◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Purge Your Own I am William F. Buckley Jr. I was born in 1925 to a Catholic family of ten children. I founded a magazine called National Review in 1955. I hosted a television program called Firing Line for thirty-three years. I was, for half a century, the central institution of post-war American conservatism. Whatever conservatism in your country once meant in its respectable form, I had a great deal to do with the meaning. I want to talk to you about a particular act I performed in 1962, because it is the most useful thing about my career to you now. In the early nineteen-sixties there was an organization in the United States called the John Birch Society. Its founder, Robert Welch, declared in writing that President Eisenhower was a conscious agent of the international communist conspiracy. The Birchers believed that fluoridation of the drinking water was a communist plot, that the civil rights movement was a communist plot, and that most of the United States government had been infiltrated by Soviet operatives. They were attaching themselves to the rising conservative movement. In 1962 I devoted the pages of my magazine to a long denunciation of Robert Welch and the Birch Society. I argued that no movement could call itself serious if it could not distinguish between its principled members and its lunatics. I said, in print, that the responsible right had to police its own boundaries or it would become indistinguishable from the kook fringe. By the late sixties the position had largely succeeded. The Republican Party that ran Nixon and Reagan would not have been intellectually respectable without that work. That is the most important fact about post-war conservatism. The movement was respectable because it policed its own extremists. I died in February 2008. I did not live to see what came afterward. But I had named him by name. In an essay in the year 2000 about a New York real-estate developer called Donald Trump, I described him precisely: a narcissist whose every utterance was an act of self-display, a demagogue with no convictions deeper than his appetite for the camera. I called him what he was. The conservative movement I founded then proceeded, over the next two decades, to welcome him in. The cost of that decision is what you are now living through. I do not speak from perfect moral authority. I was on the wrong side of civil rights in the nineteen-fifties and nineteen-sixties. I wrote, in my own magazine, that the South had the right to maintain a white-minority rule, on grounds I lived long enough to acknowledge were wrong but never fully repaired. The young James Baldwin defeated me at the Cambridge Union in 1965 and I should have heard him better than I did. And I will say this plainly: I did not purge the racist remnant of my movement as thoroughly as I purged the Birchers. That failure of mine is part of the genealogy of what your conservative movement has now become. So I am asking you to do what I did in 1962, more completely than I did. The strongman in your White House is the photographic negative of what conservatism was supposed to mean. He has no books. He has no faith. He has no principle deeper than his own gratification. He is not the heir of Reagan or of Goldwater or of Edmund Burke. He is the heir of Father Coughlin and Joseph McCarthy and Robert Welch — the figures I and a generation of serious conservatives spent our adult lives exiling from the conservative mainstream. He is the Bircher returned, in different clothing, and the movement that calls itself conservative has welcomed him as its leader. Purge your own. Throw out the Birchers, who are now wearing your colors. Police the boundaries. Restore the conservative tradition that took intellectual life seriously, that knew the difference between a principled argument and a demagogue, that understood that no movement survives the welcoming of its own lunatic fringe. Stand athwart history, yelling Stop. But this time, stop the men with your own colors.