Debunking a Longstanding Myth About William F. Buckley
Matthew Dallek (Politico Magazine, 31 March 2023); excerpt adapted from his book Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right (Basic Books, 2023). Genre: history / book excerpt. Argues that Buckley’s vaunted “excommunication” of the John Birch Society is a myth: he targeted Robert Welch personally while courting the rank-and-file, and his ideological overlap with Bircher politics was substantial.
Core Argument
Dallek attacks one of postwar conservatism’s foundational origin stories: that William F. Buckley Jr. purged the far right from the conservative movement through his National Review editorials of 1961–1965. Citing political scientists Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld, Dallek summarizes the revisionist consensus:
“However mythologized by movement conservatives since, Buckley’s halting project of excommunication was more notable for its ineffectuality and tardiness than its impact in drawing a cordon sanitaire.”
The “purge” was a carefully engineered piece of theater that cordoned off the founder (Robert Welch) while keeping the membership inside the conservative tent.
Key Claims
- Buckley shared the Birchers’ ideological substance. In 1957 he called white people “the advanced race,” defended Jim Crow, attacked critics of Joseph McCarthy, and published a book defending McCarthy. Through the 1950s National Review shared writers with the antisemitic American Mercury.
- The 1961 editorial was internally agonized. Senior NR editor Frank Meyer urged caution: “Some of the solidest conservatives in the country are members of the John Birch Society… we should act in such a way as to alienate them no more than is strictly necessary.” Publisher William Rusher wrote that “the membership… has not yet earned our condemnation, by any means.”
- Pressure from Birchers was fierce. Bircher and NR contributor Clarence Manion warned Buckley that any criticism would let liberals “drive a hole through the wall of conservative opposition.” NR National Council member Paul Talbert warned Buckley about losing subscriptions.
- Buckley vowed to thread the needle: “to make it absolutely clear that National Review approves of the John Birch Society, while disapproving Bob’s tendency to frame his entire position on the presumption of endemic disloyalty.”
- The public attack was on Welch, not the membership. February 1962 editorial called Welch’s views “far removed from common sense.” Barry Goldwater confirmed: Welch’s views did not “represent the feelings of most members of the John Birch Society.” When a reader complained about NR’s “anti-Birch” stand, Rusher dared him to find “anywhere in [the editorial’s] first five pages, a single word of criticism of the John Birch Society.”
- Buckley, in writing, denied criticizing Birchers at all. Letter to Birch founder T. Coleman Andrews: “I don’t think in my life I have made a single unfavorable reference to any members of the John Birch Society.”
- Continued ideological and material entanglement through the mid-1960s: many NR subscribers also subscribed to JBS’s American Opinion; Buckley’s 1965 NYC mayoral campaign drew Birch and fringe support; Buckley maintained relationships with extreme Birch leaders like the antisemitic conspiracist Revilo Oliver.
- Goldwater 1964 followed the same playbook. Renounced Welch’s incendiary rhetoric while welcoming the rank-and-file and many of their ideas into the fold.
- The “excommunication” was structurally impossible. “No single conservative leader had the power to ‘excommunicate’ the Birch Society. Doing so would have required the consistent, stalwart attention of numerous mainstream conservatives.”
Why It Matters for the New Right Thesis
Dallek’s piece is the single most useful corrective for the wiki’s central question of Counterrevolution: did Buckley/Goldwater/Reagan ever truly draw a boundary that the Trump era has now broken?
His answer — no, the boundary was performative from the beginning — strengthens Joshua Tait’s claim that the American Conservative Movement has always been functionally counterrevolutionary, and reframes the post-2016 mainstreaming of the fringe as a continuation, not a deviation. The movement’s gatekeepers were never the gatekeepers the standard story made them out to be. The Bircher-to-MAGA continuity becomes legible: many of the ideas (anti–civil rights conspiracism, anti-UN nationalism, anti–“deep state” rhetoric, antisemitic-adjacent grievance, Welch’s racial demographic anxiety) survived because they were never actually expelled.
Direct Tension with Trickey
Dallek’s piece is in direct tension with Long before QAnon, Ronald Reagan and the GOP purged John Birch extremists from the party (Erick Trickey, Washington Post, 2021), which retells the standard “purge” narrative — Reagan’s “I am not a member” 1965 statement, Buckley’s October 1965 14-page NR special, the Dirksen-Ford joint denunciation, and (citing biographer Carl T. Bogus) the claim that “no fig leaf of respectability remained” and the JBS went into “steep decline.”
The two pieces describe the same chronology with opposite emphases:
| Trickey | Dallek |
|---|---|
| Buckley as principled boundary-keeper | Buckley as tactical fence-walker |
| Welch + Birchers expelled | Welch sacrificed; Birchers retained |
| Conservative movement excommunicated conspiracy | Conservative movement absorbed conspiracy while disavowing its mascot |
| MAGA / QAnon as a return of what was once expelled | MAGA / QAnon as a continuation of what was never really expelled |
The wiki sides with Dallek, both because his account is the more recent historiography and because it accords with the Tait/Bradford/Francis through-line: the movement’s restorationist substance has always exceeded its rhetorical respectability.
Cross-References
- William F. Buckley Jr. — the figure whose myth this dismantles
- John Birch Society — the organization at the center of the dispute
- Robert Welch — JBS founder; the figure Buckley sacrificed
- Barry Goldwater — followed Buckley’s “criticize Welch, court members” template
- Counterrevolution — Dallek strengthens Tait’s case
- Russell Kirk — present at the Palm Beach 1962 meeting that strategized the partial repudiation
- Paleoconservatism — what the un-purged Bircher tendencies became
- Long before QAnon, Ronald Reagan and the GOP purged John Birch extremists from the party — the standard narrative this piece debunks
- Conservatives or Counterrevolutionaries? — Tait’s adjacent argument