Recently, I overheard Laura
Ingraham bewailing how the American left is now suppressing the public
discussion of sensitive issues. Laura's case in point is Kevin
Williamson, a commentator whom Jeff Goldberg at the Atlantic sacked
for an opinion that Williamson had posted on the internet in September
2014. Back then, Williamson asserted that he would be tempted to hang
women who choose to abort their unborn children. Williamson's fate
at the the Atlantic is supposedly proof positive that we're standing
on the precipice, about to be pushed into a totalitarian
society. Although I too am concerned about our diminishing freedom,
Laura's horror story seems small potatoes compared to other more alarming
situations that she might have brought up, including situations
I myself have been involved in.
The case of Williamson tells us little about our present cultural
climate and lots about the mindset of Conservatism, Inc. When it
comes to defending its own, this establishment will pull out all
stops. Since I'm not of its denomination, I'll try to be more
dispassionate. Jeff Goldberg had a perfectly good right to fire an
employee who took positions he found abhorrent, just as he had a right to hire
Kevin Williamson for
dumping on the white working class that supported
Trump. Neoconservative publications have the same right to publish
Williamson when
he mocks the singing of the National Anthem at NFL football games and
continues to attack Trump as a clown. What we're talking about is
editorial staffs and donors extending or withdrawing support from
controversialists who profit from being insulting. (That seems to be
Williamson's calling.)
Unfortunately, Conservatism, Inc. has long practiced the kind of
censorship one might expect from the Communist Party. As someone
researching a monograph on this dismal subject, I continue to be appalled by
the ease with which the movement's power-brokers have turned their onetime
devotees into unpersons. Whether it was William F. Buckley going
after Jewish libertarians for their insufficient enthusiasm for battling
communism internationally, the National Review editorial board
savaging the John Birch Society for its failure to support the Vietnam War, or
the more recent sacking and marginalizing of figures working for conservative
magazines and foundations for bringing up I.Q. questions, Conservatism, Inc.
has never hesitated to punish others for holding the wrong
opinions. In 1981, then-mainstream conservatives Irving Kristol and
George Will poured oceans of slime on literary
scholar and Southern conservative M.E. Bradford, who had the inside track
on the job of NEH director. This was done to make sure the position
went to William Bennett, who was a liberal Democrat but also a confidant of the
Kristol family. The main evidence brought against Bradford was a
footnote in one of his many books that made an unflattering reference to
Abraham Lincoln.
We might also note how conservative intolerance has been spun in
order to make it acceptable to the mainstream media. This practice
began when the talented WFB massaged his purging activities in justifying them
to his liberal media friends. Buckley claimed that those he kicked out
of his movement and magazine were all anti-Semites and screaming
racists. The evidence for this is scant indeed. The
reasons for the expulsions have varied according to time and
circumstance. While the Cold War was on, anti-communism was the acid
test for deciding who fitted into the movement and who didn't. In
the last several decades, I.Q. enthusiasts have been among those most likely to
be booted out of conservative enterprises. This was the well
publicized fate of John Derbyshire at National Review in 2012 and of
Jason Richwine at Heritage the following year.
Purges of this kind always look selective. For example,
Derbyshire, a widely published mathematician as well as a brilliant British
stylist, was expelled from the N.R. editorial board in 2012 after suggesting
that he would advise his children against stopping for a call for help from
stranded black adolescents. Whether or not one agrees with this
position, one
might ask why Victor Davis Hanson did not suffer a similar fate when
he posted a similar piece of advice (that Hanson ascribed approvingly to his
father) soon after Derbyshire's contretemps. And
why was Richwine fired from Heritage for raising I.Q. questions in a
dissertation submitted and accepted at Harvard years before he went to work at
a policy foundation? Charles Murray said equally non-P.C. things
about cognitive differences without losing his high position in the
conservative movement. The obvious answer is that conservative
power-brokers grant indulgences to those who are useful to them, even when they
express opinions that catch flak from the mainstream media. But
there are lots of people the bigwigs will happily throw to the wolves in order
to avoid unwanted controversy or to build bridges to the national
press. I know those who suffered this fate personally.
This brings up the problem of mani sudicie (soiled
hands) as opposed to the mani pulite (clean hands) that
the judicial and
police investigation of political corruption in Italy in the 1990s
called for. Conservatism, Inc. is not in a moral position to be
defending open public discussion with clean hands, given its extensive,
intergenerational purges of those who don't espouse its changing party
lines. Although one might sometimes agree with the examples of
intolerance it cites, its own record on this score is so horrifying that one
might be forced to ask: "By what right do you
judge?"
Postscript: Nothing written above should be misread as a
trivialization of the war against intellectual freedom being waged by even the
moderate left. At the time of Derbyshire's firing, the Atlantic incited National
Review to go after Hanson, Heather Mac Donald, and other influential
contributors as "racists." Perhaps because such writers
were better placed than Derbyshire in the conservative pecking order, they were
spared.