The Biggest Lie of Them All

The Biggest Lie of Them All

On April 24, the New York Post published an article claiming to expose the “smug life” of the establishment Left. On the basis of research conducted by Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto who has been investigating the “young-adult site Vox,” author Kyle Smith concludes that “liberals have stopped debating ideas, instead dismissing their opponents and half the country as stupid.” Smith’s article tries to drive home the point that while the “conservative” side is eager to debate delicate issues, the other side is full of “liberal smugness.” Indeed, even a glance at Vox would illustrate that “liberals don’t want to debate, they want affirmation.”

As I read this, I was reminded of a charge made the American Communist Party after World War Two that presumably unlike Stalin’s Russia, the United States suppressed free speech. While it is true that limits were placed on advocates of violent revolution at the time, the Soviet Union, which the Communists were then glorifying, was a hellhole of repression. Similarly, what calls itself counterfactually the “conservative movement” has no more right to lament leftist challenges to open debate than the American Communist Party did to object to the measures taken to restrict Communist activities after the Second World War. I am drawing this unkind comparison quite deliberately because I couldn’t imagine a more intolerant protestor against censoring debate than the “conservative” critics of the American Left. That is because no group in this country has a more shameful record of trying to shut up and destroy professionally those who disagree with it, providing they come from the traditional or libertarian Right.

The investigative reporter who denounced Vox, James Taranto, is someone whom I met at a conference five years ago. Taranto and I hit it off well, and he asked in the course of a conversation to see some of my writing, which he thought would interest him. After I mailed the requested works, I never again heard from Taranto, and when I reached one of his underlings a full month later, I learned that my books had arrived but that her boss had “nothing to say.” Since the reading matter included nothing we hadn’t already discussed, I can’t imagine that there was anything in my package that would have shocked Taranto, and certainly not to such a degree that he would shun me as a result. What is far more likely is that after he got back to his office and mentioned me to a superior, he was told that I was not someone with whom he should have any contact.

Those who have been reading my work know how much energy I’ve devoted to enumerating and contextualizing those efforts made by the established Right since the 1950s to purge “extreme Right” dissenters. The reasons conventionally given for these purges are totally fraudulent. Particularly disgraceful was the manner in which the isolationist Right that Murray Rothbard defends in The Betrayal of the American Right was marginalized by the post-War Right and then adding insult to injury, accused of raging anti-Semitism. (As far as I can tell, the ousted dissenters were mostly Jewish.) No one is saying the Buckleyite Right was required to embrace all the views of the interwar Right or rally to the anti-New Deal isolationists who made up the Old Right’s ranks. But those whom the postwar Right was seeking to replace were entitled to a seat at the conservative table, and the slanders that were piled on them with the assistance of the journalistic Left were extraordinarily vicious. The continued charges leveled against this Right as “wing nuts” and bigots by the mainstream media go back to the labors of W.F. Buckley and his friends on the left to reconstruct the history of the American Right.

In recent decades, those who have been “thrown off the bus,” to use Jonah Goldberg’s admiring metaphor, have been considered insufficiently receptive to efforts to move the denatured Right further toward the Left. As late as the 1990s National Review made fun of the glorification of Harriet Tubman as a leading American heroine and treated John Brownas a psychopathic mass killer. Today Tubman and Brown are both heroes of the respectable Right, as it talks up ever greater equality and inclusiveness. More recalcitrant heads will undoubtedly fall as others break ranks over new “conservative positions” which are thinly disguised leftist ones. Oh and lest I forget!  Whereas in the 1950s and 1960s Joe McCarthy was an icon at National Review, today Tail Gunner Joe is treated as a villain and Leon Trotsky has been showered with praise as an “antifascist” hero in the same magazine.

Such changes could only be achieved by throwing lots of people “off the bus” and then going after them with widely published lies and secret phone calls to prospective employers and publishers. And these uninterrupted ejections from the bus of conservatism took place while the putative good guys were fighting “the one true church of smug liberalism.” This amiable battle is continuing to unfold while “conservative” media personalities and Fox-news “Allstars” are treating their leftist counterparts as honored guests and dialogue partners. Such displays of affection are only reserved for those who disagree with the movement from the Left. Neither respect nor kindness is ever conferred on those whom the movement chooses to slime as right-wing deviationists.  As an aged victim of one of these purges, who has been dogged by my persecutors over the decades, I no longer expect to see justice done during my lifetime. And I wouldn’t care as much if these despicable hypocrites just stopped pretending to be protecting our intellectual and academic freedom.  They are even more reprehensible than the more honest Left they claim to be fighting.

By Paul Gottfried