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Jewish World Review March 3, 2008 / 26 Adar I 5768 Bill Buckley and the Jews By Jonathan Tobin
The impact of the writer who chased the anti-Semites out of mainstream politics
Buckley, who passed away last week at the age of 83, was the fervent
Catholic patrician whose work helped create the modern American
conservative movement in the 1950s at a time when nothing could have
been more removed from the thinking of most Jews in this country than
his National Review.
Though much has changed in the 53 years since NR’s debut, given that
most Jews are still, at the very least, reliable supporters of the
Democrats, if not hard-core liberals, its likely that most of them
noted the passing of Buckley without emotion.
After all, Buckley's eccentric mid-Atlantic accent, his cheerful
intellectual snobbery symbolized by his delight in $10 words where
simple ones would have served just as well, his lavish lifestyle
(skiing at Gstaad and sailing on the high seas), as well as his
rock-solid conservative politics are not the sort of things that most
Jews identify with.
SETTING THE STAGE
But there is one other aspect of his amazing career that deserves
mention. It is the fact that as much as any other person, Bill Buckley
cleared the way not only for a conservative movement where Jews would
be welcomed, but that it was his leadership that set the stage for an
American politics in which anti-Semitism was confined to the fever
swamps of the far right and far left.
As conservative columnist George Will has written, without National
Review, which Buckley started in 1955, much of what followed in
American politics - including Barry Goldwater's capture of the
Republican nomination for president in 1964 and then the electoral
victories of Ronald Reagan and the Republican takeover of Congress in
1994 - is unimaginable. American conservatism as we have known it, with
all of its subsequent ups and downs, has its origins in the pages of
that magazine in which its editor helped create a coherent movement out
of what had previously been a loose array of cranks.
In order to give life to that movement, Buckley specifically chose to
rid its ranks of people who espoused the sort of anti-Semitism that
once was inescapable on the American right.
Buckley would himself acknowledge that prejudice was a presence in his
own home growing up. And as a youngster, Buckley admitted that he was a
fan of Charles Lindbergh and his "America First" movement, whose
flirtation with anti-Semitism was of a piece with its advocacy of
appeasement of Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany.
But as National Review took flight in the late 1950s, anti-Semitic
writers found themselves on the outside looking in. So, too, did
apologists for the extremist John Birch Society.
But despite the fact that his conservatism was one that was informed by
his own Catholic faith (something that was consistently made clear in
the pages of National Review), Buckley made his journal, and by
extension, the movement for which it served as an unofficial bible,
off-limits to the anti-Semitism that was commonplace in the world in
which he grew up.
Though he didn't always agree with all of its policies, Buckley was
also a consistent supporter of Israel. A staunch anti-Communist, he was
also deeply supportive of the movement to free Soviet Jewry at a time
when many in this country (including some Jews) were loath to speak out
because it might be interpreted as opposition to a policy of detente
with Moscow.
Long after he chased the Birchers out of NR, Buckley found himself
forced to confront the issue again. When longtime colleagues Pat
Buchanan and Joseph Sobran used their bully pulpits on the right to
bash Israel and stigmatize Jews for their support for the state, it was
again Buckley who took on the haters.
Buckley repudiated Sobran's writing, which he labeled anti-Semitic, and
pushed him off the magazine's masthead.
As the issue continued to percolate in the aftermath of the Persian
Gulf war in December 1991, he devoted an entire issue of the magazine
to an essay titled "In Search of Anti-Semitism" (which was also the
title of the book he later published on the same subject), in which he
took on Buchanan, who was preparing an insurgent run for the White
House against the first President Bush.
His conclusion was damning: "I find it impossible to defend Pat
Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period
under examination amounted to anti-Semitism, whatever it was that drove
him to say and do it," Buckley wrote.
Though Buchanan would continue to snipe away on television, it was
largely Buckley's doing that he and others like him would do so from
outside a perch in one of our two major parties rather than inside it.
IN HIS OWN IMAGE
That enabled liberal Jews, such as Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz,
to feel comfortable making common cause with the right on a host of
issues as he began his own journey away from the left. Though
expectations that the Jews would ditch liberalism en masse were always
unrealistic, the birth of an intellectually viable brand of Jewish
conservative thought in this country wouldn't have happened had not
Buckley first cleaned out the GOP stables.
In terms of practical politics, Buckley's rout of the anti-Semites made
it possible for the sort of bipartisan consensus in favor of support
for Israel that we now take for granted. He replaced the Buchanan-like
world of American conservatism that existed before National Review with
something that was not only more successful, but purged of Jew-hatred.
If Israel Lobby authors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt want to find
the real father of the enormous support for Israel in our political
system today, they can look no further than the irrepressible Buckley,
whose life was a testament to the power of ideas.
His was a political faith that most Jews never embraced, but as we
survey a political spectrum in which our enemies are confined to the
margins, we should all remember the unique achievements of this
American original. May his memory be for a blessing for all who love
liberty.
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JWR contributor Jonathan S. Tobin is executive editor of the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent.
Let him know what you think by clicking here.
© 2007, Jonathan Tobin
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