By Jim Heffernan
Battery life on the WABAC was very poor. I decided for round 2 I would use a plug-in power supply and use a voice recorder to clarify any results.
I fired the machine up again and for my question I asked, “How did “movement conservatism” begin?”. Once again, lights flashed for a good long time and the following message in a masculine voice came out. Then the power supply started to smoke and everything went dead. This cryptic fragment came out.
“If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened. It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority. Sometimes it becomes impossible to assert the will of a minority, in which case it must give way, and the society will regress; sometimes the numerical minority cannot prevail except by violence: then it must determine whether the prevalence of its will is worth the terrible price of violence.”
I found this very puzzling. I’d seen the word “atavistic” and knew it was a snob word for primitive. But I was at a loss about what constituted the majority and the minority. The vagueness of the wording suggested to me that the underlying sentiment was ugly
Thanks to the wonders of Google, I was easily able to trace it to a 1957 article in The National Review by William Buckley. He wrote it two years after he co-founded the magazine. Here are the words that preceded the fragment that WABAC gave me.
“Why The South Must Prevail.”
“The South does not want to deprive the Negro of a vote for the sake of depriving him of the vote. In some parts of the South, the White community merely intends to prevail — that is all. It means to prevail on any issue on which there is corporate disagreement between Negro and White. The White community will take whatever measures are necessary to make certain that it has its way.”
“The central question that emerges, 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. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists. The question, as far as the White community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage. The British believe they do, and acted accordingly, in Kenya, where the choice was dramatically one between civilization and barbarism, and elsewhere; the South, where the conflict is by no means dramatic, as in Kenya, nevertheless perceives important qualitative differences between its culture and the Negroes’, and intends to assert its own. NATIONAL REVIEW believes that the South’s premises are correct.”
It took me a while to get breath back. The cruelty and arrogance astounded me. Yet there it is, at the foundation of what we call “movement conservatism”.
Bill Buckley is considered one of the founders of modern “conservatism.” His brother-in-law and co-founder, L. Brent Bozell, was the man who “ghost wrote” Barry Goldwater’s book, “The Conscious of a Conservative”.
Barry would lose decisively in 1964. The message would become more polished over the years. Overt racism became disguised into “dog whistle” terms like “states rights” and “law and order”.
Nixon would be elected in 1968 and paid lip service to the new “conservative” line but retained too much of Eisenhower’s “middle road” sensibilities to really satisfy Buckley’s people.
Carter would sneak in because of Nixon’s Watergate disgrace. By then “conservatism” had been weaponized by Lewis Powell’s 1971 memo which spawned an entire world of “think tanks”, institutes and “dark money” zealots dedicated to advancing the “conservative” cause. Carter was destroyed by doom and gloom journalism that had come to value the smell of political blood more than factual accuracy.
Reagan would sweep into power in 1980. He was a smooth, good-looking actor and he taught the conservatives how to hide their elitist economic goals behind sham populist rhetoric. Under Reagan it became OK to let lies go uncontested (his “welfare queen” a prime example). He popularized the idea belittling government even though the government was him and his cronies. I was a working man in those times and I marveled how a lot of my compadres loved Reagan even as our wages were being cut. I think they preferred their guns to their wages.
Reagan’s approach was such a potent vote gathering device that large portions of it survived through the next 28 years in Republican and Democratic administrations.
Reagan and Trump leaned heavily on the empty promise of “Making America Great Again,” won lots of votes and delivered little of substance to anybody that wasn’t rich.
Today, enthusiastic crowds still cheer for Trump, conveniently forgetting his dumpster fire presidency. They consider themselves Republican and conservative when they are neither. They are true RINO’s (Republican In Name Only) and do a great disservice to the great conservative and Republican traditions that built the country and that we need for our continued balance.
As always, discussion is welcome at codger817@gmail.com and, as always, I write for the joy of spreading good ideas. Feel free to forward or re-use as you like.
