Remnant Review
I sent a copy of my article on Whittaker Chambers to a man whose career I have followed at a distance five decades.
He had influence on me for six decades, although I did not know this in 1970.
In the summer of 1960, I was in between my freshman and sophomore years in college. The 1960 campaign for President was beginning. Nixon was going to get the nomination of the Republican Party.
I received a solicitation from an organization that had been formed in 1959: Youth for Goldwater for Vice President. I was told that if I sent a donation, I would get a copy of Goldwater's recently published book, The Conscience of a Conservative. I sent money, and I got the book. I also got a large bright yellow button that said "Goldwater for Vice President." Sadly, I lost that button decades ago.
That was my first introduction to Barry Goldwater. His book was beginning to get him a national reputation.
My contact had recognized the importance of Goldwater in 1959, before the book was published.
In 1958, he had co-founded the original conservative youth organization, the National Student Committee for the Loyalty Oath.
I'm not going to mention his name. He probably wouldn't care if I did, but his was a private letter.
What I did not know until I received his response was this: he was given Whittaker Chambers' tiny office at National Review when he joined the staff in 1960. Here is another example of the slogan, "it's a small world." Or maybe it's six degrees of separation. It's the Kevin Bacon game.
In 1960, William Buckley and three other people started Young Americans for Freedom, or YAF. My contact was one of the three.
After offering some amusing incidents about his cubbyhole office at National Review, he came to the point.
I was also taken by your remarks about Chambers’ pessimism. In hindsight I think that was the great failing of WFB and Burnham—they really didn’t believe a free republic of a pre-20th century sort could compete with a ruthless, centralized state like the Soviet Union. Not only military strength but also an equivalent to the KGB was needed in order to survive, and that led to their wedding of NR to the CIA, and eventually the Deep State as we know it. It was no accident that the chairman of the holding company, National Review Inc., from the launching was Bill Casey. (I did not know or know of Casey back in the 1960s, but I was working with him on a three-book project, to include his memoirs, when he died in 1987.)The other big failing was the failure to distinguish between free markets and corporate “capitalism.” Oh, there has been frothy blather about “Main Street vs. Wall Street,” etc., but the conservative movement has consistently been the lapdog of Big Business. Which now has morphed into the dominance of Wall Street’s financial markets and Silicon Valley. Between the military empire (long after the demise of the Soviet Empire), the Deep State, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley, I can only conclude that—despite its good intentions—the conservative movement has gone down in history as a colossal failure.
I guess I’ve joined Whittaker Chambers. And from his cell down there, the caricatured Benito must be shaking his head in amazement at his earthly success as witnessed by fascist America, fascist Britain, fascist France, fascist Germany, fascist Russia, fascist Israel, fascist Japan, and fascist China, to mention only the key players.
What does he mean by fascism? He means what I wrote about in 2009 in my article, "Economic Fascism and the Bailout Economy." I know this, because at the time, he posted a recommendation that people should read my article.
This is the assessment of a man who was one of the co-founders of the American conservative movement. I agree with his assessment. Well, not quite. I don't think the conservative movement is a colossal failure. I replied to him:
It's a failure, but it was never big enough to be colossal. It was always in the hope-raising business -- hope for the next election. It caught a series of falling flags.
My reference to the falling flags was to the book by Richard Whalen, Catch the Falling Flag (1972). Whalen was part of Nixon's campaign in 1968. He described how he and other Nixon loyalists were summarily dismissed as soon as the transition team was set up by John Mitchell. They were replaced by establishment Republican operatives.
THE NIXON-ROCKEFELLER ALLIANCE
Nelson Rockefeller was the governor of New York in 1960. He wanted the Party's nomination for President. He did not receive it. Nixon cut a deal with him in the summer of 1960 in order to get the support of the liberal wing of the Republican Party. The deal became known as the Treaty of Fifth Avenue.
After his defeat by Kennedy in 1960, Nixon had another fling at politics. He ran for governor of California in 1962. He was defeated by Edmund G. "Pat" Brown, the father of Jerry Brown. That was when Nixon held the famous press conference in which he told the reporters, "You won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore." This was the most inaccurate political prediction in the history of American politics.
Nixon joined a New York law firm in 1963. The firm made him partner in 1964. The firm changed its name to Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie & Alexander. Almost as soon as he joined, his personal contacts led to a big increase in the firm's income. He had a lot of contacts all over the world. The story of this can be found in two books: Nixon in New York: How Wall Street Helped Richard Nixon Win the White House (2018) and Victor Li's book, Nixon in New York (2019).
In a podcast, Li has recorded that Pat Buchanan and Dwight Chapin were employed by the firm. Buchanan became Nixon's major speechwriter as President, and Chapin scheduled his appointments. (Chapin said he could me a job with Nixon in 1971. Fortunately for me, that fell through. He and I were at California Boys State in 1958.)
Here is Li's assessment.
And, he wanted to go to New York because it was a city that excited him. A city that really intrigued him as far what he was looking for. I mean, after he had lost the ’60 election, he went back to California to practice law. And he didn’t find it very fulfilling. And actually, he had spent most of his time preparing his run for governor. So, a move to New York, really kind of stimulated him because it was near the UN, so there were always be like foreign dignitaries passing through. It was seen as the big league for the law because that’s where all the big firms were. That’s where all the big money was. And Nixon was always trying to prove himself to the so-called “Eastern Establishment,” trying to prove his credentials as someone who belonged.And so, going to New York really appealed to him. And a firm like Mudge desperately needed someone like him, who knew everybody who had a big name and who when he called someone that call would get returned. Richard Nixon leaves a message for you, you’re going to call back. So, that was sort of the draw for someone like Nixon. And this is still something that happens to this day on with big law firms. They’re looking for someone with a big Rolodex. Someone who knows a lot of people. Someone who can get those calls returned and can get clients to come in and meet with you. And, Nixon fit the bill for a firm that desperately needed someone to come in and, kind of, shake things up.
And he really seemed to enjoy living in New York. He lived on 5th Avenue, in a really nice apartment building. It was actually the same building that Nelson Rockefeller lived in.
One of the law firm's clients was Chase Bank, the Rockefeller family's bank.
Then John Mitchell arrived.
He knew everybody. He had a good relationship with Nelson Rockefeller actually because, in New York, they worked very closely together. and [inaudible 00:17:51] municipal bonds so the state could raise money. And so, there was too much work coming in for the firm. They needed more people, more infrastructure a larger footprint to be able to deal with all these issues. And Mudge was looking for firms to acquire because they were in expansion mode as well. So, it seemed like a good fit for them. They were looking to kind of get into this municipal bond market, because at the time it was exploding. And there was the added benefit for Nixon that Mitchell was someone who knew everybody that Nixon would need to talk to, get to know. If not, already know someone that he could send to like massage them, or talk with them, or whatnot.Mitchell became the perfect choice for him as far as a campaign manager, even though he had never run a campaign before. And Mitchell proved himself pretty quickly that he and Nixon could work well together.
After 1963, Nixon was part of the New York Republican establishment. That was what Richard Whalen and the other true believers discovered after November 1968.
WEYRICH'S ASSESSMENT IN 1999
Paul Weyrich (1942-2008) was a good friend. He was articulate. He was part of the New Christian Right. He helped found several New Right organizations in the mid-1970's, including his own, the Free Congress Foundation.
This 1999 letter is a classic. The original is here.
________________________________________
Ms. Amy RidenourDear Ms. Ridenour:
Late last year, I had the opportunity of speaking to the Conservative Leadership Conference on the state of the conservative movement. I’ve given similar talks in the past, and usually they have focused on the most recent election or our situation in Congress or something similar. This time, the thoughts I offered were very different, and frankly rather radical. The strong, positive response they brought forth — which came as something of a surprise to me — has led me to think that I should share them more widely. That is the purpose of this letter.
What many of us have been trying to do for many years has been based upon a couple of premises. First of all, we have assumed that a majority of Americans basically agrees with our point of view. That has been the premise upon which we have tried to build any number of institutions, and indeed our whole strategy. It is I who suggested to Jerry Falwell that he call his organization the "Moral Majority." The second premise has been that if we could just elect enough conservatives, we could get our people in as Congressional leaders and they would fight to implement our agenda.
In looking at the long history of conservative politics, from the defeat of Robert Taft in 1952, to the nomination of Barry Goldwater, to the takeover of the Republican Party in 1994, I think it is fair to say that conservatives have learned to succeed in politics. That is, we got our people elected.
But that did not result in the adoption of our agenda. The reason, I think, is that politics itself has failed. And politics has failed because of the collapse of the culture. The culture we are living in becomes an ever-wider sewer. In truth, I think we are caught up in a cultural collapse of historic proportions, a collapse so great that it simply overwhelms politics.
That’s why I am in the process of rethinking what it is that we, who still believe in our traditional, Western, Judeo-Christian culture, can and should do under the circumstances. Please understand that I am not quarreling with anybody who pursues politics, because it is important to pursue politics, to be involved in government. It is also important to try, as many people have, to re-take the cultural institutions that have been captured by the other side.
But it is impossible to ignore the fact that the United States is becoming an ideological state. The ideology of Political Correctness, which openly calls for the destruction of our traditional culture, has so gripped the body politic, has so gripped our institutions, that it is even affecting the Church. It has completely taken over the academic community. It is now pervasive in the entertainment industry, and it threatens to control literally every aspect of our lives.
Those who came up with Political Correctness, which we more accurately call "Cultural Marxism," did so in a deliberate fashion. I’m not going to go into the whole history of the Frankfurt School and Herbert Marcuse and the other people responsible for this. Suffice it to say that the United States is very close to becoming a state totally dominated by an alien ideology, an ideology bitterly hostile to Western culture. Even now, for the first time in their lives, people have to be afraid of what they say. This has never been true in the history of our country. Yet today, if you say the "wrong thing," you suddenly have legal problems, political problems, you might even lose your job or be expelled from college. Certain topics are forbidden. You can,t approach the truth about a lot of different subjects. If you do, you are immediately branded as "racist", "sexist", "homophobic", "insensitive", or "judgmental."
Cultural Marxism is succeeding in its war against our culture. The question becomes, if we are unable to escape the cultural disintegration that is gripping society, then what hope can we have? Let me be perfectly frank about it. If there really were a moral majority out there, Bill Clinton would have been driven out of office months ago. It is not only the lack of political will on the part of Republicans, although that is part of the problem. More powerful is the fact that what Americans would have found absolutely intolerable only a few years ago, a majority now not only tolerates but celebrates. Americans have adopted, in large measure, the MTV culture that we so valiantly opposed just a few years ago, and it has permeated the thinking of all but those who have separated themselves from the contemporary culture.
If in Washington State and Colorado, after we have spent years talking about partial birth abortion, we can,t by referendum pass a ban on it, we have to face some unpleasant facts. I no longer believe that there is a moral majority. I do not believe that a majority of Americans actually shares our values.
So, I have contemplated the question of what we should do. If you saw my predictions on the elections, you know that my views are far from infallible. Therefore, I do not represent this as any sort of final truth. It is merely my deduction based on a number of observations and a good deal of soul-searching.
I believe that we probably have lost the culture war. That doesn’t mean the war is not going to continue, and that it isn’t going to be fought on other fronts. But in terms of society in general, we have lost. This is why, even when we win in politics, our victories fail to translate into the kind of policies we believe are important.
Therefore, what seems to me a legitimate strategy for us to follow is to look at ways to separate ourselves from the institutions that have been captured by the ideology of Political Correctness, or by other enemies of our traditional culture. I would point out to you that the word "holy" means "set apart", and that it is not against our tradition to be, in fact, "set apart". You can look in the Old Testament, you can look at Christian history. You will see that there were times when those who had our beliefs were definitely in the minority and it was a band of hardy monks who preserved the culture while the surrounding society disintegrated.
What I mean by separation is, for example, what the homeschoolers have done. Faced with public school systems that no longer educate but instead "condition" students with the attitudes demanded by Political Correctness, they have seceded. They have separated themselves from public schools and have created new institutions, new schools, in their homes.
The same thing is happening in other areas. Some people are getting rid of their televisions. Others are setting up private courts, where they can hope to find justice instead of ideology and greed.
I think that we have to look at a whole series of possibilities for bypassing the institutions that are controlled by the enemy. If we expend our energies on fighting on the "turf" they already control, we will probably not accomplish what we hope, and we may spend ourselves to the point of exhaustion. The promising thing about a strategy of separation is that it has more to do with who we are, and what we become, than it does with what the other side is doing and what we are going to do about it.
For example, the Southern Baptists, Dr. Dobson and some other people started a boycott of Disney. We may regard this boycott in two ways. We might say, "Well, look at how much higher Disney stock is than before. The company made record profits, therefore the boycott has failed." But the strategy I'm suggesting would see it differently. Because of that boycott, lots of people who otherwise would have been poisoned by the kind of viciously anti-religious, and specifically anti-Christian, entertainment that Disney is spewing out these days have been spared contact with it. They separated themselves from some of the cultural rot, and to that extent we succeeded.
I am very concerned, as I go around the country and speak and talk to young people, when I find how much of the decadent culture they have absorbed without even understanding that they are a part of it. And while I’m not suggesting that we all become Amish or move to Idaho, I do think that we have to look at what we can do to separate ourselves from this hostile culture. What steps can we take to make sure that we and our children are not infected? We need some sort of quarantine.
It is not only political conservatives who are troubled by the disintegration of the culture. I gave a speech not long ago in which I was very critical of what was on television. Several people who described themselves as liberals came up to me and said "Well, I know I don't agree with your politics, but you are absolutely correct on this and we don’t allow our children to watch television any more."
Don’t be mislead by politicians who say that everything is great, that we are on the verge of this wonderful, new era thanks to technology or the stock market or whatever. These are lies. We are not in the dawn of a new civilization, but the twilight of an old one. We will be lucky if we escape with any remnants of the great Judeo-Christian civilization that we have known down through the ages.
The radicals of the 1960's had three slogans: turn on, tune in, drop out. I suggest that we adopt a modified version. First, turn off. Turn off the television and video games and some of the garbage that's on the computers. Turn off the means by which you and your family are being infected with cultural decadence.
Tune out. Create a little stillness. I was very struck by the fact that when I traveled in the former Soviet Union, I couldn’t go to a restaurant or any place else without hearing this incessant Western rock music pounding away. There was no escape from it. No wonder some Russians are anti-American. When they think of the United States, they think of the culture that we exported to them.
Finally, we need to drop out of this culture, and find places, even if it is where we physically are right now, where we can live godly, righteous and sober lives.
Again, I don’t have all the answers or even all the questions. But I know that what we have been doing for thirty years hasn’t worked, that while we have been fighting and winning in politics, our culture has decayed into something approaching barbarism. We need to take another tack, find a different strategy. If you agree, and are willing to help wrestle with what that strategy should be, let me know. If enough people are willing to do something different, we will call a roundtable meeting here at Free Congress this year to discuss it. I hope I will see you there.
Sincerely,
Paul M. Weyrich
________________________________________
He lived another nine years. He did not change his assessment.
REAGAN: RHETORIC WITHOUT AN AGENDA
There are millions of Americans who regard themselves as political conservatives. They believe they are part of a movement. They are not. The movement never gained traction in American life. It was always a fringe movement. It was always on the fringe of power. Outside of the deep South, it was always part of the Republican Party. It was peripheral to the party.
The big exception was Ronald Reagan. He did articulate conservative principles. As a master of rhetoric, he was an asset to the conservative movement. But he ran massive deficits throughout his presidency. He vetoed almost no legislation. He placed George H. W. Bush on the ticket in 1980. Bush was the inheritor of the Reagan legacy. Reagan relied heavily on Bush’s senior political advisor, James Baker III, who served as his Chief of Staff, 1981–1985. Reagan then appointed him Secretary of the Treasury. He served from 1985–88. Bush appointed him Secretary of State, 1989–92.
Howard Phillips was a good friend of mine. On matters political, I trusted his judgment. Wikipedia’s entry on Baker records this.
In 1982, conservative activists Howard Phillips, founder of the Conservative Caucus, and Clymer Wright of Houston joined in an unsuccessful effort to convince Reagan to dismiss Baker as Chief of Staff. They claimed that Baker, a former Democrat and a Bush political intimate, was undermining conservative initiatives in the administration. Reagan rejected the Phillips-Wright request, but in 1985, he named Baker as United States Secretary of the Treasury, in a job-swap with then-Secretary Donald T. Regan, a former Merrill Lynch officer who became Chief of Staff. Reagan rebuked Phillips and Wright for having waged a "campaign of sabotage" against Baker.
Conservatives in the Republican Party have spent over six decades as bystanders. They have wielded no political power, except for Reagan, but Reagan’s attention was limited. In any case, he left office in 1989. It does no good to have a fond memory of Reagan’s rhetoric. His rhetoric did not translate into a conservative program.
CONCLUSION
Whatever the outcome of the election in November, it is not going to translate into a post-Reagan conservative agenda. There is no conservative agenda. There is no conservative movement.
That was the assessment of Paul Weyrich two decades ago. It is the assessment of my contact who was one of the co-founders of the movement in the late 1950's. My contact calls it a colossal failure. I don’t think that’s accurate, but if the movement had ever been colossal, then what we have seen would have been a colossal failure.
Weyrich understood the problem late in life. The national problems are primarily moral, not political. He also understood any deliverance would not come from politics.
It is the weakness of American political conservatives to believe, as the Left believes, that salvation is inherently political. Whenever we see that faith implemented in political movements, we see guaranteed failures.
© 2022 GaryNorth.com, Inc., 2005-2021 All Rights Reserved. Reproduction without permission prohibited.