Resisting the Nazis Was the West’s Finest Hour

D isgraced ex–Fox News host Tucker Carlson has fully descended into the fever swamps of conspiracy theorism, from bizarre claims about UFOs to insidious, antisemitic allegations about the “Israel lobby.” Among the most persistent of his absurd ideas, though, is the notion that World War II somehow brought on the collapse of Western civilization.

Carlson has been making the claim for years, seemingly as part of an argument against continued U.S. support for allies such as Ukraine and Israel. In many respects, it seems that he has cribbed his arguments from the thoroughly debunked work of populist firebrand Pat Buchanan. Plenty of scholars — from Lord Andrew Roberts to members of Hillsdale College’s Churchill Project — have ably refuted Carlson’s erroneous claims. Anyone with an ounce of common sense realizes that standing up to Adolf Hitler’s mad ideology was an act of civilizational greatness.

Most recently, Carlson pressed the case in an interview with Jacob Rees-Mogg, a former Tory minister, who easily deconstructed it. The fact that the podcaster persists in making it is evidence that he has lost touch with the conservative movement he supposedly represents. Heroes of the American right, from Russell Kirk to Ronald Reagan, understood the folly of appeasing the Nazi regime and advocated a strong foreign policy to preserve the world order that emerged after World War II.

Today, the United States faces threats almost as complex and dangerous. Conservatives have a responsibility to reject the voices of appeasement and retreatism, especially as so many come from the far right. The Democratic Party of Barack Obama and Joe Biden proved incapable of checking Vladimir Putin, the Iranian ayatollahs, and the Chinese Communist Party; if conservatives do not rouse the opposition, the world may very well fall into a new dark age of multipolarity and geopolitical instability. We cannot afford to heed the conspiratorial ravings of Carlson and his ilk.

At the height of the Cold War, an earlier generation of conservatives looked on those who stood fast against Nazism as models to emulate. Take the traditionalist thinker Richard Weaver — most known for Ideas Have Consequences, his 1948 jeremiad against progressivism. In his writings against totalitarianisms of the left and right alike, he frequently cited Winston Churchill as the greatest statesman of the age. In his 1953 book, The Ethics of Rhetoric, for example, he argued that the prime minister’s famous speeches during the war recovered the notions of chivalry and patriotism that provided the strength necessary to overcome the revolutionary schemes of the worst kinds of tyrants. Indeed, Weaver and other Cold Warriors believed that the appeasement policies Churchill prophetically thundered against were the betrayal of Western civilization. “Britain and France had come to prefer as leaders the rhetoricless businessman type,” Weaver wrote, and “had thus emasculated themselves.”

Before and during World War II, fascist and communist movements on the continent manipulated the masses with the politics of utopian promises. Many in the Anglo-American democracies were tempted as well, and leaders who should have known better cowered in the face of the threat. “For while the world must move, evil rhetoric is of more force than no rhetoric at all,” Weaver wrote, “and Herr Hitler, employing images which rested on no true dialectic, had persuaded multitudes that his order was the ‘new order.’” What made Churchill great where other men failed was that he denied the notion that the West’s decline was necessary. Weaver would have thoroughly agreed with American journalist Edward R. Murrow’s quip that the statesman “mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.” Especially during the Battle of Britain, Churchill used his position in the House of Commons to remind the British nation of the permanent things at the heart of civilization that are worth fighting for.

Concepts others had dismissed as dusty relics of a bygone age — honor, tradition, freedom itself — were alive in the hearts and minds of the brave people on the front lines of World War II. In one particularly stirring speech, Churchill even compared the brave pilots of the Royal Air Force to the Knights of the Round Table. For them, he said, “Every morn brought forth a noble chance and every chance brought forth a noble deed.”

Of course, Churchill was not the only traditionalist who set his face against the terrible ideologies of the 20th century. While it is true that some American conservatives, such as William F. Buckley Jr., favored isolationism at the very outset of the war, they quickly reversed course as the true extent of Hitler’s ambitions became clear. And outside of the elite, American conservatives overwhelming opposed abandoning Europe to the darkness of totalitarianism. In a 1944 essay, later collected in a Liberty Fund edition of his writings, Weaver argued that the American South “was the first section of the United States to sense an enemy in fascism” precisely because of the South’s traditionalism.

Weaver wrote that the agrarians saw through the lies of appeasement and isolation because they “perceived intuitively that the new radicalisms of Europe represent a final assault upon society as that term has been understood in Western civilization.” Unlike Neville Chamberlain or the America Firsters of the late 1930s, the South at the time “never took the businessman’s attitude toward this threat” because its people “realized that as soon as the first encroachment is made, the battle is on, and there can be no cessation until a victor has been decided.” Hundreds of thousands of conservative Southerners volunteered to liberate Europe as a counterrevolutionary mission.

That traditionalism remains strong in America. To this day, Southern states remain highly overrepresented in the U.S. military compared with states in other regions. And as much as Carlson and other isolationists might bleat that the youth favors “restraint,” polling shows that young people — including very large numbers of young conservatives — support a strong foreign policy and America’s traditional alliances. The old verities that have been at the heart of the conservative movement still live, even if the media elite and populist establishment seem to doubt them.

Carlson is wrong — resisting the Nazis was not civilizational suicide. It was the West’s finest hour. The problem is that the foreign policy blob in Washington and the chattering extremists on social media have, like their predecessors in the 1930s, become the “rhetoricless businessman type.” They lack the animating faith that saved our civilization from fascism and communism, and they are therefore ill-equipped to do anything besides counsel despair. True conservatives are not ready to join them.