Flashback, June 1965: Conservative Bill Buckley Launches Long-Shot NYC Mayoral Bid

The three-way New York City mayoral race among Republic nominee Curtis Sliwa, surprise Democratic primary winner Zohran Mamdani, and incumbent Eric Adams is already shaping up to be one for the ages. But it will be hard to top the 1965 campaign, if only for the independent candidate that year.

Even with no realistic chance to win the race for New York City mayor in the fall, William F. Buckley, Jr. announced that he would campaign as the candidate of the Conservative Party 60 years ago this week.

The National Review editor and newspaper columnist entered the race hoping to deny victory in November to the Republican nominee, John Lindsay. He didn’t achieve that goal, but the 13% he did pull indicated a strong rightward drift in the New York GOP that eventually forced Lindsay to seek reelection as the Liberal Party candidate four years later—and, eventually, to leave the Republican Party altogether.

Buckley also hopped his run would be “fun,” and so it proved, especially for reporters delighted by the copy provided by a candidate never at a loss for words—especially big ones.

It all started with his initial press conference, when his response to a question on what he would do if elected became an instant classic in the annals of campaigning: “Demand a recount.”

A self-styled “radical conservative,” Buckley disagreed with virtually every major liberal initiative of the prior three decades, from the New Deal’s economic measures to civil-rights legislation, and regarded with horror Republican efforts to move to the center to accommodate these.

A prominent campaign of his read, “He has the guts to tell the truth: WILL YOU LISTEN?”

At the end of three terms under Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr., not to mention three decades under the increasing control of urban planner and neighbor destroyer Robert Moses, New York was entering a spiral of urban decay that would climax in its bankruptcy crisis in the autumn of 1975. Crime, inner-city unrest, and busing proposals were fueling a white backlash against civil rights.

An initial, positive response from cops encouraged Buckley to run. But his support widened after that to the outer New York boroughs, where residents felt their concerns were ignored. He could be coy in how he exploited such appeals. Though he refused to grant that racial superiority had a biological basis, he had written National Review editorials criticizing federal attempts to end segregation.

During his mayoral campaign, he said whites supporting the candidacy of segregationist Governor George Wallace were not motivated by racism but by dislike of African-American figures like author James Baldwin and activist Bayard Rustin who “despise the American way of life and our civilization,” and “challenge root and branch the American approach to ­free civil order.”

His brilliance lay in how he could press hot-button issues in the coolest possible manner: with polysyllabic vocabulary delivered with a posh, mid-Atlantic pronunciation and coruscating wit, concluding with a sly grin and a flick of his reptilian tongue.

In spite of the liberal leanings of many reporters, even they couldn’t help but chuckle at his best sound bites (e.g., on his two rivals, the tall Republican Lindsay and the short Democrat Abraham Beame: “The differences between Mr. Beame and Mr. Lindsay are biological, not political”).

Not having compiled a record in public office that needed to be defended, Buckley found himself on ground ideally suited to a skill he had cultivated since his Yale days, particularly after a newspaper strike left a print information vacuum for many voters: debates.

Buckley was free to stake out unusual positions on issues. As future biographer Sam Tanenhaus discussed in an October 2000 New York Times Magazine article on “The Buckley Effect,” one of these turned out to be nearly four decades ahead of its time: bicycle paths as an alternative means of transportation throughout the city, similar to what he had seen in major European cities.

Other positions turned out to be a good deal less mainstream—certainly in the context of his time, and even more so now:

* “either lock up teenage felons or make their parents legally responsible for them”;

* cut off welfare for everyone but invalids and mothers "looking after children 14 years or younger"’

*“relocating chronic welfare cases outside the city limits”;

*legalize drugs for adults—but have…

*“great and humane rehabilitation centers” for drug addicts;

*encourage emigration;

Tanenhaus says that Buckley was an arguer rather than a thinker—never able to finish what he hoped would be his magnum opus, The Revolt of the Masses. But arguing, in the form of forensic skills, was indisputably what he had developed as far back as his undergraduate days at Yale.

Just as his much-publicized two faceoffs with African-American novelist and activist James Baldwin served as an appetizer to his mayoral campaign, the latter race led in the following year to the start of a three-decade stint hosting his public television show, Firing Line.

During the campaign, Buckley increasingly absorbed the lesson that he could blunt opponents’ threats better through genial wit than with harsh rhetoric. More than a decade later, he would back a Republican candidate for President with even greater skills of this kind: Ronald Reagan.

In his new biography of Buckley, Tanenhaus notes that, for all their differences in style, it would be a mistake to think that Donald Trump has little in common with the conservative movement that Buckley helped coordinate in the postwar period. In an article last year for The American Prospect, Rick Perlstein seconds that idea, noting that “new scholarship suggests that Trump’s rise was not a reversal of what Buckley was up to, but in many ways, its apotheosis.”

I believe it is more appropriate to believe that the nature of Buckley’s forays into the public arena will never be seen again. He belonged to a group that Mitchell Ross, in a provocative 1978 book, called The Literary Politicians—figures who “practice politics by writing books” rather than continually running for public office.

Whether in newspaper columns, extended television interviews, and especially entire books, Buckley and other figures in the book such as John Kenneth Galbraith, Arthur Schlesinger, and Gore Vidal preferred to advocate positions at length.

They did not always fit comfortably into the party orthodoxy of their time and, though they could toss out epigrams with the best of them, their arguments rested on logical propositions rather than 30-second soundbites. The nature of American political discourse is poorer for the absence of the forums where they could appear to best advantage.

Quote of the Day (William Simon, on an ‘Elitist Approach to Government’)

“The American citizen must be made aware that today a relatively small group of people is proclaiming its purposes to be the will of the People. That elitist approach to government must be repudiated.”—American businessman, philanthropist, and Treasury Secretary William Simon (1927-2000), A Time for Truth (1978)

Twenty-five years ago this week, William Simon died at age 73. In both the public and private sectors, he appealed to a generation of free-market conservatives with warnings like the.

At the time, Simon identified this group as liberals who were threatening the foundations of America with a leviathan central government. But, nearly a half-century after the peak of his influence, with this bestseller, it is more apparent that this “elite” consists of financial sector titans who possess the arrogance of Gilded Age robber barons but all too little of the physical infrastructure they built.

I was reminded of Simon this past week after watching Drop Dead City, the recent documentary about New York City’s 1975 bankruptcy crisis. As Gerald Ford’s Treasury Secretary, Simon vehemently opposed bailing out the city, then, after the President reversed his earlier decision refusing aid, held out for more punitive terms, with treasury loans carrying an interest rate of 1 percent higher than the market rate.

All of this was pretty rich considering that, before entering government service in the Nixon Administration, Simon had been an extremely well-compensated bond trader—and he hadn’t raised a peep then about the extremely flimsy financial instruments and budget tricks used by New York City and Governor Nelson Rockefeller, then on a construction spree so wild that he was said to have an “edifice complex.”

It was all of a piece with the position maintained by the financial industry in general in these years, noted Village Voice investigative reporter Jack Newfield:

“The banks never warned the public about excessive borrowing, because they were busy making millions of dollars in commissions on underwriting the city's paper. The bankers made a pusher's profits, while the city slipped into addiction like a junkie. Then the banks suddenly ordered the city to withdraw cold turkey, or mug its own citizens."

A year after leaving the Ford administration to become a consultant for an investment‐banking house, Simon wrote A Time for Truth, part of a boomlet in conservative economics bestsellers that found receptive readers as the GOP sought a return to power, such as Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose and George Gilder’s Wealth and Poverty.

He reputation for straight talking with observations that shaded from being outspoken to outrageous (e.g., the “the hostile collectivism unleashed in the 60's” set the stage for Watergate, not Nixon’s paranoia). Some of his more ardent admirers even hoped that Ronald Reagan would select him as his running mate for the 1980 Presidential campaign.

It’s too bad that Simon’s penchant for straight talking wasn’t matched by straight dealing.

No, I’m not saying Simon was a swindler. But it was more than a little disingenuous that, in the 1980s, the treasury secretary who had denounced using other people’s money and debt financing made staggering amounts of money with the same two practices in the private sector.

In 1982, Simon and his partner, using only $330,000 each of their own money, borrowed $79 million from Barclays Bank and General Electric to engineer a leveraged buyout (LBO) of Gibson Greeting Cards. Eighteen months later, they flipped the company, taking it public again and selling it for $270 million.

This transaction was a key moment in the Reagan era upsurge of private equity, the investment strategy of acquiring ownership stakes or control in companies not publicly traded. From a mere 24 in 1980 in the US, it has grown to more than 17,000 today. It was all part of an era of laissez-faire capitalism that, in many ways, has lingered on to today.

The problem was that the U.S. economy moved decisively away from manufacturing, according to Bad Money, by the late political and economics commentator Kevin Phillips. “LBOs and debt speeded manufacturing’s ebb, inasmuch as goods producers constituted a disproportion of companies affected, and when they were stripped of some assets and loaded up with debt, blue-collar jobs and futures were usually at risk.”

You could also call it “Simonomics,” to signify the influence of this conservative icon who hailed the genius of the marketplace. The influence of private equity on politics spread beyond Republicans to Democrats, with donors from these companies contributing to candidates who aligned with conservative positions on taxation, regulation, and economic growth.

Away from his work, Simon was a devout Catholic active in philanthropy, and a foundation he established continues to provide scholarships for inner-city students. One wishes he would have given more prayerful consideration to papal encyclicals such as Rerum Novarum and Mater et Magistra that advocated for social progress and justice.

This Day in Media History (Beck, Palin Lead Pseudo-Event, ‘Restoring Honor’ Rally)

Aug. 28, 2010—In one of the more curious manifestations of the growing Tea Party movement, Glenn Beck (pictured) and Sarah Palin led a “Restoring Honor” rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial that attracted hundreds of thousands of attendees.

The event, audaciously held on the 47^th anniversary of the “March on Washington,” had little discernible content but demonstrated plenty of discontent—principally, with an African-American President whose election two years previously would have been inconceivable without the civil-rights movement that had reached its rhetorical zenith on this spot.

At the time, "Restoring Honor" garnered quite a bit of attention, typified by the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard, which devoted three articles in one issue to the rally: William Kristol’s lead editorial, along with features by Harvard government Professor Harvey Mansfield and Lee Harris, author of The Next American Civil War: The Populist Revolt Against the Liberal Elite.

Searching the Internet for more recent retrospectives on the rally, though, I came up with nothing significant. You might wonder, then, why I am even writing about something that left so little discernible impact on the popular memory.

But I would argue that it is worth discussing—not only as a demonstration of the amorphous anger that coalesced into the Democratic Party’s midterm drubbing the following November, but also as an example of what the historian Daniel J. Boorstin had, in his 1961 book The Image, termed a “pseudo-event.”

That resentment and the movement’s penchant for such synthetic happenings were integral elements in both the Republican Party’s domination of Capitol Hill through much of this past decade as well as in the rise of Donald Trump and his continued popularity among Republicans.

But back to Beck.

Three years ago while on a tour bus in Savannah, I saw another passenger, a middle-aged man, blinking nonstop. I couldn’t think right away who he reminded me of. Then it hit me: this was a Glenn Beck look-alike. I groaned at even this low-grade, undoubtedly unconscious imitator.

Starting out as a radio personality, Beck made the leap to television at CNN’s Headline News. Eventually the libertarian commentator came to the attention of Roger Ailes, who was casting about for an additional ratings magnet besides Bill O’Reilly. After meeting with him, the Fox News head hired Beck.

Debuting the day before Barack Obama’s inauguration as President, Beck was attracting more than 2 million viewers daily within a few weeks. Despite appearing in the 5 pm slot—not even the coveted prime time spot—Beck soon became the third highest-rated personality on the network.

 

He endeared himself to his audience with such pronouncements as that Obama had “a deep-seated hatred for white people” and that Nazi tactics were progressive tactics.

Besides Beck, Fox had also had a hand in promoting Palin. From the moment of her selection as GOP Presidential nominee John McCain’s running mate, Ailes saw her as a natural for his medium with her biting criticism of both GOP regulars and liberal press outlets, or, in a term that has been endlessly and mindlessly retailed on social media ever since, “the lamestream media.”

With mounting legal bills from the election and her new-found celebrity status, Palin stepped down as governor in July 2009. Early the following year, she was on board as a Fox political commentator—as well as a star in the insurgent right wing whose endorsement could catalyze previously moribund candidates.

Although recognizing their ability to boost ratings, Ailes before long found Beck and Palin distinctly high maintenance. That feeling began to solidify with the “Restore Honor” rally, which—particularly in Beck’s case—the news head saw as an attempt at brand building outside the umbrella of the network, according to Gabriel Sherman’s biography of Ailes, The Loudest Voice in the Room.

In no small part, that explains why Fox made no special attempt to cover a happening by one of its own stars.

Ailes’ suspicions about Beck may have sprung from a conjunction of the rally itself, the anniversary of the civil-rights milestone, and his star’s own venture. Only a couple of days after “Restoring Honor” was held, Beck launched TheBlaze, a conservative cable media company. Indeed, it might be said that the venture arrived amid a “blaze” of publicity for its founder.

Whatever the rally’s shortcomings as actual news, it was certainly the kind of “pseudo-event” that Boorstin had in mind.  Using his criteria, it was planned rather than spontaneous; planned primarily to be reported or reproduced; ambiguous as it relates to the underlying situation; and intended as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even more obnoxiously, it sparked pseudo-events meant to counter it: on that very day by the Rev. Al Sharpton, and that fall in Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s “Rally To Restore Sanity and/or Fear.”

But in another sense, "Restoring Honor" was not just a pseudo-event but also a daring act of political appropriation. More specifically, Beck and Palin capitalized on the inevitable association with Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech without acknowledging the true nature of his challenge to the American political and social order of the time.

In a single sentence, Palin lumped King together with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln as having “the same steel spine and moral courage” as the crowd.  Leave aside for a second the blatant flattery of those gathered together, not to mention the fatuity and fallaciousness of grouping them with a trio who risked death for establishing or extending freedom to Americans.

In essence, Palin was conveying that she knew that King was somehow important, but not why. The causes that drew her and Beck to the Tea Party—less government and lower taxes—were antithetical to the aims of Dr. King, who saw the federal government as the necessary guarantor of the rights of African-Americans and who in the weeks before his death was advocating for labor unions and the “Poor People’s Campaign” for jobs, unemployment insurance, a fair minimum wage, and education for poor adults and children.

Does anyone really think that Beck and Palin would regard such measures collectively as anything other than socialism?

Certain aspects of the rally—all mentioned in the trio of Weekly Standard articles—gave it a veneer of non-partisanship: its stress on the non-objectionable “God and Country”; the ban on signs; the lack of specific references to political parties; even proceeds from the event to be designated for the Special Operations Warrior Foundation.

But all of this contrasts with the lack of progressive speakers who could have balanced the more conservative Beck and Palin, not to mention the use of the “Restoring Honor” label itself, which Professor Mansfield bluntly admitted was “a jab at President Obama.”

In retrospect, the irony of that “jab” is glaring. 

Whatever his real shortcomings as a leader, President Obama has conducted his private life without the sexual scandals that plagued a predecessor (Bill Clinton) and the current occupant of the Oval Office, and his administration was largely free of the ethics violations that characterized administrations of both parties going back nearly 40 years. Beck and Palin would have been better advised to employ that "Restoring Honor" tag now for the individual seeking reelection rather than a decade ago.

The best way to illustrate the fundamental shortcoming of Restoring Honor, though, is to contrast it with the March on Washington. 

Religious conviction animated most of those on the official program (King, John Lewis, gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, Archbishop Patrick O'Boyle, and Rabbi Joachim Prinz) as surely as those at “Restoring Honor,” but they were there to promote concrete objectives—passage of civil-rights measures, ending school segregation, enforcing the 14^th Amendment, and minimum-wage and fair-labor legislation.

On the other hand, “Restoring Honor” was centered around themes—God and Country. They were not only unassailable (were liberals really against either?), but also, for that reason, unmeasurable.

Beck, for instance, had proclaimed, "Something beyond imagination is happening. America today begins to turn back to God." How to begin to assess the truth of that? What constitutes turning “back to God”? Who decides what that even is?

In producing a return to God, Beck and Palin might have done better to dispense with smarmy self-congratulation like this in favor of painful self-examination. 

They might have asked how many people might have been turned off by the religious right's near-incestuous embrace of political power, or how so many leaders of religious-affiliated institutions had alienated their faithful through their own financial and/or sexual corruption (seen most recently with Jerry Falwell Jr. and, in the past few decades, with the American hierarchy of my faith, the Roman Catholic Church).

Essay: Falwell Jr. and Religious Right Show When ‘Heaven is Not Averse to Compromise’

“Some joys, it’s true, are wrong in Heaven’s eyes

Yet Heaven is not averse to compromise;

There is a science, lately formulated,

Whereby one’s conscience may be liberated,

And any wrongful act you care to mention

May be redeemed by purity of intention.”—French playwright Moliere (1622-1673), Tartuffe (1664; English translation by Richard Wilbur, 1965)

Religious hypocrisy—the target of Moliere’s sharp satire in 17^th century France—remains just as powerful, perhaps even more so, in 21^st century America. That is the only way to view the news coming out of the evangelical world, starting—but by no means ending—with Jerry Falwell Jr. (pictured).

The son of the founder of the Moral Majority has taught all too many Americans, like Moliere’s scoundrel, that “Heaven is not averse to compromise.” That is benefiting him at the most opportune time: When he has jeopardized his job as president and chancellor of Liberty University through colossal folly.

How many male educators who take it on themselves to guide the morals of young people—and are not shy about doing so—then turn around and post, for all the world to see, on Instagram, a picture of themselves in unzipped pants, with one hand holding a glass and the other around the waist of a young woman whose shorts are also unzipped?

What could that educator have been thinking when he tapped out this caption to the picture? “More vacation shots. Lots of good friends visited us on the yacht. I promise that’s just black water in my glass. It was a prop only.”

That caption only makes matters murkier. What, for instance, is “black water”? What was it a “prop” for? And if this was a yacht, was it the “Monkey Business”—that vessel where, before the 1988 primary season began in earnest, Democratic candidate Gary Hart was photographed with his arm around a young lady not his wife?

At this point, perhaps when the stuff in the “black water” wore off, someone must have persuaded young Falwell to try to contain the damage. It began promisingly enough, when he deleted the post. But then he gave an interview to a local radio station in Lynchburg, Va., and—well, read what he said:

“Yeah, it was weird. She’s pregnant. She couldn’t get her pants zipped and I was like trying to like… I had on a pair of jeans I haven’t worn in a long time and couldn’t get zipped either. So, I just put my belly out like hers. She’s my wife’s assistant, she’s a sweetheart. I should have never put it up and embarrassed her. I’ve apologized to everybody. I promised my kids I will try to be a good boy from here on out.”

Jeans he “couldn’t get zipped”—one too many Taco Tuesdays for the school president? Isn’t that a product of one of the seven deadly sins—gluttony? 

But the clincher in this statement is that phrase “good boy”—a final flippant note that falsified the hymn of contrition.

These days, most authority figures—particularly those at an institution ostensibly dedicated to moral formation—would find it impossible to survive a sex scandal. Even at a secular school, they would be forced to resign immediately, with the board of trustees proclaiming that it’s retained outside counsel to investigate the leader’s misbehavior and the toxic environment he fostered.

But most authority figures also have not labored for Liberty University, with a board of trustees that, with many members loyal to Falwell through friendship (William E. Graham IV, grandson of Billy) or blood (Falwell’s brother Jonathan, also a minister), were willing to overlook “Junior” Falwell’s previous transgressions--numerous enough that I'm not sure why the school wasn't renamed Libertine University.

The so-called “mainstream media” such as The New York Times have been endlessly derided (and yes, let’s stipulate not without reason) for their bias against religious organizations such as Liberty University.

But I must say that these outlets pulled their punches in reporting on other Falwell controversies in the coverage of this recent incident. Invariably, they have listed only two or three.

Chalk it up to impulses toward charity, or, if you insist, the need not to strain the eyeballs of time-pressured readers. 

But no such constraints exist for Messiah University historian John Fea, who, in a blog post after the latest incident, listed three dozen examples of objectionable Falwell statements or actions that could have--but didn't--bring the hammer down on him (e.g., Falwell “created a Blackface face-mask and tweeted about it” and “Michael Cohen had ‘racy photos’ of him and his wife”).

This latest controversy—created, be it noted, entirely through Falwell’s insane Instagram post—proved a bit too much even for the executive committee of the board, which forced him to take an “indefinite leave of absence” even as catcalls from the student body were so loud they could have brought down the walls of Jericho.

(Who could blame these youths who, after being hectored to adhere to “The Liberty Way”—an honor code prohibiting premarital sex and private interactions between members of the opposite sex—now had to watch when the same proscriptions did not apply to their president? Like Bill Murray being pulled towards a seductive Sigourney Weaver in Ghostbusters, Falwell Jr. seems to think that, when applied to himself, “it's more of a guideline than a rule.”)

Clearly, the board was playing for time—time either to announce, after a decent interval, that Falwell had undergone some combination of 12-step program and spiritual counseling to announce that he’d been “redeemed,” or—if the outrage and ridicule still hadn’t subsided—to have a successor in place if Falwell is forced to step down permanently.

Don’t be surprised if Falwell survives this. What others might view as rank pretense, the religious right writes off as a redemption story in the making.

Why should they be put out when Falwell grabs a single woman by the waist when they have already excused a Presidential candidate who’s boasted about grabbing women “by the p----y?”

Unfortunately, Falwell’s not the only one willing to wink at “boys will be boys” behavior—and even engage in some of his own. Far too many evangelicals—and the entire religious right movement—have compromised their stress on personal integrity to win and keep access to power.

It was one thing to support the divorced movie star Ronald Reagan, who secured the allegiance of Falwell’s father and other key evangelicals in the 1980 election when he told them at a major Dallas confab,  “I know you can’t endorse me, but I can endorse you.”

But they could console themselves with the notion that Reagan’s second marriage had endured for nearly 30 years, that there was no serious question that he adored wife Nancy, and that he had a record of public service that could be analyzed.

But they had to shut their eyes far more to Donald Trump, who was unapologetic about his two divorces, exhibiting no real interest in atonement, and—unlike most of the other GOP candidates—lacking any governmental record to prove his fidelity to conservative ideals.

But, as recounted in a New York Times article this past weekend, he told them something, in a Dordt University address, they dearly wanted to hear:

“Christianity will have power. If I’m there, you’re going to have plenty of power, you don’t need anybody else. You’re going to have somebody representing you very, very well. Remember that.”

The same address became notorious in non-evangelical circles for another Trump statement: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”

Ever since then, evangelicals have gone a long way towards confirming Trump’s boast. It doesn’t matter to them that in the process, they demonstrated that their most telling contention about Bill and Hillary Clinton—that character counts—was utterly hollow as they followed someone who far surpassed them in moral turpitude.

Indeed, they exiled anyone who dared to question their passionate embrace of this President with no solid religious or even moral anchor—including at (surprise!), Liberty U., where, four years ago, Mark DeMoss was forced off the board of trustees for criticizing Falwell for personally endorsing Trump for President.

Enjoyment of the kind of power promised by Trump parallels the religious right’s sense of aggrievement and encirclement. All their gains in positions filled and right-wing Supreme Court justices are being jeopardized now through their overreach.

No longer are evangelicals content with debating issues that, no matter what else one might think of them, are indisputably moral in nature, such as abortion and gay rights. Now, they are forcing stalemates on issues of public safety and personal security: gun control, climate change, even COVID-19.

Religious conservatives on social media have raised hackles about politicians like California Gov. Gavin Newsom being “anti-Christian” for restricting indoor religious gatherings during the COVID-19 outbreak. 

It’s too bad these religious hand-wringers don’t spend as much time denouncing leaders like Falwell whose serial offenses have led more people to question the value of Christianity than an entire school system of secularists.

Tell me: Why do the loudest shouters about others’ sins get caught engaging in them so often themselves?

Quote of the Day (Carolyn Heilbrun, on Expectations of Change, Left and Right)

“Thinking about profound social change, conservatives always expect disaster, while revolutionaries confidently anticipate utopia. Both are wrong.”—Feminist scholar Carolyn Heilbrun (1926–2003), Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (1973)

Let’s see what the present moment brings…

Quote of the Day (Alan Brinkley, on Historians’ Treatment of Conservatism)

“While historians have displayed impressive powers of imagination in creating empathetic accounts of the past, they have seldom done so in considering the character of conservative lives and ideas.” —Columbia University professor of history Alan Brinkley (1949-2019), “The Problem of American Conservatism,” American Historical Review, April 1994

The history department at Columbia University was one of the principal factors attracting me to the school in the late 1970s. Looking back on my four years being taught by its excellent faculty, I have no regrets whatsoever.

Well, okay, maybe one. Because he didn’t arrive at Morningside Heights until nearly a decade after my graduation, I never had a chance to take a course with or even attend a lecture by Alan Brinkley.

Brinkley—who died on Monday at age 70—quickly became one of the university’s most acclaimed teachers, and even, despite his professed distaste for academic administration, even provost of the school for a couple of years.

His influence on a generation at the university, then, was considerable. But so was his impact on how historians came to view liberalism, conservatism, and the catastrophe that redefined these movements for nearly the next century: the Great Depression.

Brinkley’s article for American Historical Review might not have significantly kick-started the intensive study of conservatism that has occurred in the last two decades (surely, the electoral success of Ronald Reagan might have had something to do with that). 

But it instilled a sense in academe that conservatism should be examined in all its varieties, with at least something approaching the same rigor and seriousness accorded liberalism.

But Brinkley had already exerted influence early in his career through his first book, Voices of Protest (1982), an outgrowth of his doctoral thesis that ended up winning him the National Book Award for history. 

Though conceived as an analysis of two populist movements of the past—Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth Society and Fr. Charles Coughlin’s National Union for Social Justice—it should be read now as a warning of the discontents with the latent potential to disrupt the American political landscape that was finally realized in the last Presidential race:

“This casual mingling of themes commonly associated with opposite political poles did not originate with the Long and Coughlin movements; nor did it end with them. The populists, from whom both men derived so much ideological strength, had exhibited similar contradictions; so did later political phenomena: the George Wallace movement of the 1960s and the New Right of the 1980s, which combined populist rhetoric with cultural conservatism. Underlying all such movements in varying degrees has been a common impulse: the fear of concentrated power, the traditional American resistance to being governed—whether by private interests or by public institutions.”

And this sentence seems especially ominous: 

“Were these many protest movements to unite into a single force, they might be capable of toppling the entire structure of traditional party politics."