William F. Buckley, Totalitarian Bureaucracy Apologist?

Not so fast. What counted as “totalitarian bureaucracy” (also referred to as “Big Government for the duration”) for William Buckley would seem like Nozick’s minimal state to today’s Crooked Timber commenter.

Wow, nothing’s changed in republican rhetoric in 60 years – the Republican Party isn’t really opposing the democrats, taxes are slavery and nobody cares about freedom anymore…

An interesting side pt, just based on the OP (I don’t intend to read the full Buckley pce), is that it appeared in Commonweal, known as a (slightly, more-or-less) leftish-of-center Catholic magazine. But i don’t really know the magazine’s history.

It’s always just temporary. For the dur-ation, until the hardness of the Diamond Mountain has been worn down to not even a nub. And then ….

In other news, I had a short fb conversation with I had thought a libertarian who couldn’t see that the Great Deportation Task Force was a threat to the life and liberty of ordinary Americans. An internal enemy, you say?

The most important issue of the day, it is time to admit it, is survival. Here there is apparently some confusion in the ranks of Bolsheviks, and hard thinking is in order for them. The thus-far invincible aggressiveness of the capitalist powers does or does not constitute a threat to the security of the Soviet Union, and we have got to decide which. If it does, we shall have to arrange, sensibly, our battle plans; and this means that we have got to accept Big Government for the duration — for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged, given our present government skills, except though the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores.

Привет, товарищ Баклий!

I agree it’s self-consistent. This was the time when US government thinking about the Soviet Threat (aka Red Menace) was officially paranoid. Go and read NSC-68, with its nightmarish picture of an ideological struggle being waged all over the world at every level of society and government. There were plenty of people at the time (some of them in government) who thought that nothing less than the complete mobilisation of western societies, without tolerance of dissent of any kind, was required to defeat the Commies.
And don’t forget that the small-government tradition, from Locke onwards, still believed that a powerful and if necessary repressive security sector was needed to protect private property – for some, indeed, that was government’s only function. For the drafters of NSC-68 Communism was (I’m quoting from memory) a “fanatical faith” that among the things would do away with private property and impose state control on everything. So it’s quite logical – depending of course on where you start from.

Anarcissie @ 2

LOL. That’s a lot of snark you’re shoveling!

But surely even you must have a soft spot for the guy who, when asked what his first act would be if elected mayor of New York, said “I’d demand a recount.”

@13 As fn says, Republican rhetoric hasn’t changed a bit in 70 years.

It was consistent and he was correct. We needed what he describes. We got what he describes and we (obviously a good portion of crooked timer commentators are not included in that we) won because of it.

If you are looking to score points the money quote is

‘We must repeat this truism as often as Roosevelt repeated his promises to keep us out of war .’

That quote is mind boggling and on so many levels.

If one wants a cheap thrill, quoting someone out of historical context will often do it, but don’t let’s kid ourselves that we have a better grasp of the person or his times.

There was virtually no notable figure in 1952 who publicly questioned that the US was in a life-or-death struggle with communism. Conservatives and liberals had supported the mobilization of the economy to battle the Axis powers, so it is hardly news that they were ready to do the same if it came to a shooting war with the Soviets.

The Americans for Democratic Action were in the van of those pushing for confronting Moscow. Many of its members were former socialists who had broken with the pacifism of the hard left.

If we are going to match quotes, the rhetorical high point of crusading anti-communism probably came in President Kennedy’s inaugural. He pledged that “we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.” Not to mention that he had helped get himself elected on the charge that Eisenhower had permitted a missile gap to develop between the US and the USSR.

Anarcissie @ 20

I can’t really speak to Buckley before the seventies. So I won’t demur, although the first thing I ever published was a review of Michael Harrington’s Twilight of Capitalism in National Review. Vanished without trace, I think.

Where I will disagree is with your claim that Buckley might have preached “freedom to nearly the point of anarchy.” Surely that is another anachronism. Buckley was no libertarian. He was a conservative who believed in authority and tradition. I think the only anarchists at the time were on the cultural left.

I can say pretty confidently that Buckley was perfectly fine with authority, even totalitarianism, directed at someone other than himself. The lesser breeds if you will.
The threat of communism to Buckley and his
ilk was that they would become members of the proletariat, at best. Becoming one of the commoners was likely thought of as a fate worse than death. The social equivalent of being deflowered by savages.

I’m not a big fan of Nietzsche, but I do think he thought deeply about things, and got some things right, and apparently Buckley didn’t consider that this might be something he did get right:

“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster.
And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.”

No, the threat was being in a society that practice mass censorship, summary executions, tolerated no dissent, and was vastly poorer than the West. There is a reason very few states in Europe wanted Stalinism back after 1991.

If true, what is the likelihood that he had an anonymous hookup with his old buddy Gore Vidal?

Will G-R already wrote it up at #9, but this kind of logic was a staple of Marxism-Leninism, and is probably at least implicit in plain old Marxism (at least, Bakunin thought so). You still hear echoes of it on the left in the current day, as in “Why can’t those Occupy people organize to get anything done? They need a list of demands and a charismatic leader” etc. An organized and disciplined movement is obviously not the same thing as Big Government, but anarchistic commitments towards not going down this path can look like disorganization to some people.

@David

You said paranoid, you mean right on the mark.

Let us review the claims made, shall we?

On the one hand we have the anti communists. They claimed that Stalin was a totalitarian dictator. That he had killed tens of millions. That his system would kill millions more given the chance to expand. That he conquered and imposed his system on eastern Europe as part of building a unified communist block. That his system was far more capable of making weapons than consumer surplus. That he had a massive intelligence network of spies and sympathizers that reached to the highest levels of American government and culture. That CPUSA took direction from Moscow and was the prime recruiting ground for that network. That Whittaker chambers’ accusations were largely true.

All of these claims were true. Every one of them was disputed by the anti anti communists, for various reasons. It’s not paranoid to start a witch hunt when your town is actually infested with honest to goodness witches.

I respond to Cassander this way:

What the Red Scare represented was a criminalization of politics. The New Deal Internationalists were seeking to avoid a Cold War with the Soviets. People like Harry Dexter White and even Alger Hiss did not commit treason as defined by our Constitution, and in White’s case, he was acting on authority of Morgantheau and FDR in trying to find a way to bring the Soviets into the World Bank and IMF. Hiss too committed no crime that I can find while serving as a lead aide to Hopkins and FDR at Yalta, for example, and he was merely following Hopkins’ and FDR’s lead in liasioning with the Soviets during the negotiations. Hiss’ time with Chambers in the mid to late 1930s was when Hiss was a lawyer who had dealings in the Agricultural Department. The relatively few true Soviet spies in the US government got very little for their efforts (Let’s remember Fuchs was more effective than the Rosenbergs in pilfering nuclear bomb secrets and at least Oppie had told Graves he didn’t even want Fuchs in the Manhattan Project, but was overruled) and most were just Reds who felt more strongly than the average person about promoting labor unions and racial tolerance and support for blacks in our nation.

When we avoid conflating being a Red and being a spy, we begin to see the politics of the time in a less hysterical way and realize there were in fact very few persons actually practicing witchcraft. The irony is of course that people like Aldrich Ames and the Walker family, who were not motivated by politics but “good old money” motives, gained access to far more state secrets for the Soviets–and of course, the Soviets still collapsed under their own weight. This is what led Daniel Patrick Moynihan to doubt the cult of secrecy surrounding official Washington since the start of the Cold War.

Maybe our Founders were wise in having such a narrow definition of “treason.” I think that is what kept our nation from dissolving its union in the 1790s as Jeffersonians accused Hamiltonians and Hamilton of fealty toward England and Hamiltonians and Hamilton accused Jefferson of fealty toward France. It led to the Alien & Sedition Acts which thankfully could have been worse in their prosecutions, but were still bad enough for a young republic. Same with the Smith Act and the Espionage Act and the aggressive use of contempt citations and orders to hound out Reds in the late 1940s and 1950s.

Relax. Trump and Putin are going to be best friends forever.

There is also the hypothesis that – no matter if society and the state endorse or discard Burke’s or Buckley’s suggestions – when the hostilities last for long enough, the more liberal, less statist party to a war inevitably assimilates towards its adversary to the point of the two becoming indistinguishable. I think this assumption underpins the setting of 1984.

When Gore Vidal called Buckley a crypto-Nazi in a TV debate in 1968, he couldn’t have known that 28 years later, Buckley would propose that HIV-positive gays be literally branded on their buttocks to identify them as infected and dangerous.

Anybody who expects a consistent anti – “Big Government” position from the political Right is deluded, historically illiterate, and not paying attention. And also extremely gullible.

Probably a member the US pundit class.

Oh Cassander, you speak with less precision than you think.

Hiss did not deliver cables to any Ruskies at Yalta. He delivered rather unimportant cables to Chambers in the late 1930s–and if you can find me how it affected America in any way that was so terrible, please let us know. I wonder, in this context, what you think of the Dulles Bros. and their footsie activities with Japanese war lords and German Nazis at the time…or how Bullitt and Joe Kennedy gave information to Nazi informants too during the 1930s and into the first year of the European side of World War II…Or the manner in which Allen Dulles negotiated and went beyond his instructions with German Nazis later in the War or John F. Dulles’ “Christians for a Just Peace” (not sure of that exact title) in the middle of the war preaching forgiveness of the Nazis…

Here is also Conrad Black, no liberal-left guy, in his magisterial FDR bio, at page 1080:

“….Hiss’ chief contribution at the (Yalta) conference was a sensibly reasoned argument against giving the Soviet Union three votes in the international organization. In this as in all other matters, while he was competent and unexceptionable in his functions, Hiss had no influence whatever on Roosevelt or American policy at Yalta.” (Parenthesis added) He noted FDR had never met Hiss before Yalta and never spent a minute alone with FDR at Yalta per Charles Bohlen, a long time US diplomat.

Also, the source you cite on the KGB records, as you rhetorically downgrade the importance of Ames, actually refers to Ames as the “most successful” spy for Soviet Russia.

And for the record, nobody is talking about how genocidal Stalin was with largely Ukranian kulaks and what you don’t mention, the Thermidorian destruction of the Soviet ruling elites of the Great Purge period of 1935-1939. And you don’t really refute my point about Fuchs because that undermines the thesis of the right wing for decades, which is that Commies were festering inside the US government in Washington DC waiting to destroy the US from within. Fuchs was outside the orbit, served as a scientist at Los Alamos and then departed as he was being found out, and ended up in Europe. He was a known Commie from the start, having experienced real oppression as a Jew from Nazis and deciding only Commies would be best to fight Nazism (however wrong we think that, one has to at least understand it), and oh, yes, I just remembered, the US and USSR were allies during WWII which makes him in that context not much different than Jonathan Pollard or those who willingly gave secret information to Somerset Maugham at those swank DC parties, when Maugham was serving as a British spy against Americans. Funny how hardly anyone was put on trial for contempt or spying for that…

Finally, the reason our Founders placed such a hard burden of proof for the definition of Treason in our Constitution is they intuitively if not expressly understood, from their own life experience, that foreign affairs is usually a continuation of domestic policies and disputes.

Two points:
At this stage, few people saw a military threat from the Soviet Union. The “aggressiveness” Buckley mentioned was partly the Soviet strategic desire to retain control of the territories they had conquered in 1945, but mostly the idea that Communism was a virulently hostile fanatical ideology bent on world domination, and needed to be combated by every conceivable means, everywhere, if it was not to triumph. Enemies were anywhere and everywhere, and could be living next door to you. This is why I described the documents and speeches of the time as paranoid: they were conspiracy theory products, and to find their like today you’d have to go to the further shores of the conspiracy Internet, or perhaps the Islamic State.
Second, part of the fear was the attractiveness of Communism in western states. Remember that in France and Italy the Communists were regularly clocking up 20-25% of the votes and had Ministers in government. This was primarily because of their role in the Resistance, and because of the complete discrediting of most of the parties of the Centre and Right. A Communist “takeover” of Europe did not seem as much of a fantasy then as it does now.

Ian Maitland 09.12.16 at 2:57 am @ 34:
‘I take my hat off to your astounding memory. I can’t deny that some of the attributions to William Buckley sound plausible.

I do have a creative memory, but in this case I think it’s pretty accurate. Unfortunately there does not seem to be any way to check. Buckley later wrote up his interviews or debates with Harrington in a book, but in all four (I think there were four) he portrayed himself as the ‘winner’, which was not my judgement of the one I saw, unless one scored only on entertainment value.

@Anarcissie

>I’m not sure conflating mass murder with some sort of excess death by demographics calculation due to bad farm policy makes a lot of sense. I mean stick to killing s, the red Chinese executed a lot of people to, it was a big country.

I am sticking to the killings. when you take someone’s seed grain and leave him to starve, you’re killing him.

>European capitalism also murdered 10s of million of Europeans in the 20th century, but WW1 always gets a pass.

Which capitalists started ww1? The anarchist who murdered franz ferdinand? The austrian, german or russian monarchists? WW1 is a remarkably uncapitalist war.

>s. As a person of largely Irish descent, it is my duty to suggest that body counters also consider not only poor little old Ireland under the liberal rule of the Brutish Empire, but India as well

Famines in pre-industrial societies are a fact of life. the Raj did not cause them, made extensive efforts to prevent them in fact. Communist famines, by contrast, were deliberately caused by governments requisitioning food at gunpoint and letting the peasants starve. As for liberal ireland, the worst you can accuse them of is doing nothing. had stalin and Mao done nothing, millions would have lived. They did not do nothing, they actively suppressed the truth, prevented aid from being sent, and shot people who tried to flee the famine zones. And even by the most generous of plausible accountings, the death tolls for communist famines was an order of magnitude higher than anything you can ascribe to liberalism.

Oh dear Cassander. Your history appears to be a little bit biased.

I’ve just skimmed through WFB’s article. He argued that the Republicans had all but abandoned their traditional stance on the principal strategic issue, anti-statism:

It appears to be the new historic destiny of the Republican Party to accept the Democratic platform, less a token constant.

But the “strategic issue” was only the “second issue of the campaign,” the first being “survival.” Buckley conceded both parties approached this tactical point in the same way (or, rather, Taft and Truman did) and, unlike the strategic issue, that similarity was acceptable:

…our chances of ultimate victory against an indigenous bureaucracy are far greater than they could ever be against one controlled from abroad…

The “Missouri ignoramus” was, to Buckley, much preferable to the “Georgian bandit.” Those republicans who, like WFB, agreed the Soviet menace was overarching…

…will have to support large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards and the attendant centralization of power in Washington—even with Truman at the reins of it all.

The article was ostensibly an attempt to explain why Taft, as the Republican candidate, would still be preferable to Truman (who had not yet withdrawn from the race) despite the lack of substantial policy differences beyond a “token constant.” Not a particularly convincing attempt.

Wow Cassander, absence of facts much? Ireland was a colony, not a feudal state; native Americans were exterminated In a war, not just by disease; and the death toll in Iraq was a million by 2008. If you can’t get basic facts right why should anyone listen to you bleat about history?

>Those communists in Germany at the turn of the century trying to overthrow their capitalist government must of been confused, given that Germany wasn’t even capitalist.

By the turn of the 20th century, Germany was capitalist. Not the turn of the 19th. Even by 1850, capitalism is, at best, still pretty nascent and confined largely to the big urban centers and their immediate surroundings. Peasants into Frenchmen is not about Germany, obviously, but it does do a good job of showing how capitalism spread in France throughout the 19th century (it covers time from well before the date of the cover), and how surprisingly late it was to come to much of the country. Germany was a little ahead in this regard, but not that much.

It was January 1952. Nazism was dead and buried. The British empire was coming apart spectacularly. In contrast, the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China were clearly on the rise. The Rosenberg trial (March 1951) had just shown how Communist sympathies could motivate otherwise decent and high-minded Americans into spying for Moscow. Against that backdrop, Buckley’s assessment of the Red menace was neither paranoid nor exceptional. The oddness is not in that.

It’s in Buckley’s willingness to support the functioning of the state on a war footing (although temporary, as Glen Tomkins argues in #40), even under Truman’s management. Additionally, Buckley is taking for granted that the war state would in all likelihood be a welfare state. Contrary to John Holbo’s remark in #4, Buckley wishes wistfully for the expungement of the “horrors of welfarism” while realizing that the real-life Republicans are not going to “repudiate the ‘inroads that have been made over the past years into individual freedom.”

@49 ‘Famines in pre-industrial societies are a fact of life.’ True.
‘the Raj did not cause them.’ Perhaps, depending on the meaning of the term ’cause’
‘made extensive efforts to prevent them in fact.’
The claim requires evidence, especially considering the numbers who died despite the ‘extensive efforts’ that claim were made to avert disaster. Did the Raj want Indians to die in droves? But large numbers did, in part as a result of preventable inefficiencies by the British colonial administration and policy decisions.

I’m glad Cassander once again proving the old adage that when it comes to republicans accusing people of things it’s always projection.

>— indeed, that the moral situation of writing history requires that one axe or another be ground

When you can’t attack facts, attack motive! Logically fallacious, to be sure, but traditional. Why conquest wrote what he did was irrelevant. What matters is that he was largely right and his detractors were largely wrong. Or do you value ideology above truth?

>when body-counting games come around, I am morally constrained to tediously mention again those mounds, heaps, and piles accumulated by liberal capitalist Britain in the 19th and early 20th century,

Are you also constrained to ignore the mountains of corpses your ideological kinsmen generated? Because I am hard pressed to find people that speak well of colonialism these days, marxism, not so much.

>, instead of defending the indefensible.

Only if by defending you mean pointing out that pile your ideas associated with is much larger than the one my ideas are defending the pile. Where I come from, that’s called math.

cassander commented on William F. Buckley, Totalitarian Bureaucracy Apologist?.
‘When you can’t attack facts, attack motive! Logically fallacious, to be sure, but traditional. Why conquest wrote what he did was irrelevant…’

The only fact in the sentence to which you refer was my assertion that I liked Conquest, and why, which is that I agreed with him on the point mentioned. And then I told you which axe I was grinding. No facts or motives were harmed! The math cannot run until the moral axe has been sharpened, because otherwise we are going to find that the commies are judged by one standard and the liberals by another. That is why, in my childhood, the Irish famine existed only in folk tales and family legends, until one day I opened an obscure book which said that more than a million had died of starvation or the associated diseases that accompany famine — the Four Horsemen ride in close formation — and that during this period, food was exported from Ireland. When I’ve brought this up in body-count games such as this one, the response from the fans of liberalism and capitalism is always the same.

@JD. Badly expressed. Should have said “had had” Both the French and Italian Communist parties exited government in 1947, but they retained control of major cities and were a very significant electoral force. In 1952, the fear of a Communist government in France or Italy, elected or as a result of a mass seizure of power (general strikes etc) was very real.

cassander@60
And the British government couldn’t ship in supplies because Germans were sinking British ships.

Rubbish. The point is the British govt didn’t even try to ship in supplies; in fact it diverted what supplies it had elsewhere.

See this review of Mukerjee’s Churchill’s Secret War:
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2031992,00.html

Whatever one thinks of Churchill overall, this was not his finest hour, to put it as mildly as possible.

@LFC
>Rubbish. The point is the British govt didn’t even try to ship in supplies; in fact it diverted what supplies it had elsewhere.

Yes, they did the math and concluded they didn’t have the spare food or the shipping. Churchill was unquestionably callous towards Indian suffering, but even if he had wanted to stop the famine, once the japanese conquered burma there was little he could actually do beyond the aid that was sent.

>p.s. The point is not that the famine was ‘capitalist’, but rather has to do w its preventability (which is the part of your remark I was originally addressing).

The only way to prevent it would have been to prevent the fall of southeast asia to the japanese, something that was beyond the power of the UK.

@Anarcissie

> I would guess. One million was about a quarter of it.

more like an 8th.

>That puts the English gentlemen not in the Stalin class but the Pol Pot class.

Well first, the holodomor killed about well first, stalin killed about 1/3 of the population of the ukraine. And if you insist on comparing the percentage of all of the USSR, then I will insist on comparing the irish famine to all of the UK, and you will still come out the worse.

On the moral level, though, the two are only equivalent if you think there is no difference between a bad surgeon and a good butcher.

Your assessment of the Soviet menace is spot on IMHO, but what’s the point of discussing the Bengali famine or the Great Irish Famine here?

Stupid people don’t understand De Morgan’s laws.

@Anarcissie

>The initial question was whether it was sensible to see Communism as the number one threat to the US in 1952, given the information available to the general public and the upper circles of government at that moment

What else could you possible consider a larger threat in 1952? It was hostile, it had nukes, and it had already murdered tens of millions. it was certainly a more direct threat to the US than the Nazis were.

>Hence the fear was nourished.

The establishment loathed McCarthy and relentlessly mocked Chambers. Alger Hiss had former presidential nominees and sitting supreme court justices testify on his behalf as character witnesses. The sitting president condemned his trial. You can’t get more establishment than that. Anti-communism in the US was always a decidedly populist phenomenon, something elites were afraid of, not whipping up.