Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [133]
Worse than RINOs, Frum and Johnson have not violated conservative principles; they have publicly challenged the right wing’s paranoid fantasies. As conservatives who cannot be easily dismissed as members of the liberal elite, they represent the greatest threat to the hegemony of the right wing, for their disaffirmations of the right’s fabrications feed the small flame of doubt burning quietly in the hearts of the believers. If there were more conservatives like David Frum and Charles Johnson, the tiny flame could bloom into a wildfire, and the whole brittle paper world of right-wing persecution politics would collapse into ashes.
But there are precious few like Frum and Johnson these days. If Republicans have any hope of rescuing their party and the country from the paranoia that has engulfed it, the wobbly-kneed critics need some help. When Michael Steele and other conservatives muster the courage to take on the right wing, their colleagues need to get their backs. When Rush Limbaugh retaliates, someone has to say, “Steele is right. Limbaugh’s rhetoric is ugly and incendiary, and he does not lead our party.” The more people who stand up, the harder it will be for the right to force Republican critics to apologize and genuflect, the harder it will be for paranoid conservatives to cling to their precious fantasies of persecution, and the harder it will be for demagogues of the right to exert their influence on the political culture and the government of the nation.
“Scorn and Derision”
To see how quickly the precarious edifice of political paranoia can crumble when determined leaders from both ends of the political spectrum start whacking at it, we need only look to our history.
In January 1962, four of the founding fathers of modern conservatism and a public relations consultant met in a hotel room in Palm Beach, Florida, to discuss Senator Barry Goldwater’s plan to run for president. They included Senator Goldwater; William F. Buckley Jr., founder of the National Review; William Baroody, head of the American Enterprise Institute (the think tank that would eject David Frum decades later); Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind; and Jay Hall the PR guy.44
One of the chief topics of discussion was the John Birch Society (JBS). The JBS had been growing rapidly and seducing conservative leaders across the country. From 1,500 members at the beginning of 1960, it had attracted between 60,000 and 100,000 members by the end of 1961.45 The five men in Palm Beach despised the paranoia of JBS founder Robert Welch, who had accused Dwight Eisenhower of being a communist agent. They were also concerned that the JBS’s support of Goldwater would discredit his candidacy. So they came up with a plan to marginalize it, dividing up the responsibilities. William F. Buckley Jr. promised to expose Welch to “scorn and derision” in the National Review. Russell Kirk said, “I’ll just say, if anybody gets around to asking me, that the guy is loony and should be put away.”46
In the next issue of the National Review, Buckley published a five-thousand-word excoriation of Welch in which he encouraged conservatives not to “acquiesce quietly” to Welch’s wrongheaded ideas. Senator Goldwater then published a response in the subsequent issue, writing, “I believe the best thing Mr. Welch could do to serve the cause of anti-Communism in the United States would be to resign . . . We cannot allow the emblem of irresponsibility to attach to the conservative banner.”47
After Goldwater had lost his presidential bid, the National Review continued to attack Robert Welch and the JBS. In an even more scathing 1965 article, Buckley assailed Welch’s “conspiratorial mania,” “paranoid and unpatriotic drivel,” and “psychosis of conspiracy.”48
In the meantime, Richard Hofstadter published “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” in Harper’s magazine. The essay described the tactics and characteristics of paranoid political movements and singled out the JBS as the most prominent contemporary proponent