Birch and Tea

To toil at National Review is to know what it’s like to read “Buckley must be spinning in his grave!” at the beginning of umpteen letters, e-mails, blog posts, and tweets from less-than-gruntled critics supremely assured of their originality. The beauty of this evergreen — and its cheap presumptions about a great man — is that it can be wielded with equal convenience by trolls of every political persuasion and in response to any number of detected heresies.

But, with the whiff of bigotry and malice that so many smell in popular politics since the tranquil days when the last Bush effigies were burned, it has increasingly taken a single form, repeated over and over: viz., that WFB would be aghast that the conservative movement, along with the Republican party, has allied itself with the kooks and cranks of the Tea Party, especially since it was Buckley who so decisively expelled the Birchers from the movement, thereby saving it, in the early 1960s.

The latest entry in this genre comes from inside the family, as it were, in the person of former RNC research director David Welch. Welch writes on the New York Times op-ed page (because, where else?) that the GOP needs a similar house-cleaning now:

It is a shame that William F. Buckley Jr. passed away in 2008. The conservative movement could use him — or someone like him — right now.

In the 1960s, Buckley, largely through his position at the helm of National Review, displayed political courage and sanity by taking on the John Birch Society, an influential anti-Communist group whose members saw conspiracies everywhere they looked.

Fast-forward half a century. 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.

Let’s pause for a second here and remember why Buckley took action........ Continued

I believe this means the same as JBS HAS been RIGHT about most things.

I think that thoughtless comment about Ike probably cost them their respectability and gave the Communists a really nice soft lob to hammer back at them.

Someone once hypothecated a little bit about how things would be different today, if Lee Harvey Oswald had been on the mark in his attempt to kill General Walker (who was a Bicher, which was LHO's reason for going after Walker). He'd have been in prison or on the run, instead of nested on the fifth floor of the Texas Book Depository .... no presidency for LBJ, no War on Poverty. Think about it.

All the new world order crap. The UN, the council on foreign relations, etc. He was for selling the Panama Canal. I remember watching him debate Reagan and Pat Buchanan on that.

Murray Rothbard, paleocon of fragrant memory, once accused Buckley of being totalitarian for having supported the idea of a large and powerful defense establishment (in preference, Buckley insisted, to learning Russian at gunpoint). So Buckley was d'accord with the Neocons on that policy, anticipating them by several years.

But he was also a conservative more in the colors of Burke and Hobbes, than of Thomas Jefferson. He dreamed of a civilized, Catholic world in which gentle people could all get along in their fortress of moneyed solitude, and not be roiled by the anxieties of nationalism that the French Revolution and Napoleon's wars had stirred up in Europe, dividing the upper classes of the great powers and placing them in competition, and limiting their social intercourse.

All the new world order crap. The UN, the council on foreign relations, etc. He was for selling the Panama Canal.

Holding the Panama Canal was a PR disaster, especially after after our actions during the Suez crisis in 1956. I don't remember Buckley being pro UN, pro new world order, etc. unless it advanced American interests.

Well, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen that Panama Canal debate but I remember being solidly on Reagan’s side (though I saw it on cable years later and the issue was long settled). I’d stand shoulder to shoulder on most things with Buckley, but on the international stuff and the free trade stuff like Nafta and GATT and the WTO and the UN, I part company with republican orthodoxy. None of our policies should be dictated to us by foreign bodies, our tax policies are our own business, and treaties should be between individual nations, not these regional treaties and international conventions. In my view, the UN, WTO and ICC should be disbanded. A confederacy of republics, along the lines of NATO would be preferable.

Buckley never said that there weren’t communists in the government. He was a supporter of McCarthy. Come back when you have an argument.

PS. I’m a former Bircher.

Buckley never said that there weren’t communists in the government. He was a supporter of McCarthy. Come back when you have an argument.

You must be posting in response to someone else. Let's let it go at that.

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