Posted on Tuesday, January 3, 2023. Thanks to Dale Steinreich’s “The Coming of Conservatives, 1951.”
1951, The Establishment Takeover with William F. Buckley’s God and Man and Yale.
1955, he founded the National Review with James Burnham and Willmoore Kendall. What gave Buckley and the conservatives the advantage was the National Security State: Buckley [CIA], Burnham [OSS, CIA], Kendall [OSS, CIA]. which made no sense for a new movement seeking liberty and advocating small government. There already was a small government: the libertarians. Why did they need to be replaced? Simple: they opposed the U.S. empire.
1947, the National Security Act formed the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA was prohibited by law from spying on Americans. What is it doing today? Spying on Americans.
1952, the National Security Agency, NSA, was supposedly formed to monitor foreign threats. What is it doing today? Collecting the phone calls, texts, and emails of all Americans. Buckley and company were truly activists for the national security state. formed in the late 1940s to the early 1950s.
1955, The National Review Crew: Salesmen for the Deep State. Principal founders for the National Review were Buckley, Burnham, Kendall, and William Casey. All worked for the OSS and CIA. Buckley’s sister, Priscilla Buckley, who was Managing Editor, also worked for the CIA.
Buckley’s most notorious writing was “Why the South Must Prevail,” published in the National Review, on August 24, 1957. The National Review’s defense of disenfranchising black voters to preserve segregation. “The central question . . . is whether the white community in the South is entitled to prevail . . . . The white community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.”
Scarier than Buckley was James Burnham. Not only did Burnham truly admire the Third Reich (1942) as a power group, but he also admired Joseph Stalin. In “Lenin’s Heir,” the Partisan Review, Winter, 1945, pp 63-64, he thought both leaders “were decisive and efficient.” “Stalin proves himself a great man in the grand style . . . the banquets, their enormous menus, all against the winter backgrounds of the starving multitudes, the dying millions at the front. . . . to starve by deliberate decision, several million is a type of action attributed ordinarily only to Gods.”
George Orwell was so appalled by Burnham that he wrote two warnings about him. The first is “Second Thoughts on James Burnham,” Polemic, May 1946; the second, is one of the great novels ever, 1984. 1984 was Orwell saying, this [Mao, 45 million dead; Stalin, 43 million dead] is where we’re headed if the James Burnhams of the world get their way.
Again the new movement, the Conservatives, was infuriating. They would rope their audience in by singing the praises of small government. The next minute, they would completely contradict that with a giant, unAmerican military-industrial state. “The Party and the Deep Blue Sea: Ideally, the Republican Platform should acknowledge a domestic enemy: the state,” William F. Buckley, the Commonweal, January 25, 1952.
Nowhere do you see Orwellian doublespeak than in the early Buckley. He starts off favorably quoting early libertarians, Albert J. Nock, Herbert Spencer, and Mencken, going through the usual conservative speil praising small government. Then all of a sudden, he turns on a dime and admits that he doesn’t believe any of it with statements like, “means that we have to accept big government for the duration, a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores. We must support large armies and air forces . . . and the attendant centralization of power in Washington–even with [the Democrat Harry] Truman at the reins of it all.”
1. The Political Economy of Liberal Corporatism, Joseph R. Stromberg. Gary North called Stromberg “a gifted historian.”
2. The Rockefeller File, Gary Allen.
3. The Triumph of Conservatism, Gabriel Kolko, 1963.
4. Left & Right: The Prospect of Liberty, Murray Rothbard.
5. The Ruling Class, Angelo Codevilla.
6. Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism, Gary North.
“God-fearing Christian Americans have been told that the Constitution teaches the absolute separation of Church and State. They have been told correctly. But what they have not been told is precisely where it says this. It does not say this in the First Amendment. The First Amendment says only that Congress shall make no law regarding religion or the free exercise thereof. So, where does the Constitution prohibit a Christian America? In a section that has been ignored by scholars for so long that it is virtually never discussed-the key provision that transformed American into a secular humanist nation. But it took 173 years to do this: from 1788 until 1961.”
7. Conservatism: A Phony Movement?
Charles Burris explains: “What most Americans mistakenly regard today as the “Conservative movement” has undergone many convoluted and dramatic transformations over the past sixty years. Perhaps the most keen observer has been Murray N. Rothbard, the internationally acclaimed economist and historian. How this disinformation process began is detailed in three insightful articles, “Life in the Old Right,” “The Foreign Policy of the Old Right,” and “The Transformation of the American Right,” available online. However, Rothbard’s long-awaited book, The Betrayal of the American Right, tells the full story of how this subversive movement at war with American liberties and the rule of law, came about. “Conservatism,” since the days of Burke and Robespierre, has stood for the status quo and an apologia for tyranny.”
8. A Choice, Not an Echo, Phyllis Schlafly, 1964.
9. The Conscience of a Conservative, Barry Goldwater, 1960.
10. The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, Russell Kirk, 2001.
11. Why Hayek Is a Conservative, Bloom
12. Russell Kirk: American Conservative, Bradley Birzer, 2015. Birzer is the co-founder of the Imaginative Conservative. He’s written a number of books, The American Cicero: The Life of Charles Carroll (Lives of the Founding Fathers, 2010, and others.
13. J. R. R. Tolkien, Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle Earth, Bradley Birzer, 2014.
14. With No Apologies, Barry Goldwater, 1955.
15. The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, George H. Nash, 1976.
16. Statecraft As Soulcraft: What Government Does, George F. Will, 1983. Creepy.
17. by Charles Burris, Sunday, June 4, 2017.
While over many decades there have been innumerable volumes published on Conservatism, tracing its earliest origins, multifaceted ideological character and ever-shifting beliefs over time, two sets of books have proven indispensable in helping me to understand and define its essence and make-up. Most of this important material is unknown to contemporary individuals who self-label themselves as “Conservative,” and identify with such persons as O’Reilly, Hannity, Coulter, Levin, Limbaugh, Savage, or other media talking heads. They are “reactionaries” in the truest sense. for their shallow, ahistorical conception of what it means to be a “Conservative” is more a gut-level reaction or emotive response to the imbecilities of the Left rather than a carefully thought out set of principles.
Many would no doubt assert that Russell Kirk is the uncle of that Star Trek guy.
But the two sets of in-depth, scholarly books presented here address these gaping deficiencies: Peter Witonski, The Wisdom of Conservatism (four volumes); and W. H. Greenleaf’s magisterial three volume set on The British Political Tradition: Volume One: The Rise of Collectivism; Volume Two: The Ideological Heritage; and Volume Three: A Much Governed Nation. Greenleaf’s series is especially useful and intellectually intriguing because he explicitly characterizes the long-range ideological struggle as one between libertarianism versus collectivism.
18. Build a Foundation of Conservatism with these 10 Books from ISI, the Intercollegiate Society of Individuals. This list was put together by Gary North.
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20.
There are so many podcast episodes that come out of Tom Woods and TomWoods.com that saying “This is the best podcast ever” loses its meaning . . . but only a bit. He highlights a talk he gave at a Mises Institution Conference on fascism on how the leader is the embodiment of the people’s will and the infatuation of executive power, in particular of the conservative movement, and he was talking about that as an undesirable aspect of mainstream conservatism. He quotes regularly from Robert Nisbet. He quotes often from Nisbet’s Twilight of Authority. See some terrific quotes from Nisbet here.
The introductory note at the Mises Institute gives this description of Nisbet
Robert Nisbet (1913–1996), the eminent sociologist, taught at Columbia University and made his mark on intellectual life through observing the intermediating structures in society that serve as a bulwark between the individual and the state. He was known as a conservative, and his work is on every list of conservative contributions to the social sciences, but far from being a typical conservative, he blasted conservatism as a species of militarist and invasive interventionism, one that abused people’s public and private pieties in the service of a ghastly civic ethic of statism. He is the author of The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America and Twilight of Authority.
Following his opening quotation, Tom Woods references George H. Nash’s book, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, 2006.
Liberty at Risk, Gary DeMar, 1993.
Stromberg: The Political Economy of Liberal Corporativism (Center for Libertarian Studies, 1977). The following essay by Joseph Stromberg is one of three published in pamphlet form by the Center for Libertarian Studies in 1977 on the subject of state capitalism. As did the others, this one attempts to show how anti-competitive combines depend upon government intervention for their continued existence and how this proves to be pathological.
This bibliography I liked but it is from an anarchist, anti-capitalist site.
The Journal of Libertarian Studies @ The Mises Institute.
The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916, Gabriel Kolko, 1964.
The Conservative Mind: from Burke to Santayana, Russell Kirk.
Witness, Whittaker Chambers, 1952.
Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand, 1957.
The Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay, 1787.
Democracy in America, Alexis De Tocqueville, 1831.
The Conscience of a Conservative, Barry Goldwater, 1960.
Road to Serfdom, Friedrich von Hayek, 1944.
Ideas Have Consequences, Richard Weaver, 1948.
Free to Choose: A Personal Statement, Milton and Rose Friedman, 1980.
God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom,” William F. Buckley, 1951.
On Liberty, John Stuart Mill, 1859.
Our Enemy, the State, Albert Jay Knock (1870-1945), 1935.
Nock was a prominent essayist at the height of the New Deal. In 1935, hardly any public intellectuals were making much sense at all. They pushed socialism. They pushed fascism. Everyone had a plan. Hardly anyone considered the possibility that the state was not fixing society but destroying it bit by bit.
an increase of State power and a corresponding decrease of social power.
It is, unfortunately, none too well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own. All the power it has is what society gives it, plus what it confiscates from time to time on one pretext or another; there is no other source from which State power can be drawn. Therefore every assumption of State power, whether by gift or seizure, leaves society with so much less power; there is never, nor can there be, any strengthening of State power without a corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of social power.
He praises the Articles of Confederation as the closest model of American freedom. And he blasts the men who hammered out the Constitution as nothing but usurpers engaged in a coup d’etat. Far from heralding the drafters, he exposes them as public creditors, land speculators, money lenders, and industrialists looking for the privilege. They tossed out the Articles and used unscrupulous methods to ram the Constitution down the public’s throat.
It was in this stage of American history, Nock says, that the state was unleashed. Next came the party system, and the dynamics of statism that causes “every intervention by the State” to enable another so that “the State stands ever ready and eager to make” interventions through deceit and lies.
A History of the American People, Paul Johnson, 1997.
Modern Times: The World from the 1920s to the 1990s, Paul Johnson, 1983, Revised in 1991.
“The Jeffersonian Conservative Tradition (Union and Empire),” Clyde N. Wilson, November 9, 2015. This essay from Tom Woods was excellent.
Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy, Murray Rothbard, 1984.
The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution, Michael Lind, 1995.
The Next Conservatism, Paul Weyrich, and William S. Lind, 2009.
The American Conservative magazine was founded by Patrick Buchanan.
From Charles Burris, posted Saturday, May 21, 2022. Basically about how the Conservative movement run by William F. Buckley was a fraudulent scheme run by the CIA.
How the CIA Bamboozled The Public For 70 Years
https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/cia-bamboozled-public-70-years/
The Phony Legacy of William F. Buckley, Jr.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/the-phony-legacy-of-william-f-buckley-jr/
“I’m Convinced That The Whole National Review Is A CIA Operation” — Murray Rothbard
https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/im-convinced-whole-national-review-cia-operation-murray-rothbard/
National Review and the Triumph of the New Right
https://www.lewrockwell.com/1970/01/murray-n-rothbard/conservatism-is-a-scam/
How The National Review Sold Its Soul to Google
https://emeralddb3.substack.com/p/how-the-national-review-sold-its?s=r
Old Right, New Right
https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/old-right-new-right/
Conservatism: The CIA’s Synthetic Movement (Amazon book list) https://www.amazon.com/ideas/amzn1.account.AEBTJREFBXVDZILEQGA7RXD32C2Q/21NG0LT2JQTTB?type=explore&ref=idea_cp_vl_vv_d/lewrockwell
America’s Synthetic Political Ideologies At Home And Covert Intervention Abroad
https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/americas-synthetic-political-ideologies-at-home-and-covert-intervention-abroad/
Buckley vs. Vidal: When Debate Became Bloodsport
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/26/movies/buckley-vs-vidal-when-debate-became-bloodsport.html
https://open.spotify.com/episode/30axzMvX0FSfBoODEtBTZE
William F. Buckley: Who was he, really?
There is much more in the three-way discussion above by conservatives Peter Brimelow, Paul Gottfried, and Joseph Ford Cotto which puts a new light upon Buckley’s possible faux Catholicism, and the infamous Gore Vidal/William F. Buckley live to fight on ABC national TV during coverage of the 1968 presidential conventions: was Buckley, like Vidal, indeed gay as was NR publisher William Rusher, and close Buckley tool, Marvin Liebman, who created such Buckleyite front groups as Aid Refugee Chinese Intellectuals, the American Emergency Committee for Tibetan Refugees, the American-Asian Educational Exchange, the American African Affairs Association, the American Committee for Aid to Katanga Freedom Fighters, and the World Anti-Communist League? In addition, Liebman was an early supporter and co-founder of Buckley’s Young Americans for Freedom and the American Conservative Union. Among his later notable clients were: the Friends of Free China, the Friends of Jim Buckley, the Committee of Single Taxpayers, the American-Chilean Council, the Ad Hoc Citizens Legal Defense Fund for the FBI, Firing Line, and Covenant House
The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, George H. Nash, 1976.
San Gabriel Tutor 