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.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?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.
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.