A recently posted commentary by Ben
Shapiro on National Review Online caught my attention. Contrary to the
misleading view that the evolution of the conservative movement has been a
generally harmonious development (toward ever greater moderation), Shapiro
provides a different perspective. The leaders of his movement have been busily
purging dissenters on the Right for decades; and Shapiro presents this example
of industrious house cleaning to his friends on the Left as something they
might want to emulate. Shapiro complains that his side has done its duty by
“ousting bigotry,” but the Left, which only occasionally “slams” its baddies,
has just not been as fastidious.
I shall admit to having a
horse in this race. One of my young friends, Darren Beatty, who spoke at an
organization of which I’m president, the H.L. Mencken Club, was fired as a
speech writer by the Trump administration for consorting with “white
nationalists.” Several cogent articles have already appeared, two on the American
Greatness website, proving that our organization is not in any way a
white supremacist one. These commentaries also show that Darren’s speech, which dealt with educational
standards, had nothing to do with racial issues, and that his dismissal as a
speechwriter for the Trump administration was an unmitigated outrage. All the
same Ben thinks that it was commendable that Darren was fired, after CNN
denounced Darren and after the SPLC had unkind things to say about the Mencken
Club. Never mind that Shapiro and his colleagues at National Review have been
similarly smeared by the same groups. Moreover, two years ago, Slate in a discussion of the Mencken
Club, found us far less objectionable than Ben’s colleagues at National Review,
whom the African author, Osita Nwanevu, condemned for “helping to build the
alt-right.” Perhaps I should have anticipated Shapiro by urging “sensitive”
conservatives last year to eschew National Review as a cesspool of bigotry.
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Ben’s admission that his
movement (not mine) has been throwing out heretics for decades did however make
me think about my own thankless task in researching these purges, first for
my history of the conservative movement that
was published in 2007 and more recently, for an anthology now in press. Up
until the 1980s, contrary to what Shapiro suggests, these blood-lettings were
never unleashed against racists or anti-Semites. Almost all the early victims
of purges were unmistakably Jewish and inclined toward libertarianism, e.g.,
Murray N. Rothbard, Frank Chodorov and Ron Hamowy. These undesirables disagreed
with Buckley on the policy implications of his aggressive anti-Communism. In
1965 Buckley and the National Review editorial board formally excommunicated
the Birchers, but not for the reasons that are commonly given, namely that the
John Birch Society was a pack of white supremacists and anti-Semites. (The JBS
magazine American Opinion had Jewish and black
members on its editorial board.)* National Review attacked the
Birchers quite explicitly for opposing American military intervention in
Vietnam. Significantly, a very outspoken anti-Semite, Revilo Oliver, was
allowed to write for National Review years after the expulsion of the Birchers.
In recent years the victims
of conservative purges have been overwhelmingly identified with the “far
Right.” Some of these excommunicated have been immigration critics, who offer
cultural as well as economic reasons for their stand. Others have written about
IQ differences between genders and ethnic groups, and still others (like me)
have been viewed as just downright uncooperative. This distancing by mostly
young careerists from a more pronounced Right makes perfectly good sense. Like
Shapiro these publicists seek to gain influence on the Left while controlling
respectable debate on their side. Note that Shapiro is concerned that the Left
allows “anti-Semites” to go unchallenged, by which he seems to have in mind
pro-Palestinian Muslims. Shapiro also imagines that anti-Jewish prejudice
dominates everything is on his Right, although in the case of the Mencken Club,
the general membership and the board, as Jack Kerwick notes in American Greatness, are packed with Jews. And
non-whites are certainly welcome as members.
But there is also the issue
of positioning. NR authors, most notably David French and Kevin Williamson,
have managed to become feature writers in left-of-center magazines like The
Atlantic; meanwhile Never-Trumpers have been featured on the “fake”
news networks as well as on the establishment Republican fox-news.
Mainstream conservative writers’ like Kevin Williamson, have happily justified the removal of
Confederate monuments and statues; they also predictably acclaim the merits
of second (if not necessarily third or fourth) wave feminism as their position
and like Jonah Goldberg, “are very sympathetic to arguments for gay
marriage.” In my considered view, this veering toward the social Left has been
driven by professional considerations and by funding sources. Well-heeled
donors can be found in defense industries and in large corporations and even
among casino owners who are preoccupied with Israeli security. But there are
far fewer people with big bucks who care about fighting cultural wars.
Needless
to say, my generalization should be heavily qualified. I profoundly respect
most black conservatives (who go after black race hustlers whom their white
allies are mortally terrified to lay a glove on). I likewise admire the
gutsiness of Tucker Carlson who grills establishment conservatives as well as
terminal leftists; and I respect those who are now uncovering the shocking
manner in which the Obama-Hillary administration abused intelligence services
with the active assistance of their directors. But this commentary is not about
these occasional bright lights on the conservative firmament. I am far more
concerned here with setting straight a record that Ben Shapiro has brought up
only to misrepresent. It is high time that we shed light on how the
conservative movement has turned on its own. And adding insult to injury, the
same movement has lied about the reasons for its treachery.
- Perhaps
the most gifted writer associated with the Birch Society was veteran black
journalist George S. Schuyler, about whom a young friend Mary Grabar is
now publishing a Curiously recent tributes to Schuyler on movement
conservative website pointedly ignore his longtime, passionate endorsement
of the JBS. Indeed one has to consult Wikipedia in order to find out this
otherwise well-hidden fact. A Jewish star writer for American
Opinion (which was later renamed New American) Alan
Stang, lived on to become the grand old man of the JBS. Such
evidence of ethnic tolerance may be incompatible with the obligatory
depiction of the Birch Society in the establishment conservative press as
a viciously bigoted organization, after its ouster from the movement in
1965.
Paul
Gottfried [send
him mail] is Horace Raffensperger Professor Emeritus of Humanities
at Elizabethtown College and author of Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt, The Strange Death of Marxism, and Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American
Right. His latest books are Fascism: The Career of a Concept and Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other
Friends and Teachers.
