Witchdoctoring up conservatism

William Buckley is still dead, and people are still writing about him - in part to correct the many myths about the man. As Jeffrey Tucker says at the Mises blog, "What I can't stand is the incredible, shocking ignorance of those who claim that free market thought in American began with [Buckley..."

That's true.  Buckley didn't start the 'free market movement' in America or even seriously contribute to it; what he started in America was a movement that fused capitalism and religion, something entirely destructive of freedom's ends.  As has been said here before, that fusion is not merely wrong, it's fatal.  Ayn Rand pointed out Buckley's fatal flaw as a defender of freedom: "because he tells people that the foundation of capitalism is religious faith, [he] implies that reason and science are on the side of the collectivists."  There is no greater point for a defender of capitalism to concede, and Buckley's religio-conservatives handed it to their opponents as a free gift.

A new obituary of Buckley by Harry Binswanger calls him bluntly what he was, a witchdoctor, and quotes a 1960 letter written to presidential candidate Barry Goldwater warning him off Buckley's witchdoctoring:

The attempt to use religion as a moral justification of Conservatism began after World War II. Observe the growing apathy, lifelessness, ineffectuality and general feebleness of the so-called Conservative side, ever since.  You are, at present, a rising exception in the Republican ranks... That is why I want to warn you against them now, and help you to identify the nature of their influence.

Of Buckley's magazine National Review, Binswanger reminds us that in her Playboy interview of 1964 she called it

"the worst and most dangerous magazine in America" because of its crusade to tie capitalism to religion.

In her letter to Goldwater she explained

I am profoundly opposed to it--not because it is a religious magazine, but because it pretends that it is not. There are religious magazines which one can respect, even while disagreeing with their views. But the fact that the National Review poses as a secular political magazine, while following a strictly religious "party line," can have but one purpose: to slip religious goals by stealth on those who would not accept them openly...

This, she became convinced, was Buckley's mission, something all too clear from his ever-present willingness to sell out capitalism (two such incidents are described by Binswanger) but never religion.  The way the communists took over the liberals in the nineteen-thirties was, she told Goldwater, "what [Buckley's] professional religionists are now attempting to do to the Conservatives."

Their success can be measured in every Republican primary.  Concludes Binswanger, with my hearty endorsement:

Buckley, more than anyone else, is responsible for subverting the "conservative movement," turning it into its current, depraved status as the anti-reason, anti-man, welfare-statist "religious right." The world is well rid of him.

** Read Binswanger's complete piece here: William F. Buckley, Jr.: The Witch-Doctor is Dead.