The Purge
29th October 2022
An examination of the “gatekeeping” that has taken place in the American conservative movement will bring me sooner or later to the subject of purges. This theme has engaged my interest as an historian of the conservative movement because it is key for understanding the vicissitudes of American conservatism. Purging unwanted dissenters has often been presented as the movement’s sensible reaction to extremism. It has supposedly allowed conservatism to become respectable—or at least so it seemed before the American media ceased to recognize anything as being respectable that was not recognizably part of the Left.
As late as October 27, 2005, on the fiftieth anniversary of National Review, Jonah Goldberg praised his magazine’s founder, William F. Buckley, Jr., for “throwing friends and allies off the bus from time to time.” Further: “The Randians, the Rothbardian anarchists and isolationists, the Birchers, the anti-Semites, the me-too-Republicans: all of these groups in various combinations were purged from the movement and masthead, sometimes painfully, sometimes easily, but always with the ideal of keeping the cause honest and pointed north to the ideal in his compass.”
Curiously, Goldberg’s praise was echoed in the New York Times and elsewhere in the national press, which depicted the by-then venerated WFB as a high-minded conservative who had dealt heroically with right-wing extremism among conservatives. Only a handful of commentators, either libertarians or on the far Left, bothered to notice that Buckley’s targets in the 1950s and 1960s were hardly neo-Nazis. Most of them were Jewish isolationists who differed with his view of foreign policy.
As ZMan never tires of pointing out, Buckley and his merry men were chiefly engaged in a desperate attempt to prove to the Liberal Establishment that they were Highly Respectable–conservatives, yes, but of the Nicer Sort, not in any way a threat to progressive cultural hegemony, just a sort of Loyal Opposition. (Trump has, of course, thoroughly upset their applecart.)