Buckley Policed the Fringe, and the Right Grew Stronger for It

Every movement has to decide what it will not carry. Say yes to everyone and you become a bus station: busy, loud and going nowhere in particular. Say no too often and you become a seminar of seven. The art is in the sorting, and the men who do the sorting are never thanked at the time.

In the years after 1955, a young editor in Manhattan took on the job nobody wanted. William F. Buckley Jr. and his magazine, National Review, looked at the people who were calling themselves conservatives and decided, in public and by name, that some of their ideas were not conservative and some of their conduct was a liability. The decisions were controversial then and are controversial now. Critics call it elitism, a gatekeeper's vanity. I'd argue it was something closer to custodianship, and that the modern right is standing on the ground those decisions cleared.

Let me tell the story in order, give the critics their best argument, and then weigh it.

The magazine and its mission

National Review appeared in November 1955. Its opening statement promised that it would "stand athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so." It was a declaration that the magazine meant to set a direction, not to print everything.

At that moment American conservatism was less a movement than a set of rooms with the doors shut. There were traditionalists, anti-Communists, free-market economists, Catholic intellectuals and plain irritated taxpayers, and they did not know one another. Buckley's project was to introduce them and build a shared house. A house, though, needs walls.

The first wall: Ayn Rand and her circle

The earliest break was intellectual. Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged appeared in 1957 and quickly became a sensation. Its energy and its defense of the producer against the looter appealed to many readers on the right. But Rand's system was explicitly atheist, and she scorned religion and tradition as irrational.

National Review ran a review of the novel in its issue of December 28, 1957, and chose Whittaker Chambers to write it. Chambers, the former Soviet spy turned witness against Alger Hiss and author of Witness (1952), knew totalitarian thinking from the inside. His review, titled "Big Sister Is Watching You," was withering. He argued that the book's morality was a materialism that left no room for anything above the individual will, and he wrote that from almost any page of the book a voice could be heard, "from painful necessity, commanding: 'To a gas chamber — go!'"

That sentence has been quoted ever since, usually as a cheap shot, and it was a bruising one. But the argument underneath it was serious: a philosophy that denies any transcendent order, and treats compassion as weakness, cannot be the moral foundation of a free society. The Founders did not think so either. For a fair account of Rand's actual influence and the myths about her, see Six Myths About Ayn Rand and Her Uneasy Place in the Conservative Movement.

The point for our purposes is not that Rand had nothing to say. Her defense of productive work, of the entrepreneur and of capitalism as a moral system has served many conservatives well. The point is that National Review refused to let her atheism and her contempt for tradition become the movement's creed by default. It chose its foundations on purpose.

The second wall: the John Birch Society

The harder case came a few years later, and it involved people who were not far from Buckley's side in the Cold War.

The John Birch Society was founded in December 1958 by Robert Welch, a retired candy manufacturer from Massachusetts, at a meeting in Indianapolis. It took its name from John Birch, an American missionary and Army intelligence officer killed by Chinese Communists in August 1945, whom Welch described as the first casualty of the Cold War. The Society grew fast in the early 1960s, with local chapters of dedicated, energetic and often admirable members who cared about their country and hated Communism.

The trouble was with the leadership's theory. Welch had written a long manuscript called The Politician, circulated privately, in which he charged that President Dwight Eisenhower was a "dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy." He made similar charges about other prominent Americans, including Eisenhower's brother Milton and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. These were not criticisms of policy. They were accusations of treason, with no evidence, against a general who had commanded the Allied armies in Europe and a President who had just served two terms.

What the critics said

The case for staying quiet was not stupid, and it deserves a fair statement.

"The Society's members are the foot soldiers of anti-Communism. They go door to door, they write letters, they show up at school boards. Why alienate them over a manuscript most of them have not read? Welch is an eccentric, but liberal editors are already sneering at the whole right as paranoid, and a public denunciation by one of our own only hands them the headline. A movement that cannot hold its fringes will never win a majority, and unity is a virtue."

That argument has real force, and the cost of an expulsion is real. Some conservatives who felt attacked never forgave Buckley, and he spent years answering their letters.

The 1962 editorial

Buckley decided that the cost of silence was higher. In February 1962 National Review ran an editorial, "The Question of Robert Welch," arguing that Welch's claims were so detached from reality that they destroyed his usefulness as a leader. It said that the Society's leadership should be repudiated by serious anti-Communists and that Welch should step down. The editorial did not condemn the membership as a whole, and Buckley took pains to say so. The target was a man who had turned a political cause into a conspiracy theory about the nation's most honored leaders.

Barry Goldwater, then the movement's rising political star, was pressed by reporters about the Society and made clear by 1962 that he thought Welch should step down. Goldwater, who had just published The Conscience of a Conservative (1960), understood what was at stake: a party whose standard-bearer cannot say that a former President was not a Soviet agent is a party that cannot persuade a majority of anything. Welch did not step down, and the Society went its way, but conservative leaders had drawn a public line.

Buckley later extended the same discipline to other cases, including a long and careful effort in the following decades to separate the conservative movement from anti-Semitism, a campaign he took up in print in the early 1990s.

The argument, in four premises

Here is the case for what Buckley did.

1. A movement is defined by what it refuses. If every claim made in its name is attributed to it, then its worst claims set its reputation. Refusing the false is what makes the true believable.
2. Conspiracy theories are not neutral allies. A theory that makes treason the explanation for every defeat requires its followers to stop weighing evidence. A movement that loses the habit of weighing evidence loses the ability to persuade anyone outside itself.
3. Persuasion is the business of self-government. The American system rewards coalitions that can speak to a majority. The Founders' design in Federalist No. 10 expects factions to be checked by a large and varied republic, and a faction that cannot reason with its neighbors is a faction that cannot govern.
4. Truth is a conservative commitment. Conservatives defend the idea of an objective moral order, and that includes the discipline of honest claims. Accusing a man of treason without proof is not a harsher form of patriotism. It is bearing false witness.

The objection that it was elitist

Now the strongest answer to the critics who call such gatekeeping elitist.

The charge is that a Manhattan editor with an Ivy League degree and a taste for sailing decided which grassroots Americans counted as respectable. There is something to that complaint, and the lesson for every movement is humility: the people at the bottom often see problems the people at the top miss, and a movement that forgets this will drift.

But look at what Buckley actually policed. He did not police the positions of ordinary Birchers, many of whom held conventional views on taxes, the Cold War and the United Nations. He policed the leadership's claims of fact: that Eisenhower was a Communist agent, that the whole government had been taken over from within. Those were assertions that could be tested, and they failed. A line drawn at false factual claims is not snobbery. It is the line any honest argument must draw.

The test of elitism is whether the gatekeeper excludes people for who they are or for what they assert. Buckley excluded assertions. He did not exclude the farmer from Indiana who joined a chapter out of fear of Communism; he told him that his leader was wrong, and that there was a better movement to join. And the evidence of how this worked is in what followed: Goldwater won the Republican nomination in 1964, and Ronald Reagan's 1966 and 1980 victories were built on a movement that had a reputation for seriousness. The people who did the sorting handed the next generation a coalition that could win.

The Founders were gatekeepers too

There is a deeper precedent. The Constitution itself is an exercise in refusal. Its framers rejected the Articles of Confederation, rejected monarchy, rejected a pure democracy, and rejected, in Madison's words in Federalist No. 10, the "mischiefs of faction." They did not think every voice should be given power. They thought every voice should be given a hearing in a structure built to filter passion into judgment. See the account of that design in Montesquieu Warned That Liberty Dies Where One Hand Makes and Enforces Law.

A movement is a smaller republic, and it needs the same discipline. Edmund Burke, whom the movement revered, praised the habit of mind that kept reform within reason, a theme taken up in Burke's Doctrine of Prescription Says Old Institutions Deserve a Hearing. A movement that welcomes every fantasy is a movement that cannot recognize its own tradition.

Where the lesson cuts the other way

Honesty requires a warning. The gatekeeper's job can be abused, and the temptation is to use it against honest dissent. A movement that expels those who merely disagree with the leadership has not preserved its integrity. It has become a church with a pope.

So the test for any act of discipline is the one Buckley's defenders claim for him: is the person excluded asserting something false, or something merely unwelcome? Welch's claim that Eisenhower was a Communist agent was false. A claim that a tax bill is a mistake, or that a foreign intervention is unwise, is merely unwelcome, and the right has always had room for debate about both. A healthy movement polices the first and welcomes the second. See also Populism and Conservatism Agree on Who Gets Ignored, Not on Every Remedy for what happens when elites forget to listen.

What Buckley's discipline built

The practical results were large. By drawing the line at the leadership of the Birch Society and at Rand's atheism, National Review made it possible for the movement to attract Catholic intellectuals, evangelical Protestants, Jewish neoconservatives and ordinary Republican voters who would not have joined a movement that included a conspiracy theory about Eisenhower. Fusion between traditionalists and libertarians, argued over by Frank Meyer and Russell Kirk, was possible because the house had a shape. Goldwater's nomination in 1964 and Reagan's presidency later were built on it.

The lesson for today is not to repeat Buckley's specific decisions. It is to copy his method: name the claim, test it, and have the courage to say that it is false, even when it comes from your own side, even when it costs you friends.

The case in brief

1. A movement is defined by what it will not carry, and refusing falsehoods is what makes its truths credible.
2. Buckley and National Review broke publicly with Ayn Rand's atheist philosophy in 1957 and with the John Birch Society's leadership in 1962, over claims that failed the test of evidence.
3. The strongest objection, that gatekeeping is elitist and costs unity, is answered by what was policed: false factual claims by the leadership, not the honest views of members.
4. The Founders practiced the same discipline, building a structure that filters passion into judgment, and a movement is a smaller republic.
5. The same power can be abused against honest dissent, so the test is always whether the thing excluded is false or merely unwelcome.

What you can do: the next time a claim from your own side lands in your feed, check it against a primary source before you share it, and say so when it fails.