible that Buchanan could win the presidential nomination against the politically weakened, tongue-tied George Bush Sr.
Similar double standards were discernible in the character blackening committed against M. E. Bradford in 1981, in which neoconservative journalists, particularly George Will and the editors of the Wall Street Journal, played key roles. Bradford’s offense was to have characterized Lincoln as a tyrant and to have likened his invasion of the South to Hitler’s attack on Germany’s neighbors and Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland. The attacks against Bradford, which focused on a footnote in one of his books, were remarkably selective, given his voluminous output as a literary scholar.18 The outrage was also dishonest, given the lack of reaction then or later to a signature essay that Podhoretz had placed in Commentary in 1963, “My Negro Problem—and Ours.”19 Unlike Bradford, who never disparaged black people, Podhoretz explained to his readers how he was managing his “hatred” for Negroes. These effusions, however, did not serve to disqualify the cofather of neoconservatism (along with Irving Kristol) from leadership in the conservative movement. Nor did his stated revulsion for those of different skin color diminish Podhoretz’s considerable influence in the Reagan administration.
Also going after Bradford in 1981 were Buckley and Heritage president Edwin Feulner. Both of these movement dignitaries, whose fortunes were bound up with the neoconservative ascendancy, visited newly elected president Reagan. They asked the chief executive to reconsider the nomination of Bradford and presented their Southern friend of many decades as someone who would disgrace the NEH directorship. While on their visit to the White House, the same conservative luminaries plugged the candidacy of a liberal Democrat, William Bennett, whom the neoconservatives were prepping for the office they intended to deny Bradford.
The assault on the courtly Texan Bradford, as Keith Preston indicates in his contribution to this anthology, stemmed from multiple causes, starting with crass material interest. The neoconservatives hoped to put their own favorite in a position that would yield financial resources. If things worked out as they hoped (and as indeed they did), they would have hundreds of millions of dollars in grants to distribute to their foot soldiers. Their destruction of Bradford’s reputation and, ultimately, life was collateral damage. As documented in the second edition of The Conservative Movement,20 grants of hundreds of thousands of dollars went to Eric Foner, scion of a famous Communist family who has since morphed into a figure of the academic Left. Someone who then seemed to be working cheek by jowl with the neoconservatives, Foner published a rant against Bradford as a prejudiced Southerner in a newspaper column that managed to be widely distributed and even reached members of Congress.
These incidents illustrate the difficulty of attributing all purges from the conservative movement to changes in ideological direction. Equally important were the social dynamics and the political and material goals of movement players when the purges unfolded.
Although not all expulsions occurred for the same reasons, every one of them was spun in the same way: as a dismissal of “right-wing” fanatics. Since, according to their accusers, those who “left” the bus engaged in racism and anti-Semitism—and in some cases, Holocaust denial—it thereafter became impossible for them to regain lost professional ground. Nor would the broadsides necessarily stop after they had been fired from a conservative magazine, dismissed from a GOP foundation, or removed from the board of self-described traditionalist or libertarian institutes. At most, these targets might hope that their enemies would forget about them. In some cases, however, those thrown off the bus were subject to at least intermittent abuse intended to justify their fall. This happened in a particularly bizarre way to Murray Rothbard, in the form of an obituary that Buckley inserted into National Review shortly after Rothbard’s death.21 Here Buckley offered a comparison between Rothbard and cult leader David Koresh. Neither apparently had more than a handful of followers: Rothbard had “as many disciples as David Koresh had in his redoubt in Waco.” “Yes, Rothbard believed in freedom; David Koresh believed in God.” It had not been enough for National Review’s founder to scold Rothbard during his lifetime.
Purges over the past thirty years have reflected the leftist course of the conservative movement and, more generally, the Republican Party. Avowed positions of anti-racism, anti-anti-Semitism, moderate feminism, and, for the younger generation of neoconservatives, enthusiasm for gay rights, including gay marriage, have all become characteristic of a transformed conservative movement. Conservatism, Inc., has moved in exactly the same direction as the Center Left, albeit more slowly, and it has made critical decisions about what counts as permanent concerns and what may be changed. Clearly, support for the Israeli Right, liberal internationalism, as a foreign policy, and improving the tax and trade situation for large corporations are more important to the movement than whether an editor at National Review endorses gay marriage as a human right. Social issues get billing in such circles mostly as a parenthetical activity, intended to jolly along the GOP’s evangelical base and to appease certain subscribers and donors.
Rupert Murdoch, Paul Singer, and Sheldon Adelson, who keep the conservative movement well financed, stand on the left on most social issues but are also fervent Zionists. These benefactors put up with what are to them uncongenial social positions because they are mindful of the pro-Israel position taken by evangelical Christians. Their media beneficiaries, moreover, can distinguish between profitable and nonprofitable issues. The decidedly leftist positions on social issues once taken by Rudy Giuliani and Joe Lieberman did not keep either from enjoying the favor of the conservative media—for example, when their names came up in connection with a presidential nomination. In 2008 and even earlier, William Bennett was pushing Joe Lieberman for president. Despite the fact that the Connecticut senator took social and economic stands that closely coincided with those of Barack Obama, he was a hawk on foreign policy, which is all that mattered to Heritage, and the rest of Lieberman’s fan base.
Equally relevant, the effect of the leftist shifts of the conservative movement, punctuated by widely publicized purges, has resulted in pushing permissible political discussion in the same direction. It is naive to believe that their movement has veered toward the left only in response to where “the culture” has drifted. The conservative movement, no less than its Center Right counterparts in Canada and Western Europe, has contributed to where our political culture has moved.
The establishment opposition on the right has absorbed many of the ideological positions previously or still held by its opponents. The conservative movement’s younger representatives often sound like the opposition, and for a transparent reason: they have been educated in the same institutions, have picked up the same ideas, and inhabit the same social world. What is more, they encounter only feeble resistance on their side of an exaggerated political divide. Because of neoconservative-GOP media outreach and the lack of a visible alternative on the right, rank-and-file Republicans assume that the anti-Democratic side must be conservative.
Beyond ideological change, certain unacknowledged connections have contributed to the purges under consideration. The conservative movement acts and speaks as part of a larger media enterprise. As Jack Kerwick underscores in his chapter, the authorized conservative movement works to accommodate the Center Left, plays by its rules, and pursues many of the same interests. The conservative movement seeks to be “inclusive,” but not by embracing those on its Right.
All members of what Jack Kerwick calls the “Big Con” share certain beliefs, however much they may bicker over elections and hot-button issues. They each accept a vast welfare state, opportunistically invoke the spirit of the civil rights era, accuse the other side of “racism,” and celebrate the advance of feminist and gay rights. These discussants define for the rest of us what is allowable political discourse. Even if these authorized members of the public conversation disagree on the achievements of President Donald Trump, a cleavage that divides official conservatives from each other as well as from official liberals, they agree about who on the right should be treated as nonpersons. Those who suffer expulsion with all its consequences have been guilty of interfering in some way with business as usual. They raise unwanted questions or are trying to reintroduce ideas that the media class no longer cares to entertain. Unlike the long-vilified “paleoconservatives” or the younger and more obstreperous racialists and “altrightists,” the Murdoch empire enjoys the status of a respectable adversary. Integral to this honor, as Samuel Francis observed in the 1980s, is a willingness to purge and humiliate right-wing dissenters.
Aside from the Birchers, who constituted a mass movement that was independent of Buckley, most of the objects of purges posed no real threat to official conservatism. Those who fell into outer darkness became for their critics a social embarrassment and/or, in the early days of Buckley’s career, a diversion from the central theme of anti-Communism. Such considerations already affected the purges that took place in the decades of conservatism’s ascendancy. Looking back on the Birchers of 2008, Buckley claimed to be isolating a lunatic fringe that would damage the courteous Right. At the time of the purge, however (October 1965), James Burnham provided a very different explanation as to why his fellow editors were reacting against the John Birch Society. They were opposing the Birchers because of their “unpatriotic” opposition to America’s latest foreign intervention. The leader of this society, Robert Welch, had “given up on the Vietnam War,” and he and his members were accused of representing “the isolationist tradition that survives in many parts of the country, though it no longer gets much recognition, even from many of those who still share it.”22 Virtually every conservative purge since the 1960s has been subject to the same process, namely, a calculated reconstruction of the circumstances intended to make the expulsion fit public relations needs. Whether or not the Birchers pushed bizarre conspiratorial views (which in fact they did), it is unlikely that Buckley and his circle would have moved against them were it not for the Society’s isolationist foreign policy.
The purges were not a passing ancillary aspect of conservatism; they were a defining characteristic of a movement, whose modus operandi was to take up stands where the Left had been the moment before. “Conservatism” turned by design into a “harmless persuasion” (Samuel Francis’s memorable term) vis-á-vis the progress of liberalism, including Cultural Marxism. Through its alliance with corporate interests and ethnic lobbies and through a carefully limited (and thus easily abandoned) opposition to such initiatives from the Left as the Voting Rights Act and the feminist revolution, Conservatism, Inc., has been able to survive and grow as a media power. It has also depicted the welfare society in which we live, for better or worse, as a product of “free-market capitalism.” For decades, conservative power brokers have been blacklisting original and independent minds. What has been lost from the public debate is a generation of serious critical thinkers on what is now the nonaligned Right. The calls by the conservative movement for “tolerance” in universities and the media ring hollow, given their tainted source.