> [...]
Look, I'm sure there are still people who subscribe to conservative magazines and belong to conservative groups who think water fluoridation is a communist conspiracy. Or that individual altruism and Christian morality should be denounced as weakness of will. Or that segregation is a good thing. But none of those is considered a mainstream position of movement conservatism. So that's what's I mean when I say the NR read the Birchers, Randites, and Wallaceites out of the movement.
A point of terminology: "crazy." Obviously I think a large percentage of the stuff published in the National Review over the past 55 years has been, in some sense, crazy. But when I say NR read crazies out of the movement, I'm talking about the kind of crazy mentioned above.
> And yes, the NR famous engaged the John Birch Society. But weren't
> they based on a bunch of grouplets that basically became the
> Goldwaterites -- who became the organizational backbone of the new
> right?
Most early Birch Society members never bought into the rantings of Robert Welch. Even most of JBS's national executive committee privately dissented from many specific things Welch said. I mean, the guy believed in the Illuminati and all sorts of stuff that have nothing to do with Goldwaterism. After 1964, once NR started denouncing the JBS as a group and the mainstream GOP party organization became more congenial to the hard right, the JBS suffered a gradual exodus of its sane members and only a truly crazy rump remained.
Some of that rump participated in the Wallace movement, but the Wallaceites in no way had the support of mainstream movement conservatives. Young Americans for Freedom polled its members in 1968 and Wallace was the preferred candidate of 4% of them. YAF's newspaper, New Guard, reported the results of the poll and wrote in an editorial that even that low score for Wallace was "an official embarrassment to YAF's leaders." The editorial reported that at YAF's national office, Wallace was "typically referred to...as a 'populist demagogue' who exacerbates racial prejudice for personal gain, and who would destroy conservative politics."
And why should they have supported Wallace? The conservatives very much wanted to elect a conservative president. Wallace, or anyone who talked like him, could never win a national election. Much better to cannily weave some of Wallace's underlying themes into the conservative message to win over his electorate, but without having to sound like lunatics.
> This style of attacking small points in order to defend the main
> thrust of absolute crazies seems to me the soul of the NR stance. And
> the essence of the relation of Republican media and party elites to
> their conspiracoid wing to this day.
Look, Alexander Cockburn has said some really crazy shit over the years. But personally, I really like him. I read "The Golden Age Is In Us" at a low point in my life and found it charming and inspiring. If asked by to assess Cockburn by a hostile questioner, I would attack the small points of crazy in order to defend the main thrust.
So far be it from me to denounce right-wingers for doing the same thing. It would be easier to just denounce them for being right-wing in the first place.
SA