How the Right Lost Its Mind

by Charles J. Sykes

  Buckley’s excommunication of the Birchers was not a repudiation of anticommunism, nor was it an attempt to bolster the GOP establishment or make the GOP a less conservative party. (At the time it was Goldwater who was the “antiestablishment gadfly.”) In fact it was precisely the opposite: Buckley understood that conservatism would never be viable as long as it was associated in the public mind with crackpotism.

  Goldwater, who grasped the larger challenge to the movement, took the opportunity to distance himself from Welch. “We cannot allow the emblem of irresponsibility to attach to the conservative banner,” Goldwater wrote. Ultimately this was not enough to save his candidacy, which was crushed in the Johnson landslide in 1964. But as Buckley later observed, “The wound we … delivered to the John Birch Society proved fatal over time. Barry Goldwater did not win the presidency, but he clarified the proper place of anti-communism on the right, with bright prospects to follow.”20 His point: the purge of the Birchers paved the way for the robust anticommunism of Ronald Reagan.

  THE ADVERSARIANS

  The fusion of the 1960s did not, however, resolve the inner tensions within conservativism. The Nixon years were a painful reminder that, despite the Goldwater nomination, the GOP was not synonymous with conservatism. Indeed, although he was loathed by the left, Nixon often governed as a liberal Republican, creating bureaucracies like the Environmental Protection Agency and imposing wage and price controls. Anticommunist conservatives felt betrayed when he opened the door to China; Buckley and National Review were outspoken in their opposition to his policies.

  But the most significant development in the 1970s was the rise of what became known as the New Right, a movement that had grown impatient and frustrated with what they regarded as the “establishment” or the conservative movement. “If there was a single moment you can point to as the beginning of the New Right, it came in August 1974,” direct mail guru Richard Viguerie later wrote, when Gerald Ford named Nelson Rockefeller, “the very symbol of old, Eastern, liberal establishment Republicanism,” as his vice president.

  In their attacks on the intellectual “elite” of the time, the New Right activists valued activism and winning elections over intellectual theorizing. From the beginning the new movement seemed intent on burning down the conservative status quo. “The enemies of the New Right were compromise, gradualism, and acquiescence in the corrupt system. Partisan identification had little to do with their antagonisms,” Matthew Continetti recalled. “Conservatives and Republicans with Ivy League degrees were sellouts, weak, epiphenomena of the social disease.”21

  For a while in the mid-1970s, leaders even toyed with the idea of backing former Alabama governor George Wallace for president. As Kirkpatrick Sale wrote in his 1975 book Power Shift, the New Right was not attracted to Wallace because of any positive agenda he might embrace, but rather because of what he was against: “Wallace has no real policies, plans, or platforms, and no one expects them of him,” Sale wrote; “it is sufficient that he is agin and gathers unto him others who are agin, agin the blacks, the intellectuals, the bureaucrats, the students, the journalists, the liberals, the outsiders, the Communists, the changers, above all, agin the Yankee establishment.”22

  Others were attracted to what they saw as his strength. National Review’s publisher William Rusher was among those who briefly backed the idea of supporting Wallace in 1976, an idea that also appealed to William Loeb, the influential publisher of the Manchester Union Leader, who had doubts about whether Reagan was tough enough. “He’s a great salesman and a great talker,” Loeb said of Reagan, “but the one who goes to Washington has to be a tough SOB.”23

  In the view of some New Right leaders, noted the historian Nicole Hemmer, there was no “tougher S.O.B. than George Wallace.” Ultimately the idea of backing Wallace fizzled out, when some of the calmer heads realized that would have meant an alliance with an unsavory coterie of crackpots, including anti-Semities and Holocaust deniers. But the flirtation with Wallace served to expose a soft underbelly of conservativism.

  Unfortunately—and this is one the tragedies of the movement—the conservative message of freedom was often overshadowed by the politics of race. It’s worth noting that every GOP member of the U.S. Senate supported the 1957 Civil Rights Bill; in the House, only nineteen voted against the bill. But Buckley’s National Review remained opposed to the legislation and initially took positions that remain a blot on the conservative legacy. In a 1957 editorial titled, “Why the South Must Prevail,” Buckley argued that because whites were the “more advanced race,” they were “entitled to rule.”24 In another piece, Buckley cited the backwardness of blacks in the South to argue that whites therefore had a right to “impose superior mores for whatever period it takes to affect a genuine cultural equality between the races.”25 Seven years later, Barry Goldwater, who had supported the 1957 bill, voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Bill.

  Over time, Buckley moderated his views and came to regret his stance on civil rights. “I rather wish we had taken a more transcendent position, which might have been done by advocating civil rights legislation with appropriate safeguards,” he wrote decades later. In an interview with Time magazine, Buckley confessed, “I once believed we could evolve our way up from Jim Crow. I was wrong. Federal intervention was necessary.”26 Unfortunately, however, the battle over civil rights was a defining moment for both the GOP and the conservative movement. Electorally, Republicans scored significant successes in the South and in some traditionally Democratic strongholds by exploiting a “white backlash” against many of the social changes that began in the sixties. In his New York mayoral race, Buckley appealed strongly to working-class white voters in the outer boroughs who were being driven away from their Democratic roots by concerns over crime, bad schools, busing, as well as issues like abortion and school prayer. Those voters, many of whom were to become “Reagan Democrats,” were key to the GOP resurgence, reshaping the nature of the party and the conservative movement.

  In particular, the New Right sought to capitalize on the shift in the Right’s center of gravity. Throughout the 1970s, the campaign against the effete, poetry-quoting Burkean elites of the Buckley era continued apace. Clearly targeting erudite conservatives like George Will, author Kevin Phillips derided “conservatives whose game it is to quote English poetry and utter neo-Madisonian benedictions over the interests and institutions of establishment liberalism.” Similar themes would be echoed in the 2016 campaign. “The attacks on National Review, on George Will, on conservatives with elite educations, on conservatives granted legitimacy by mainstream institutions is a replay of the New Right rhetoric of the 1970s,” notes Continetti. “Names have been added to the list of Republicans in Name Only, of false, cuckolded conservatives, but the battle lines are the same.”27

  The parallels are striking. Writing in the 1970s, Phillips’s view of the alternative to conservatism “elitism” bore a strong resemblance to what would become of Trumpism three decades later:

  Then there are other conservatives—many I know—who have more in common with Andrew Jackson than with Edmund Burke. Their hope is to build a cultural siege-cannon out of the populist steel of Idaho, Mississippi, and working-class Milwaukee, and then blast the Eastern liberal establishment to ideo-institutional smithereens.28

  Many conservatives who advocated a more populist and nationalist vision coalesced around former Reagan communications director Patrick Buchanan, who mounted a searing indictment of what was then the establishment GOP. Years before the Trump campaign, Buchanan appealed to both the nativist Right and lingering isolationist sentiment that had been largely dormant since the 1930s. But Buchanan also brought something more troubling back to the forefront of conservative politics. When the former Nixon speech writer referred to Congress as “Israeli occupied territory,” many observers detected a whiff of anti-Semitism.

  Once again, Buckley was to play a crucial role as gatekeeper, devoting an issue of the National Review to a lengthy critique
of Buchananism titled “In Search of Anti-Semitism.” Buckley did not argue that Buchanan was an anti-Semite, but said that he was clearly “saying anti-Semitic things.”29 While he did not completely excommunicate Buchanan from the conservative movement as he had done with the Birchers, Buckley effectively marginalized the new anti-Semites. After one of his writers, Joseph Sobran, was accused of trafficking in “crude and naked” anti-Semitism, Buckley first barred him from writing about Israel in National Review, and later fired him.30

  * * *

  FOR THE NEXT several decades, there would be a complicated, fraught, and at times awkward alliance between mainstream conservatives and the insurgents of the New Right. But despite the tensions, the movement somehow managed not to split itself asunder for the next several decades. Why not? Why didn’t the Right embrace Wallace? Why didn’t it reject the establishment Right of the time?

  In addition to Buckley’s role as gatekeeper, there were three major factors at work here. The first and most obvious was the rise of Ronald Reagan and his role as the great unifier of conservatives. Divisions remained, but they were submerged under his leadership; leading voices of various versions of conservatism were gathered under the aegis of his administration, which included both Pat Buchanan and Jack Kemp. (During the 1980s, I was especially drawn to the type of conservativism espoused by groups like Empower America, which was run by Kemp and Bill Bennett. If there is a direct line from some elements of the New Right to Trump, there is also a straight line from Kemp to Paul Ryan’s brand of conservatism.) Not surprisingly, the ideological differences flared after Reagan left office.

  The second factor was the decision by leading figures on the New Right to walk away from alliances with the kook fringe. Rusher’s conclusion that a Wallace campaign was unworkable meant that the extremists expelled from the movement by Buckley in the 1960s would not be invited back in.

  But the third factor is, in some ways, the most intriguing. The Reagan years paradoxically coincided with the relative absence of conservative media voices. Even as the New Right began making its push for conservative purity and laying the groundwork for the election of Ronald Reagan, Nicole Hemmer wrote, the first generation of conservative media (the Manion Forum, Human Events, Regnery publishing, even the National Review) was in decline, “out of power, out of money, and out of influence.” On the eve of conservatism’s great triumph, “conservative media activism was largely defunct. The second generation would not rise until Reagan left office.”31*

  The Fairness Doctrine, which paved the way for conservative radio, was not repealed until 1987 (over considerable conservative opposition); Rush Limbaugh did not launch his national talk show until 1988; Fox News did not go on the air until 1996. So for most of Reagan’s term, there was no conservative echo chamber, no powerful talk radio, no Fox News or a right-wing infrastructure providing air cover or enforcing ideological purity.

  This raises what historian Nicole Hemmer calls “an unresolved and vitally important question: Why did the political movement attain its greatest success at the very moment conservative media was in decline?” [Emphasis added.]32 One possibility may be that the lack of a raucous Right media during the 1980s actually gave Reagan the space for maneuver and ideological flexibility that his successors would not enjoy. Imagine, for example, the reaction of the current Right media to Reagan’s amnesty for illegal immigrants or his decision to raise taxes later in his administration.

  After Reagan, the media landscape changed dramatically. In the 1990s, Hemmer notes, “Republican politicians had become markedly more sensitive to the judgment of media personalities.” The post-Reagan conservative media types were very different from their predecessors: they made a lot more money, enjoyed significantly more celebrity and, notes Hemmer, “were entertainers first and conservatives second.”33

  But most important of all, they had far more clout. The balance of power had shifted. “The first generation of conservative media may have snuck one of theirs past the GOP gatekeepers in 1964,” Hemmer wrote, “but the second generation were the gatekeepers.”34

  The messengers were about to become more important than the message.

  CHAPTER 5

  STORM WARNINGS

  EVEN BEFORE THE END of George W. Bush’s presidency, there were warnings that conservativism was in trouble, isolated from both reality and its own constituencies. Some conservatives were troubled by Bush’s decision to engage in nation-building exercises in the wake of the Iraq War. There had always been a deep strain of isolationism on the Right, extending back to the America First movement in the 1930s and articulated by such stalwarts as Senator Robert Taft even after the war. But since the end of World War II, (with occasional dissents from Buchananites) conservative foreign policy was shaped first by the fight against Communism and later by the War on Terror. So the vast majority of conservative voters continued to back the war and were later appalled by what they saw as Obama’s less aggressive policies. Only after Trump’s appearance on the scene (and his false claim that he had opposed the invasion) did Republican voters turn against the Iraq War in large numbers. But the idea of using the military to “spread democracy,” disturbed many conservatives, including Buckley and George Will, both of whom were critical of the Bush policies. Seeds of disillusionment had already been planted.

  While the Right seemed more or less united on foreign policy, more ominous cracks appeared on the question of immigration. Although a hard line on dealing with illegal immigrants was to become a litmus test in 2016, there was never a real consensus on the issue among conservatives. In 1986, Ronald Reagan had signed the Simpson-Mazzoli Act, which was effectively a massive amnesty for illegals who had entered the country before January 1, 1982. After the number of illegal immigrants surged again, many GOP leaders including Bush, along with Senator John McCain and Marco Rubio and much of the business community began to push for another shot at immigration reform. For a time, comprehensive reform seemed possible, as polls consistently suggested widespread support among Republican voters for some sort of a path to citizenship.

  But beginning in the Bush years, the loudest voices on the Right increasingly railed against policies they labeled “amnesty,” and the issue became a flash point between the party’s establishment and its insurgent populist base. (In 2013, a comprehensive bill crafted by the so-called Gang of 8, passed the U.S. Senate by a vote of 68 to 32, with 14 GOP senators voting in favor. Faced with fierce opposition from conservative activists, the bill died in the House.) As it turned out, the issue appealed powerfully to the elements of the GOP base that had largely been ignored by party leaders.

  In 2005 two leading conservative thinkers, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, issued a prescient warning in their widely discussed but sadly ignored critique of conservatism: “The Party of Sam’s Club.”1 Their point was that the GOP was intellectually exhausted and out of gas. Despite the Left’s taunt that the GOP was the party of the “angry white male,” Republicans were actually doing very little for the white working class.

  Instead, they wrote, the GOP in Bush’s second term “feels increasingly tired and corrupted by power, obsessed with fighting yesterday’s battles and unwilling to adapt to the changing political landscape.…” So far, the Republicans had not “paid a political price for insider-friendly appropriation bills, Medicare boondoggles, or the smog of semi-corruption rising from the party’s cozy relationship with K Street.” But conservatives should not delude themselves, they argued, because the “conservative” policies of the Bush years were less “a visionary twist on traditional conservatism, and more and more like an evolutionary dead end.”2

  Author David Frum echoed many of those critiques, accusing Republicans of “losing touch with reality” and suffering something worse than a lack of leadership. Rather, Frum wrote in 2008, the Right was experiencing a “crisis of followership.” On the eve of Obama’s election, Frum wrote that Republican conservatism was “tired and confused”:

  Once the party of li
mited government, now it is the one that enacted the largest new social programme since the 1960s: the prescription drug benefit. Once the party of law and order, it now offers amnesty in all but name to illegal immigrants. Once the party that ran against Washington’s special interests, it is now run by lobbyists. Once the party of sound management, it is now tarred by the managerial disasters of the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina.3

  This had, unfortunately, become a pattern. Despite electoral victories, conservatives too often failed to deliver, often taking detours into political and ideological cul-de-sacs.

  DISTRACTED AND DERAILED

  The resiliency of the conservative movement had been vividly on display again in 1994, when Republicans won control of Congress. The vote was a repudiation of Bill Clinton’s health care policies and an apparent ratification of the policy agenda laid out in Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America. Over the following six years, the GOP had notable successes, including balancing the budget and reforming welfare, but once again set expectations that were doomed to frustration. Republicans quickly learned the futility of trying to run the country without also controlling the White House. An ill-advised government shutdown over Medicare funding helped Clinton revive his sagging political fortunes and easily win a second term.

  In 1997, the Gingrich revolution was both derailed and distracted by the Clinton scandals that culminated in the impeachment of the president. Wonky policy proposals on entitlement reform paled beside the temptation of a roiling sex scandal, complete with a semen-stained dress and presidential perjury. This also marked the coming of age of the Right media, which now included Fox News and the growing power of the new generation of conservative talkers, who were shaped by and in turned helped shape the climate of political discourse. Perhaps inevitably, the new conservative media focused far more on Clinton’s foibles than on explaining conservative ideas, even those laid out so hopefully in the “Contract with America.” That would also set a pattern for the new media that would have notable consequences two decades later.