Steve Farrell
Friday, Feb. 21, 2003

John F. McManus’ new book, “William F. Buckley Jr. – Pied Piper for the Establishment,” is just such a book. It asks difficult, probing, politically incorrect questions and delivers frank, fearless, roll up your sleeves answers, which stiff right jab (excuse the pun) a branch of conservatism that really is not conservative.

According to McManus, neo-conservatives have taken over the Republican Party and incrementally remade it in the image of the socialist new world order, with the chief architect of that damning remake being none other than William F. Buckley Jr., the so-called “savior of conservatism,” the founder of National Review.

Mr. Buckley promised in that magazine’s premier issue to stand “athwart at history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one [was] inclined to do so” – and at times, McManus admits, Buckley delivered.

Trouble is, Buckley and NR’s standing athwart at history, taken as a whole, was and is laden with provisos, compromises, incremental abandonment and, importantly, a nebulous, transmutable definition of just what conservatism was – a definition Buckley once described as “a dance along a precipice.”

McManus has another vision of what conservatism ought to be:

• a movement which ought to stand fast by an inspired constitution;

• a movement which ought to uphold the Judeo-Christian ethic as a necessary appendage to successful self government;

• a movement which ought to prefer principle over party, U.S. sovereignty over permanent entangling alliances;

• and a movement which ought to have the guts to call a conspirator a conspirator, a traitor a traitor, a mass murderer a mass murderer.

The Buckley patented answer, complains McManus (a former Buckley fan): “stupidity and innocent miscalculations.” Likewise, the Buckley explanation as to the march of communism across the globe, McManus notes: “It’s not a conspiracy.”

Buckley, though few see it, takes Marx’s explanation that communism arises here and there as a spontaneous movement among the left-behind poor, and he promotes it.

McManus, the president of the John Birch Society, an organization that Buckley abhors, will have nothing to do with such naïve conclusions. Former Secretary of Agriculture (under Eisenhower) and American patriot Ezra Taft Benson sums up McManus’ take:

“Communism is not a political party, nor a military organization, nor an ideological crusade, nor a rebirth of Russian imperialist ambition, though it comprises and uses all of these. Communism, in its unmistakable reality, is wholly a conspiracy. ...”

This is vital. The problem with refusing to call evil “evil” is that while we stick our heads in the sand, communism and its sister isms continue to pop up and prosper (even after the “Fall”) because the West continues to “naïvely” finance, counsel and shape so-called democratic movements of the poor across the globe – in ways which nearly always put the wrong guys in power.

To make matters worse, these same “naïve” politicians “naïvely” advance domestic socialism right under our noses and do it in the name of conservatism. The chickens have come home to roost.

Buckley and company reject old right conservatism in other ways, including their libertarian-like rejection of morality in public life. They are all for drug legalization, prostitution, homosexuality and pornography as “holy” rights to be protected, consistent with privacy, the free market and limited government.

Yet why is it, McManus wonders, that Buckley and NR are the most zealous of the zealous in defense of the United Nations, NATO, the EU, NAFTA, the WTO and other emerging manifestations of world government?

By contrast, McManus recognizes that successful national self-government begins with individual self-control, that moral corruption breeds crime and crime breeds police state solutions. As for the United Nations and its tentacle organizations – McManus would drop them in the middle of the Atlantic, or ship them all to Peking to be among like-minded people.

Admittedly, Mr. McManus took a risk attacking the establishment’s favorite son (he does provide upbeat solutions), but the book was necessary to unveil what is wrong with the conservative movement today, he says.

The common supposition is that the nature of politics has caused a drift to the center, wherein “the right” now looks like “the left” and “the left” like “the right,” but McManus blows this fiction away. He thoroughly documents that the drift is, in part, a result of behind-the-scenes shoving by trusted “conservatives.”

Buckley, the consummate conservative – a man whose greatest claim to fame (according to pro-Buckley biographers) is that he discredited and marginalized the old right and created a class of “legitimate” conservatives who the leftist’s media could trust to keep the debate “civil” – may be the greatest “shover” of them all.

If you read this book, you may agree.

Contact Steve at StiffRightJab@yahoo.com

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Author’s Note
Click here to order “William F. Buckley Jr. – Pied Piper for the Establishment": http://www.aobs-store.com/reviews/bkwb.htm