Kabaservice, Buckley, and the Tea Party

Geoffrey Kabaservice has an excellent essay in the New Republic about what today's Republicans ought to learn from William F. Buckley's attack on the John Birch Society. (This is the Kabaservice whom we last met here advancing strange artistic notions about the Eisenhower Memorial.) In 1962, the Birchers subscribed to all sorts of crazy theories, including most famously the belief that a Chinese army was actually massing in Mexico, waiting for a signal from communist sympathizers in Washington to sweep across America. Buckley got tired of people assuming that as a conservative activist he must share such notions, and Kabaservice clearly wishes today's sane conservatives would do something similar about the Tea Party:

Needless to say, it is not a keen grasp of reality that distinguishes the politics of the Tea Party. The many Tea Partiers who fail to distinguish between liberalism and socialism are only repeating the errors of the Birchers, whom Buckley criticized for their “neurotic oversimplifications.” In his later years, Buckley believed that the Republican failures in Iraq stemmed from a similar tendency to engage in ideological wishful thinking instead of hard analysis. He also cautioned against the tendency of conservatives to transform the cautious insights of supply-side economics, for example, into theological certainties, and to move toward ever more narrow and rigid definitions of doctrinal acceptability. Fanaticism and obsession, he believed, ultimately represented a surrender of individual freedom. . . .

Above all, Buckley wanted conservatism to be a responsible and effective governing philosophy. He recognized that a movement that delegitimizes its opponents as Communists and traitors is doomed to be irresponsible and ineffective. He warned against conservative triumphalism and refusal to compromise. He had been mentored by Whittaker Chambers on the need to balance the ideal with the practical, and to strive for conservative advances that inevitably would fall short of utopia. To live, Buckley reminded conservatives, is to maneuver.

It certainly would be nice if we had some conservative leaders dedicated to  making the compromises necessary to govern. And to telling the truth.