Last week, the Claremont Institute hosted a fascinating panel discussion at the Kirby Center, Hillsdale College’s beautiful embassy in Washington. The topic was, of course, Donald Trump.
Specifically, the panel was titled, “The Trump Phenomenon: How Did We Get Here, and What’s at Stake?” Expanding upon themes explored in the Claremont Review of Books‘s latest cover story, a panel of thoughtful conservatives, led by CRB editor-in-chief Charles Kesler, considered what Trumpism portends for the Republican Party in 2016 and beyond.
But one line in particular caught my attention. Trying to press an “anti-anti-Trump” case amid Martha Bayles’s and Peter Wehner’s withering criticism, Claremont’s William Voegeli offered an historical analogue for Trumpism.
“I think it is often the case in American political history that worthy causes have unworthy champions,” Voegeli urged. “Anticommunism and Joseph McCarthy would be at the top of that list.”
Voegeli isn’t the first to compare Donald Trump to Joe McCarthy. But he might be the first to make that comparison in defense of Trump.
Yet Voegeli’s mention of McCarthy calls my mind two far greater anti-Communists: Whittaker Chambers and William F. Buckley. More specifically, it calls to mind Chambers’s strong words of caution to Buckley, in 1954 and 1955, against the nascent conservative movement putting its faith in McCarthy.
After famously serving as a witness against Communist Alger Hiss and then penning his famous autobiography, Chambers undertook several years of correspondence with a young William F. Buckley, Jr., at the very beginning of the modern conservative movement. Buckley, who was only then founding National Review, had just penned his second book, with brother-in-law Brent Bozell, titled McCarthy and His Enemies. In it, Buckley and Bozell attempted to push back against McCarthy’s enemies, while at the same time voicing their own criticism of McCarthy’s excesses. (In some respects, Buckley and Bozell’s argument echoed Irving Kristol’s assertion two years earlier, in Commentary, that “there is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing. And with some justification.”)
Chambers had received a pre-publication galley copy of McCarthy and His Enemies directly from publisher Henry Regnery. He thoroughly enjoyed the book: “Please take my order for the co-authors’ book right away,” he wrote Regnery. But he was blunt in his own assessment of Senator McCarthy:
Regnery shared Chambers’s letter with Buckley, who hoped that Chambers would blurb the book. But to no avail: “He replied by telegram that he did not want his name to be used in any way,” Buckley later reflected. But Chambers followed his telegram with a letter to Buckley, which spurred a correspondence and friendship lasting the rest of Chambers’s life.
A year later (and about three months before Buckley published the first issue of National Review), Chambers and Buckley returned to the McCarthy question, in the aftermath of McCarthy’s speech criticizing President Eisenhower’s summit with Khrushchev in Geneva. Chambers shared McCarthy’s basic opposition to the summit: “Every day since Geneva is disclosing the shocking realities of that conference,” he wrote to Buckley. “Geneva was, of course, a smashing victory, but wholly and solely for the Communists.”
“What was needed,” Chambers further explained, “was a wise speech.” But McCarthy’s speech was no such thing: it was ham-fisted, dishonest, and needlessly alienating not only members of McCarthy’s own political party but also conservative Democrats. McCarthy had proved much more interested in “provok[ing] a split in the Republican Party” than in forming a political coalition capable of achieving the principles that McCarthy purported to pursue.
And this led Chambers to close his letter with the bluntest possible assessment of McCarthy’s deficiencies as a political leader:
Chambers proved correct, of course. Joe McCarthy was right about certain things, and those truths demanded a political response. But McCarthy’s own excesses set back his own cause—indeed, he so thoroughly discredited his own cause that even today the history of mid-century anticommunism is sullied in the minds of too many by vague notions of “McCarthyism.”
In 1999, forty-five years after he began his correspondence with Chambers, Buckley published The Redhunter, a novel reflecting upon McCarthy’s excesses. In an interview, Buckley was asked, “Does this novel reflect second thoughts?”
“I have thought for a long time that McCarthy did more damage to his cause than benefit,” Buckley replied.
And so William Voegeli was correct last week when he said, “it is often the case in American political history that worthy causes have unworthy champions.” But when Voegeli and others make this point and highlight McCarthy as his example, we ought to read the history not as a reassurance, but as a warning.
Adam J. White is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.
