But if you were asked to use a word that was not a swear, and were given about five minutes to calm down, a good second choice would be “disintegrated.” There’s no clear answer, however, as to why — why it seems like people are living in their own separate realities; why our leaders seem to operate via conflicting conspiracy theories and obscure philosophies; why it feels like a screaming, ephemeral electronic blob called the internet is actually running the world instead of the people supposedly in charge of it.
But he plays a critical role in modern American history, both for the story of his rise and the means of his decline. Back in 1958, during the height of the Red Scare, Welch, a wealthy candy magnate, joined forces with businessman Fred Koch (yes, the dad of those Kochs) to create the John Birch Society, a membership-only group meant to carry out their lifelong fight against communism in America. But unlike Joseph McCarthy, who razed Hollywood, or the House Un-American Activities Committee, which singled out federal employees, Welch thought that the most “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy” was actually President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The list of alleged White House Soviets soon grew to include Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, CIA director Allen Dulles, Chief Justice Earl Warren, Harry Truman, the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds (of course), Cornelius Vanderbilt, Charles de Gaulle, Woodrow Wilson, and so forth.
Despite being led by a man who thought the president was secretly a Soviet plant, the John Birch Society grew popular in the early 1960s — so popular, in fact, that it made up a significant portion of the growing American conservative movement. And none feared the Birchers more than William F. Buckley, the editor-in-chief of National Review, who was trying to mainstream this ideology inside the Republican Party along with presidential aspirant Barry Goldwater. Like his fellow ideologues, Buckley was terrified of the rise of communism and its attendant philosophies: socialism, moral relativism, and progressivism. (As he famously said, “A conservative is one who stands athwart history, yelling Stop.”) Like Welch, a onetime friend, he feared that liberals sympathetic to these ideas would bring Soviet elements into the federal government. But as he wrote to a friend, there was a difference between the paranoid “unreality” of the John Birch Society and the informed suspicion of “responsible conservatives.” And that posed an existential problem: if Birchers were too visibly associated with conservatism — if Birchers were the first thing voters thought of when they heard the word “conservatism” — the Republican Party, already in a civil war between Northern moderates and traditional Southern conservatives, would view Goldwater as a liability and his movement as just a bunch of kooks.
If their intent had not been clear enough, the cover literally said “AGAINST TRUMP” in gilt gold letters
Over the course of several years, Buckley ran a tireless campaign against the Birchers, both in his private conversations with Republican Party leaders, politicians, and writers and donors, and in dozens of editorials, columns, and essays in National Review, which, at the time, had over 44,000 subscribers. His anti-Bircherism was so thorough that he even spent time writing antagonistic letters back to subscribers who had canceled their publications over his stance. (He wrote a lot of letters: Birchers made up a large percentage of the Review’s readership, to say nothing of the Review’s donors.) The Birchers’ influence on the right slowly began to wane, relegating them to the edges of the party, nowhere close to influencing the agenda being rapidly adopted by the Republican mainstream. (Welch did himself no favors by writing an essay in 1966 declaring that communism was an Illuminati plot dating back to the time of ancient Sparta, alienating the slightly fringier right-wing magazines that still ran his work.) By the time Welch died in 1985, Ronald Reagan was president, the right-wing intelligentsia controlled the GOP, and the few thousand remaining Birchers were calling Earth Day a Leninist plot and claiming that chemical compounds extracted from apricot pits could cure cancer. Buckley, now the de facto intellectual voice of the Republican Party, was hailed as the ultimate conservative gatekeeper — a man who could successfully push right-wing nutjobs out of the Republican Party and cultivate a serious movement based on Values and Principles.
And that was the fate of poisonous conspiracy theories back then. If a ludicrous idea started building momentum, the ringleader and their affiliates would get pushed out of an organization, then another one, and another one, before being deemed so poisonous that society in general would exile them to some tract of rural land to farm beets and / or start a cult. If they were still interested in spreading their ideas, their options were limited to the physical media they could afford to purchase — a monthly pamphlet sent through the mail, a ham radio, or a sign on the side of the road. Barricaded from the tightly controlled mass communication networks of print distribution and broadcast signals that informed the nation and the leaders they chose, they were forever stuck on the fringes.
That was where “crazy” used to die.
For the next five decades, National Review maintained its power in the Republican Party as the arbiter of what was considered acceptable conservative thought. True, they’d gained new competitors over the years, whose dominance in nonphysical media could reach massive audiences faster than a magazine could go to print. Rush Limbaugh could rile millions of Americans listening to him on AM radio, Newt Gingrich could pontificate about Bill Clinton on C-SPAN, Matt Drudge could change the George W. Bush agenda with the right hyperlink, and Fox News could hyperventilate about Waco or jihad or Barack Obama for hours. But National Review was written by smart, serious people. This print magazine was for the thinkers who generated the ideas that the broadcasters could spread and the politicians could enact. And National Review was, by 2015, horrified at Donald Trump’s ascent in the Republican Party.
by Tina Nguyen, The Verge | Read more:
Image: Verge staff
