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The Great Purge: The Deformation of the Conservative Movement

Paperback – April 1, 2015
by Paul E. Gottfried (Editor), Richard B. Spencer (Editor)

A central crucible in the evolution of the American Right has been "the purge"-that is, the expulsion, often in an explicit fashion, of views or individuals deemed outside the bounds of "respectability." Victims include the John Birch Society, Peter Brimelow, John Derbyshire, Sam Francis, Revilo P. Oliver, Murray Rothbard, foreign-policy makers deemed "isolationists," immigration reformers, and many others.
This essay collection is an attempt to better understand conservative ideology (often euphemized as "timeless principles") and how it functioned within its historic context and responded to power, shifting conceptions of authority, and societal changes. Through the purges, we can glimpse what conservatism is not, those aspects of itself it has attempted to deny, mask, leave behind, and forget, and the ways in which memories can be reconstructed around new orthodoxies. Contributors include Peter Brimelow, Lee Congdon, John Derbyshire, Samuel T. Francis, Paul Gottfried, James Kalb, Keith Preston, William Regnery, and Richard Spencer.

Buckley, as was mentioned above, was a gatekeeper. He (and pretty much he alone) decided what was "legitimate" conservatism, and what was beyond the pale. Over time he moved Left, and so a lot of his early collaborators were eventually pushed out. To be to the right of Buckley was to be an extremist, by his definition. The Left was happy to go along with this. Why not accept a general who divides his own forces before the battle?

As you can see this book was published 9 years ago. It was the spring of the Alt-Right, before Richard Spencer made his transition to white nationalist and class clown, that brought the whole Alt-Right crashing down on top of him.

It's ironic that someone who could so clearly see how badly that Buckley had handled his "15 minutes of fame" and lost the plot of what he was trying to accomplish -- in turn handled his fifteen minutes of fame even worse.

Richard Spencer to the memory of William F. Buckley: "Here, hold my beer"

Still, before all that he started Arktos Publishing, and did a couple issues of this magazine: The Radix Journal, which were pretty good. The publishing house lives on (sans Spencer) but the journal is history. They both published a lot of French "New Right" and other European right-wing stuff. Arktos still does.

Currently they seem to have picked up all of Alexander Dugin's books, which I believe the Biden administration specifically asked Amazon to deplatform (and they did, of course).

A representative sample of recent books published by Arktos

Free Republic was pretty much itself an outpost of Buckleyism in the early years. Buckley was very successful in gatekeeping. And, just like you couldn't write about race and IQ, or black dysfunction in the pages of The National Review after a little while, such topics were off-limits on FR in the past. (And, you still can bump into remnants of these prohibitions if you try top post articles from some sources).

My sense is that Free Republic has moved in a Nationalist and rightward direction over the last 20 years, while the National Review has continued to slide to the Left, so that today a lot of Freepers hold views more aligned with Paul Gotfried, Pat Buchanan, and others from the paleo-conservative right that Buckley was so busy purging.

All the people who got purged were the ones who described what the future would be if we kept going on the trajectory of the 1990’s and 2000’s.

Their assessment turned out to be totally correct. And if anything, understated.

What FR will turn into remains to be seen. It’s mostly boomers who are aging out, and old people don’t like change and throwing over the opinions of a lifetime.

Thirty years ago, the USA was globally dominant, and Political Correctness was in retreat. In 2024 the USA is in serious decline, and the Left has won all the battles and Woke dominates corporate and institutional life.

The future of the Right is in how it responds to its total defeat. On FR we have various mixtures of Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance and we will see what that looks like at the end of a second Trump Presidency.

The two main issues were, first, that the 1980s dose of deregulation and more free markets were supposed to scrape the barnacles of New Deal statism from the SS United States. The free market were supposed to reinvigorate the US economy, not make the world safe for globalist oligarchy and drive down US wages.

Second, the failed half-fought wars of Korea and Vietnam were supposed to avoided by a combination of the more judicious use of force that, when applied, was supposed to be overwhelming and brief like the Gulf War. Instead, Bush refused to simply pick a local client sufficiently brutal to impose order in Iraq and refused to recognize that we had, in fact, won in Afghanistan in 2022 and we could have left a handful of SF operators in place in perpetuity. When he decided to impose the same "nation building" plan in Afghanistan to build a strong central regime in Kabul that no one wanted, he simply repeated the Soviet's mistake.

So now we have an utterly corrupt political and business elite who are only good at ferociously defending their privilege and revolting cultural tastes and not the United States.