William Buckley: conservative but not (too) crazy.
In an op-ed published Monday in the Times, former Republican National Committee staffer David Welch laments the disappearance of right-wing “gatekeepers” like William Buckley, the National Review editor who in the 1960s denounced the extremist John Birch element of the GOP and silenced the party’s nuttier elements. Buckley, writes Welch, “displayed political courage and sanity” in his opposition to the conspiracy mongers who saw Communists behind every potted plant – and even, in the person of President Eisenhower, in the White House. Welch likens conservatives’ mid-century flirtation with the far right to the present-day takeover of the GOP by the Tea Party, which he believes Buckley would have similarly characterized as “essentially calling on the party to commit political suicide.” Here’s Welch:
The modern-day Birchers are the Tea Party. By loudly espousing extreme rhetoric, yet holding untenable beliefs, they have run virtually unchallenged by the Republican leadership, aided by irresponsible radio talk-show hosts and right-wing pundits. While the Tea Party grew, respected moderate voices in the party were further pushed toward extinction. Republicans need a Buckley to bring us back.
In 2012, however, there is no William Buckley to pull the Republican Party back from the brink. The vacuum has enabled “extreme, untested candidates to take center stage and then commit predictable gaffes and issue moon-bat pronouncements. Democrats have used those statements to tarnish the Republican Party as anti-woman, anti-poor, anti-gay, anti-immigrant extremists. Buckley’s conservative pragmatism has been lost, along with the presidency and seats in Congress.”
But while Welch exhorts “party leaders” like Chris Christie and Jeb Bush to “seize this moment as Buckley did decades ago,” he curiously neglects to delve into the largely negative role now played by Buckley’s old magazine itself. It has morphed from a publication brave enough to carry Buckley’s unpopular rejection of the Birchers to a cowardly, sycophantic arm of the Republican Party. In the past election cycle, the National Review was a vocal proponent of the very extremists Welch castigates. It was an early booster of Ted Cruz in Texas, devoting a gushing 2011 cover story to the UN conspiracy theorist (Ban Ki-moon wants to destroy your golf courses — really!) who prevailed against the more moderate David Dewhurst in the Republican primary. It inveighed against the moderate Richard Lugar, who lost the Republican primary to Richard Mourdock (“a credible conservative alternative,” according to NR), a member of the GOP “rape caucus” who defined compromise as “Democrats joining Republicans to roll back the size of government.” Mourdock, it should be noted, went on to lose an eminently winnable seat in Indiana in November . . . and still NR writers continued to defend the “spirit” and “authenticity” behind his assertion that pregnancies resulting from rape were “something that God intended to happen.”
National Review backed plenty of other extremist losers as well, such as New York House candidate and anti-abortion crusader Wendy Long, a favorite of the rabidly Catholic Kathryn Jean Lopez, who as much as anyone personifies the magazine’s swerve from the conservative mainstream to the fringe far-right. Lopez likes to say that Catholicism provides the light and inspiration for her life, but her favorite word is “abortifacient,” not “Jesus” or “God,” and she spends more time lobbing faux-naive softball questions (“But isn’t the HHS mandate all about contraception?” she asks, as if she’s just so confused about her #1 issue) at business owners challenging the Obama administration’s contraception mandate (oh, excuse me, “abortion-drug, contraception, sterilization mandate”) than she does celebrating the role of religion in public life. Even when she interviews the author of a book as unrelated to religion as “Rush to Judgment,” a defense of George W. Bush’s war on terror, she manages to squeeze in a Catholic League-approved question. Of course, she doesn’t ask whether the unnecessary war in Iraq violated the church’s just-war theory or how Bush’s approval of torture squares with Catholic doctrine. Grabbing every opportunity to bash Obama is a Lopez tic, so she poses this probing question, contrasting the ostensible “discomfort” over Bush’s religious views to the acceptance of Jimmy Carter’s: “What do you make of this? Has this, too, only gotten worse? I’m thinking here about the freedom-of-religion debate we’re having at the moment.” Sigh. Well, I guess in Lopez’s world, “freedom of religion” is restricted to the freedom to deny employees health care that covers — oh, horrors! — birth control.
Rich Lowry: an unworthy successor.
Under editor Rich Lowry, National Review gives a platform to writers far more odious than Lopez, who is basically a harmless ranter who elicits eye-rolls even among conservatives and was ousted from the editorship after NRO’s “Corner” blog turned into something too close to “Catholic Corner” for the magazine’s backers. There is, for example, Dennis Prager, a talk-show host who equates “conservative values” with “American values” and recently penned an entire article about the threat of public nudity to Christianity. Secular, godless liberals apparently think nudity is OK because they see no difference between humans and rutting, carefree animals:
Leftism seeks to undo most of the values that are distinct to Judeo-Christian religion. The Left has always been anti-religious, and especially anti-Christian. Karl Marx understood that a vibrant leftism and a vibrant Christianity could not coexist. He was right.
The language Lopez’s fellow National Review pro-lifers use to refer to women who exercise their Constitutional right to abortion is noxious. A taste of Michael Walsh:
It seems to me the pro-life movement is missing a big beat when it fails to turn the Left’s own tables on it and point out that the FDR/LBJ/BHO welfare state is only sustainable with a high birthrate, and that most of those millions of aborted babies since Roe v. Wade would today be taxpayers helping to prop up the tottering system, instead of being thrown out with the other medical waste. But this is the end result of the sexual revolution: a society that either prevents or annihilates its own children today so that they won’t be around tomorrow to take care of their annihilators.
Kevin Williamson, who calls himself a “roving correspondent” for the magazine, employs the sort of language that drove socially moderate Republicans away from the party after it embraced figures like Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum. He describes a movie about gay families, That’s My Family, as “a very clever piece of cinematic propaganda courtesy of organized homosexuality” and “a product of the institutional wing of the gay-rights movement.” It’s enough to make one wonder whether he thinks there is an armed wing of the gay-rights movement as well, as he seems to picture LGBT advocates as Orwellian members of a gay Hitler Youth. In Williamson’s mind, perhaps “homosexuals” (funny how the right-wing just can’t pull itself away from the 19th century, pathological connotations of “homosexual”) assemble in strip clubs across the country to plot the demise of traditional America. William Buckley, as man of his time, surely would not have approved of gay marriage, but he might have recognized that bile like Williamson’s is repellant to the 53 percent of Americans who see little wrong with it. Perhaps he would not have written John Birch-esque sentences like this:
There are no cease-fires in the culture wars, because the Left simply will not stop until it has achieved total conformity, which it pursues under the banners of “tolerance” and “diversity,” i.e., a virtue the Left does not possess and a condition the Left will not abide.
Other contributors include Mark Krikorian, the anti-immigration zealot whose brand of xenophobic, racist rhetoric was, as much as anything, responsible for Romney’s devastating numbers among Hispanics on November 6. “Islamophobic” is perhaps too kind a term for Andrew C. McCarthy and Mark Steyn, both of whom harbor more hatred than fear for any religion outside the Judeo-Christian tradition. McCarthy, the author of such brilliant tomes as “The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America” and “How Obama Embraces Islam’s Sharia Agenda,” sees “sharia totalitarianism” even in relatively pro-western countries like Turkey, while Steyn is offensive both in content and tone. (Sample Steyn: “How quickly the supposed defenders of liberal, pluralist, Western values came to sound as if they were competing to be Islam’s lead prison bitch.”) McCarthy’s crusades against Muslims — and it is indeed a crusade against all Muslims, not simply radicals, as he always puts scare quotes around “Islamic democracy” and writes fair-minded things like, “far from being a fringe ideology, Islamic supremacism is the dominant interpretation of Islam of the Middle East” — brings to mind another infamous McCarthy. He mimics Steyn in his conviction that President Obama sympathizes with jihadists, ranting that “the American people have elected, and now reelected, a president notoriously fond of America-bashing Islamists” whose passion for social justice is “not meaningfully different from the Islamist perspective of America. Both envision a world in which the enlightened, godly West is in constant conflict with a barbaric East that is not only pushing sharia law in the Middle East but has somehow infiltrated the U.S. and is thisclose to veiling women and murdering gays (who otherwise rate zero interest or empathy from either man) in every state without a Michele Bachmann to protect it.
The magazine also runs columns by Michelle Malkin, a writer second only to Ann Coulter in her penchant for bomb-throwing crudity. Malkin, who spouts racism and misogyny and then complains about being labeled racist and misogynistic, calls the president “the brass-knuckle-wielder-in-chief” and refers anyone associated with his campaign as “Chicago thugs.” She hilariously whines about Hollywood’s coarsening of the culture while coarsening it herself to an amazing degree. Likewise, National Review contributor Thomas Sowell uses his minority status as cover to make statements that would, coming from one of the ostensibly racist MSNBC hosts he lambastes, sound remarkably . . . racist. In his world, the left (or the Left, as conservative capitalization fetishists prefer to say) is really the side filled with racists, because . . . well, because they have the audacity to call out the dog-whistles peddled by conservatives like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly.
These are the people on the National Review’s payroll, yet they appear nowhere in Welch’s New York Times piece. He praises Buckely’s rhetorical and political legacy but ignores the sinister role of Buckley’s real, tangible legacy – the National Review itself – in the GOP’s current devolution. Lowry, et al. have sullied a publication that used to lay claim to the rational center, that used to subscribe to logic and that perhaps would have logically deferred to the judgment of 99% of scientists rather than running a blog dedicated solely to poking fun at Al Gore and the “myth” of anthropological climate change. The magazine is a sad shell of Buckley’s flagship. It is better than its fellow conservative publications, some of which regularly refer to Obama as a “red diaper baby” (The American Spectator), and certainly better than the true media heirs to John Birch, such as World Net Daily, whose addition of presidential also-ran Rick Santorum to its stable of authors perfectly exemplifies the GOP’s trend toward endorsement of the fringe. If NR chose reason over ranting, it could be an even more influential voice today, when previously sane outlets like the Wall Street Journal editorial page have hired people like committed anti-feminist (read: misogynist) James Taranto and published inaccurate and hilarious letters from “scientists” denouncing climate change.
Strangely and perhaps tellingly, given the frantic pace at which its Corner blog is otherwise updated, National Review did not offer a rebuttal to Welch’s op-ed until late Tuesday night. When it did so, it chose as its messenger not a contemporary of Buckley’s or a confederate familiar with the man’s legacy but a baby-faced online editor who looks hardly older than myself. It would have looked bad, I suppose, had an older or more distinguished figure inconveniently agreed with Welch’s diagnosis. Daniel Foster’s argument is weak and unpersuasive, positing that the GOP’s embrace of unsuccessful, extreme candidates like Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock occurred prior to their controversial (and ostensibly election-losing) comments about rape. “After his rape stupidity and his subsequent cupidity in refusing to bow out, Akin was more or less cast out from polite Republican society,” Foster writes, ignoring the real question: If the “stupidity” of remarking on “legitimate rape” was enough to make Akin an outcast, why were his earlier, nearly identical (but less widely publicized) remarks not enough of an impetus? Akin’s record even at the time of his nomination placed him on the loony fringe. As a Missouri state legislator, he voted against a bill criminalizing spousal rape, explaining that allegations of marital rape might be used “in a real messy divorce as a tool and a legal weapon to beat up on the husband.” He blamed government involvement in student loans for giving America “the equivalent of stage three cancer of socialism,” opposed spending federal money on school lunches for students below the poverty line, and compared incumbent Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill to “one of those dogs” who goes to Washington to “fetch” and who became less “ladylike” after her 2006 campaign. In short, the remarks about “legitimate rape” were hardly Akin’s first offense. What further bound of propriety was National Review waiting for Akin to breach?
Foster tries to draw a distinction between the loony fringe of the John Birchers and the current Tea Party, but in many cases it is a distinction without a difference. The Birchers of yesterday are the Birthers of today, whether Foster admits it or not. He asks us to “remember why Buckley took action”:
In the late 1950s, the Birch Society’s founder, Robert Welch, published a book claiming that the sitting president of the United States, a Republican, was a Communist agent. Other Birchers claimed that there were Red Chinese on the Mexican border prepping an invasion, or that the Council on Foreign Relations was actively plotting a U.S.-Soviet merger.
Did Foster miss the number of times the current “sitting president of the United States” has been smeared as a Communist? Does Sarah Palin, who just days ago stated without reservation that “Barack Obama is a socialist” and whom Republicans would have placed a heartbeat away from the presidency, count as one of the “nuts [who] are and ought to be shouted down”? (The GOP and its enablers at Fox News seem to be doing a just fantastic job of shouting her down.) When Mitt Romney, the man at the top of the Republican ticket, stood onstage with Donald Trump, was he shouting down Trump’s birther contention that Obama’s “grandmother in Kenya said he was born in Kenya and she was there and witnessed the birth,” his support of “the great” Jack Welch’s labor report conspiracy theories, or his belief that energy-efficient light bulbs cause cancer? When the American Spectator, a publication for which erstwhile veep candidate Paul Ryan has written, publishes an article that uses the word “Marxist” to describe Obama no fewer than 12 times, where is Foster’s outrage? Where is it when Allen West, much praised in the pages of National Review, claims blithely that “there’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democrat Party who are members of the Communist Party” and posits that Obama seeks to “enslave” blacks via the welfare state? West, it should be noted, lost his election this year. I guess Buckley’s supposed heirs at National Review really saw that one coming.
The name-callers, then, are hardly all “the fringy stuff” that Foster defines them as, unless he considers his own magazine’s contributors fringy. Thomas Sowell, whose syndicated column appears multiple times per week on the website, enthusiastically endorsed Dinesh D’Souza, the auteur who brought us 2016: Obama’s America, which purports to examine the president’s “anti-colonial” hostility toward American democracy. “Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s,” D’Souza writes in the accompanying book. “This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son.” 2016 is a remarkable piece of conspiracy-laden agitprop, leading even right-wing stalwarts at the Weekly Standard and the American Conservative to describe it as “the most ridiculous piece of Obama analysis yet written.” The Weekly Standard notes that D’Souza “always sees absence of evidence as evidence of something or other,” which comes pretty darn close to describing the Birch-era conviction that a lack of proof that Eisenhower was not a Communist agent was proof that he certainly could be. And don’t think that Sowell’s endorsement of D’Souza is his first foray into Crazyville. He bemoans the “un-American vision of Barack Obama” (really, why not Barack Hussein Obama?), asks, “Have you noticed how many of our enemies in other countries have been rooting for Obama?” and froths, “The America that has flourished for more than two centuries is being quietly but steadily dismantled by the Obama administration.”
Given that Welch does not press the point in his op-ed, it is perhaps expected that Foster likewise fails to address his magazine’s own complicity in enabling extremists. Ironically, on the same day the website ran Foster’s piece, it also published the transcript of a speech delivered at conference put on by the William F. Buckley Jr. Program at Yale. Neal B. Freeman, a member of the program’s board of directors, heaped praise on Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels for his “common-sense conservatism . . . the crystallization of what Bill Buckley used to celebrate as ‘the politics of reality.’” Freeman commends – get this – Daniels’ moderation, favorably comparing the governor’s low-key efforts at labor reform to the pot-stirring, demonstration-provoking measures passed by Scott Walker in Wisconsin.
It is instructive to recall, when tempted to fight fire with fire, that the fire department itself uses water. Our speaker tonight, dousing the flames with anodyne rhetoric, signed legislation this year that makes Indiana the first right-to-work state since Oklahoma . . .
Yet Freeman’s remarks are printed, with a straight face, alongside Foster’s defense of Tea Party elements of the GOP that are farther to the right than even Scott Walker. And if NR thinks it so laudable to douse the flames, why did it publish, on the same day, a column by professional fire-starter Michelle Malkin, whose illustrious past includes defending the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, raving against “rabid feminists,” and sliming Michelle Obama as the “Bitter Half” and the “First Crony.” Hypocrisy, thy name is Rich Lowry.
It’s easy to see why someone on the NR payroll lacks for self-reflection, but Welch’s choice to give the magazine a pass is truly puzzling, especially considering the existence of a nearly contemporaneous example of NR lending credence to the loony fringe. Welch could hardly have been unaware of the attempt, in the weeks preceding publication of his op-ed, by United Nations conspiracy theorists and far-right religious fundamentalists to sink ratification of a UN treaty protecting the rights of people with disabilities. When even Bob Dole and John McCain, the Benghazi conspiracy theorist in-chief, support ratification, you know the 38 Republicans voting “no” represent the worst the party has to offer. Representative of these 38 votes was Utah Sen. Mike Lee, who gathered signatures for a letter that, as Quartz reports, held that “the treaty threatened US sovereignty and could force the parents of disabled children to send them to public schools. It drew the support of home-schoolers who also fretted that the treaty was, among other things, a sly way to force America to adopt laws enshrining ‘abortion rights, homosexual rights, and demands the complete disarmament of all people.’”
Based on the United States’ own Americans with Disabilities Act, the treaty would have done nothing of the sort, and would have had no power to alter American laws. But facts are never an issue for folks like Rick Santorum – and apparently they matter little at NRO as well, as Betsy Woodruff penned a piece for the website urging a “no” vote and arguing that the treaty could “potentially undermine American sovereignty.” The article is lousy with quotes from Lee, and makes the irrelevant and jingoistic case that the quadrennial status reports required by the treaty would be “self-abasing for the U.S.”
A report in Roll Call highlights just how far the GOP has fallen:
One by one, Senators of both parties approached [Dole], with former colleagues gently resting their hands on his shoulder or reaching out to his left hand. … Then, one by one, after Dole was wheeled off the floor, most Republicans voted against the measure. Many members did not register their “nay” votes verbally, instead whispering their opposition directly to the clerk or gesturing their hands from their chairs.
Classy.
Welch should have held up National Review pieces such as Woodruff’s as evidence of the magazine’s utter failure to police Buckley’s dictum to support the “most conservative candidate who is electable.” Richard Mourdock was not electable. Wendy Long was not electable. Neither, once Floridians had gotten a taste of his extremism, was Allen West. If other Republicans continue to buy into conspiracy theories about blue-hatted takeovers of everything from golf courses to home school curriculum, they may find themselves unelectable as well. (Or at least we can hope.)
Welch wants to “identify those who can bring adult supervision back to the party,” a category that obviously includes no one at Buckley’s old rag. He notes that Buckley “saw the danger the Birchers posed to the party, and in 1962 he wrote a devastating essay in National Review that condemned them.” National Review would no sooner publish a comparable essay today than it would endorse Barack Obama for president. If he truly wants to steer the GOP back to a course of sanity, he should ask why.
. . . So Well Read. . . 
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