A few years ago, I wrote an extended piece bearing the title The Republicans: WTF Happened to this Party?. Recently, in response to a couple of engaging (relatively) meas culpas—Matthew Continetti’s The Right The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism and Tim Miller’s Why We Did It—I began preparing an update.
I originally planned to write about both in the same piece, starting with Matt, but my “take” on Matt’s piece grew so long-winded I decided that I’d better start with Tim instead, since his book is a memoir rather than a history, posting it as The Republicans: WTF Happened to this Party? Part II Part 1: Tim Miller’s Why We Did It, and save my long-windedness at Matt’s expense for a second post, which, of course, is precisely what this is. In addition, I must say/warn the reader, that the more I sought to “comment” on Matt’s work, the more I grew to dislike it, and so what follows is, to a great extent, a rambling, lurching, often sneering supplement to Matt’s tome, pointing out the frequent, grievous omissions and evasions, full of detours, deviations, and divagations from the main topic as I mount and dismount at will from a variety of hobbyhorses, forgetting about poor Mr. Continetti for pages at a time before returning to him.
Since you can’t rely on Republicans (or anyone else) to tell the whole truth, I supplemented Matt with Dana Milbank’s The Destructionists The Twenty-Five Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party and Nicole Hemmer’s Partisans The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade Politics in the 1990s. I should also mention my readings of earlier anti-Trump Republicans like Max Boot’s The Corrosion of Conservatism, Charles Sykes’ How the Right Lost Its Mind, Charles Wilson’s Everything Trump Touches Die, and Stuart Stevens’ It Was All A Lie. Dana, for the most part a fairly standard issue liberal, tells you the sort of things that Republicans tend to leave out, while Nicole has an excellent ear and understanding for the upstream “culture” that eventually shapes our politics. Oh, and I can’t forget Julian Zelizer’s excellent study, Bringing Down the House Newt Gingrich and the Rise of the New Republican Party. So let’s get started!
The first half of Continetti’s book is largely a description of the efforts of “good” conservatives—William F. Buckley/National Review conservatives—to wrest control of the Republican Party from the Dwight Eisenhower/Richard Nixon/Jerry Ford centrists, while foiling the efforts of racist, anti-Semitic, conspiracy-obsessed populists like Joe McCarthy, George Wallace, Pat Buchanan, and, of course, Donald Trump to claim it for their own. Guess who wins?
If ever a book’s opening was set to suit a liberal’s taste for schadenfreude, it is Continetti’s. Here is how he begins:
On July 6, 2003, three months into the second Iraq war, I showed up at 1150 Seventeenth Street NW in Washington, DC. I had just turned twenty-two. It was my first day as an editorial assistant at the Weekly Standard. At the time, 1150 Seventeenth Street was more than an office building. It was an intellectual hub—the frontal cortex of the American Right. The magazine where I was about to begin work was the most influential in the city.
From 1150 Seventeenth Street emanated the ideas that shaped the Republican White House and Congress and then the world. On the same floor as the Standard was the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). It was a small think tank cofounded by the magazine’s editor that since its inception in 1997 had advocated for a defense buildup, containment of China, and regime change in Iraq. The top floors of the building housed the Right’s premier think tank: the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).
The Economist dubbed the whole affair the rive droit. But in twenty years’ time, all had changed.
The rive droit is gone now. The building at 1150 Seventeenth Street was demolished in 2016. AEI moved to a renovated mansion near Dupont Circle. Neither PNAC nor the Standard exists any longer. The George W. Bush administration is a distant memory. The twin projects of 1150 Seventeenth Street—the expansion of democracy abroad and a recommitment to traditional moral values at home—ran aground.
What follows is quite likely to be the standard textbook for the intellectual history of the conservative movement in the U.S. from, well, 1920 to 2020, with a very heavy emphasis on the post-WWII era, treating it almost entirely as an intellectual process, with minimal input from the “real world”, other than a hatred of contemporary liberalism and a passionate fear of communism, which allowed conservatives to accept what had once been entirely unacceptable—massive federal taxation and spending on behalf of a massive, permanent federal bureaucracy, and even a military draft, once thought of in a now very far off time as the most outrageous of government intrusions—the pressure welding a disparate mix of libertarians, Catholics, capitalists, southern “traditionalists” (that is to say, racists), and ex-communists into a vague doctrine of “fusionism”, a form of cooperation born of the necessity to defeat communism, a necessity so great that the wide disparities in ideas and attitudes among the “founders” rarely emerged—in public, at least.
As an intellectual package, “fusion” would prove so potent in the coming decades that no one would have guessed that its viability was entirely dependent upon the continuing existence of the communist threat. When the threat disappeared, so did the reason for the continued existence of the National Review. The Weekly Standard, was the product of an ersatz Cold War, invented to replace the real one with a “War on Terror”, which the Bush administration managed to lose in a singularly catastrophic manner. As Karl Marx said in his famous essay, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,1 aka “Napoleon III”, “history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” Unfortunately, the Weekly Standard’s farce was a singularly bloody one.
The story of the “Right” is a story that’s been told more than once, but Matt tells it reasonably well, much of the time, though with some serious errors, of both omission and commission, errors that, to my mind, become increasingly egregious as he approaches the present, bringing it up to date with the post Cold War conservative collapse, whose roots, I believe, were visible long before Mr. Continetti ever noticed them, if he ever did—roots that on occasion Mr. Continetti either fails even to notice at all, or, if he does notice them, strives to cover them up. And so, in the course of this review/diatribe, I intend to do some digging.
The early going of The Right is a near-microscopic history of the National Review, which during the 1950s was just about the only game in town, with the focus very much on Buckley in particular, whom Continetti has studied with some care.2 It was Buckley who took up the banner of “true” conservatism, from the trembling hands of the older generation—consisting very largely of Herbert Hoover and Robert Taft, both shell-shocked after repeated defeats at the hands of the Great Satan, FDR. The times called for something new, and, though the times may not have known it, that something was a foppish rich boy from Connecticut (more or less), with an oil man from Texas for a daddy (though he made his big money in Mexico), and a mommy from New Orleans.
Like not a few great leaders—FDR, for example, and Napoleon—Buckley had little in common with the people he led. A truly exotic creature, Buckley spent his first years in Mexico before moving to France as a young child for a year or two, beginning his formal education in London, where he acquired English as a third language, developing what one suspects was a carefully nurtured mid-Atlantic accent, because most of his schooling ultimately took place in the U.S. (His older brother James talked like an insurance salesman from Buffalo.) Buckley was a true Renaissance man, athletic and daring, a pilot and sailor, but gifted as well at the keyboard, excellent on both the piano and harpsichord.
He was a man of enormous self-confidence, who relentlessly sought the spotlight and flourished there for decades. But he was also a serious man and labored hard to create a “true” conservative movement when none existed out of what could have been nothing more than a handful of wayward prima donnas—though I “confess” that I found little of what he had to say at all impressive. He had a great gift for friendship, got along very well with people he sharply disagreed with (though it seems to have helped if they were famous), and dazzled generations of admirers, many of whom still follow his flame at the National Review.
Whatever intellectual unity—or “fusionism”—Buckley and his coterie at the National Review achieved during its early days came from a common hatred of communism and the New Deal, which, in their eyes, amounted to the same thing, because both were guilty of the original sin of not recognizing Original Sin, though the various groups defined Satanism differently. For the Christian conservatives it was Adam eating the apple; for the southerners, it was the “race mixing” of New Deal liberals; for capitalists, it was the failure to recognize that trade unionism was communism; for the libertarians, it was the failure to realize that markets are smarter than bureaucrats; for the ex-communists it was the failure to realize that the absolute evil of communism required absolute dedication to defeat it.
Though the NR folks may not have known much about it—and Continetti ignores it completely—another form of “fusionism,” also driven by the fear of communism, was taking place, a coalition between enemies who had been divided by theological conflict for centuries, Catholics and evangelicals. In the early fifties, the evangelical churches in the U.S. were led very largely by men who grew up reading three books—the Bible, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and John Fox’s Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perillous Days, Touching Matters of the Church, aka “Fox’s Book of Martyrs”. The latter two, almost unknown today, were products of the bitterly anti-Catholic English Reformation, when the Pope was not only referred to as “the Scarlet Whore of Babylon” but was actually assumed to be one. The leadership of the Catholic Church, in turn, had grown up in the unrepentantly anti-modernist Catholicism of the pre-World War I Papacy.
Events after World War II changed the atmosphere dramatically. The Catholic Church recognized that Stalin’s Russia posed a mortal threat to all of Catholic Europe, a threat that could only be defeated by the power of the United States. At the same time, Evangelicals discovered that the hated Yankees were serious, this time, about their assault on segregation, aka the “southern way of life”, an assault whose ultimate source, they were sure, could only be communism itself. (Ironically, it was also the fear of communism that pushed many “liberals”, like JFK and RFK, to actively support efforts to overturn segregation in the south.)
Buckley and his friends were largely unaware of the potentialities of this emerging alliance. They were particularly unenthusiastic about the Catholic working class, because they had a furious hatred of labor unions, completely uninterested in the fact that many trade unionists were passionately anti-communist, having fought them for years. The NR conservatives regarded all unions as, effectively, “communism”. This anti-big government, anti-communist, anti-union posture aligned them in substance if not in manner with the “Old Guard” Main Street Republicans, who made up the body of the party. They were very largely Protestant “old stock” rather than Catholic or evangelical. They dominated the party at the congressional level but always seem to lose out to the New York money men when it came to nominating presidential candidates.
Who were these people? They were the “owners”, the people of substance in the small towns and middle-sized cities, very often of some inherited wealth, though rarely “independently wealthy”. They were the people who ran things, who owned farms and houses and banks and businesses, who took it for granted that their success in life entitled them be in charge of their communities, both overtly and covertly.3 Their “Bible”, more or less, was Ralph Waldo Emerson’s once famous essay Self Reliance:
There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.
The man who does not stand alone does not stand, and, in fact, is not a man.
These people hated the New Deal, which rewarded the losers and punished the winners, and, most of all, denied them their proper role at the apex of their communities. The U.S. Supreme Court had largely protected them, through both the Populist and Progressive Eras, wielding the Constitution as the ultimate shield of the rights of “property”, but now the infernal cunning of Franklin Roosevelt had used the ginned up emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II to seize control of America from the people who built it and whose rightful possession it was—the “real Americans”.
For these Republicans Roosevelt was the precise anthesis of what America should be, every hour that he was in power a continuing insult and burden, a burden that, seemingly, could never be cast off, for the monster could never be defeated. Perhaps 20 years ago I read a book written by a man from a prosperous Pittsburgh family, born in the late thirties, who once told his mother, “I remember how you all celebrated the end of World War II. You were singing and dancing and laughing all night!” And his mother said “Oh, that wasn’t when the war ended. That was when Roosevelt died.”
Yes, they hated him, and they hated all his works. The problem was, they were in the minority, and their “passion” only ensured that they would remain that way. The earnest Taft Republicans and passionate National Review crew alike lacked the political acumen of Dwight Eisenhower, who wrote, in a famous letter to one of his brothers:
Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.
Prior to the Great Depression, Republican doctrines of laissez-faire, somewhat modified by the “Progressive” Teddy Roosevelt, largely satisfied a majority of the American electorate. Franklin Roosevelt changed all that. He championed the cause of organized labor, winning over workers in the Northeast and industrial Midwest; he subsidized the farmers of the Midwest and the South and the ranchers of the West, subsidizing mining and logging interests as well; and throughout rural America he built roads, bridges, dams, irrigation projects, and rural electrification. Republicans “promised” to get rid of all of this and wondered why they lost.
Buckley, and some of his fellows at the National Review, like AV non-fave rave Russell Kirk, knew why: universal suffrage, bad enough when it was only for men, but even worse now that dames were voting too. So, were you going to ask a gang of lazy, good for nothing yahoos to disenfranchise themselves and shut down the gravy train they’d been riding for the past 25 years? Good luck with that. The National Review lacked any sort of coherent answer to the problem, but, since “ideas rule the world”, as Buckley wrote with typical “panache”, if the National Review kept preaching the “truth”, eventually the world would come around.
Continetti notes the particular influence on Buckley of a friend of his father, the now almost forgotten man about town Alfred Jay Nock, whose despairing elitism, pining for the sort of deferential society which he had in fact never even known, spoke to Buckley, who also felt out of place and out of time in comfort-loving, bourgeoise America, deaf to the call of spirit and passion and greatness. Nock also did Buckley the favor of teaching him how to write witty, charming prose, prose that can often conceal the fact that the author has nothing to say.
The little I’ve read by Nock I found very boring. He comes across as a vain, fussy man, proud of his petty snobberies, their very pettiness, he believes, revealing his exquisite social and aesthetic palate. He has a flavor of genteel Nietzscheanism, forever distancing himself from the vulgar masses. The New Deal, of course, he saw as the apotheosis of the great unwashed, and, as the years wore on, and the chances of a return to “normalcy” seemed ever further off, he developed a “philosophy”—or, better, “vain hope”—that people like himself might constitute a “remnant” of sanity and taste that would somehow, in the fullness of time, recapture the leadership of society.
This notion of constituting a “remnant” was very attractive to Buckley and almost all of his confreres at the National Review. Buckley was a romantic Catholic (Nock, as far as I can tell, was not religious), in love with a romanticized vision of the Middle Ages of the sort merchandized by notorious apologists like Cardinal Newman and G. K. Chesterton, whom I find even more boring and pretentious than Buckley. Buckley lacked the suspicion that many Catholic traditionalists—and southern traditionalists—had for capitalism—it had made his daddy rich, after all—which helped Buckley connect with the libertarians, who tend to see themselves as another kind of “remnant”, tough-minded and strong-willed realists who see the world as it is rather than as they might wish it. The former communists were still another kind of remnant, men who had been through the fire, the only men who knew how hot that fire could be. All three groups recoiled at the sight of bland, flabby liberal America waddling into the very jaws of doom, ready to let all the past greatness of Western Civilization collapse into nothing as they searched endlessly for that perennial mirage, a free lunch—a free lunch and a free trip to Heaven. And it was the duty of the Remnant to remain obdurate, to continue to speak the truth, both in the hope of awakening society to the truth and to serve as an example of commitment and sacrifice that would ultimately inspire others to take up and spread the true gospel.
Several years before the National Review’s birth, of course, someone came up with a more aggressive approach to bringing America back to its senses— picture the New Deal as “20 years of treason!” “A conspiracy so immense!” Continetti (remember him?) not unnaturally tabs Tail Gunner Joe McCarthy4 as the progenitor of American populism, which reached its full, evil flowering (so far) in Donald Trump’s four years in the White House.
I find it a little surprising that no one but me (as far as I can tell) finds it “significant” that McCarthy’s reign of terror from 1950 to 1954 coincided almost exactly with Korean War, which began on June 25, 1950 and ended in late 1953. McCarthy gave his “famous” Wheeling, West Virginia speech in February of 1950, when America had already been shaken by Soviet expansion into eastern Europe, the communist triumph in China, the explosion of the first Soviet atomic bomb, and the revelation of Alger Hiss’s espionage by Whittaker Chambers. That does sound like a full plate, but in the first year of American participation in the Korean War, U.S. forces, after first surging north to the Yalu River, which separates Korea from China, were almost driven to the sea by the Chinese. The U.S. suffered over 37,000 dead and over 100,000 wounded in Korea, the majority coming in the first year of a war fought in a country 99 percent of Americans never heard of, and a war, surely, that most of them did not want to fight.
It was no wonder that they responded to the notion that the real problem was here at home, that we had been betrayed. McCarthy struck a nerve with many Americans that, probably, no Republican had struck since Teddy Roosevelt. Here was a man! A man who told the truth!
McCarthy energized the two groups who would later become Nixon/Reagan/Trump Democrats—working-class Catholics and evangelicals. He also energized one of the largest, and surely least known, ethnic groups in America—German Americans. The real basis for the Isolationist movement in World War I was German Americans, who saw no reason to fight the Vaterland, and Irish Americans, who saw no reason to die for the British Empire. Prior to World War II, of course, it was impossible for any mainstream politician to express overt sympathy for Hitler, but plenty of German Americans silently believed that the U.S. should have teamed up with Germany to defeat the U.S.S.R., instead of the other way around. Continetti, like so many others, pictures Charles Lindbergh as the über isolationist, but Charles, of Swedish ancestry, whose father, a congressman, was a prominent isolationist in the World War I era, was more the face of isolationism than its source. It is seldom remarked, but surely no “accident”, as the commies like to say, that Pat Buchanan is of Irish, and Ron Paul of German, ancestry.
As Continetti relates, McCarthy presented mainstream Republicans with the same challenge that Donald Trump would do 66 years later: he was a liar, but he was a winner, and if telling the truth condemns you to defeat, as it had in 1950 for Republicans for the past five presidential elections, well, then you need a fellow who doesn’t mind telling a fib or two. One by one, elected Republicans knuckled under; Maine Senator Margaret Chase Smith’s famous 1950 “Declaration of Conscience” was signed by only six Republican senators and did not mention McCarthy by name.
But fifties Republicans were lucky; ultimately, they didn’t need McCarthy, because in President Dwight David Eisenhower they had something much better: a winner who wasn’t a liar. McCarthy stupidly, but inevitably, “had” to attack Eisenhower, because otherwise he condemned himself to irrelevancy.
To their credit, some of Buckley’s band, like Whittaker Chambers, disliked McCarthy and refused to support him—though, of course, they also refused to denounce him—but Buckley himself, to his discredit, did admire McCarthy, and wrote a book in “cautious”—or perhaps “hypocritical”—praise of him, McCarthy and His Enemies, an exercise in eat your cake and have it tooism, declaring that, in effect, if McCarthy went “too far”, well, when faced with an utterly unscrupulous enemy, it is ultimately an act of cowardice not to be unscrupulous as well, if that is what is necessary to win—a preview, really, of the notorious “Flight 93” “argument”.
Once McCarthy’s flame expired, Republicans were back to square 1, stuck with Eisenhower’s “dime-store New Deal” as department store heir Barry Goldwater would call it—somewhat cheaper, but philosophically indistinguishable, from the real thing. What to do? One thing that, it seems, conservatives of whatever stripe did not do back in the fifties was look at, you know data. It seems that neither Main Street Republicans nor Buckleian conservatives ever bothered to look over voting patterns over the past few decades to determine where they were losing votes, or gaining them, and why. Main Streeters believed in “character”, while Buckley et al. believed in “ideas”. Both groups thought they ought to win because they deserved to win, but they seemed to have no interest in developing a plan that could induce the American electorate to recognize their virtue.
The Main Streeters at least had a theory to explain their repeated defeats—the same given by McCarthy: treason! The great incubator for conspiracy theories was, of course, the John Birch Society, founded by Robert Welch in 1954, which saw the fine hand of the Communist Party behind every major defeat for “Americanism” since Franklin Roosevelt took his first oath to office in 1933. In the South, conspiratorial thinking was kicked into high gear—high gear with a supercharge of nos—thanks to the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision Brown v. Board of Education. This decision, which signaled the beginning of a new era in race relations in the U.S., placed a large number of hitherto safe Democratic votes in play—at the presidential level in particular—an opening that, 10 years later, the Republican Party would seek to exploit.
Continetti acknowledges the role of Buckley in transforming the Party of Lincoln into the Party of “States Rights”—states rights and racism— but does so intermittently—more and more intermittently as time goes on. He quotes only briefly from Buckley’s infamous 1957 editorial Why the South Must Prevail:
He [Buckley] wrote National Review’s infamous August 1957 editorial “Why the South Must Prevail,” arguing that “the White community is so entitled [to maintain racial discrimination] because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.”
Note that, again, Buckley is suggesting that conservatives should not, and cannot, allow themselves to be bound by “the law” when “Truth” itself is at stake. Amusingly, the editorial was written to oppose the 1957 Voting Rights Act, supported by House Republicans 167-19 and by Senate Republicans 43-0 (including, of course, Senator Barry Goldwater). Here is a little more of what Buckley had to say:
The central question that emerges—and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalogue of the rights of American citizens, born Equal—is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.
Buckley explicitly argues that southern whites have the “right” to defy federal laws that threaten their ability to “prevail, politically and culturally”, and goes on to say that if the federal government actually attempted to enforce such laws, the “consequences might be violent and anarchistic.”
Got that? If the federal government tries to enforce the law, it might lead to anarchy! So, you know, don’t do it!
Three years later, it wasn’t William F. Buckley who had changed, but Barry Goldwater. It was Goldwater’s famous book, The Conscience of a Conservative, “compiled”, more or less, from Goldwater’s speeches by Buckley confidante/brother in law Brent Bozell, that really initiated the era of “modern conservatism”. Goldwater, naturally, did not disavow his vote for the 1957 Civil Rights Act, and implicitly declared his opposition to segregation—in public facilities, at least— but explicitly denied the right of the federal government to address segregation in the south—a distinction without a difference, except with regard to with the possibility of winning the votes of southern racists for the purpose of creating a “true” (true and racist?) conservative party.
This was Goldwater’s explicit aim. When he first came to the Senate in 1952, he was a champion of integration, integrating the Senate cafeteria, for example, by hiring a black legislative assistant and demanding that she be served, something northern liberal Democrats like Hubert Humphry had somehow never gotten around to doing. But Goldwater quickly discovered that the only senators who hated the federal government, and communists, and labor unions with the same ferocity as he did were southern Democrats, who had all been pushed sharply to the right by the clear, impending peril of a federally mandated end to racial segregation. Northern “Republicans” were really just Democrats with tailors. If actually reducing the federal behemoth required sentencing tens of millions of black people in the south to a life of continued oppression and subservience, well, Barry didn’t mind. After all, if they just took a little initiative, all their problems would go away.
Goldwater’s book was an immediate sensation and gave “real” conservatism a glamor that it had never had before. He was young, vigorous, and good-looking, the exact opposite of Taft, who in manner and appearance was the quintessential fuddy-duddy. Obviously, Goldwater spoke to the south, which was delighted to hear a non-southerner vigorously declare that it was the south’s “right” to “solve its own problems in its own way,” as southerners never tired of putting it. He spoke to Americans who, like himself, felt outraged that Uncle Sam hadn’t gotten rid of those communists as quickly as he did away with those Nazis. The Cold War, with its peacetime draft, long commitments of troops overseas, constant tension but no resolution, was both new and profoundly frustrating to many Americans, particularly those who, like Goldwater, held fantasies of American omnipotence and wanted to believe that, with a little determination and grit, we could send that Khrushchev fellow packing any time we pleased. Quite probably, he spoke to a generation raised in the warm sun of post-war prosperity, who felt that maybe they didn’t need a federal government to take care of them—and, not so incidentally, to take so much of their paycheck.
The fact remains that Goldwater, to my mind, made a pretty cold-blooded decision to entirely turn his back on what was the great moral question of the post-war era, the position of black Americans in their own country. In The Conscience of a Conservative, Goldwater/Buell enunciated the “Goldwater Compromise”: segregation is “wrong”, but the south has the right to make its own decisions, and that’s an end to it. There’s no discussion of morality, all men are created equal, or any of that—though Goldwater did allow that it was “wrong” for the federal government to use force against the states to compel compliance with Supreme Court decisions that had been “wrongly decided”, thus reviving John Calhoun’s “nullification” doctrine for a new age, and providing much needed balm to a south infuriated by President Eisenhower’s use of federal troops in 1957 to force the desegregation of the public schools in Little Rock, Arkansas.
It's easy to believe that, by 1960, more Americans were becoming more suspicious of the civil rights movement, which had begun its campaign of “non-violent resistance” in 1958, with “sit-ins” designed to prod the integration of restaurants and other establishments. Goldwater’s veneration of the rights of “private property” provided a most convenient veil for clearly racist policies. “You can’t legislate morality” became the absurd catchphrase of supposedly non-racist conservatives, who had always supported legislation banning anything they considered immoral—prostitution, homosexuality, pornography, etc.[^5*]
Goldwater did say, in The Conscience of a Conservative, that the federal government did have the right to protect the right to vote, though he didn’t show much interest in having the government actually do that. Buckley, however, was far to the right of Goldwater on this issue. Bill did little to conceal the fact that, even after Goldwater’s crushing defeat in 1964, he saw no reason to promote the enfranchisement of southern blacks. Continetti, to get back to him, works hard to give Buckley a pass when, in 1965, Buckley worked himself into a fury over the press coverage of the murder of a civil rights worker, Viola Liuzzo, a white woman who ventured down to Alabama to join the civil rights marches there, with the murder of a policeman in Mississippi. Continetti discusses a speech that Buckley made at a 1965 communion breakfast for Catholic policemen, giving the following account:
Both events were terrible, Buckley argued. But the former death was, sadly, less shocking than the latter one. “Every age in which values are distorted—an age like our own—in which truths are thought either not to exist, or to exist only as quaint curios from the dead past—the wrath of the unruly falls with special focus on the symbols of authority, of continuity, of tradition,” he continued. “It is no accident at all that the police should be despised in an age infatuated with revolution and ideology.” Nor was it a surprise, he went on, that the Catholic Church should be singled out for “the brunt of the organized hatred of the principal agents of revolution.”
So, in other words, the policeman—a “symbol of authority”—was murdered for being a symbol of authority, because we live in a distorted age, and no one cared, because we live in a distorted age. Is Buckley saying that in the old days—before the New Deal, one presumes—policemen were never murdered, because symbols of authority were respected? This is nonsense, of course. Policemen are armed because they come in contact, not with revolutionaries, but with desperate criminals, and this has happened as long as there have been policemen. This is an absurdly tortured argument, a laughable exercise in whataboutisme—and quite inappropriate, one might suggest, for a communion breakfast—contrived entirely to denigrate the media coverage of Viola’s murder, which Buckley insisted was unremarkable, because she had, in effect, asked for it. In his excellent 2011 book, William F. Buckley and the Rise of American Conservatism, Carl Bogus provided a little more detail.
“So the lady drove down a lonely stretch of road in the dead of night” [said Buckley], “sharing the front seat with a Negro identified with the protesting movement, and got killed. Why, one wonders, was this a story that occupied the front pages from one end of the country to another, if newspapers are concerned with the unusual, the unexpected?”
Allow me to deconstruct: “This woman was riding around in the middle of the night seated next to a Negro. A Negro! I’m sorry, but this woman is sick. I’m not saying she deserved it, but I am saying that she asked for it. A white woman who has no better sense than to associate with Negroes in the middle of the night is not someone that anyone—anyone respectable—needs to be concerned about.”6
While Goldwater hid behind the Constitution—his version of it, anyway—to allow the structure of segregation to endure untouched, George Wallace, the other great figure on the right in the Sixties, was an outright champion of racist oppression—“I say, segregation now, segregation forever!” he declared in 1963 when attempting to prevent the integration of the University of Alabama.
It is “fascinating” to watch Continetti struggle with the spectacle of his beloved conservative forebears struggling to finesse the passionate emotions raised on the right by the second great “evil” populist of the post-war era. Wallace stunned Democrats with his success in the 1964 Democratic presidential primaries, winning over 30% of the vote in Wisconsin and over 40% in Maryland. And his open—to say the least—advocacy of the “right” of the south to maintain its racist institutions proved embarrassingly attractive to the Republican right as well. His independent run for the presidency in 1968 terrified the NR crowd, who recognized Wallace for the shallow charlatan he was, a charlatan who told the conservative “masses” of America—such as they were—what they shouldn’t want to hear but did.
The NR folks were in a bind. They didn’t want to talk about their belief that Wallace was wrong to enforce segregation—that would infuriate his many admirers. But they also didn’t want to admit that they felt that as the governor of Alabama Wallace had the “right” to enforce segregationist policies in accord with Alabama state law, because that would open them to the charge that they supported segregation, and by 1968 even Buckley had given up on the notion that one could somehow preserve the old south—not that he wanted to say so publicly, of course.
The tactic the NR folks seized upon to differentiate themselves from Wallace was to criticize him for everything except his stand on racial issues. Russell Kirk, who very likely agreed with Wallace regarding segregation, rumbled that Wallace was “almost utterly ignorant of statecraft on any grand scale,” a ludicrously equivocal statement that Kirk could probably have made with all honesty about every man or woman who had ever lived except himself. The problem was, any criticism of Wallace in NR provoked wild consternation among its subscribers. The man is just saying what he thinks. What’s wrong with that? The danger was great. “Buckley needed to keep George Wallace from swallowing American conservatism whole,” Continetti “explains”.
Appropriately enough, Buckley himself led the charge: “Those conservatives who take sly pleasure from Wallace’s techniques should reflect that that kind of thing is do-able against anybody at all; do-able for instance by the Folsomite Wallace of yesteryear, who roared his approval of his candidate’s attack on the ‘Wall Street Gotrocks,’ ‘the damned decency crowd,’ and ‘them Hoover Republicans.’”
Well, anyone who makes fun of Wall Street is seriously beyond the pale, but the epithet “Folsomite” requires some unpacking. “Kissin’ Jim” Folsom was a seriously liberal populist Alabama governor first elected to the office in 1946, who actually believed that the government should help the poor, and, almost unbelievably, actually tried to bring integration to Alabama. According to the “Encyclopedia of Alabama”, which does have a liberal slant, Folsom advocated the following reforms in his 1946 inaugural as governor:
[T]he elimination of voting restrictions, fair apportionment of the state legislature, and more access to government positions for women. His first-term legislative proposals included: a convention to rewrite the 1901 Constitution; elimination of the poll tax; legislative reapportionment; placement of women on juries; and large highway bond issues. He also attempted to appoint voting registrars who would not discriminate against African Americans. The legislature killed virtually all of his proposals, and he was able to find relatively few individuals willing to serve as voting registrars on his terms.
I don’t think that Buckley, by describing Wallace (accurately) as a one-time Folsomite, was calling him “soft” on race—I think he was just being foppish, because his “thumbnail” of Folsom earlier in his piece simply described him as “leftist”, which he certainly was—but to Alabamians with long memories, at least, that’s precisely what Buckley was saying.
It is “interesting” that by 1964, Dwight Eisenhower, Mr. Dime Store New Deal, was sounding a lot like Barry, if not indeed like George Wallace. Once famous/now forgotten author Theodore White describes the scene at the 1964 Republican Convention in his book The Making of a President 1964, when Eisenhower addressed the crowd, concluding, White says, with some penciled in lines added to the prepared text:
“Let us,” he said as he wore to the end of his remarks, “particularly scorn the divisive efforts of those outside our family, including sensation-seeking columnists and commentators, because, my friends, I assure you that these are people who couldn’t care less about the good of our party”—at which point the Convention exploded in applause, shouts, boos, catcalls, horns, klaxons and glory. Here at last was someone cutting a bit of raw flesh from the hitherto unnamed enemies, and the delegates could vent emotion. (On the floor, one delegate from North Dakota, jumping up and down, was heard yelling: “Down with Walter Lippmann! Down with Walter Lippmann!”) But Eisenhower was not through. He had another penciled addition to his discourse: “…let us not be guilty of maudlin sympathy for the criminal who, roaming the streets with switchblade knife and illegal firearms seeking a helpless prey, suddenly becomes upon apprehension a poor, underprivileged person who counts upon the compassion of our society and the laxness or weaknesses of too many courts to forgive his offense.” A second time a nerve was twinged: an ex-President of the United States was lifting to national discourse a matter of intimate concern to the delegates, creating there before them an issue which touched all fears, North and South. The Convention howled.
Ike, one might say, was pretty handy with a switch blade himself.
Many social commentators posit Vietnam, and the stunningly tumultuous 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago,7 as the beginning of conservative mistrust of the media. Louis Menand very well reflects this misconception (misinformation?) in a recent piece in the New Yorker, When Americans Lost Faith in the News, portraying it, amusingly, as a right-wing plot: “the media”—the New York Times and the three TV networks then existing—had portrayed the Democratic convention “honestly”, but “the right’ spun the truth to their advantage, claiming the media had glamorized the hippie rioters and defamed the police. In fact, as Ike’s diatribe shows, conservatives had been furious long before, over race rather than Vietnam.
“The media” in those days was essentially the New York media. When they portrayed the civil rights movement as a struggle between good and evil, they felt they were being “honest”. But southerners were furious to see themselves as uniformly portrayed as a pack of pot-bellied, illiterate hillbillies, and many of the “good people” in the Midwest were disgusted to see blacks, whom they regarded as good for nothing more than hewing wood and drawing water as morally superior to their southern brethren, the hard-working, “good” people of the south. So who was letting the “crazies” into the party, Goldwater or Ike?
Continetti’s evasiveness regarding Republicans and race achieves its apogee, as one might expect, when he comes to Ronald Reagan. It can, in fact, be said that at this point the tone of the The Right approaches that of hagiography. For example, we’re told that at college
Reagan devoured the work of classical economists such as John Bright and Richard Cobden, the nineteenth-century liberal free traders who waged a successful campaign to repeal the protectionist Corn Laws in Great Britain. He read Frédéric Bastiat, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich Hayek. By the time he graduated, his individualistic, Christian, liberal democratic worldview was fully formed.
Continetti’s “source” for this drivel is the autobiography of now-forgotten right-wing columnist Robert Novak. I strongly doubt that Reagan read any of these, except perhaps the Reader’s Digest version of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, or indeed could recognize even the names of the others, unless he stumbled across them in the right-wing rag he read so religiously, Human Events. But even he had—which he hadn’t—his “worldview” wasn’t “fully formed” by graduation—far from it, since Reagan was a passionate New Dealer throughout the 1930s and 1940s, acknowledging that as late as 1949 he was a “hemophiliac liberal” (his words, from his 1966 autobiography Where’s the Rest of Me?,8 which he did not reissue in 1980). In the book, Reagan recalls his delight at Harry Truman’s unexpected win in the presidential election of 1948, writing excitedly to a friend, “With a Democratic president and a Democratic congress, we’ll have national health care for sure!”
In the 1950s Reagan turned aggressively to the right. He had always been strongly anti-communist, fighting with them for control of the various liberal causes he had been involved with in Hollywood. My guess is that the expansion of Soviet power after World War II, coupled with the spy scandals, pushed him strongly to the right—well into the fringes of the conspiratorial right, in fact—convincing him that the ideological line pushed by the National Review that communism was simply the logical extension of liberalism, was accurate, that every “liberal” program was simply the opening wedge to outright communism. In her book What I Saw at the Reagan Revolution, Peggy Noonan portrays Reagan as interpreting every Democratic victory in Congress as evidence of “growing Communist influence”. The fact that the American communist party by the 1980s consisted entirely of a handful of aging misfits, simply living off the Soviet dole—the U.S.S.R. subsidized the party extensively—in return for filing absurd reports on the ever increasing “signs” that the American working class was growing ever more restive—had absolutely no impact on Reagan. It didn’t matter what the FBI said.9 He knew.
Continetti is at his absolute worst when it comes to Reagan and race. Speaking in the context of Reagan’s first campaign, his successful run for governor of California in 1966, Continetti says:
Reagan held Goldwater’s position on civil rights. [Which is to say, he opposed federal efforts to overturn state-sponsored segregation and supported the “right” of those in the private sector to pursue segregationist policies.] But he tried to avoid the subject. He was extremely sensitive to the charge of racism. His church forbade it. His parents remonstrated against it. One of the few missteps in Reagan’s political career took place during his first run for governor, when he left the state convention of the National Negro Republican Assembly in a huff after his primary opponent implied that he was a racist. (Reagan later returned to the meeting and apologized for storming out.) “Mostly Reagan shied away from the civil rights issue, distancing himself from segregationists and talking about riots and order instead,” wrote historian Matthew Dallek [author of The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan’s First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics].
In fact, Reagan had a lot more to say about race than either Continetti or Dallek wanted to admit. Like Goldwater, he opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Bill and the 1965 Voting Rights Bill, hiding behind the Constitution in both cases. When running for governor of California in 1966, he supported a ballot initiative that would overturn existing “fair housing” provisions in the state. Said Reagan, “If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, it is his right to do so.”
When running for president in 1980 he called the Voting Rights Act “a humiliation of the South”,10 reflecting his continuing belief that the federal government should never had done anything to force the south to reverse its centuries-long policy of brutal oppression of black Americans. A long succession of Republican Supreme Court justices, like William Rehnquist, Antonine Scalia, and John Roberts, have continued the Reagan “tradition” of sucking up to the injured pride of the south,11 suggesting that it was somehow “wrong” to acknowledge that the 13 states that comprised the confederacy—and many others—had relentlessly pursued centuries–long policies of oppression against the black race—and even more wrong to try to do something about it, even though nothing is clearer that many states in the present day are aggressively seeking still to discourage black Americans from voting.
In the end, it was not “ideas” but rather events that broke the liberal Democratic monopoly on political power that held from 1933 to 1968 and ultimately allowed Reaganite conservatism to take power in 1980—in particular, the failure of liberalism to anticipate, much less contain, much less resolve, the enormous upwelling of black “rage” (rage and lawlessness) that exploded after the passage of major civil rights legislation—legislation that liberals innocently believed would solve all their problems instead of multiplying them exponentially—coupled with an equally massive failure abroad, the quagmire of Vietnam.
It was Richard Nixon’s misfortune to come into office at the end of the “Good Times”, the end of the once relentless growth in economic productivity that underlay a 30-year boom that turned America into the world’s first middle-class state. Nixon’s mix and match, moderate Republican domestic policies—which often reflected the “will of the people” much more accurately than “fusionist” fantasies found appropriate, were bad enough for the NR crowd, but it was his foreign policies made “real” conservatives’ hair stand on end. Nixon accepted that we were in an “era of limits”, that if he wanted average Americans to continue to enjoy the ever-increasing prosperity they had come to expect, it was time to put a cap on the endlessly spiraling arms race with Soviet Union and reach “détente” with both the Soviets and their comrades/mortal enemies in Communist China. For the National Review, which effectively defined itself by its limitless hatred of communism, this was nothing less than a denial of its reason for being. Fortunately for NR, people on the other side of the aisle felt the same way.
The race riots of the Sixties and Vietnam had split the Democratic Party in half. What proved to be the lesser half clung to “Cold War liberalism”, championing equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcomes as the answer to racial tensions and holding to the “absolute” rejection of the possible moral acceptance of communism. They hated the “Peace” movement, which very often either saw the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. as morally equivalent or else surrendered outright to the romantic ideal of the “Revolution”, which most liberals had explicitly rejected after the failure of Henry Wallace’s run for the presidency on the Progressive Party ticket in 1948.
Naturally, the Cold War Liberals, soon to be “Neocons”, hated the accompanying moral anarchy of the hippie movement as well. Like the NR fusionists from decades before, they began to fear that Americans lacked the “will” to defeat communism, that we were, essentially, a nation of lotus eaters, whether fat-assed suburbanites living out their cul-de-sac lives in a culture largely defined by color television sets, swimming pools, and barbeques or bare-assed hippies, stoned out of their minds and wandering the streets of Haight-Ashbury.
Perhaps the leading Neocon Democrat was Paul Nitze. Nitze was one of the founders of the Truman administration’s Cold War policy, his world view significantly shaped by two incidents that occurred at the close of World War II—incidents whose significance, I surmise, were largely due to the fact that they confirmed and clarified pre-existing attitudes in his mind. The first occurred when he visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki immediately after the end of World War II to assess the damage. To his amazement (or perhaps not), he discovered/concluded that the damage, while massive, was not irreparable. A war waged with nuclear weapons, he concluded, was possible, even winnable, and thus would not be radically different from previous wars.
The second event occurred in Moscow, when he tripped over an air vent in a sidewalk. The vent, he was informed, was to a bomb shelter under the city. Nitze’s mind moved rapidly, if not facilely. The Soviets had an entire “second Moscow” underground! In fact, they had similar “second cities” all over the Soviet Union! An all-out nuclear war was not only “possible”, the Soviets were preparing for one, a war that they confidently expected to win!
We can see—or at least I can—that Nitze reached the conclusion he wanted. The Soviets were, he thought, essentially demons, demons with whom no compromise was possible. Tripping over a single air vent in Moscow convinced him that the Soviets had not only prepared Moscow to withstand a nuclear attack but had made similar installations throughout the entire country. But a single air vent does not an underground city make. Furthermore, Moscow has been frequently occupied by foreign invaders and burned to the ground in both the 17th and 19th centuries. Russia had been conquered in World War I and brutally savaged beyond Westerners’ capacity to imagine in World War II. It is not surprising that the Soviets might be protective of their capital city, but very surprising if they took similar precautions throughout the entire Soviet Union, if only for reasons of cost.
Furthermore, Nitze’s generalization of the power of nuclear weapons from Hiroshima and Nagasaki was unjustified. The atomic bombs used on those two cities had an explosive force equivalent to about 13 “kilotons” (13,000 tons) of TNT each. Hydrogen bombs could be literally ten thousand times more powerful, though the use of such gargantuan weapons became less likely as the technology of Armageddon “advanced”; sophisticated deployment of 100 and 200 kiloton “minis” could be much more deadly. By the early 1970s, the U.S. had about 30,000 nuclear weapons, and the Soviets, about 40,000. If Nitze thought an all out war employing such grotesque excess would be even conceivable, much less winnable, by any stretch of the imagination, it was because he wanted to. And, clearly, he did want to.
By 1980, it was Republican boilerplate, enunciated even by “establishment” Republicans such as George H. W. Bush that an all-out nuclear war was winnable, and that the U.S.S.R. was planning such a war. The historical record shows that many U.S. military leaders felt that the U.S. should itself initiate such a war, which they saw as the only possible way to win a nuclear exchange. In the early days of the Reagan administration, Nitze protégé Thomas K. Jones, deputy under secretary of defense in the early Reagan years, argued that such a war would not constitute much of a hardship if proper precautions were taken: “If there are enough shovels to go around,” he said, “everybody’s going to make it.” Furthermore, neocons like Richard Perle, an assistant secretary of defense under Reagan, argued that the Soviet Union literally did have enough shovels and conducted regular civil defense drills during which Soviet civilians dug shallow trenches and covered themselves with dirt, which would supposedly protect them from the million-plus degree heat of nuclear fireballs.
All of the “true” anti-communists wanted to encourage such “thinking”, even if they did not want to be the ones spouting it, because, ultimately, they feared, not the strength of the Soviet Union, but the weakness of the American people. Once Americans were told that “the worst is over, we can relax,” they would relax, completely, surrendering happily to their gluttonous love of comfort and ease.
The communists, of course, would not relax. Communists never relaxed. And victory would be theirs. Unless! Unless a passionate few could mobilize America’s flagging spirits, convince Americans that the danger, far from fading, was growing ever greater than ever before. And thus was born the first of a series of ever more recondite doomsday “theories” (really fantasies) of how any pause in the nuclear arms race would inevitably lead to American weakness and American surrender. It is “piquant”, to say the least, that Nitze was a reliably fecund source of such “theories” whenever any sort of nuclear agreement between the U.S. and the Soviets was in the offing—any such agreements negotiated by Democrats, that is, though he remained nominally a Democrat until 1979. It is even more piquant that Nitze acquired a remarkable appetite for such agreements when he neared retirement age, taking a well-publicized “walk in the woods” with Soviet Ambassador Yuliy Kvitinsky in 1982 in hopes of working a comprehensive agreement with the Soviets on arms control, three years before Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise to power, almost as if his constant warnings were nothing more than career insurance.
In the years before his sylvan stroll with Kvitinsky, however, Nitze was surely in quick communication with the “other” neocons, the Public Interest neocons, led by neocon godfather Irving Kristol, who became active in the late 1960s, infuriated both by the dramatic increase in black street crime that made many American cities far less livable and the refusal of many liberals to acknowledge the problem, much less attempt to solve it. The Public Interest folks were heavily though far from exclusively Jewish and those who were Jewish had a particular fear that an either “isolationist” or realpolitik America would lose interest in defending Israel. And, of course, they were disgusted by the “New Left”, which often embraced the Palestinian terrorists as a part of their revaluation of all values.
The views of the neocons drew heavily on three fascinating—fascinating, though deeply flawed—works from the early 1950s—Whittaker Chambers’ tortured and frequently disingenuous “confession” Witness, Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, and George Orwell’s 1984. Chambers’ picture of communism as, essentially, the Anti-Christ, was powerful and personally convincing, but Arendt’s study provided an intellectual justification for regarding communism as defined as a blind, relentless struggle for power as an end in itself, a portrayal confirmed imaginatively by Orwell’s famous dystopia.
Both Orwell and Arendt were naturally shaped in their thinking by the examples of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia. It is not surprising that, thanks to the Nazis’ hideous sadism in their treatment of “out” groups—principally Jews, of course, but also homosexuals, Gypsies, the “unfit”, and all the Slavs—it was assumed by “everyone” that Hitler ruled with the same vicious paranoia as Stalin. But he didn’t. Hitler sentimentalized the German peasants rather than murdering them. Hitler kept the German economy on a peacetime basis well into 1943—something the Allies never would have believed, regardless of the evidence—because the whole purpose of the war was to make life “good” for the Germans.
Arendt correctly predicted the horrors that Mao Zedong would rain down upon the hapless Chinese, but she didn’t predict—nor did George Orwell—that Stalin’s successors, though they would continue to operate an oppressive, totalitarian state, would abandon torture and murder as standard management tools. They had lived under an outright terrorist regime, and they hadn’t liked it. They really believed that the great accomplishments the Party had achieved in the struggle against Hitler could be replicated in the domestic economy—though, in fact, the Soviets could never really rein in the Russian “Pentagon”. Huge military expenditures throughout the Cold War—much of it necessitated not by the West but rather “tensions” within the communist bloc, of course—effectively guaranteed that the inherently dysfunctional Soviet economy (because communism does not “work”) could never begin to match the prosperity of the West.
But the Soviets, as well as the leaders of their puppet regimes in eastern Europe, though they clung to their support of “revolutionary” regimes abroad, really sought to justify their right to rule by their ability to provide for the working class and feared that they would fall from power if they didn’t. And, from 1945 until about 1970, living standards in eastern Europe and the U.S.S.R. did improve—from abysmal to dreary, to be sure—but life was better. And Party leaders throughout the Soviet Bloc felt that they could only guarantee the loyalty of the “masses” by continuing to make life better still.12
Fritz Bartel argues convincingly (to me, at least) in his fascinating study The Triumph of Broken Promises: The End of the Cold War and the Rise of Neoliberalism that the sharp slowdown in productivity growth that hit the West in the 1970s hit the Soviet bloc as well, but the Soviets were able to cushion it via a massive increase in oil production, which became vital to the survival of the Soviet bloc following the OPEC oil embargo in 1973. Production of Russian oil rose from about 20 billion barrels to about 180 billion in only a few years, rising to over 400 billion around 1980.
It was only the boom in Soviet oil production that allowed the Soviets to keep the citizenry of the entire Soviet bloc even moderately content with their lives, a contentment that was purchased at an enormous price, because the Soviets delivered all the oil essentially at cost, despite the enormous premium that oil commanded, thanks to the rise of OPEC. The Soviet Union was likely the only empire in history that exploited itself for the benefit of its “colonies” rather than the other way around, selling oil to its eastern satellites at cost while over-paying for second-rate industrial products in return, losing money all the way around. Despite having some of the richest farmland in the world, and despite the fact that Tzarist Russia had been one of the leading grain exporters in the world prior to World War I, the U.S.S.R. imported millions of tons of U.S. agricultural products throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In 1950, a mere five years after the incredible destruction that the U.S.S.R. suffered during World War II, a war that brought enormous prosperity to the United States, the GDP per capita of the U.S.S.R. stood at 30% of the U.S. By 1973 it had “climbed” to 36%; by 1990 it had fallen to 30%. This was the all-powerful colossus of the neo-cons’ imagination.
The neocons saw none of this, of course, would never have believed in the staggering shortcomings in the Soviet economy no matter what the evidence, neglecting even the obvious fact that the almighty Soviets couldn’t even feed themselves. To see the Soviets as anything other than infinitely more powerful than the U.S.—and, of course, infinitely more devious and ruthless as well—was either insanity or treason, or both. In the early 1970s, the center of their movement became the office of a Democratic senator, Henry Jackson, from Washington State. Jackson’s run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972 pulled the neocons together, and his subsequent defeat for the nomination by Senator George McGovern pushed most of them en masse into the Republican Party.
The journey was a difficult one. Nixon’s visit to China, which he proudly lauded as a milestone in human history, stunned “real” anti-communists like the NR crowd, who still wanted to believe that the U.S. could defeat communism by a sheer act of will: “If we don’t admit that they exist, they won’t exist.” Something had to be done to “prove” that the Soviets were the same monsters they had always been. Otherwise, the whole world view, and whole reason for being, of the “true conservatives” and their newly minted neocon brethren, would collapse. It was a battle the neocons would win, but only as a prelude to losing the entire war, in a manner none could have believed to be possible.
The neocons did experience some immediate gratification as a result of their journey, for Nixon, with all his faults, did crush the McGovern nightmare in satisfying fashion, but that only led to the nightmare of Watergate. If anyone has written a book on what Watergate “meant” to conservatives, well, I haven’t read it. On the one hand, the record of the Nixon administration—its abysmal toleration of repeated criminal behavior, first for absurdly trivial political ends,13 and then, much more outrageously, its gross exploitation of governmental power to conceal those crimes—was atrocious and entirely worthy of condemnation, but, on the other, it was both a staggering humiliation imposed on the only party the conservative movement had and an effective reversal of one of the most one-sided political victories in American history, leaving Republicans with America’s only non-elected president (Jerry Ford) as their leader.
It also led to what I believe was the defining event in contemporary history for the neocons, the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam and the subsequent collapse of the South Vietnamese government in Saigon on April 30, 1975. The unforgettable scene, with desperate Vietnamese clinging to the skids of American helicopters, seared itself into the minds, and the souls, of the neocons. This was humiliation without limit, at the hands of the communists! The collapse had been set in motion by the peace agreement signed in January 1973 and thus negotiated, of course, by the Nixon administration under the leadership of Henry Kissinger, then serving as national security advisor. The agreement was widely regarded as nothing more than a fig leaf for a unilateral withdrawal, regardless of the consequences to the South Vietnamese government, which is exactly what it was, and there was plenty of hidden animosity for Kissinger, but it was a Democratic Congress that shut the door to any “gesture” that would somehow “save” Vietnam—for there was no way the American people would support—or in fact the U.S. could contrive—a decisive intervention, but of course the neocons’ reaction was entirely emotional. They clung blindly, absurdly, to the notion of American omnipotence—despite the fact that the U.S. had repeatedly not intervened in previous communist military triumphs—and the explicit demonstration of the lack of such omnipotence was simply unendurable to them.
It is my belief that that it is at that moment that conservatives became convinced that Democrats were not merely soft headed and incompetent but “objective traitors”—weaklings and cowards whose first instinct was surrender, who must be denied power by any means necessary. The election of the wooly-headed Carter in 1976 confirmed their worst fears.14 It was at that time—according to me—that the Wall Street Journal’s editorial policy towards the Democratic Party became not merely “aggressive” but vicious, and its unscrupulous fury would only ripen over the years—thanks largely to the “leadership” of uber prick Robert Bartley—and has not declined one whit some 40 years after the end of the Cold War.
While conservative elites were aghast at Democratic cowardice in foreign affairs, an equally potent issue was brewing domestically, thanks to the Supreme Court’s infamous and now overruled decision Roe v. Wade, handed down in December 1971. Although many evangelicals initially welcomed the decision, thanks to the old evangelical creed of individualism, they quickly allowed themselves to be convinced by their Catholic allies—exactly how will probably never be determined—that Roe v. Wade was a liberal plot against “life”. The conviction that liberals had willfully done the unforgivable, a crime against humanity full equal to the Nazis’ horrifying “Final Solution”, gave the Catholic/evangelical alliance a strong conviction that they were on a literally sacred crusade, that there could be no compromise against the “party of death”, as author Ramesh Ponnuru labeled it. Absolute evil demands absolute resistance, with no goal acceptable other than absolute victory.
At the same time, another “culture issue”—that of gun control versus the Second Amendment “right” to bear arms—was also ripening. It has rarely been mentioned how the race riots of the late 1960s created the modern obsession with the Second Amendment. Conservatives, determined to protect their families, began compulsively stockpiling guns and ammo, developing a cult of self-defense, with laser-sighted handguns, Kevlar-piercing ammunition, fast draw holsters, and the like, while liberals, desperately trying to finesse sky-rocketing rates of street crime, pinned their hopes on gun control, something that, in my skeptical opinion, could never work in the U.S. and, in any event, never did work in practice. The “gun wars” continue unabated down to the present time.
With the election of Ronald Reagan, “modern” conservatism was finally in power. Both the oil shock and rising competition from both Europe and Japan meant that the American economy’s ability to extract what were effectively monopoly profits from the world had now vanished. The Carter administration sought to reduce inflation both passively and actively—passively by not protecting industries like steel and home electronics from foreign competition and actively by deliberately stimulating competition in the trucking and airline industries. This meant, of course, that wages were flat-lining or even declining and people were losing their jobs even as prices were increasing.
Carter’s failures abroad were deeply embarrassing as well, most notably the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian revolution, neither of which were his fault, though conservatives were sure, of course, that they were the inevitable product of Democratic “weakness”.15 Thanks in part to their contempt for Carter, conservatives decided they would never accept any agreement with the Soviets by a Democratic president, both because Democrats were inherently weaklings and because the Soviets would never agree to anything that didn’t advantage them greatly—though the “real,” unstated purpose here was to ensure that the Cold War would last forever.
Humiliating as Carter’s situation was with regard to Iran, the first order of business for the new Reagan administration was domestic, to get the nation’s soaring inflation rate under control. Carter had actually taken the first step, choosing inflation hawk Paul Voelker as head of the Federal Reserve, though whether Carter had any inkling of how tough Voelker intended to be to “squeeze” demand out of the economy seems to be a pretty open question.
With Voelker pursuing an astringent monetary policy on his own (with Reagan’s strong backing), the real question was what the new administration intended to do with its fiscal policy. Here the point man was David Stockman, who had spent four years in Congress representing Michigan’s fourth district before becoming Reagan’s director of management and budget. Stockman’s four years in Congress filled him with disgust. The traditional congressional appropriations process, he felt, guaranteed a complete lack of fiscal discipline. Regardless of the legislation at hand, representatives all had only one question that needed answering. How much money will this give my district?
The appropriations process, Stockman concluded, had to be taken out of Congress’ hands, even though that is precisely where the Constitution had placed it. The answer was to craft one enormous legislative package, that would make both substantive legislative reforms and make appropriations, eliminating the standard log-rolling and backroom maneuvering that allowed Congress to conceal its real decisions from the public. A popular president like Reagan—who had stunned Washington not only by easily defeating Carter but by winning control of the Senate as well, something many Republicans had not thought possible—could create public support for such a comprehensive package and drive it through Congress all at once, which, of course, is precisely what Reagan managed to do, though there were in fact two major pieces of legislation, the “Gramm-Latta Budget” and the “Kemp-Roth Tax Cut.” I was at a legislative conference immediately after the passage of these two pieces of legislation and young female Democratic staffer told us “they castrated those strong old men” (the committee and subcommittee chairs of the House Ways and Means (taxes) and Appropriations Committees).
Gramm-Latta made significant cuts in social spending, though conservatives wanted much more, but these were more than outweighed by massive increases in defense spending, for perhaps the deepest obsession of the right was that Carter had squandered America’s nuclear superiority over the Soviets, which was the root of all our problems in foreign affairs. The fact that the U.S. had never been able to “bend” the Soviet Union to its will even when we possessed a nuclear monopoly—accepting overt Soviet control of eastern Europe, for example—meant nothing to conservatives. They had an appetite for blood, and would not be denied.
Kemp-Roth marked the debut of “supply-side economics”, a pseudo “theory”/hustle that continues to define conservative “thought” to this day. Supply-side economics was dreamed up by economists Robert Mundell and Arthur Laffer and pushed by Wall Street Journal journalists Jude Wanniski and Robert Bartley, .along with the then ubiquitous but now seemingly forgotten pitchman George Gilder, and first publicized by Congressman Jack Kemp. The “Laffer Curve”, which should have been known as the “Laugher Curve”, demonstrated the truism that, at some point, increasing taxation rates would stifle economic growth to the extent that tax revenues would decrease rather than increase. This “thought” was flipped on its head and pumped up with steroids to “mean” that the cure for economic doldrums was always a tax cut, under any circumstances.
The real “genius” of supply-side economics was the premise that tax cuts alone guaranteed economic growth. Previously, Republicans had always insisted that balancing the budget, by cutting spending, was the first step to ensuring growth. But now spending cuts became an afterthought. Cutting taxes alone was thought to ensure sustained economic growth, growth that would, over time, shrink the national debt to an afterthought. Previously, Democrats were always able to out promise Republicans because they claimed that deficits didn’t matter. Now Republicans could join in on the fun!
But this rosy scenario—really the flip side of Keynesian “demand-side” economics, which claimed that government spending would trigger economic growth on a scale large enough to shrink the debt into insignificance—wasn’t rosy enough for “real” supply-siders like Gilder, who were soon claiming that supply-side economics would prove such a powerful boost that cutting taxes would, in a delightful paradox, increase tax revenues. We could cut taxes, increase spending, and balance the budget, all at the same time! Republicans have, of course, continued to proclaim this most egregious falsehood all through the ever-increasing deficits of the Reagan, Bush II, and .Trump years, regardless of, you know, reality! But, since we never did experience the runaway inflation regarded as inevitable by old -time green-eyeshaders like Robert Taft and Herbert Hoover, no one cared. At least, the Republicans sure didn’t.
Stockman was not a supply-sider. While he did believe that tax cuts to encourage investment would give an enormous boost to the economy—which they did not—he also believed quite fervently in the necessity of a balanced budget. The negotiation of Kemp-Roth was somehow an eyeopener for Stockman, who wanted to believe that all supply-side advocates actually believed in a tax code that didn’t play favorites, that cut tax rates but eliminated all the special tax breaks granted to powerful insiders over the years—the beloved “level playing field”. What he got, of course, was the precise opposite—massive tax cuts for the rich, yes, but a massive increase in gimmicks, loopholes, and write-offs as well, instead of their elimination. In a long, famous article published in the Atlantic, The Education of David Stockman, Stockman was quoted as calling Kemp-Roth “a Trojan horse to bring down the top rate”, which, though quite a decent summary, moved Mathew Continetti, whom I’ve more or less neglected for the past several thousand words, to “honest” rage. “It was the most dramatic betrayal of a president since White House counsel John Dean turned on Richard Nixon during the Watergate crisis,” Matt snarled, which is certainly an “interesting”—and even self-revelatory—comparison, for, in both cases, both men did no more than tell the truth—which, to Mr. Continetti at least, was the ultimate betrayal.
Stockman, unlike Reagan—and, really, unlike almost every other “conservative” in the country—was fully committed to the notion that a balanced budget was necessary for economic growth and that every other priority must give way to achieving that balance. Although in the first Reagan budget he said nothing about the massive increases in defense spending—even though they were quite unnecessary—he later became incautiously impatient with Reagan’s genial indulgence of the massive waste at the Pentagon, accusing generals of caring more for their pensions than their country, which is not how you are supposed to talk in Washington, DC.
David was soon out, of course, but all the gimmicks lingered, and the “$100 and $200 billion deficits, as far as the eye can see” that he predicted came true, but the economy didn’t suffer, and no one cared. “Reagan taught us that deficits don’t matter,” rumbled Dick Cheney, preparing another “Trojan horse” following the Republican victory in the congressional elections in 2002, to match the first massive Bush tax cut in 2001 that did nothing for the economy, but did help destroy the budget surpluses left over from the Clinton administration.
Did Reagan care about deficits? His record, really, speaks for itself. He didn’t. William Niskanen, a member of Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisors, in his book Reaganomics, called Reagan “a tower of jelly” on fiscal matters, though “a tower of political acumen” might be more accurate.16 At any rate, it was Reagan, not the Ph.D. geniuses, who had the last laugh, because, in the short term, at least, everything came up roses for him.
The great successes of the Reagan administration—reducing inflation, promoting economic growth, and facilitating a remarkably successful (at the time) conclusion to the Cold War—helped formulate the basic pillars of “modern Republicanism”: ever more generous tax cuts for the rich (with more modest reductions for the common folk as “Trojan Horse” camouflage), ever increasing spending on defense as an end in itself, and a truculent foreign policy that despised any restriction on the ability of the U.S. to do as it pleased on the international scene. Republicans believed in “limited government” in the sense that they rejected liberal plans for an expanded governmental role in addressing real or perceived social ills, but they had no interest in making any cuts in domestic spending except for programs targeted to the poor, and even then they much preferred to talk about such cuts rather than to make them, because of the extensive political costs involved in actually making such cuts. What they really wanted was a return to the White New Deal, though they pretended to “hate” the Roosevelt legacy. They talked the talk of Milton but walked the walk of Franklin. They were happy to vote for the principle of a balanced budget, but only as a way of forcing Democrats to propose spending cuts themselves. When Republicans were in power and could have cut federal spending, they never did so. Both Bush II and Trump massively increased domestic spending even as they massively increased defense spending and cut taxes, both to goose the economy and to create massive deficits as a way of limiting the possibility of increased social spending from occurring when and if the Democrats did get back in.
In effect, what the Republicans “really” did was to stop thinking about domestic policy during the Reagan years. Supply side economics was a fraud—tax cuts did not “pay for themselves” in the form of increased revenues, though Republicans would still be claiming the contrary in the Trump years. Nor did tax cuts stimulate economic growth so powerfully that the national debt shrank to obscurity. Instead, it grew. But the fears of “true” conservatives like Stockman proved to be misplaced: $100 billion and even $200 billion deficits did not “crowd out” investment. In The Triumph of Broken Promises, Fritz Bartel argues that the great increase in international wealth since the 1970s, in Europe, in the Middle East, and in Asia, provided ample new funds to cover America’s continuing massive deficits. Whatever the cause, the economy boomed, more or less, while deficits soared, but inflation did not. So where was the downside? Republicans could preach virtue and practice “vice”, could eat their cake and have it too, and when clean fingernails Republican George H. W. Bush tried to take the punch bowl away, “real” Republicans screamed like stuck pigs, and the stage was set for the rise of an explicitly irresponsible Republican Party rather than an implicit one.
In What I Saw at the Reagan Administration, Peggy Noonan describes the fury of the “real Republicans” at Bush’s failure to honor Reagan’s legacy. “He wouldn’t let us have any fun!” (my words) are her continual complaint, regarding “Abominable No Man”/OMB Director Richard Darman (fellow straight arrow White House Chief of Staff James Baker comes in for a few hard knocks as well). It was Noonan who wrote Bush’s famous/infamous “Read my lips: No new taxes” pledge when he accepted the Republican nomination for president in 1988, which Darman of course opposed, and which Darman successfully encouraged Bush to break in a 1990 budget deal with a Democratically controlled Congress, a budget that coincided with a drop in what had been a rising rate of inflation in the last years of the Reagan administration. (Inflation rate in 1986, 1.1%; in 1990, 6.1%; in 1991, 3.1%; and never reaching 4% again until 2007.)
Much of Continetti’s discussion of the Reagan years is focused, not on governmental policy but right-wing infighting, as the influx of largely secular neocons tends to crowd out the “old right”, leading to a great deal of testiness that occasionally slides over into anti-Semitism. In addition, many conservatives were shrewd enough to notice that Reagan, far from shrinking the Nation’s Capital in importance, had instead made the District the place to be for the young and ambitious on the right as well as the left. Continetti is curiously (to me) uninterested in the momentous events that took place in the closing years of the Reagan administration and those of the administration of Bush I—the ending of the Cold War and the dissolution not merely of the Soviet empire but the old Russian empire as well, surely among the most remarkable events in the modern history of Europe—were mere noises off in his mind compared to the power struggles within conservatism itself—the fight between “true conservatism” and populism, as Continetti defines them. Most of this doesn’t really interest me—though, clearly, they do reflect, as Continetti notes, the fragmenting effects of the collapse of communism, which left conservatives without a defining enemy. Social and economic issues were coming to the fore in a way that would divide conservatives instead of uniting them.
Continetti jumps right over what to me was a most “telling” moment in Reagan’s second administration—Iran-Contra. Ronald Reagan’s inability to obtain the release of American hostages held by Iranian militants filled him with rage. To be utterly impotent—another Carter!—was simply more than Ronnie could bear. And when a Democratic House of Representatives and a Republican Senate (Ronnie forgot about that part) forbade him from providing military aid to his beloved “Contras” in Nicaragua, well, Ronnie would stop at nothing to right these wrongs, and he didn’t, committing any number of crimes to do what was “right”, and the law, and the Constitution, be damned.
Reagan took a severe, though far from fatal, hit when the story finally broke, but what was truly “significant” to me was the extent to which “the Right” embraced the right of Reagan to violate the Constitution in the name of a “higher law”—proof, as if any were needed, that the Right’s supposed veneration of the Constitution was a purely tactical matter. I was particularly struck when, decades later, Andrew Sullivan recalled his differences over Iran/Contra with Charles Krauthammer:
We were both passionate anti-Communists in the day and the one issue I remember having a big fight with him about in the 1980s was the Iran-contra affair. I was a squishy supporter of the contras but found the Reagan administration’s illegal contempt for the Constitution and the Congress an outrage. Charles loved it.
Because whatever helps us is good, and whatever helps them is bad!
The Iran Contra affair was investigated by an independent counsel, Lawrence Walsh, who ended up indicting 14 administration officials and convicting 11 of them, even though complaisant, Republican-dominated appeals courts reversed some of the convictions, and all those indicted were pardoned by then President George Bush, who was very likely guilty of obstruction of justice, because, like the rest of them, he had lied lustily under oath about the matter, and the testimony of others, including an extensive diary kept by Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, could easily have confirmed his guilt. Bush later blamed his 1992 loss to Bill Clinton on Walsh, and his obnoxious habit of, you know, enforcing the law—that is to say, when he wasn’t blaming his loss on Alan Greenspan for causing the 1992 recession. Continetti, I might remark, says nothing about this.
Reagan’s triumphs in both domestic and foreign affairs weren’t enough for him. He also launched a judicial revolution as well, one that failed to reach complete fruition until the Trump years, when a truly “dead Constitution” majority was in place on the Supreme Court. Whether the particular doctrine being pushed by the conservative justices calls itself “originalism” or “textualism” or whatever, the gist is this: there is a single meaning of the U.S. Constitution, reflected in the language of the text itself as understood by a reasonably well educated person of the time of its enactment, whether the text of the original document or the successive amendments, whether standing on their own or as modifying the original text. This meaning, by studying contemporary relevant texts, can be ascertained once and for all, without misunderstanding or disagreement. This meaning defines what is “constitutional” and it must be followed. Why must it be followed? Well, perhaps we can say that the Constitution embodies “natural law” (whether Lockian or Thomistic apparently doesn’t matter), and therefore it should be followed because it is, literally, “true”. Or we can apply a pragmatic justification; if we don’t follow this standard, then there is no standard at all. The law is anything anyone who happens to wear a robe says it is. Then, of course, we have no law. No one can know what the law is, no one will dare to act, to plan for the future, because no one can know what the consequences of his actions will be.
Clearly, I have no patience with this argument. There never was one Constitution, even as the ink dried on the original text on September 17, 1787 in Philadelphia. The Constitution did incorporate notions of natural law, far more Lockian than Thomistic, but much of it was simple political horse-trading, all of the participants believing that something “more” than the Articles of Confederation was needed but having many differences of opinion as to how much. The notion that they achieved absolute agreement on every word is absurd. Like any great enterprise, it was guided by the spirit of “We’ll know where we’re going when we get there” as much as anything else. Above all, what really shaped the Constitution was the conviction of the delegates at the convention that the new arrangement required the buy-in of all 13 states, which guaranteed that on many issues the few could overrule the many. For example, the provision prohibiting Congress from banning the slave trade until 1808 was added at the insistence of only two states, Georgia and North Carolina, who were hungry for cheap slaves. Other slave states, like Virginia, wanted the option of an immediate ban, not because they were against slavery but because they feared that if their state “too many slaves” they might suffer a devastating slave rebellion.
The last thing the Constitution resembles is a mathematical treatise, laying down a handful of axioms and deducing from them a complete system of government. If it were, there would be no proliferation of disputes over the validity of the theorems (decisions) drawn from it, which is most obviously not the case, for both “liberal” and “conservative” Supreme Court justices have disagreed endlessly over just about everything throughout our history. The one thing the good justices have never done with their endless reasoning is compel assent—at least, not through rational argument and proof.
The Alien and Sedition Acts, passed in 1798, are widely regarded as among the most egregiously unconstitutional legislation ever passed. The latter act contained the following language:
[T]hat if any person shall write, print, utter or publish, or shall cause or procure to be written, printed, uttered or published, or shall knowingly and willingly assist or aid in writing, printing, uttering or publishing any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or either house of the Congress of the United States, or the President of the United States, with intent to defame the said government, or either house of the said Congress, or the said President, or to bring them, or either of them, into contempt or disrepute; or to excite against them, or either or any of them, the hatred of the good people of the United States, or to stir up sedition within the United States, or to excite any unlawful combinations therein, for opposing or resisting any law of the United States, or any act of the President of the United States, done in pursuance of any such law, or of the powers in him vested by the constitution of the United States, or to resist, oppose, or defeat any such law or act, or to aid, encourage or abet any hostile designs of any foreign nation against United States, their people or government, then such person, being thereof convicted before any court of the United States having jurisdiction thereof, shall be punished by a fine not exceeding two thousand dollars, and by imprisonment not exceeding two years.
This outrageous legislation was promulgated and signed by the conservatives’ favorite founder, John Adams. Furthermore, another fave rave, Alexander Hamilton, opposed enactment of the law purely on pragmatic grounds, and once it was on the books, he aggressively encouraged its use against any Jeffersonian scribbler who might defame His Rotundity.17 The obvious fact is that it is the pressure of events, not scrupulous antiquarian scholarship, that defines our understanding of the Constitution.
Mr. Continetti, whom the reader has every reason to have forgotten about, hasn’t much to say about constitutional law and his happy to leave in the lap of AV non-fave rave Antonine Scalia:
Scalia’s role as the face of legal conservatism was exactly what originalism needed: his happy warrior approach (though more warrior than happy) galvanized the political and intellectual energy surrounding the movement. It also helped, a cynic might note, to connect legal conservatism to what at the time was an important ethnic bloc: Italian Americans. There was a reason the Senate voted 98–0 to confirm Scalia.
“Warrior” is right, for Scalia and fellow sleazebag Chief Justice William Rehnquist labored mightily to destroy the constitutional justification for the modern civil rights movement, a judicial version of the “southern strategy”. As is now fairly well known, Rehnquist, while clerking for Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson in 1952, wrote a memo, “A Random Thought on the Segregation Cases”,18 referring to the appeals from lower court decisions that would eventually result in the legendary Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. The memo is discussed in this 2004 article for the Los Angeles Times by Cass Sunstein, then professor of law at the University of Chicago and now with Harvard:
Rehnquist’s memo unambiguously stated that “Plessy vs. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed.” It acknowledged that this “is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position for which I have been excoriated by 'liberal' colleagues.” But in its key passage, it insisted that “one hundred and fifty years of attempts on the part of this court to protect minority rights of any kind—whether those of business, slaveholders, or Jehovah's Witnesses— have all met the same fate. One by one the cases establishing such rights have been sloughed off, and crept silently to rest. If the present court is unable to profit by this example, it must be prepared to see its work fade in time, too, as embodying only the sentiments of a transient majority of nine men.”
Rehnquist went on: “To the argument ... that a majority may not deprive a minority of its constitutional right, the answer must be made that while this is sound in theory, in the long run it is the majority who will determine what the constitutional rights of the minority are.”
In other words, the Constitution doesn’t matter. If the white people of the south want to oppress the black people of the south, it will happen, and courts and constitutions be damned.
It is “interesting” to compare Rehnquist’s “argument” both with Buckley’s “argument” that whites in the south, even when they are in the minority, have the right to oppress blacks, thanks to whites’ “cultural superiority”, and to compare it as well with the current conservative worry over the “tyranny of the majority,”19 which in 1952 Rehnquist clearly thought was a good thing, at least as long as whites were in the majority.
Rehnquist compounded the disgrace of this memo exponentially when it came to light during his 1971 hearing after President Nixon nominated him to be associate justice on the Court. Rehnquist claimed that he had written it at Jackson’s request, so that it reflected Jackson’s views, not his, a deliberate lie—made under oath, of course—smearing the man who essentially made his career with his own feces, so to speak. This 2012 article, Rehnquist's Missing Letter: A Former Law Clerk's 1955 Thoughts on Justice Jackson and Brown, by Brad Snyder and John Barrett, discusses Rehnquist’s perfidy in detail, perfidy that would be repeated when Rehnquist was nominated, and confirmed, as chief justice in 1986.
In the years to come, both Rehnquist and Scalia repeatedly emphasized their contempt for Brown v. Board of Education, deliberately playing up to the deeply held southern fantasy that legal segregation should have been allowed to stand. They also asserted the unconstitutionality of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed segregated business practices, as did rejected Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork. Economic stars Gary Becker and Milton Friedman (both Nobel Prize winners), happily chimed in, “explaining” that the magic of the free market would automatically erase segregation, because segregation wasn’t “efficient”, though somehow they never noticed that the “efficient” free market hadn’t erased segregation for more than a hundred years following the Civil War. They also never noticed that slave markets had endured for thousands of years all around the world, while free markets never existed anywhere until sometime in fifteenth century, and then emerging only around the English Channel between England and the Netherlands—almost as if there were more to heaven and earth than dreamt of in their philosophy. At the same time, while Reagan conservatives furiously defended the legality, if not the desirability, of segregation—that is to say, affirmative action for white people—they furiously assaulted even the constitutionality of affirmative action for black people. Uprooting affirmative action programs wherever they existed was a full-time obsession with the Reagan-era Justice Department, a practice enthusiastically supported by Reagan federal court appointees. The lack of scruple of the Reagan judiciary would manifest itself ever more fully in the years to come.
But all that lay in the future. The departure of Reagan, and the end of the Cold War, left a huge vacuum in American conservatism, which the “kinder, gentler” George Bush was ill-equipped to fill—though on foreign affairs, freed from the fear of Soviet retaliation, he proved far more bloody-minded than Reagan, setting an interventionist agenda with his 1991 invasion of Iraq that his successors would follow, with disastrous consequences.
Continetti passes very quickly over “Operation Desert Storm”, as it was dramatically dubbed, considering how massively, and how tragically, U.S. involvement in the Middle East and Central Asia would shape world history in the coming years. Describing Bush’s address to Congress justifying the planned invasion, Continetti tells us this:
Sounding like Woodrow Wilson, he told the assembled lawmakers that the war against Iraq was about more than oil or retribution. The issue was not Kuwait. “It is a big idea: a new world order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind.”
Continetti’s language here is quite “cautious”. Is sounding like Woodrow Wilson a good thing or a bad thing? Continetti doesn’t say. He leaves it hanging, a hint of irony, perhaps, but a hint of deniability as well. In his “prelude” to The Right, which I quoted at the beginning of this rambling commentary/diatribe, Continetti describes the ruin that overtook the rive droit when George W. Bush sought to initiate that “new world order” in full but is remarkably reluctant to even consider the roots of that disaster, which plagues us, and virtually all of “mankind.” to this day.
My own “take” on the first Iraqi invasion, delivered in my less than gracious “obituary” for Aigh Dubya, is considerably harsher:
Bush’s biggest crime, of course, was “Operation Desert Storm”. Bush deliberately introduced foreign military intervention as a device for creating public support for a triumphalist, flag-waving “American” (read “Republican”) foreign policy that in fact ran directly counter to America’s real foreign policy interests. Before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Bush had practiced a ruthlessly “realpolitik” approach to advancing U.S. interests in the Middle East. On March 16, 1988, Saddam launched the worst chemical weapons attack in modern history, slaughtering up to 5,000 helpless Kurdish citizens of his own country in the town of Halabja in a five-hour assault involving a dozen bombers. Shortly thereafter, April Glaspie, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, met with Saddam, assuring him that the U.S. desired a “deeper, broader” relationship with Iraq and deliberately assured him that the U.S. would not object if Iraq sought a “revision” (my word) of its boundaries with Kuwait, as long as at least a remnant of Kuwait remained. It’s only when Saddam made clear his intention to consume the whole that Bush acted.
When Bush did act, he acted with consummate hypocrisy, denouncing Saddam as “worse than Hitler” and urging oppressed minorities within Iraq to rebel against him, even while planning to keep Saddam in power after he was forced to retreat from Kuwait. In the aftermath, U.S. forces “stood down” while Saddam massacred thousands of brave men and women who made the mistake of taking the word of the president of the United States.
Bush and his lieutenants lied endlessly to cover up this ugly record, pretending that they “really” intended to drive Saddam from power, and, once the tonic of our glorious victory wore off, invented the myth of “weapons of mass destruction” to justify the reinvention of a battered, beaten, impotent Saddam Hussein as an existential threat to world peace against which the U.S. (aka the Republican Party) provided the only possible defense. The dominant interventionist wing of the Democratic Party bought into this myth and largely based U.S. policy upon it, keeping the myth alive for eight long years before 9-11 gave George W. Bush the excuse to revisit Iraq, resulting in the massive disaster from which we have yet to recover. The unwillingness of the U.S. establishment to admit how utterly groundless and self-serving our obsession with Saddam Hussein has been, and how disastrous, is a major cause of the worldwide malaise that continues to consume both the United States and a great portion of the rest of the world.
Instead of talking about all this monumentally Bushian hypocrisy, all Continetti wants to discuss is the discord the invasion created within the Republican Party, noting that much of it had a distinctly anti-Semitic overtone, as critics like Pat Buchanan portrayed it as a “Jewish plot” (my language), even though the Bush White House was scarcely permeated with Jews. In fact, Secretary of State James Baker was a definite bête noir of the AIPAC crowd—unsurprisingly, since Big Jim’s most famous quote was undoubtedly this one: “Fuck the Jews. They never vote for us anyway.”
It is “interesting” that, with all the talk about “Jewish money”, there was so little about “Saudi money,” as discussed, for example in Craig Unger’s book House of Bush, House of Saud, which I haven’t actually read. There is no question that it was the Saudis who were most concerned about Saddam’s appetite for expanding Iraq’s grip on the Middle East’s oil resources, and there is no question, in my mind, at least, that it was Bush I’s decision to leave U.S. troops in Iraq after “Operation Desert Storm” at the request of the still nervous Saudis, a decision reaffirmed by both the Clinton and Bush II administrations, that ultimately led to the terrorist attack on the twin towers, as convincingly described in in Christian Alfonsi’s essential study, Circle in the Sand. To quote myself once more
U.S. policy makers received frequent warnings that presence of a substantial nmber of U.S. troops could lead to disaster. During the leadup to the first Iraqi War, the U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Charles Freeman, warned the administration that “It remains our judgment that Saudi and Arab political realities preclude a U.S. military presence in the Islamic holy land which appears to be open-ended or semi-permanent.” During the war itself, a report issued by a committee headed by Richard Clarke stated that “A permanent U.S. presence will provide a rationale for, and could become a target for, the terrorist threat that will outlive the war.” But the Saudi ruling class wanted us there, as did Israel, and the Israel lobby here in the U.S.
The purpose of Operation Desert Storm was not to free Kuwait, as Bush pretended, not to make the world safe for democracy, but rather to reassure the Saudis, whom the U.S. relied upon to guarantee a “reasonable” price for the world supply of oil. But Catholic right-wingers like Buchanan and Russell Kirk much preferred making snarky comments about Jewish journalists and Israel than making serious analyses of the actual, hidden goals of American policy in the Middle East, goals hidden under an endless tissue of lies compiled, in very large part, by both the “liberal” and conservative wings of the Blob, aka the military intellectual complex.
Continetti also misses the great expansion of Republican lawlessness and hypocrisy in domestic affairs after the end of the Cold War, which occurred under the leadership of Newt Gingrich. It was Gingrich who led the Republican Party to officially embrace a substance-free fiscal policy, built around the notion that tax cuts solve everything. George I had set the ball rolling with his famous/infamous promise at the 1988 Republican Convention, “Read my lips: No new taxes.” Bush eventually realized that this was nonsense, making a very sensible deal with the Democrats, who controlled both the House and the Senate—a deal that prefigured the tax and spending package Bill Clinton would put together four years later and which Bush would later deliberately mischaracterize to cover his ass from the hysterical Republican blowback orchestrated by Gingrich.
Gingrich actually entered Congress in 1978, but was not much in the public eye, though this was not for lack of trying on Gingrich’s part. Gingrich figures surprisingly little in Continetti’s analysis of the development of post-Reagan “why did it all go wrong” conservatism, which treats Trump as, in effect, the successor to Joe McCarthy, George Wallace, and, especially, Pat Buchanan, who Continetti wants to see as the “bad” populist par excellence, thanks to his explicit anti-Semitism. But it was Gingrich who first introduced the full-throttle, “burn it down” mentality into the GOP.
Gingrich realized, in his first years in Congress, that the Democrats, in their post-Watergate reforming zeal, had set traps for themselves, setting standards for squeaky clean ethical behavior that, surely, not all of their members would be able to meet. In his first term, Gingrich engaged in an aggressive campaign to force the House to expel Charles Diggs, a black Democratic congressman from Detroit who won reelection despite being convicted of 11 counts of mail fraud. Gingrich’s motion was easily voted down, but a pattern was set. After all, if Democrats could force a Republican president out of office, why couldn’t Republicans do the same to a mere congressman?
Gingrich rode a wave of public bitterness and mistrust of “authority” engendered by the sixties race riots, Vietnam, and Watergate, a public that could enjoy destruction for its own sake, the sheer pleasure of seeing the big shots being driven from their mansions of privilege being pursued as an end in itself. I can remember an article appearing in the Washington Post around the year 2000, written by David Simon, creator of the legendary TV series The Wire, recalling his early days as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, when he arrived in Washington determined to be the next Bob Woodward. What was “funny” about the piece was Simon’s clear belief—and I think he was entirely in earnest here—that from now on, every president would be impeached, that American “history” would consist of nothing but one huge presidency-destroying scandal after another, stretching as far as the eye could see. Because who wants to, you know, govern? That’s so boring!
Gingrich, though almost a generation older than Simon, had this same lack of concern with the existing order, and a real hunger for disruption. Until he was elected to Congress, at age 35, he had been, effectively, a nobody, and he had a furious ambition to advance himself. Though he fancied himself as a man of extraordinary vision—he was always advising those who, he thought, failed to “understand” him that they needed to “take it up another level, or maybe two”—a more accurate description might be the one contrived for G. K. Chesterton by T. S. Eliot: “His mind swarms with ideas; there is no evidence that it thinks.”
Gingrich imbibed heavily from seventies “futurists” like Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock and The Third Wave, envisioning a world shaped and reshaped by commanding spirits right out of Ayn Rand. Bumbling bureaucrats were out; passionate entrepreneurs were in, and the Silicon Valley of the eighties and nineties must have seemed like his dreams come true to him.
In fact, Gingrich had no substance to his thoughts, no core. His forte—and for a long time it rarely failed him—was tactics, reflecting his ceaseless longing to advance himself. But because he focused so obsessively on tactics—and himself—his followers, whom he raised to power in the stunning Republican wave of 1994, could never fully trust him. His constant flow of “new ideas” suggested—accurately—that he didn’t really believe in anything, and this was particularly true on social issues, which Gingrich deliberately soft-pedaled both out of political calculation and, I suspect, personal conviction. Though he was happy to kowtow to the evangelicals, and denounce Democratic “hippie” morality, he clearly felt bound in his personal life by no rules other than those he fashioned for himself.
Gingrich could, in fact, be quite “moderate” on policy when push came to shove, as he demonstrated on occasion when dealing with President Clinton, but his appetite for notoriety and destruction very often got the better of him, as he first demonstrated when he led a noisy demonstration against President Bush’s 1990 budget agreement with the Democrats in Congress (they held majorities in both houses) for raising taxes in violation of Bush’s earlier pronouncement, even though earlier Gingrich had actually supported the measure. Because some Democrats were also against the bill, his opposition drew enough supporters to defeat it, leading to a brief, weekend, shutdown of the federal government.
This was, one could say, the beginning of the “infantilization” of supply-side economics—that it was always a good idea to cut taxes, no matter the circumstances, and always wrong to raise them. “Serious” libertarian economists like Milton Friedman and Gary Becker had never had the nerve to explicitly reject the falsehoods that were supposedly “proved” by a “theory” that was little more than a truism—that at some point a very high tax rate would bring in less revenue than a lower one. The fantasy of self-financing tax cuts as the guaranteed cure for any and all economic ills was effectively weaponized by political activist Grover Norquist, through his organization “Americans for Tax Reform”, founded in 1985, which devoted itself very largely to forcing all Republican candidates for office to pledge never to raise taxes for any reason whatsoever. Norquist’s group, and others like it—The Club for Growth, for example—masqueraded as strict libertarians but really had no goals other than lowering the tax burden on their millionaire and billionaire funders.
To avoid treading on sensitive toes, Norquist labeled as a tax “increase” even the removal of special tax benefits and write-offs for favored groups, under the “theory” that the “correct” tax rate should be zero. The “true” libertarian economic argument, voiced by “honest” libertarian economists like Friedman and Becker before (but not after) Reagan’s victory in 1980, that the entire set of welfare provisions enacted by the Roosevelt and Johnson administrations—principally Social Security and Medicare, but also wage and hour restrictions, unemployment insurance, workers compensation, crop subsidies, etc.—should be jettisoned, was quietly discarded. Though conservatives continued to rail against “big government”, they did nothing to shrink it.
With substance abandoned—with Republicans having no policies they wanted either to adopt or repeal, other than their beloved tax cuts—Gingrich taught them to attack Democrats on substance-free grounds, accusing them of being crooks, cowards, and communists.
Gingrich’s hour came when Bill Clinton’s stunning victory over George I shattered both the confidence and credibility of the Republicans’ ruling class. I have never quite understood why Republicans found Clinton’s win so devastating. Apparently, they expected that the presidency was something they didn’t have to earn; it was theirs by right. They never understood that, with the Cold War over and the Republican supply of domestic issues essentially zero—with the exceptions of abortion and gun control, in which the Republican elite took no personal interest—the Republican Party simply had nothing to offer the American people.
Clinton, having deliberately run as a centrist in both the 1992 primaries and the general election, quickly swerved left once in office, despite his Alan Greenspan-friendly fiscal policies, handing Republicans a massive win in 1994, giving them control of the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. There wasn’t the slightest question as to who would be House Speaker, and a pattern would be set that would endure for decades: New men, contemptuous of the old pieties, would rise to prominence, and, in response, the Old Guard would retire without a fight. Republican Bob Michel, House Minority Leader during the Reagan-Bush years, was so intimidated by Gingrich’s presence that he didn’t even run for reelection in 1994, handing Gingrich the honor of becoming the first Republican Speaker of the House since Joe Martin held the gavel back in 1952.
Gingrich continued the practice initiated under Ronald Reagan of diminishing the constitutionally prescribed legislative procedures. While Republicans were in office, committee and subcommittee chairs were given limited terms, so they couldn’t accumulate entrenched power. Legislation would be very largely under the control of the Speaker.
But all this “inside baseball” paled in comparison with Gingrich’s real innovation, “the power of the purse”. Congress already had the power of the purse, of course, laid out in great detail in the Constitution. What Gingrich proposed was really an end run around the presidential veto, and the standard congressional process: Congress would refuse to approve a budget unless the president agreed to whatever substantive changes to whatever existing laws the congressional leadership would choose to amend. Do it my way or we’ll burn the house down—a policy of rule or ruin—and verging on “ruin, then rule”— a confession that Republicans could never muster the political support necessary to change the existing political system—it was too popular—and so the only recourse was to wreck the damn thing and force the American people to accept a do-over.
Continetti avoids any substantive discussion of Gingrich’s massive abuse of the legislative process laid out by the Constitution in a single hypocritical paragraph:
Clinton outmaneuvered Gingrich during budget negotiations in the fall of 1995. The result was two government shutdowns for which Republicans took the blame.
These were not “budget negotiations”. The way it works is that Congress passes a budget and the president either accepts it or vetoes it. What Gingrich was “demanding” was that the president agree to significant changes in the Medicare program—changes that had not gone through the regular legislative process, because Republicans did not want to have to go on record as supporting them—in exchange for passage of a budget. The Republicans “took the blame”, not because Clinton was a clever negotiator, but because the shutdowns were entirely unjustified and unprincipled and entirely Gingrich’s doing.
Why did Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole agree to this arrangement in the first place? Because, I am sure, he was afraid. The world he knew had dissolved beneath his feet, first by the emergence of Clinton and then by the emergence of Gingrich. Dole was a relic, a wounded, decorated World War II hero surrounded by young draft dodgers scarcely half his age. Like Michel, he was a man from another time.
But Dole had, he hoped, an ace up his sleeve. Let Gingrich destroy Clinton; Dole would still be the shoo-in for the Republican nomination in 1996. As president, Dole would be guaranteed clout that Gingrich, however bombastic, could never match. Just to be on the safe side, Dole didn’t run for reelection to the Senate in 1996, which he could have done. Two years of sitting second fiddle to Gingrich was enough for any man. The pattern set by Michel and Dole when confronted by right-wing nihilism—quietly resign—would be repeated endlessly in the Trump years. Not until after January 6 did a single elected Republican official dare to openly defy and resist Trump. The rest would posture briefly and then retreat into silence, to be followed, after a discrete interval, by a discreet retirement.
Neocons like Irving Kristol, who were assuming intellectual control of the right as the original NR founders of the new conservatism faded into insignificance, due to both age and the collapse of communism, applauded the “new fusionism” (my term) of Newtonian hypocrisy. Continetti quotes Irving as exclaiming on the occasion of Newt’s finest hour, the stunning Republican sweep in the 1994 congressional elections as follows: “The American people now have a Republican Party that is future-oriented, rather than ‘conservative’ in the older stick-in-the-mud meaning of the term.”
Falser words, of course, have rarely been spoken. I guess Irving forgot to notice who was in the House Speaker’s office with Newt on his night of triumph: not Irving or Milton, but Rush Limbaugh.
“Limbaugh’s importance to the conservative movement cannot be overstated,” Continetti tells us, which is true enough. He can’t quite bring himself to say why, but the answer is obvious: it was Limbaugh who opened the sluicegates to the racist, misogynistic smut that Donald Trump parleyed into a four-year stint in the White House. Continetti can’t bring himself to notice, can’t acknowledge that it was Gingrich and Limbaugh who turned the Republican Party into a bottom-feeding, mouth-breathing, substance-free, value-free pack of Yahoos. Limbaugh was “the common man’s William F. Buckley”, Continetti pathetically proclaimed in his abysmal February 2020 post, The Era of Limbaugh, on the occasion of Limbaugh’s announcement that he was dying of cancer. Limbaugh was not the common man’s William F. Buckley. He was the heir of McCarthy and Wallace, a sneering, leering man who despoiled all he touched. I was stunned by the outpouring of uncritical Rushbo worship from Continetti and other supposedly sophisticated conservatives at the time of Limbaugh’s announcement. And I was stunned all over again by the commentaries by “thoughtful” conservatives on Limbaugh’s death—none of them daring to admit how entirely negative Limbaugh’s career was, how entirely given over to malice and deceit, with nothing positive about it at all. Ross Douthat, trying to finesse the issue, linked Limbaugh with three other notable Republican plug-uglies—Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, and Roger Ailes—said “we can say of them their gifts were ample, their ascent remarkable, their influence enduring — and yet their most important legacy has been ashes and defeat.” Well, ashes, defeat, and the total collapse of the moral and intellectual integrity of the Republican Party. Let’s not forget about that part as well.
In The Right, Continetti tones down is “real time” praise of Limbaugh in his 2020 article, which placed him alongside of Buckley, Ronald Reagan, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas, a comparison that I can only call “abysmal”. In The Right, Continetti says “Limbaugh’s politics were the same as the conservative movement’s”, a statement as naïve as it is enlightening, for Limbaugh’s “politics” were the politics of hatred—hatred of blacks, hatred of homosexuals, and hatred of any form of female assertiveness. Limbaugh spoke to and for a white middle and working class audience, heavily Catholic and heavily evangelical, who hated every aspect of both the civil rights movement and the sexual revolution. Many of these people had not done well in the Reagan Revolution. It’s rarely noticed, but both the Carter and the Reagan administration pursued a common strategy to control inflation—union busting, either implicit or explicit. When the Carter administration deregulated the trucking industry, it effectively doomed the once-mighty Teamsters Union to extinction—no loss to the Democratic Party, since the Teamsters had been bitterly anti-Democratic every since Bobby Kennedy locked up one-time Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa. Carter also deregulated the airline industry, which did not have such a devastating effect, since running an airline is not the same as running a trucking company, but it still weakened the unions’ bargaining position.
The Carter administration refused to help America’s bloated steel industry, allowing everyone else to benefit from the lower prices and higher quality of imported steel. The Reagan administration continued this policy of “benign neglect” as well, and, for the most part, watched passively as the Japanese swallowed up home electronics and the market for high value office equipment like copy machines, along with many other industries. Union membership fell sharply over these years, particularly in the industrial Midwest. In 1972, 39% of workers in Michigan were union members, one of the highest rates in the country. In 1992, the figure was 26%, still one of the highest. High rates of union membership drive up wages even for non-union employers; declining union membership, of course, has precisely the opposite effect. By and large, the Clinton “boom” did not reach these people. Seaboard states prospered, for all kinds of reasons. The interior did not, and the “Rustbelt States” in particular went from high wage to low wage in a generation. “Red America” was in the process of being born.
Red America wanted someone to blame for its suffering, and “the Clintons” provided the target. Continetti, speaking of the American Spectator, a right-wing publication that broke the “Troopergate” story describing Clinton’s endless liaisons as governor of Arkansas, acknowledges carefully that “its stories about Clinton, and especially his wife Hillary, often escaped factuality and loosed the surly bonds of plausibility,”20 but overall his coverage of the orgy of Clinton hatred that virtually defined the Republican Party during the 90s is hypocritical at best. He speaks precisely once of the “bizarre land deal known as Whitewater—describing it as one of Clinton’s “actual misdeeds”, even though the years’ long investigation by Independent Counsel Ken Starr resulted in no charges ever being filed against either of the Clintons. Continetti also acknowledges that close Clinton associate Vincent Foster committed suicide and was not murdered, but doesn’t mention that partisan Republican judges and politicians and lawyers forced five investigations of Foster’s suicide, desperately searching for something—anything—that would embarrass the Clinton White House and effectively prolonging the case for its own sake.
On the Clinton scandal, his affair with Monica Lewinsky, which led to his falling into the perjury trap carefully prepared for him by the loathsome Ken Starr, Continetti is cautiously agnostic, covering his tracks by not offering his own judgment on anything, but choosing as his beard/covert spokesdude Christopher Caldwell:
Only a few on the right, while disapproving of Clinton’s behavior, did not think it merited removal from office. One was [Weekly Standard] senior writer Christopher Caldwell. For Caldwell, the Lewinsky scandal was a way for conservatives and Republicans to avoid confronting the fractures within their coalition. The GOP’s dogged pursuit of Clinton over the Lewinsky lie, Caldwell believed, was a consequence of religious conservatives from the South capturing the Republican Party. “Monica Lewinsky became a substitute for anti-Communism,” he wrote in the Atlantic Monthly.
Republicans constantly used their control of the federal court system to harass the Clintons, rolling out an endless series of decisions patently intended to punish him for the “crime” of being elected. The suit brought against Clinton by Paula Jones, was, from the very beginning, “assisted” by Republican operatives and ultimately became, in fact, a “vast right-wing conspiracy” against Clinton, the only problem being that few doubt that Clinton did proposition her.21 something that, of course, he “had” to deny.
The impeachment of Bill Clinton was one of the biggest travesties in American history, a years long exercise in lawlessness, as Republican judges and Republican members of Congress gleefully twisted “the law” into whatever shape best served their desires. But what Republicans in Congress only attempted, Republicans on the Supreme Court achieved, in their brutal declaration of “Game Over” in the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election.
Continetti is unsurprisingly and pathetically evasive on the subject of the Republican justices’ power grab:
For conservatives, the Florida recount was nothing less than an attempt by Gore and the Democrat-appointed judges on the Florida Supreme Court to override an election.
Once again, Continetti tells us, not what he thinks is “the truth”, but rather what someone else said or thought. And, of course, it is “amusing” that, while Republicans have the right to reject court decisions made by judges appointed by Democrats, Democrats have no right to complain about court decisions made by judges appointed by Republicans. Intellectual hypocrisy can go no further.
Bush v. Gore was, in terms of sheer intellectual indefensibility, the worst Supreme Court decision in American history—proof, if any were needed, that conservative “theories” of originalism, textualism, et al. were arrant sophistry, pure and simple, and nothing more, a simple cloak for result-oriented jurisprudence of the crassest hue—though I suspect that, had the Court allowed the recount to continue, in the short time remaining for it to happen, Bush’s “victory” in Florida would not have been overturned, short of the discovery of a massive cache of Gore votes, which, in my opinion, was very unlikely. In any case, Republican control of the state government of Florida, and of both houses of Congress, more or less guaranteed a Bush win. But the fact that “Earth Tones Al”, with Bill Clinton and all his honeys tied around his neck, could still outpace George Bush, Jr. by half a million votes, stunned the Right. In early 1992 they thought they couldn’t lose. In late 2000, it looked like they couldn’t win.
Bush was almost handpicked by big business and Republican state governors, horrified by the freak show that Newt Gingrich had conjured up in the U.S. House of Representatives, a freak show that had already consumed him. George was selected to be, in effect, Clinton without all the sex, and, with both education reform and a prescription plan for Medicare at the very top of his agenda, Clinton lite in all but name.
Domestic peace and tranquility? That was not what neocons like Irving Kristol and son Bill had signed up for. “We need a war,” said Lynne Cheney, back in the Clinton years, and the neocons, Jew and Gentile alike, set about searching for one, resurrecting the Committee for the Present Danger, finding a new “present danger” in the form of the ugly but pathetic figure of Saddam Hussein. The Soviet Union and its empire of captive nations in eastern Europe had a population of well over 300 million; Iraq had a population of about 40 million. It also lacked the 40,000-odd nuclear weapons that the Soviets possessed, the fleets of missiles, bombers, and submarines, but, hey, when God gives you a lemon, you squeeze that little fucker for all its worth.
Sadly, Bill Clinton had proved to a be a pushover for right-wing propaganda, with its endless hysteria about “weapons of mass destruction”, which are not weapons of mass destruction! He was “assisted”, to a painful extent, by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who coined the deeply unfortunate phrase and concept “Indispensable Nation”, declaring the U.S. as the savior of all mankind, authorizing us to, among other things, contribute to the death of thousands of Iraqi children. All in the name of “good”, of course!
Albright assuaged her conscience, and that of the rest of the Democratic establishment, by limiting American do-gooding to endeavors that could command the support of the “community of nations” (my phrase), working through international consortia, relying on the UN when possible—though this was not always possible, thanks to the Security Council vetoes possessed by permanent members Russia and China. This proved a major point of distinction between Democrats and Republicans, and a major rallying point between elitist neocons and the Republican “masses”—the Catholics and evangelicals.
The neocons hated the UN for its anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism, for its corruption and inefficiency, and for its increasingly “correct” agenda, which co-existed uneasily with the massive sexism and misogyny of many of its most powerful member states. Many Catholics and evangelicals disliked it out of a mixture of xenophobia and racism and saw it as an insidious tool of secular values. The best-selling series of evangelical “End Times” novels, beginning with Left Behind in 1995, pictured the Anti-Christ as the secretary general of the UN.
In George Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign, he talked the neocon talk, but after the election refused to walk to walk the neocon walk prior to 9/11. Continetti relates without comment the newly formed Weekly Standard’s deep frustration with Bush’s lack of “manliness”, carefully failing to offer us his opinion of the matter. He also tries to dress up “early Bush” as a new form of “conservatism”, when what Bush really intended was, for the most part, simply to finesse the long-standing Democratic advantages in education and health care issues. Bush addressed education with largely bipartisan “No Child Left Behind” legislation, which was not anti-teachers union enough for “real” conservatives, who wanted to destroy the unions, even though the teachers unions hated NCLB too. The Bush administration’s gift to the old folks, the expansion of Medicare to cover prescription drugs, with no provision for funding, infuriated the billionaire Koch brothers to the extent that it triggered their continuing, massive involvement in politics at both the state and federal level—even though the Koch machine was happy, after Trump’s election, to blow an even bigger hole in the federal budget in the name of lower corporate taxes, not mention other assorted gimmies for the rich.
After 9/11, of course, everything changed. Compassionate conservatism was out; kicking ass was in. When it comes to discussing the utterly disastrous “War on Terror”, Continetti retreats to his now familiar tactic of simply quoting others, carefully choosing establishment naysayers only to deliver the bad news that Bush’s policy was a disaster of world-historical proportions—though, to give him some credit, he does emphasize the negative rather firmly, to wit:
The policy architecture of the war on terror had started to buckle. Bush’s plans to try captured terrorist suspects in military commissions in Guantánamo Bay were foiled and delayed. More and more people came to view as torture, and Congress forbade, the “enhanced interrogation techniques,” such as waterboarding, that had been used on high-value terrorists in the aftermath of 9/11. In late 2005 the New York Times revealed the existence of the Terrorist Surveillance Program, which collected information, without a warrant, on phone calls by foreigners originating in or routed through the United States. The sensationalist news coverage, as well as the legal morass, that accompanied every revelation of Bush’s secret counterterrorism efforts divided America—and the conservative movement.
Strong words—for Matt, at least, though he could have skipped the complaint about the “sensationalist” news coverage and also might have mentioned the extent to which the “War on Terror” revealed conservative “impatience” with constitutional niceties when the Constitution got in their way—see, example, Charles Krauthammer’s wrathful column The Constitution Is Not A Suicide Pact and my beatdown of Justice Scalia’s war on truth regarding the rights of “enemy combatants”. Of course, what Matt doesn’t at all acknowledge is that Bush’s policy was not only disastrous, but also entirely unjustified and unjustifiable, a simple power grab intended to make the U.S. the dominant military power in the Middle East, assuring U.S. control of the world oil supply and guaranteeing the security of Israel for generations, a policy whose stupidity and deceitfulness I’ve howled about any number of times.
Continetti gives a more honest treatment over the developing dispute within the GOP over immigration, even giving some credit to one of his favorite heavies, the reliably anti-Semitic Pat Buchanan, on the issue. 9/11 itself and the utterly disastrous “War on Terror”, combined with the relentless increase in the non-European population in the U.S. led to a rebirth of xenophobia, creating a “populist moment”. Though Continetti has little to say about the horrific impact of the U.S. invasion of Iraq on that country, he has plenty to say about its effect on the Republican Party:
Its duration and cost exceeded the patience of the American public and much of the conservative and Republican grass roots. It catalyzed a revolt against the conservative and Republican establishment. Compassionate conservatism and the Freedom Agenda were not the only casualties of the war in Iraq. The barriers that had long insulated conservative elites from the dark side of their movement fell too.
The notion that the “dark side” of the Republican Party consisted exclusively of the populist masses and not the “rive droit” Beltway elite is a bit amusing, but let it pass, let it pass.
The continuing disaster that constituted the “War on Terror” was probably enough to doom the Republicans in 2008, but that, in fact, turned out to be only the appetizer, when the vaunted “self-policing” free enterprise system suddenly self-destructed, demanding an immediate and immense bailout from those supposedly incompetent federal bureaucrats in Washington. The Republican Party’s response, Continetti uncomfortably admits, was to stop thinking. Barack Obama, “nothing more than a conventional academic liberal,” now became the Anti-Christ.
Matt surprises me a bit by acknowledging that the likes of Charles Krauthammer were as hysterical in their response to Obama as were the Rush Limbaughs and Jerry Falwells—something he didn’t acknowledge with regard to the Clintons.
During the Obama years, images of decline, irreparable transformations, unbridgeable divides, and fascistic liberals filled the minds of conservatives. Every faction of the Right treated the Obama presidency as an inflection point. America’s fate would be decided one way or the other. It was said that Obama’s victory presaged America’s slide into European social democracy and global irrelevance. Obama’s stated desire to reverse the Reagan revolution flamed conservative fears.22 Charles Krauthammer argued that Obama undermined the “moral foundation of American dominance.”
Continetti doesn’t seem to realize it, but the Republican “establishment” labored as hard to wreck both the Clinton and Obama administrations as did the populists. Even when the writing was on the wall in 12-foot letters, when the “Tea Party” threatened to wreck the U.S. government’s credit by refusing to raise the limit on the national debt, the conservative elite refused to recognize that they were the bad guys. It was all Obama’s fault, somehow. If he didn’t spend so much time playing golf in Martha’s Vineyard, this wouldn’t have happened.
Despite the obvious hatred the Tea Party bore towards the “Establishment” Republicans of the Bush administration, the Establishment did a remarkable job of self-hypnosis, pretending that here, at last, were “real” conservatives, conservatives who really wanted to shrink the size of government, when all the Tea Party wanted to do was destroy Barack Obama and bring back “White Socialism” that would shower government benefits on themselves and deny them to lazy blacks and dirty immigrants. The National Review/Weekly Standard crowd embraced the Tea Party, as they would embrace Trump in 2016, because they were desperate for a win, a win at any price. Successive waves of “grown up” Republicans like John Boehner and Paul Ryan would cater endlessly to the Tea Party’s fantasies and hypocrisies and finally throw up their hands in despair because “these people won’t listen to reason,” as if that hadn’t been their sole motive and passion from the beginning, that they had no positive agenda at all, only hate. As I’ve said a dozen times before, Donald Trump did not “change”, or “capture”, or “corrupt” the GOP. He merely took off the mask.
The “doom” of the Republican Party began when libertarians like Barry Goldwater realized that the only reliably anti “big government” constituency in the United States were white southerners. It was either defend their “right” to maintain their grossly oppressive racial codes or lose every election. The welfare state ultimately became a political liability when liberal Democrats deliberately set out to use it to remedy racial oppression, as they had deliberately not done before, and when the great urban riots of the sixties were followed by a massive surge of violent crime in the black urban ghettoes of America’s big cities, a surge for which liberals had no answer. Conservatives were given new opportunities when two new issues emerged—the environment and the sexual revolution—but their ties to both big business and the conservative religious confessions—the Catholics and the evangelicals—discouraged them from addressing these issues intelligently. Their belief in the efficacy and infallibility of free markets—that they would provide an ever-growing standard of living for everyone without any governmental interventions —was blown to pieces by the Great Recession. Their attempt to replace the all-unifying issue of anti-communism with the War on Terror was a stunning exercise in deceit and incompetence, inflicting huge scars on the entire world—scars which the great majority of conservatives fail even today even to acknowledge.
During the heyday of the Reagan Revolution, conservatives never realized how limited their ideas were, how dependent upon specific circumstances for their efficacy and success, with the result that when circumstances changed, they were caught flat-footed. Clinton’s victory in 1992 came as an absolutely shattering blow. Overnight, they went from easy winners to hapless losers, which is why, over and over again, the “Establishment” has had no recourse to the forces of nihilism but to resign. They have no confidence in themselves, no confidence that they could ever win again, and so they give in, helplessly putting their necks before the headsman’s blade—anything other than to think, and to take responsibility for their own failure. In the entire reign of Trump, only a tiny handful of Republican officeholders have dared to take any stand against Trump at all, and none of them—repeat, none—did so when it would really count—when it would serve as much more than a pinprick.23 Both parties, in fact, are corrupted by their inability to win convincing majorities on a regular basis, which makes both so willing to entertain lazy and dangerous conspiracy theories, but the Democrats still believe —most of the time—that they can win without cheating. The Republicans have given up that hope long ago.
It was this awareness of the party’s almost “terminal” weakness that caused so many members of the conservative establishment to get on the Trump train once it became clear he was going to win. Continetti, like so many, calls Trump “lucky”, but his luck consisted largely in the blindness of the establishment, who never understood that the party’s devotion to “small government” and balanced budgets had always been a lie, and never understood how disastrous, and how unpopular, the Blob’s interventionist foreign policy had been under both Bush and Obama. Trump rolled over everyone in the 2016 Republican primaries not because he was lucky, but because he was the only one to say that the emperor had no clothes.
He was “lucky” in the general because of the pathetic desire of the Republican establishment to win. With a few “honorable” exceptions, like William Kristol, who had done as much as anyone to mire us in Afghanistan and Iraq, the supposedly honorable men and women of the Republican Party, like George Bush, like Colin Powell, like Peggy Noonan, like Paul Ryan, and like Mitch McConnell—and like Matthew Continetti—kept their mouths shut. Maybe he wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe he didn’t really mean all those awful things he said. Maybe this time he would really apologize and see the error of his ways. And so they eased themselves step by step into the swamp, a swamp from which they could never emerge unless they were willing to admit, publicly, that they had chosen to dwell there in the mire of their own free will in the first place, that they had chosen it for their home.
During Trump’s four years in office, Continetti devolved into a semi-Trumper in the mode of the National Review’s Rich Lowry and Charles C. W. Cooke (aka “See Dubya”), groaning over the style but greedily swallowing the substance whole. We’re winning, for God’s sake! We’re winning! Ugottaproblemwitdat?
Then, of course, Jan. 6 happened. Who could have seen that coming? Who? Who? Well, not Matthew Continetti, for sure.
To be fair to Matt, because why not, he does come down pretty hard on El Donaldo in his conclusion, after indulging in a brief fit of whataboutismo, clumsily comparing Trump to William Jennings Bryan—hey, they were both populists, amirite?—before indulging in a fairly extended fit of honesty:
In the space of one hundred years [from the inauguration of Warren Harding], despite setbacks and internal battles, the American Right had come of age, gained the trust of its fellow countrymen, changed the world, and then, after decades of confusion, joined forces with a man it did not trust but eventually came to adore. That man departed Washington with the Republican Party out of power, conservatism in disarray, and the Right in the same hole it had dug with Charles Lindbergh, Joe McCarthy, the John Birch Society, George Wallace, and Pat Buchanan. Not only was the Right unable to get out of the hole; it did not want to.
1. We came close to our own 18th Brumaire on January 6, 2021. See my prescient (if I do say so myself) Jan. 20, 2017 essay The Eighteenth Brumaire of Donald Trump. I should add that Marx’s bon mot was shamelessly “borrowed”, in true Marxian fashion, from his life-long collaborator, Fredrich Engels.
2. I’ve discussed Buckley a number of times, most particularly in this review of his son Christopher’s memoir Losing Mum and Pup.
3. Well into the sixties, it was common in many small towns and not so small cities for high schools to award scholarships not to the neediest students but rather to those who came from the most prominent families—as a way of demonstrating rank. This is described in the once-famous sociological studies, Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture (1929), and Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts (1937), by Robert and Merrell Lynd, describing the city of Muncie, Indiana. In 2020, the city’s population was about 65,000. (I also recall the practice being satirized in Mad magazine.)
4. I’ve written about McCarthy a number of times, and most of them, at least, can be found either here or here.
5. Even as a young teenager I was bewildered by this argument, since so much of the “law”, particularly back then, had an entirely moral justification (as opposed to a pragmatic one). But conservatives somehow regarded it as conclusive.
6. One can also ask if Buckley thought that the murder of white women who rode around at night seated next to “Negroes” was so common as to be considered “usual and expected”.
7. In fact, the 1968 Republican Convention was far from calm, but they had better crowd control, and the party itself was not split—in part because many of the “crazies” were backing Wallace. See contemporaneous accounts like An American melodrama: The Presidential campaign of 1968, The Making of a President 1968, and Garry Wills’ Nixon Agonistes for “period” flavor.
8. “Where’s the rest of me?” was a “famous” (sort of) line from Reagan’s big picture, King’s Row, which occurs when Ronnie wakes up in a hospital to discover that both his legs have been amputated.
9. The FBI had extensive information about how weak the American Communist Party was, but never shared this information. What bureaucracy wants to admit that it’s no longer needed?
10. Quoted by Lou Cannon The Role of a Lifetime, p, 520. Cannon covered Reagan from his first governorship through the end of his presidency.
11. When campaigning for reelection in 1984 in Macon, Georgia, Reagan had this to say:
But every time I return here, I'm struck anew by the quiet beauty of this good land and the courage of her people. You who pledge your loyalty and stand by the eternal values, who, during those dark days when so many were burning our flag, you never stopped waving it. You make it so easy to say it's good to be back in the heart of Dixie.
The South is a never ending spring of America's spirit, a living devotion to those good things that bind us as a people -- family, neighborhood, hard work, love of country, freedom, and, yes, faith in a just and merciful God.
He even managed to work in a salute to Jefferson Davis, though only praising him for his devotion to the line-item veto, not the slavery and treason thing.
13. It is still amazing to me that John Mitchell, as attorney general, would sit in his office and listen to a “plan” from G. Gordon Liddy that would involve, among other things, kidnapping of delegates to the Democratic Convention—apparently with the idea of somehow influencing the outcome. What was to be done with the kidnappees after the convention was over? Would they be murdered? Mitchell didn’t approve this, but he did ask Liddy to come back with something less expensive. Apparently, the arguments against kidnapping were purely financial.
14. It pains me as a Democrat to acknowledge that Carter, when first in office, explicitly held to the notion that, after the death of Stalin, the entire Cold War was just a misunderstanding that could have been avoided. In his autobiography, the British politician Roy Jenkins says that Carter’s election stimulated European unity, because German chancellor Gerhard Schmidt was convinced that Europe couldn’t rely on Carter to stand up to the Soviets. In fact, before and after Carter, Europeans often worried that the U.S. would decide that Europe wasn’t worth a nuclear war and would make some sort of deal with the Soviets and retreat to the western hemisphere.
15. Iran’s release of the hostages immediately following Reagan’s assumption of office is believed by many conservatives to be irrefutable proof that Iran was “afraid” of Reagan. In fact, the terms of the release had been negotiated by the Carter administration, but the Iranians spitefully withheld the hostages’ release until after Carter’s term in office expired. Tragically, the U.S. military intellectual complex has been able to use the Iranian hostage taking as an excuse to wage an absurd and counter-productive vendetta against that country for more than 40 years now, for no other purpose than to create an “enemy” that will justify its own continued existence.
16. Niskanen’s own acumen, whether political or economic, do not impress. In a “withering” commentary, How to Turn a Recession into a Depression, Bill “explained” how then-Senator Obama’s planned economic policies would result in disaster, policies that, despite screaming, utterly despicable Republican opposition, instead turned recession into prosperity. Niskanen was often described as “the most honest man in Washington”, which is 1) an awfully low bar and 2) utterly untrue. He was quite willing to misstate the truth for political advantage, and often did so, though it is true that his impolite talk eventually got him pushed out of the Reagan administration, but that happened to anyone who actually wanted to cut the size of government.
17. See James Morton Smith’s excellent article, Alexander Hamilton, the Alien Law, and Seditious Libels for more.
18. For whatever reason, the full text of the memo doesn’t seem to be available on the internet.
19. As I wrote in an article on Florida governor Ron DeSantis a couple of months ago, “Republicans have just about given up the idea of ever winning a majority, or even a plurality, of the vote in a presidential election. They have decided that the Founders deliberately rigged the Constitution to ensure that the small states would be advantaged, and the large ones disadvantaged, in both the Senate and the presidency in order to prevent the “tyranny of the majority”. As this extensive new article in the New York Times makes clear, they have decided that any device they can concoct to thwart the will of the majority is ipso facto constitutional.
20. Not sure why the bonds of plausibility need be “surly”, but let it pass, let it pass.
21. The “case” against Clinton here is more murky than is popularly assumed. Contrary to popular assumption, Jones did not sue on the grounds that she had received severe emotional distress because Clinton had exposed himself to her. Rather, her suit claimed that Clinton exacted retribution against her after she rejected his advances, denying her raises, promotions, etc., the only problem being that she presented precisely zero evidence to prove that. And did she, in fact, reject his advances. The “proof” is that several people who saw her shortly after the incident said she seemed very upset. Well, if you had engaged in oral sex with your state’s governor fifteen minutes after meeting him, and then, fifteen minutes after that, found yourself being pushed out the door, painfully aware that your fifteen minutes of “fame” were over, wouldn’t you be upset too?
22. Actually, Obama frequently praised Reagan and I certainly don’t recall his promise to “reverse” the Reagan revolution. I believe Mr. Continetti is extrapolating here.
23. Minor exceptions: the Senate vote that defeated Paul Ryan’s planned evisceration of Medicaid, which might have been due simply to the fact that there are lots of poor whites in both Kentucky and Maine, and George Romney’s vote to impeach Trump the first time around, though that was largely due, I think to personal pique. I think if Trump had offered Romney either State or Treasury Romney would have taken the job. Instead, Trump sneered at Mitt for being a loser. Romney also had an advantage in that Utah was both strongly Republican and anti-Trump.
