What Buckley’s Fight with the Birchers Tells Us about Movement Purges

T his morning’s vote to remove Liz Cheney from her position as the third-ranking Republican in the House brings a close to the debate Cheney touched off, and offers the party an opening to move on. It assures a caucus leadership that reflects where the rank-and-file are. And it frees Cheney to make her case without concern for the responsibilities of her previous position. If House Republicans are actually serious about the one defensible argument for this vote — that the party needs to stop talking about Donald Trump and the 2020 election if it is to succeed in the 2022 midterms and beyond — then it should pick a replacement for Cheney who wants to talk about neither of those topics, and Kevin McCarthy should have the spine to make his caucus stick to the “that’s all over with” approach to the 2020 election that he took today at the White House.

Cheney should not, however, be purged from the party for telling the truth about the 2020 election. To the contrary, if anyone gets kicked to the curb, it should be the people who persist in perpetuating lies about the election. And those of us who are in the business of ideas rather than the business of electoral politics should insist, whenever the topic arises again, that the truth is preferable to such lies. The 2020 presidential election was far from flawless, and in some places it was conducted in flagrant disregard of the law. But it was not stolen, and anybody who continues to claim otherwise should be seen in the future as an unreliable liar.

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National Review has some history with movement purges, of course: William F. Buckley’s determined and effective campaign to blackball Robert Welch, the head of the John Birch Society, and essentially banish the Birchers from the conservative movement in the early 1960s is one of the defining episodes in the magazine’s history. Unfortunately, people who invoke this controversy sometimes fail to understand two of its central aspects.

The first is that Bill Buckley was a highly reluctant purger. He did not roam the landscape looking for other conservatives to pick fights with in order to demonstrate his magazine’s dominance over rivals. His campaign against Welch and the Bircher movement was powerful precisely because he did not choose such battles lightly.

National Review was built, as much as anything, around answering a question: What is conservatism? Essential to that endeavor was disputation among varying points of view, and the first decade of NR was nothing if not rich in disputation. Buckley himself changed his mind on some important things over time. What emerged as movement conservatism was always more a philosophy than an ideology, and it was understood from the outset as a fusion of differing strands of thought. A major motivation for this fusion was the understanding that conservative people and institutions needed to unite, and that in order to do so, they had to rally around the ideas they shared rather than being divided by the ideas on which they disagreed. The drive was for common ground, rather than theoretical coherence. For all of his intellectual firepower, Buckley’s importance to the movement came as much as anything from his temperament, his ability to keep the entire naturally fractious enterprise from splintering. In NR’s 65th-anniversary issue, Neal Freeman described Buckley as “the president of a club almost all of whose members were themselves unclubbable,” and that about sums it up.

As Alvin Felzenberg wrote in his history of Buckley’s fight with the Birchers, Buckley was originally on good terms with Welch and the John Birch Society, and they shared some overlap in their audience and their donors. Buckley knew that an open breach would, in the short run, give lots of fodder to conservatism’s omnipresent critics on the left. “I wish the hell I could attack them without pleasing people I cannot stand to please,” he grumbled privately. But he faced two problems. First, the movement’s critics — ranging from the Kennedy administration to moderate Republicans such as Richard Nixon — were ceaseless in attempting to tie the nascent conservative revival to Welch’s insanities. And second, Welch was the classic definition of a fanatic: He wouldn’t change his mind and he wouldn’t change the subject. Eventually, taking him on became a less-damaging option than letting him fester.

Before going into battle with Welch, Buckley rounded up allies. He convened a meeting of conservative intellectuals to agree on an approach. He got Barry Goldwater on board, and Goldwater publicly called for Welch to resign as leader of the John Birch Society. He got Ronald Reagan to submit a supportive note for publication. In short, having been goaded into a battle he did not want, Buckley made the fight itself a team enterprise. Moreover, in the interests of taking the narrowest possible approach, Buckley first attempted to focus surgically on Welch; it was only when Welch’s followers refused to abandon him that Buckley’s campaign widened to the John Birch Society as a whole.

Buckley’s reluctance brings us to the second, crucial fact about the Buckley–Welch fight: It was about lies, rather than ideas or people. Buckley did not turn against the Birchers because they had exotic or eccentric ideas; National Review published plenty of those. Buckley’s relationship with populism was complicated; though he famously quipped that he would rather be governed by the first 400 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty, he was equally hostile to the prospect of being governed by rabble-rousers like George Wallace. But it’s a serious distortion of his career to suggest that his issue with Welch and the Birchers was merely snobbery or a disinclination to align with blunt, uncouth rabble-rousers. Had that been the case, he would have been against the John Birch Society from the start, and against a great many others with whom NR made common cause over his decades in charge.

No, the real problem with Welch was that he was peddling conspiratorial falsehoods, and easily debunked ones at that. The most famous of these was the theory that Dwight Eisenhower, of all people, was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy,” and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, was too. These lies and their obsessive repetition were damaging to conservatism in a number of ways. They discredited the movement with people who might otherwise become converts. They redirected the energies of Welch’s followers away from more productive battles. And perhaps most dangerous of all, they also gave a plausible excuse for the government to use illiberal and repressive tactics against conservatives. As Felzenberg recounts:

During a trip to Los Angeles in 1961, [President] Kennedy . . . said the real danger to the nation came from extremist elements within rather than from foreign powers without. . . . When asked whether he thought it dangerous to the electoral process that large financial contributions were going to “right wing extremist” entities, Kennedy responded, “The only thing we should be concerned about is that it does not represent a diversion of funds which might be taxable for non-taxable purposes. Days after this press conference, IRS Commissioner Mortimer H. Caplin launched a “test audit” of twenty-two organizations the administration considered “extremist.” The agency termed this the Ideological Organizations Audit Project.

Buckley believed [that] Kennedy intended . . . to disparage all the administration’s conservative critics. . . . He may even have surmised that he had become one of the administration’s targets. He anticipated that the administration would seek to vilify, if not silence, its conservative opposition.

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If all this sounds familiar, it’s because the stakes of the Cheney fight are much the same as the stakes of the Buckley–Welch fight were. There have been laughable efforts to argue that Cheney’s ouster is about a disagreement over ideas, or about the class of person who should control the Republican Party. But it’s not about either of those things. It’s not really even about a willingness to personally tolerate Donald Trump; Cheney, after all, voted with Trump 93 percent of the time while he was president. While where and how Cheney chose to talk about the party’s divisions may have sealed her fate, the core question that separates her from her critics is a straightforward matter of truth versus falsehood, and wouldn’t be an issue at all if Trump didn’t remain deeply invested in demanding that Republicans perpetuate his lies about the election.

Today, as much as ever, conservatives ought to be focused on maintaining a united front against the Left’s assaults on our culture, our economy, and our system of government. We should not be eager to turn inward hunting for enemies. But if there is one thing we must not tolerate, it is an insistence on keeping alive lies that lead members of our movement away from that fight.