General Franco is an authentic national hero. It is generally conceded that he above others had the combination of talents, the perseverance, and the sense of the righteousness of his cause, that were required to wrest Spain from the hands of the visionaries, ideologues, Marxists and nihilists that were imposing on her, in the thirties, a regime so grotesque as to do violence to the Spanish soul, to deny, even, Spain’s historical identity.[2]
The “regime so grotesque” overthrown by Generalissimo Francisco Franco—with crucial aid from Mussolini and Hitler—was in fact Spain’s democratically elected government. The methods Franco used to protect Spain’s “soul” included mass murder and the consignment of political opponents and anyone suspected of being a political opponent to concentration camps. Nor was this all in the past when Buckley praised the dictator: As the historian Paul Preston notes, Franco’s opponents were “still subject to police terror and execution” as late as the 1970s.[3]
In the half-century since those articles were published, movement conservatives have learned to be more circumspect. These days they claim to be champions of freedom and personal choice. From the beginning, however, the movement was profoundly undemocratic, concerned, above all, with defending religion and property. Chapter 1 of God and Man at Yale denounced the school for not being “pro-Christian,” and Chapter 2, although titled “Individualism at Yale,” was mainly an attack on professors who taught Keynesian economics and had kind words for progressive taxation and the welfare state. And if democracy wouldn’t produce an environment sufficiently protective of religion and property, so much the worse for democracy.
The fact, however, was that there was no Franco in America, and no real prospect of one arising. To gain power in this country, the new conservatives would have to take control of a political party and win elections.
In 1964 a coalition of conservative activists seized control of the Republican National Convention and nominated Barry Goldwater for president. It was, however, a false dawn for the right. The fledgling conservative movement was able to nominate Goldwater only because the Republican establishment was caught by surprise, and the movement still had no way to win national elections: Goldwater went down to humiliating defeat. To achieve its goals movement conservatism needed a broader base. And Ronald Reagan, more than anyone else, showed the way.
On October 27, 1964, Reagan gave a TV speech on behalf of Goldwater’s doomed campaign that the reporters David Broder and Stephen Hess would later call “the most successful national political debut since William Jennings Bryan electrified the 1896 Democratic Convention with the ‘Cross of Gold’ speech.” In later years Reagan’s address—formally called “A Time for Choosing”—would come to be known simply as “the speech.”
Lincoln’s speech at Cooper Union it wasn’t. Reagan’s speech might best be described as a rant—a rant against the evils of big government, based not on logical argument but on a mix of gee-whiz statistics and anecdotes.
The statistics were misleading at best, and the anecdotes suspect. “Federal employees number 2.5 million, and federal, state, and local, one out of six of the nation’s work force is employed by the government” declared Reagan, conveying the impression of a vast, useless bureaucracy. It would have spoiled his point if people had known what those useless bureaucrats were actually doing: In 1964 almost two-thirds of federal employees worked either in the Defense department or in the postal service, while most state and local employees were schoolteachers, policemen, or firemen. He attacked Aid to Families with Dependent Children with a story about a woman with seven children who wanted a divorce because her welfare check would be larger than her husband’s paycheck—a story he claimed to have heard from an unnamed judge in Los Angeles.
Reagan also displayed a remarkable callousness. “We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night,” he said, referring to one of John F. Kennedy’s campaign lines. “Well that was probably true. They were all on a diet.”
At the end, seemingly out of nowhere, came a sudden transition to what sounded like a demand for military confrontation with communism:
Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us they have a utopian solution of peace without victory. They call their policy “accommodation.” And they say if we’ll only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he’ll forget his evil ways and learn to love us. All who oppose them are indicted as warmongers.
It wasn’t a great speech by any normal standard. Yet Broder and Hess were right: it made a huge impact. The National Review, with its arch High Tory rhetoric, spoke only to a tiny if wealthy, self-consciously elitist minority. Reagan had found a way to espouse more or less the same policies but in language that played to the perceptions—and prejudices—of the common man. His speeches resonated with people who wouldn’t have been able to follow Buckley’s convoluted sentences and neither knew nor cared about how Generalissimo Franco saved Spain’s soul. What Reagan had discovered was a way to give movement conservatism a true popular base.
In part Reagan did this by using small-government rhetoric to tap into white backlash without being explicitly racist. Even when he wasn’t railing against welfare cheats—and everyone knew whom he was referring to—his diatribes against armies of bureaucrats wasting taxpayers’ money were clearly aimed at voters who thought their money was being taken away for the benefit of you-know-who.
Reagan also, however, tapped into genuine grassroots paranoia over the Communist threat.
It’s no accident that George Clooney chose to make Good Night, and Good Luck, a dramatization of Edward R. Murrow’s confrontation with Joe McCarthy, in 2005: Communism was the terrorism of the 1950s. The realities of the enemy were very different: A nuclear-armed Soviet Union posed a true existential threat to the United States in a way Islamic terrorists don’t, and the Warsaw Pact, unlike the “axis of evil,” really existed. Psychologically, however, the response to the Communist threat of the 1950s seems familiar and understandable today.
Ironically, one problem with being a superpower is that it’s hard to explain to its citizens the limits of that power. Canadians don’t wonder why their government is unable to impose its will on the world. Americans, however, are all too easily convinced that those who threaten the nation can simply be eliminated by force—and that anyone who urges restraint is weak at best, treasonous at worst.
In reality there was no sane alternative to a restrained approach. Like modern terrorism, communism in the fifties and sixties was a threat that could be contained but not eliminated. Moreover, in the end, the strategy of containment—of refraining from any direct attempt to overthrow Communist regimes by force, fighting only defensive wars, and combating Soviet influence with aid and diplomacy—was completely successfuclass="underline" World War III never happened, and the United States won the Cold War decisively. But it was a strategy that, like a rational response to terrorism, seemed cowardly to people who saw only weakness and degeneracy in restraint. Reagan’s caricature of containment as the belief that “if we’ll only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he’ll forget his evil ways and learn to love us” was echoed forty years later by Dick Cheney’s ridicule of John Kerry for saying that the “war on terror” should best be seen as a policing problem.
2.
William F. Buckley, “Yes, and Many Thanks, But Now the War Is Over,”