How the Right Lost Its Mind

by Charles J. Sykes

  Flippancy aside, Buckley was on a mission; at arguably the worst political moment (a year after the Goldwater debacle) and certainly in the least hospitable environment (New York City), he set out to make an unapologetic case for conservativism. Buckley wanted to explain what freedom, restrained government, and an ordered society actually looked like in the context of the real world, and specifically in the nation’s largest and most challenged city.

  While establishment Republicans insisted that conservatives rally around the standard-bearer (Lindsay), Buckley challenged the notion of blind party loyalty, especially if that meant jettisoning the party’s bedrock principles. Lindsay’s GOP, Buckley said, was “indifferent to the historic role of the Republican Party as standing in opposition to those trends of our time that are championed by the collectivist elements of the Democratic Party.…” Buckley was offering voters a chance to cast their ballot “for a candidate who consults without embarrassment, and who is proud to be guided by the root premises of the Republican philosophy of government, the conservative philosophy of government.”3

  Buckley was able to carry that debate into the belly of the beast. During the campaign, Buckley had the chance to sit down with the mandarins of the New York Times editorial board. In terms of influence, Freeman later recalled, “There is nothing in contemporary culture with which to compare the dominance of the sixties-era New York Times.” In his close encounter with the citadel of the established media, Buckley met not just with editorial writers, but also the paper’s executives as well as the editors and reporters from the major beats. “Bill was surrounded,” Freeman recalled, “by contemporary liberalism’s A-Team.”

  The two-hour-long meeting between Buckley and the Times men, Freeman wrote, “would prove to be a real education. For them.” That conference, he later surmised, “may have been the first time in their lives that most of the Times-men had faced an articulate and informed Conservative in close encounter.”4

  A HOUSE DIVIDED

  That meeting was a culmination of Buckley’s decade-long effort to make some sense out of American conservatism.

  For Buckley, this was a battle of ideas that the Right had been losing badly for decades. “One need only to spend some time on a university campus,” declared the “publisher’s statement” in the first issue of National Review in 1955, “to have a vivid intimation of what has happened. It is there that we see how a number of energetic social innovators, plugging their grand designs, succeeded over the years in capturing the liberal intellectual imagination,” wrote Buckley.

  And since ideas rule the world, the ideologues, having won over the intellectual class, simply walked in and started to run things. Run just about everything. There never was an age of conformity quite like this one, or a camaraderie quite like the Liberals’.5

  In the mid-1950s, conservatives—Buckley called them “radical conservatives”—were a small, neglected, despised remnant in American politics, “for when they are not being suppressed or mutilated by Liberals, they are being ignored or humiliated by a great many of those of the well-fed Right, whose ignorance and amorality have never been exaggerated for the same reason that one cannot exaggerate infinity.”6

  But in the 1950s, conservatives were also a house divided. “Conservatives,” notes Lee Edwards in a thoughtful history of the movement, “have always been a disputatious lot.” Those disputes have generally focused on genuine philosophical differences—on ideas. “Far from being signs of a crackup or a breakdown,” Edwards argued, “intense uninhibited debate among conservatives is an unmistakable sign of intellectual vigor in a national movement whose influence and longevity continue to surprise many in the political and academic worlds.”7

  In the 1950s those disputes generally pitted traditionalists and libertarians against one another. One of the leading traditionalists, Russell Kirk, resisted the classical liberal emphasis on individualism, saying that it amounted to “social atomism” and was, in any case, incompatible with the traditional Christian view of the world. These were not easy issues to resolve, as Buckley freely admitted. “The conservative movement in America has got to put its theoretical house in order.” One of the goals of National Review was to somehow reconcile the competing schools of thought by bringing together traditionalists, libertarians, and anticommunists to hash out their differences.

  The resolution came from a somewhat unlikely source. Frank Meyer was a former communist who had morphed into a radical libertarian of the sort distrusted by the traditionalist wing. But in 1962, he published In Defense of Freedom, which laid the foundations for what became known as “fusionism,” a careful balancing of the disparate elements of the Right. Basing his idea of balance on the conservativism of the founding fathers, Meyer made the case for “reason operating within tradition” and the concept of “ordered liberty,” which juxtaposed “freedom of the person” with the “Christian understanding of the nature and destiny of man.” Fusionism struck a delicate balance between freedom on the one hand and moral responsibility on the other. The fusionists noted that the Constitutional Convention in 1787 had not embraced either the “libertarian” vision of the Jeffersonians nor the “authoritarian” politics of Alexander Hamilton, but had steered a middle course as laid out by James Madison, who helped craft a system of checks and balances.

  In 1964 Meyer gathered a group of conservative thinkers of various ideological hues and asked them to address the question, “What is conservatism?” Lee Edwards summarized the rough consensus that emerged:

  They accept “an objective moral order” of “immutable standards by which human conduct should be judged.”

  Whether they emphasize human rights and freedoms or duties and responsibilities, they unanimously value “the human person” as the center of political and social thought.

  They oppose liberal attempts to use the State “to enforce ideological patterns on human beings.”

  They reject the centralized power and direction necessary to the “planning” of society.

  They join in defense of the Constitution “as originally conceived.”

  They are devoted to Western civilization and acknowledge the need to defend it against the “messianic” intentions of Communism.8

  But this was not an easy sell. There were still dissenters on the Right who noted that incompatibility between traditional conservatism (suspicious of reason, anticapitalist, and authoritarian) and the rising libertarian tide on the Right. But despite those inherent tensions, writes Edwards, by the mid-1960s, “the tumult between the disputants had nearly subsided, and fusionism had become, by a process Meyer called ‘osmosis,’ a fait accompli.… They were tired of feuding, of endlessly debating how many traditionalists and libertarians can dance on the head of a pin.” As historian George Nash noted, the process was helped by “the cement of anti-communism.”9

  It was also helped along by the rise of Barry Goldwater, whose thinking was imbued with the debates that had been taking place among the conservative intellectuals. Goldwater’s 1960 book, The Conscience of a Conservative, was an instant bestseller and galvanized much of the nascent but still somewhat inchoate conservative movement. Along with his ghost writer, L. Brent Bozell, Goldwater pulled together all of the major schools of conservative thought from anticommunism to classical liberalism. Deeply informed by years of Buckley’s attempt to craft a coherent conservative critique of government, the slim volume was also a primer on both antipopulism and antiauthoritarianism.

  Although Goldwater would be long remembered for his 1964 convention speech where he declared that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice … moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue,” what is striking about rereading Conscience is its attempt at carefully balancing the competing strains of conservative thought. In its opening pages Bozell/Goldwater lay claim to a historical tradition of conservatism that “has regarded man neither as a potential pawn of other men, nor as a part of a general collectivity in which the sacredness and the separate i
dentity of individual human beings are ignored.”10 Conservatives rejected the concentration of power in the state as well as populist demagoguery:

  Throughout history, true Conservatism has been at war equally with autocrats and with “democratic” Jacobins.

  The true Conservative was sympathetic with the plight of the hapless peasant under the tyranny of the French monarchy. And he was equally revolted at the attempt to solve that problem by a mob tyranny that paraded under the banner of egalitarianism.11

  Bozell/Goldwater then laid out the essential elements of the fusionist settlement that united the disparate wings of the movement:

  The Conservative looks upon politics as the art of achieving the maximum amount of freedom for individuals that is consistent with the maintenance of social order.

  The Conservative is the first to understand that the practice of freedom requires the establishment of order: it is impossible for one man to be free if another is able to deny him the exercise of his freedom.

  But the Conservative also recognizes that the political power on which order is based is a self-aggrandizing force; that its appetite grows with eating. He knows that the utmost vigilance and care are required to keep political power within its proper bounds.

  Thus, for the American Conservative, there is no difficulty in identifying the day’s overriding political challenge: it is to preserve and extend freedom. [Emphasis in original.]12

  This meant, first and foremost, constraining the role of government as well as our expectations. Echoing Buckley’s earlier critique of “modern Republicanism,” Bozell/Goldwater challenged the Eisenhower era’s approach to the issue, which had been spelled out in the book A Republican Looks at His Party, written by a member of the Eisenhower administration named Arthur Larson. Both Buckley and Goldwater zeroed in on Larson’s formulation that “if a job has to be done to meet the needs of the people, and no one else can do it, then it is the proper function for the federal government.” This was, as columnist and author E. J. Dionne has pointed out, a restatement of Abraham Lincoln’s comment that the role of government was “to do for the people what needs to be done, but which they cannot, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, for themselves.” But Goldwater juxtaposed Larson’s statement with one from a prominent Democrat, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who had written that the New Deal “conceived of the federal government as the whole people organized to do what had to be done.”13

  Buckley had directed withering fire on that view of government, and Goldwater followed suit:

  Here we have, by prominent spokesmen of both political parties, an unqualified repudiation of the principle of limited government. There is no reference by either of them to the Constitution, or any attempt to define the legitimate functions of government. The government can do whatever needs to be done; note, too, the implicit but necessary assumption that it is the government itself that determines what needs to be done. We must not, I think underrate the importance of these statements.14

  Goldwater offered a starkly different approach to how conservatives would henceforth look upon government power. “Government represents power in the hands of some men to control and regulate the lives of other men,” he wrote. “And power, as Lord Acton said, corrupts men. ‘Absolute power,’ he added, ‘corrupts absolutely.’”

  PURGING THE CRACKPOTS

  In the early 1960s, conservatives faced another daunting challenge. Liberalism was the regnant ideology, and the GOP establishment was ideologically tepid and lifeless. But even as conservative ideas began to gain traction at the grassroots level, the Right faced a problem on its fringes.

  It was the other estimable nineteenth-century philosopher John Stuart Mill who observed that “Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives,” and the taunt has stuck. However wrong-headed and unfair, the slur has been a source of comfort to the Left and annoyance to the Right for generations.

  But as Buckley recognized, the problem that dogged conservatives was not stupidity; it was crackpotism. And before conservatism could compete effectively on the political battlefield it would have to deal with its vexing problem. Conservatism before the National Review was a mess. “The American Mercury, for which Buckley worked briefly, was a nest of anti-Semites,” conservative writer Matthew Continetti later observed. “The libertarian Freeman was beset with infighting, more interested in criticizing the New Deal than in coalition-building. Cranky, conspiratorial, bigoted, frustrated, powerless—this was the conservatism of William F. Buckley’s young adulthood.”15

  Buckley admitted as much. “Sometimes the conservative needle appears to be jumping about as on a disoriented compass,” Buckley wrote. “My professional life is lived in an office battered by every pressure of contemporary conservatism. Some of the importunities upon a decent American conservatism are outrageous, or appear so to me, at any rate. (‘We should have high tariffs because the farmers have high subsidies, and they shouldn’t, by the way.’) Some are pathological (‘Alaska is being prepared as a mammoth concentration camp for pro-McCarthyites.’) Some are deeply mystical (‘The state can do no good.’).…”16

  Conservatism, Buckley insisted, must “be wiped clean of the parasitic cant that defaces it, and repels so many of those who approach it inquiringly.” But that would not be easy. As Buckley knew, crackpotism is not incompatible with intelligence and it is not a matter of ideology alone. Crackpots, whose views are fiercely held as a matter of conviction, may be educated and credentialed. As they will often earnestly point out, their views are supported and reinforced by unique research and logic—the sort that flourish in the hothouse environment of the internet.

  Within their own bubble, the crackpots’ ideas can seem plausible and insightful. Supporters praise one another for daring to embrace overlooked truths. But ideas that win plaudits and huzzahs within the ideological bubble often turn out to be disqualifying for the general electorate. When crackpots venture out of the bubble, their notions are often exposed as eccentric and daft.

  Worst of all: They make it harder for the substantive and thoughtful conservative critiques of these issues to break through the media clutter. Of course, the Left has its own cadre of oddities, but the playing field is not a level one. Because the stupidity and extremism of the Right remains its operating assumption, the mainstream media are more than eager to let the wacky displace and overshadow the sensible. Unfortunately, this circumstance is compounded by an understandable tendency among battered and besieged conservatives to launch embarrassing defenses of inappropriate candidates.

  Buckley and the editors, Continetti recalls, “spent an enormous amount of time and energy during the early years of the magazine disassociating their conservatism from its atavistic and gnostic forebears.” Acting as gatekeepers for the still embryonic movement, Buckley set out to purge the cranks while providing a forum for new, provocative thinkers (many of them Jewish), who would otherwise have been shut out of the movement. “By denying a platform to quacks and haters,” Continetti notes, “they broadened their potential audience.”17

  One of the earliest subjects for excommunication was Ayn Rand, whose novel Atlas Shrugged had become a massive bestseller that appealed powerfully to younger conservatives (as it would for several decades). In a brutally derisive review in Buckley’s magazine, Whittaker Chambers (himself the iconic bestselling author of Witness) savaged Rand’s book as “sophomoric,” “primitive,” and dogmatic. Chambers wrote that the novel was “a remarkably silly book. It is certainly a bumptious one. Its story is preposterous.” The former communist turned conservative found its tone disconcerting. “From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged,” he wrote, “a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘To a gas chamber—go!’”18 (Rand, whose appeal was not diminished by the attack, later called National Review “the worst and most dangerous magazine in America.”)

  Buckley had more luck with the John Birch Society. The anticommunist group was growing, and
its profile and influence posed a challenge to the Right. The group’s leader, Robert Welch, claimed that former president Dwight D. Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy,” and that the government of the United States was “under operational control of the Communist Party.”

  Welch’s “influence was near-hypnotic, and his ideas wild,” Buckley later wrote. The conservative editor regarded Welch’s claims as “paranoid and unpatriotic drivel.” Conservative icon Russell Kirk was even blunter. He thought Welch was “loony and should be put away.”

  But the Birchers were a force to be reckoned with and posed a real problem for soon-to-be presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, whose uphill battle against the GOP establishment would be hindered by any lingering associations with the Birchers. Kirk saw a broader problem for conservatives. By making outlandish claims that Eisenhower had been a secret agent of the communists, Welch “was a great weight on the back of responsible conservative political thinking.”

  So the decision was made to take on the Birchers directly. Perhaps only Buckley, with his impeccable conservative, anticommunist credentials, could have gotten away with it. In February 1962, National Review published a lengthy dissection of Welch’s bizarre theories and concluded, “His distortions disqualified him from effective services as an anti-communist leader.” Buckley’s excommunication was scathing.

  The fact of the matter is [our long analysis concluded] that Mr. Welch, by what Russell Kirk has called “an excess of zeal, intemperance and imprudence,” promotes a split in the conservative movement—by asking for the tacit support of men who cannot in good conscience give it, who, moreover, feel that to give it is to damage our chances of success. “Cry wolf often enough,” Mr. Kirk wrote to Mr. Welch, “and everyone takes you for an imbecile or a knave, when after all there are wolves in this world.” If we are to win the war against communism, we have no less a task before us than to change national policy. Nothing is clearer than that Mr. Welch is not succeeding in doing anything of the sort. Mr. Welch, for all his good intentions, threatens to divert militant conservative action to irrelevance and ineffectuality.19