What would William F. Buckley have thought of Donald Trump? Not much, according toGeorge Will, who in a column last Thursday described Trump as “a counterfeit Republican” and “an affront to anyone devoted to the project William F. Buckley began six decades ago with the founding in 1955 of the National Review—making conservatism intellectually respectable and politically palatable.”
“Buckley, of course, succeeded in excommunicating the John Birch Society from the conservative movement,” said Rush Limbaugh the next day. “So my guess is that Buckley would be amused and would get as much out of it as he could, but, at some point, he would probably denounce Trump.”
Limbaugh guessed right. In an article for the March/April 2000 issue of Cigar Aficionado—the year Trump unsuccessfully sought the Reform Party’s nomination—Buckley dilated on “the rampant demagogy in the present scene”:
Look for the narcissist. The most obvious target in today’s lineup is, of course, Donald Trump. When he looks at a glass, he is mesmerized by its reflection. If Donald Trump were shaped a little differently, he would compete for Miss America.
But whatever the depths of self-enchantment, the demagogue has to say something. So what does Trump say? That he is a successful businessman and that that is what America needs in the Oval Office. There is some plausibility in this, though not much. The greatest deeds of American Presidents—midwifing the new republic; freeing the slaves; harnessing the energies and vision needed to win the Cold War—had little to do with a bottom line. So what else can Trump offer us? Well to begin with, a self-financed campaign. Does it follow that all who finance their own campaigns are narcissists?
At this writing Steve Forbes has spent $63 million in pursuit of the Republican nomination. Forbes is an evangelist, not an exhibitionist. In his long and sober private career, Steve Forbes never bought a casino, and if he had done so, he would not have called it Forbes’s Funhouse. His motivations are discernibly selfless.
Buckley distinguished between two types of demagogy. One is “cynical demagogy”—i.e., ordinary pandering to voters. His concluding sentence: “The resistance to a corrupting demagogy should take first priority.” Presumably Trumpery fell into the latter category.
Which raises the question: What would Buckley have done, or counseled others to do, to resist Trump today, when he is disrupting the Republican nomination process? “Conservatives today should deal with Trump with the firmness Buckley dealt with the John Birch Society in 1962,” argues Will, echoed by Commentary’s Peter Wehner: “Just as Buckley excommunicated the John Birch Society from the conservative movement in the 1960s, so should conservatives today stand up to Trump and Trumpism.”
This columnist is in full sympathy with Will and Wehner’s objective. But the analogy strikes us as fanciful.
Here is how Will describes what Buckley did to the Birchers:
The society was an extension of a loony businessman who said Dwight Eisenhower was “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.” In a 5,000-word National Review “excoriation” (Buckley’s word), he excommunicated the society from the conservative movement.
If only someone would write an essay excoriating Trump. But wait. Here’s Wehner:
Fortunately there are conservative commentators who are doing just that, including Bill Bennett, David Brooks, Mona Charen, Charles C.W. Cooke, Michael Gerson, Jonah Goldberg, Victor Davis Hanson, Charles Krauthammer, Matt Lewis, Rich Lowry, Michael Medved, Paul Mirengoff, Dana Perino, John Podhoretz, Karl Rove, Jennifer Rubin, Kevin Williamson, regular contributors to this web site (among them Max Boot, Noah Rothman and Jonathan Tobin), editorial page writers for the Wall Street Journal and others.
That’s 20 names. Add Will, Wehner himself and the unenumerated Journal writers, and the count approaches 30. Somehow Trump seems immune even to weapons of mass excoriation.
But really, what would one expect? The situation in 1962 was dramatically different from today, as is clear from Buckley’s own account, published in the March 2008 issue of Commentary (Buckley died Feb. 27 of that year).
Buckley was among a group of conservatives favoring Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona for the 1964 presidential nomination. “It seemed inconceivable that an anti-establishment gadfly like Goldwater could be nominated,” Buckley recalled:
And it was embarrassing that the only political organization in town that dared suggest this radical proposal—the GOP’s nominating Goldwater for President—was the John Birch Society. . . .
The society became a national cause célèbre—so much so, that a few of those anxious to universalize a draft-Goldwater movement aiming at a nomination for President in 1964 thought it best to do a little conspiratorial organizing of their own against it.
Thereby proving the dictum that even paranoids have enemies. The plot was hatched at a meeting in Palm Beach, Fla., of five men: Buckley, Goldwater, Russell Kirk (author of “The Conservative Mind,” published in 1953), William Baroody (soon to be president of the American Enterprise Institute) and Jay Hall (a PR man who had represented General Motors in Washington).
Imagine a similar group today, consisting of the leading conservative journalist, politician, intellectual, think-tank head and PR flack. So numerous are conservatives today that we can’t think of an obvious choice in any of these categories. Just the Republican presidential candidates currently number 16, not counting Trump, almost all of whom have strong conservative credentials. (And if, pace Wehner, David Brooks qualifies as a conservative, so surely would even George Pataki and Rand Paul.)
In 1962 the “conservative movement” was small enough that you could fit its leaders around a table. One might say the conservative movement no longer exists—that the movement has moved. The GOP is a conservative party today in a way that it was not half a century ago. Trump owes his lead in the polls to this embarrassment of riches; his would be a mere protest candidacy if there were a single conservative alternative rather than upward of a dozen.
Another difference is that the Palm Beach group’s objective was not to neutralize a potential rival but to distance Goldwater from an embarrassing supporter. That was a delicate undertaking, as Buckley recalled. Kirk offered that (in Buckley’s paraphrase) “the John Birch Society should be renounced by Goldwater and by everyone else . . . with any influence on the conservative movement”:
But that, Goldwater said, is the problem. Consider this, he exaggerated: “Every other person in Phoenix is a member of the John Birch Society. Russell, I’m not talking about Commie-haunted apple pickers or cactus drunks, I’m talking about the highest cast of men of affairs. Any of you know who Frank Cullen Brophy is?” . . . Brophy was a prominent Arizona banker. . . . “You just can’t do that kind of thing in Arizona. For instance, who on earth can dismiss Frank Brophy from anything?”
Thus the men settled on “an allocation of responsibilities”:
Goldwater would seek out an opportunity to dissociate himself from the “findings” of the Society’s leader [Robert Welch], without, however, casting any aspersions on the Society itself. I, in National Review and in my other writing, would continue to expose Welch and his thinking to scorn and derision. “You know how to do that,” said Jay Hall.
I volunteered to go further. Unless Welch himself disowned his operative fallacy, National Review would oppose any support for the society.
“How would you define the Birch fallacy?” Jay Hall asked.
“The fallacy,” I said, “is the assumption that you can infer subjective intention from objective consequence: we lost China to the Communists, therefore the President of the United States and the Secretary of State wished China to go to the Communists.”
“I like that,” Goldwater said.
Accordingly, Buckley’s famous February 1962 essay, “The Question of Robert Welch,” was framed as a denunciation not of the John Birch Society but of Welch himself and his ideas. He opened by noting that “some members of the National Council of the John Birch Society are at their wits’ end, and one or two have quietly resigned”:
Their dilemma is, reduced to the simplest terms: How can the John Birch Society be an effective political instrument when it is led by a man whose views on current affairs are, at so many critical points, so critically different from their own, and, for that matter, so far removed from common sense?
Buckley observed that “many” society members were “men and women of high character and purpose,” who “include, in our judgment, some of the most morally energetic, self-sacrificing, and dedicated anti-Communists in America.” In his conclusion he even credited Welch with having “revived in many men the spirit of patriotism”—but argued “that same spirit now calls for rejecting, out of a love of truth and country, his false counsels.”
Yet Buckley’s dissection of Welch’s doctrine was as unsparing as his tone was civil. The whole essay is worth reading, but here’s a taste:
Mr. Welch’s annual Scoreboard, published in a summer issue of American Opinion, Mr. Welch’s public journal, has for several years listed the United States as “40-60%” Communist-controlled. And this past summer Mr. Welch raised the figure to “50-70%+”! That is to say, he is reaffirming his belief that, to quote again his own words, “the government of the United States is under operational control of the Communist Party.” . . .
Mr. Welch’s summation: “And we have seen on every side, in a hundred different manifestations, the unceasing efforts of our government to carry out all programs and take all steps required to bring about the merger of the United States with Soviet Russia and all of its satellites into a one-world socialist government.” Disagree? “These are all plain facts . . . incontrovertibly clear to anybody who will use the eyes, the intelligence, and the common sense God gave him.”
Woe unto the man who disagrees with Mr. Welch. He is 1) an idiot, or 2) a Comsymp, or 3) an outright Communist.
In his 2008 article, Buckley quoted Kirk as calling Welch “loony”—the same adjective Will used in his column last week. A more precise description would be “fanatical.” Buckley in 1962:
He persists in distorting reality and in refusing to make the crucial moral and political distinction. And unless that distinction is reckoned with, the mind freezes, and we become consumed in empty rages. The distinction is between 1) an active pro-Communist, and 2) an ineffectually anti-Communist Liberal.
Trump is a different animal altogether—a narcissist, as Buckley aptly described him in 2000, or, as Will put it in opening his column last week:
In every town large enough to have two traffic lights there is a bar at the back of which sits the local Donald Trump, nursing his fifth beer and innumerable delusions. Because the actual Donald Trump is wealthy, he can turn himself into an unprecedentedly and incorrigibly vulgar presidential candidate.
He’s a blowhard, not a fanatic. One reason there hasn’t been a Buckleyesque essay on “The Question of Donald Trump” is that his ideas are too insubstantial to subject to a withering analysis.
So what can be done about Trump? Will has one suggestion: “The Republican National Committee should immediately stipulate that subsequent Republican debates will be open to any and all—but only—candidates who pledge to support the party’s nominee.”
It’s probably too late for that, for reasons we discussed earlier this month: Federal campaign regulations require that eligibility for debates be determined by the “staging organizations,” not the party, and according to “objective criteria” that are not structured “to promote or advance one candidate over another.” Besides, it’s easy to imagine that such a heavy-handed response would backfire, giving Trump a grievance that would both fuel a third-party run and turn fair-minded voters against the GOP.
In contrast with Buckley’s civility toward John Birch Society members back in 1962, Will has little patience with Trump supporters, or with those who view them sympathetically (ellipsis his):
Buckley’s legacy is being betrayed by invertebrate conservatives now saying that although Trump “goes too far,” he has “tapped into something,” and therefore. . . .
Therefore what? This stance—if a semi-grovel can be dignified as a stance—is a recipe for deserved disaster. Remember, Henry Wallace and Strom Thurmond “tapped into” things.
That suggests an answer to the question what Buckley would do. Wallace and Thurmond both ran for president in 1948, before Buckley entered public life. (He published “God and Man at Yale” in 1951 and founded National Review four years later.)
But another third-party candidate, whom Buckley rightly viewed as a fake conservative, ran 20 years later. On Jan. 24, 1968, George Wallace appeared as a guest on “Firing Line,” where he endured 49 minutes of combative questioning from host William F. Buckley.
I maintain Trump will either (1) get bored and leave the race or (2) leave the Republican race and run as a third-party candidate to ensure his friend Hillary Clinton becomes president. Of course, Hillary’s email difficulties might intervene.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 