10. Heer's claim that I gloss over the dark side of conservatism is false. My book is all about the decades-long effort (ultimately unsuccessful) to keep the dark side out of the movement and the GOP.
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11. I argued, years ago and in Heer's own mag, that Buckley deserved credit for this but that the failure of his successors to gatekeep was a major indictment of modern conservatism:https://newrepublic.com/article/102241/what-william-buckley-american-conservatism …
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12. But that doesn't mean I think Buckley's racism, and NR's, deserve a pass. One of the strengths of Carl Bogus' WFB bio is that he levels a scorching indictment against NR's opposition to civil rights...https://www.amazon.com/Buckley-William-Rise-American-Conservatism/dp/1596915803 …
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13. ...but at the same Bogus acknowledges that free-market logic compelled NR to support the 1956 Montgomery bus boycott. That level of nuance is lost, if not in lib histories of conservatism, at least in indictments like Heer's
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14. An advantage of *not* being a liberal historian writing about conservatism is that you don't have to use kid gloves when dealing with the dark side, as I think McGirr did at times with the Birchers' racism & lunacy in her (superb) "Suburban Warriors" https://www.amazon.com/Suburban-Warriors-Origins-American-Politics/dp/0691096112 …
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15. But objectivity should compel the acknowledgement that Buckley at least did struggle to find the line on racial issues -- as he did for ex. by firing Joe Sobran for racism, which you wouldn't know from Heer's articlehttps://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2012/01/23/courting-cranks/ …
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16. Heer does have a point that conservative historians of conservatism typically minimize the dark side in writing about their heroes and forebears. I wrote about that too in TNR a long time ago:https://newrepublic.com/article/106505/william-rusher-national-review-david-frisk …
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17. The unwillingness of conservative historians to include the unsavory parts of the tale is a major drawback of the firsthand accounts of the movement, and part of the struggle for historians has been to fill in the elements these primary accounts omit
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18. More conservatives won't write histories of equal merit to the best liberal histories unless they abide by academic standards of objectivity, but they won't write such histories until the univs admit them, OK their approaches and offer them real possibilities of getting jobs
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19. But I have real problems with the approach of too many lib commentators, and some lib historians, to write off Buckley, and the con movement, and the GOP, and all Trump voters, as nothing but racists. That way lies civil war as well as bad history.
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This is a strawman argument. I (and more importantly the scholars you criticize) aren't saying Buckley etc are "nothing but racists." Rather they are saying racism has played a big part in conservative history which is worth analysis.
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Replying to @HeerJeet @RuleandRuin
Which you already pointed out. "The problem with the straw man Kabaservice has chosen to fight against here—few people would go so far as to call Buckley an erudite Klansman—... it ignores the vast array of troubling episodes in conservative history."
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And not one word on Kendall.
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End of conversation
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