On Monday, March 1, Steve Benen took note of the craziness involved in a Politico story about the GOP trying to purge itself of extremists quoting Erick Erickson of Red State as one of the anti-extremists:
The problem is, some of those who want to keep the extremists at bay are themselves extremists.
The attempt "to clean up our own house," as Erick Erickson, founder of the influential conservative blog RedState, puts it, is necessary "because traditional press outlets have decided to spotlight these fringe elements that get attracted to the movement, and focus on them as if they're a large part of this tea party movement. And I don't think they are." [...]
Erickson has advised new tea party organizers on how to avoid affiliations with extremists and this month banned birthers -- conservatives who believe that Obama was not born in the United States and is, therefore, ineligible to be president -- from his blog. (He has long blacklisted truthers, those who believe that the U.S. government was complicit in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks -- a conspiracy theory with devotees across the political spectrum.)
"At some point, you have to use the word 'crazy,'" said Erickson.
Yes, Erick Erickson wants to help rid conservatives of the extremist. As Simon Maloy explained, "That's the same Erick Erickson who called retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter a 'goat f--king child molester,' who called two sitting U.S. senators 'healthcare suicide bombers,' who praised protesters for 'tell[ing] Nancy Pelosi and the Congress to send Obama to a death panel' (before furiously backtracking), and attacked President Obama's Nobel Prize as 'an affirmative action quota.'"
(And since Steve's post, Erickson has claimed "It is and has always been the left" who resorts to violence, including, of course, the Nazis:
From Hitler to Mao to Lenin to Stalin to Chavez to Castro to Guevera to Arafat to Pol Pot to Mugabe to [insert your favorite American union] to Margaret Sanger the left and its heroes have used death, violence, and murder to advance their agenda.
Ah yes, that violent sociopathic thug, Margaret Sanger! How did Martin Luther King get left off that list, I wonder?)
Steve totally gets the kabuki nature of this exercise:
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My suspicion is that some news outlets that are receptive to Republican messages will buy the line -- the GOP is moving to the mainstream. They'll even support it by pointing to things like CPAC scrapping a panel discussion on the president's birth certificate (while accepting Birchers as an official co-sponsor of the event).
All the while, fringe ideas and extremist personalities continue to drive the party and its message. For crying out loud, last week, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) offered praise for a lunatic who flew an airplane into a building, and faced no criticism from his party whatsoever. Indeed, a year from now, if Republicans take the House majority, Steve King will be the chairman of the Judiciary Committee's panel on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law -- and no one in GOP circles will find that insane.
Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) said African Americans were better under slavery, and he too received no criticism from his party at all -- and is also positioned to be a House Judiciary subcommittee chairman if Republicans are in the majority next year.
The idea of Republicans and conservatives in general purging the radicals seems sensible, right up until one appreciates the fact that it's too late -- the inmates are already running the asylum.
But, of course, it's not just the Republicans. And not just the media, either. It's all of Versailles that's infected. When Obama repeatedly pretends that Republicans can be reasoned with, rather than blasting them mercilessly for their embrace of paranoid fantasies, he's joining in on the kabuki, tacitly accepting the political legitimacy of those fantasies-even as he marginalizes the wildly popular public option as an irrational fantasy of the "left of the left."
One cannot compare the current conservative attempt to appear respectable and not insane to the 1960s effort without taking some account of the contexts of both efforts. Just as one could not accurately compare Sadam Hussein with Adolph Hitler if one didn't go a little further than their facial hair to note the vast gulf in their military capability (even if Sadam had had every single last one of the WMDs Bush/Cheney fantasized about), so we must also compare the larger contexts of William F. Buckley's attempt to marginalize the John Birch Society back then, and talk of doing something similar today.
When Buckley set out to marginalize the Birchers, he ran the only prominent conservative publication there was, for most practical purposes. It was a very different, much more concentrated, much more top-down media environment. He also failed, even then, although the official story now pretends otherwise. What did do was pull off a kabuki play of his own, in which he and other prominent conservatives could claim to have purged the Birchers. But what kind of a purge is it, when Bircher authors continued to sell millions of copies of their books?
Buckley tells his version of how things happened in "Goldwater, the John Birch Society, and Me" It's mostly about how he got together with Goldwater and others in Palm Beach before Goldwater had decided to run for President, how they decided to deal with the Birchers. There's a little bit about the execution of their plan-with Buckley quoting briefly his own, self-described " ,000-word excoriation of Welch" in the National Review, and a snippet of Goldwater's "explicit endorsement...we published in the following issue" which went so far as to claim that Welch's views didn't even represent the Birchers themselves!
Mr. Welch is only one man, and I do not believe his views, far removed from reality and common sense as they are, represent the feelings of most members of the John Birch Society. . . . Because of this, I believe the best thing Mr. Welch could do to serve the cause of anti-Communism in the United States would be to resign. . . . We cannot allow the emblem of irresponsibility to attach to the conservative banner.
But, of course, this was a sheer fantasy on Goldwater's part. As was the conclusion of Buckley's 2008 retrospective account:
The wound we Palm Beach plotters delivered to the John Birch Society proved fatal over time. Barry Goldwater did not win the presidency, but he clarified the proper place of anti-Communism on the Right, with bright prospects to follow.
In fact, Welch's phantasmagorical imagination has alwaysrepresented a powerful force on the right, without which movement conservatism could have never gotten much of anything accomplished. It's just that they needed to be proper hidden or else explained away. But the one thing they couldn't be is actually disappeared, and the evidence here is overwhelming. The Birchers both wrote and read all manner of bizarre pamphlets, booklets and books, traces of which can still be found online to this day. One of my favorites--which caused convulsive laughter when a friend of mine got hold of a copy back in the day--was Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles, written by David A. Noebel in 1965. It doesn't appear that Noebel was himself a member of the Birch Society, but he was an associate of the much more famous Reverend Billy James Hargis, who was a member, and his writings were certainly embraced by Birchers. As for Hargis himself, Wikipedia notes:
At the height of his popularity in the 1950s and 1960s, his Christian Crusade ministry was broadcast on more than 500 radio stations and 250 television stations.
Hargis also wrote books, as well. Buckley had no role in subduing his influence. A plain old-fashioned sex scandal did that-a full decade after Goldwater's ill-fated presidential run.
He was disgraced after accusations of sexual misconduct from students at his American Christian College....
In 1974, Hargis announced that he would step down from most of his activities, including resignation from the presidency of American Christian College, due to health problems.[4] However, a sex scandal erupted at the College the same year, involving claims that Hargis had had sex with four males and one female student. In fact, a couple he married found out on their wedding night that he had deflowered both of them.
Another major piece of evidence of how little real damage Buckley did to the Birchers can be seen by the success of another Bircher author, John A. Stormer. Regarding his political career, Wikipedia notes:
Stormer has served on the Missouri Republican State Committee and was state chairman of the Missouri Federation of Young Republicans (1962-64). His further involvement in politics led him to be a member of the Missouri delegation to the Republican Convention which nominated Barry Goldwater in 1964. He has honorary degrees from Manahath School of Theology (1965) and Shelton College (1976). He joined the John Birch Society.
And as for his writing:
In the 1950s, John Stormer became disillusioned with the political candidates and philosophies that he was asked to support. In 1962, he left his career as editor and general manager of a leading electrical magazine to begin an intensive study of communism. With what he learned, he wrote the book None Dare Call It Treason which sold over seven million copies [emphasis added]. The book argues that the United States is losing the Cold War because it has been heavily infiltrated by Communist subversives.
In his book, None Dare Call It Treason...25 Years Later, he again writes of what he considers as the cultural manipulation going on in American society and warns of the alleged designs of the Fabian Society and their agenda of democratic socialism. Writing in 1989 he also argued that Perestroika and Glasnost were merely Soviet propaganda tools.
None Dare Call It Treason was published in1964, and continued selling strongly for years. Buckley had no apparent influence in squelching its appeal.
These are just some of the easiest examples to pick out that discredit Buckley's claim to have purged the conservative movement of the Bircher stain. It was put-on, a kabuki play from start to finish. But the non-disappearance of the Birchers and their paranoid lunacy wasn't the only thing false about Buckley's account, for Buckley himself had been a staunch defender of such paranoid lunacy at an earlier point in time, precisely a decade earlier. To be sure, he was subtle about it. He and his brother-in-law, Brent Bowzell, co-authored a defense of Joe McCarthy, McCarthy And His Enemies. In a remarkably restrained NY Times review, William S. White wrote:
In the detailed section on the original "cases" before the old Tydings Committee, they criticize Senator McCarthy in some of these cases. Indeed, they find that "some of his specific charges were exaggerated; a few had no apparent foundation whatever." This judgment does not, however, tend to impeach Mr. McCarthy. The conclusion is that "the nation's living shame" lies n the fact that the Tydings committee found his accusations "a fraud and a hoax." For, say Messrs., Buckley and Bozell, the McCarthy campaign forced the State Department to "take a new hard look" at some of the McCarthy "cases" and the upshot was the "separation" of 29 per cent of them through "loyalty or security channels," because earlier evaluations had not been "stern enough."
That is, the book's verdict here is that it is permissible, and even singularly useful, to make attacks against the foreign office of a great anti-Communist power that are "exaggerated" or in some cases actually false if the end result is to cause the dismissal of slightly more than a quarter of those accused.
Thinking along these lines, the authors take up General Marshall. They concede he is no treacherous Communist, and so they give this handsome vindication to the General of the Army and a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, the recent presentation of which was made disorderly by Communist hoodlums in Oslo:
"Marshall's loyalty is not doubted in any reasonable quarter. On the other hand, Marshall no longer rides as high as he once did in the esteem of his countrymen ... To the extent that McCarthy, through his careful analysis of Marshall's record, has contributed to cutting Marshall down to size he has performed a valuable service ... As regards his imputation of treasonable motives to Marshall, McCarthy deserves to be criticized even if Marshall's general reputation for loyalty did not suffer. McCarthy's judgment here was bad."
And yet, they wrote their book to defend McCarthy!
Here's the bottom line on Buckley: (1) Senator McCarthy attacked the patriotism of the Army Chief of Staff during WWII, who subsequently served as Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State in a Democratic administration. McCarthy said that Marshall had ""aided the Communist drive for world domination". This sort of excess showed 'bad judgement,' but was no reason to condemn McCarthy overall.
(2) On the other hand, Robert Welch--a private citizen--attacked the patriotism of the Allied Supreme Commander in Europe (Marshall's subordinate), who subsequently served as the Republican President. Welch called Eisenhower a ""dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy," and this sort of excess was grounds to condemn him overall, and exile him completely.
Such exquisite double-standards are what passes as "principle" in a "conservative intellectual". And this is what some insist is missing today. I think not. I think that we have Buckleys as well as Welches in greater abundance than ever before. And kabuki is the only theater left in town--except, of course, for theater of the absurd.
p.s. I said above:
But, of course, it's not just the Republicans. And not just the media, either. It's all of Versailles that's infected.
I just want to remind folks of all the Democrats in Congress who mindlessly voted to defund ACORN based on a cheap scam promoted by FOX and Glenn Beck. The problem isn't Buckley and his modern day descendants. The problem is a political establishment that doesn't recognize these miscreants for what they are, and banish them from meddling in grownup affairs they obviously can't understand, but seeks to curry their favor, instead. |
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