NR’s Attack On Phyllis Schlafly Gets Conservative History Wrong

National Review is turning 70. The legacy of that publication is hard sum up, but suffice to say, it’s impact on American politics has been enormous, and it’s one I certainly feel personally. I worked there for a couple of years, and I was very grateful for the job and the experience it gave me. My tenure at NR only overlapped with the last few months of William F. Buckley’s life, though I had met him once earlier in my career — he presented me with an award in front of my parents, who flew out to D.C. for the occasion — and for a long time, merely having a photograph with me and WFB was enough to hoodwink people into thinking I had a career in political journalism.

Anyway, my longstanding appreciation for the institution is why I am so perplexed that in NR’s 70th Anniversary issue, there’s an article attacking the legacy of conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly. The attack on a beloved icon of the right is bad enough on its own, but what makes the whole thing especially intolerable is that it is ultimately an attack on the legacy of National Review itself.

The headline on Rachel Lu’s piece, “The Rise of a Populist Influencer in the Age of Print Media,” seems benign enough. But in the first two paragraphs, Rachel Lu launches straight into a jeremiad against Schlafly’s hugely influential book, A Choice Not An Echo:

Schlafly had a wonderful knack for the pithy phrase, the savvy slur, the damning detail. Mean-spirited and conspiratorial, she trained her guns on fellow Republicans, eager for factional conflict. It’s shameless propaganda. And yet, from a comfortable distance, it’s also a rollicking good read. It’s oddly reassuring to be reminded that the political sphere has its own enduring (if ugly) truths, and that shills and sophists will always be with us. … And she was a propagandist through and through, a true virtuoso of the paranoid style.

Hard to know where to unpack this, but what’s interesting is that Lu’s criticisms of Schlafly pretty much mirror the same criticisms that were leveled at William F. Buckley himself in the ’50s and ’60s, who was also decried as masking sophistry and propaganda with his cleverness. Many years after his death, Buckley is often venerated as an erudite example of what conservatives ought to be, when in fact, at the time, he was far more pugnacious than people give him credit for. For all his wit and education, he was not some suave intellectual sending dispatches from his yacht — in many respects, he was a sesquipedalian shock jock who fearlessly challenged the liberal order.

But what really leaps out is Lu’s claim that Schlafly was “a true virtuoso of the paranoid style.” Sixty years on, Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” is one of those essays that is more invoked than read, to the point “paranoid style” is basically a cliché. But the context here is really damning, and for Lu to invoke it apparently unironically either betrays a great deal of ignorance or, worse, a rejection of one of the foundational events of modern American conservatism.

To recap, Schlafly’s self-published A Choice Not An Echo played a major role in Goldwater winning the Republican nomination in 1964. The book successfully persuaded many in the party that the Republican East Coast establishment’s grip on the party was suppressing grassroots activists and new ideas. And accordingly, voters should take a chance on Arizona’s Barry Goldwater, who was very much a GOP outsider, with new free-market, small government ideas that were seen as radical at the time. For Goldwater to win the nomination in 1964, wresting control from the establishment and giving more control to the grassroots was a huge triumph, even if Goldwater went on to get trounced in the general election. Schlafly’s book, which eventually sold more than three million copies, was hugely responsible for getting voters to not only accept a new direction for the GOP, but it also had a lasting impact of making Republican voters more involved in grassroots activism and party politics.

Now moving from a party controlled in smoke-filled rooms stuffed with party bosses and plutocrats to a party run more from the bottom up was always going to be somewhat awkward. The problem with big tents is that they frequently have to accommodate circus animals, and the GOP of the era had to deal with Birchers and other factions that, rightly or wrongly, were hailed as extremist at the time. (Buckley and National Review famously worked to marginalize the Birchers from the conservative movement, a decision that Goldwater was engaged with and participated in.) The Democrat and media establishments were also eager to try and discredit the new direction of the Republican party by portraying it as being in thrall of extremists.

This is where Hofstadter comes in. “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” was published in Harper’s in November 1964 as a rebuke of Goldwater Republicans. It was largely premised on a 1959 lecture he gave on the BBC, less subtly titled “The American Right Wing and the Paranoid Style.” Hofstadter argued that the post-McCarthy right had abandoned reason and moderation in favor of conspiratorial ideas that were a matter of psychological projection.

Of course, Hofstadter was a leftist and disciple of the radical Frankfurt School Marxists. His interpretation of events was heavily colored by ideology and largely discredited by history. Goldwater’s small-government, free-market ideas, coming on the heels of an era where there were 90 percent top tax rates in America, would eventually become widely accepted as effective policies. And even if Joe McCarthy was wrong on several particulars, the paranoia of the era would prove more than justified — communists such as Alger Hiss really had infiltrated the highest levels of American government, and the radical left was just a few years away from spending the ’70s and early ’80s involved in terrorist bombing campaigns.

Why Lu would blithely embrace this disingenuous interpretation of conservative political history is simply beyond me. Lu acknowledges that “Goldwater seemed ideally suited” to bring “key principles and consolidated around the core of intellectuals assembled at the fledgling National Review” into the mainstream. She even notes that Goldwater’s seminal book was ghost-written by Buckley’s brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell of National Review.

The fact is, there really wasn’t any daylight between Schlafly’s mission to wrest the party control from insiders and National Review’s mission to bring conservative principles and political debates to the masses. The two weren’t just complementary, they were overtly coordinated. And yet, in the 70th anniversary of National Review, Lu is trying to second-guess this:

Decades later, they are still debating the lessons of the failed Goldwater campaign. To some, it has the romantic aura of a noble lost cause. Others view it more philosophically as a salutary lesson in the importance of balancing principle with practicality, something the nascent conservative movement in the 1960s had yet to learn. In this latter interpretation, the Goldwater fiasco represented the growing pains of a movement that would rise again in a more mature form under the leadership of Ronald Reagan. The ideas were good, but the moment was not yet ripe.

Rereading Schlafly’s missive, one is forced to consider a less hopeful lesson. Perhaps the Goldwater takeover really wasn’t so principled in the first place. Perhaps its longest-surviving legacy will be not conservative principle or intellectual integrity but a power-hungry populism that seems to wax strongest whenever the right is frustrated and losing its way. Perhaps the “last man standing” among those rising conservative stars will turn out to be a woman, who taught the right never to compromise and never to believe people who tell you things you don’t want to hear.

It’s pretty amazing how Lu casually elides over the causal relationship between Goldwater pushing the GOP in a new direction in 1964 and Reagan’s eventual triumph in 1980. This not only had world-historic implications — the collapse of Soviet communism — it defined movement conservatism for generations to come and validated the principles, best explicated by Buckley and National Review, from the prior generation of movement conservatism.

Further validating Schlafly, it is also noteworthy that Reagan’s rise to president also involved a fair degree of counterinsurgency within his own party; Reagan lost the nomination in 1976, but captured it in 1980, and it was fair to say he was the grassroots candidate in both primaries. This is no small thing, because populism is ultimately at the heart of Lu’s incoherent critique:

The book feels eerily contemporary for another reason. Schlafly is telling the populist story with plot points that are now as familiar to us as “once upon a time” and “happily ever after.” The nation is imperiled not by real threats in a dangerous world but by malevolent elites who sabotage American interests for purely selfish reasons. Ordinary Americans, being good and true, want sensible policies (and would mostly agree with her about what those are); if polls or analysts suggest otherwise, that’s because they’re manipulative liars. Everything depends on the breaking of the elite stranglehold.

Does this sound familiar? Is it at all surprising that Schlafly’s last significant political act, just before her death in 2016, was to give her blessing to Donald Trump?

And there you have it. Lu is starting with Trump and reasoning backwards. Populism swept Trump into power, and this somehow must force us to consider whether the Goldwater campaign, which allowed Schlafly, Bozell, National Review et al. to inject an element of populism into the Republican party, “really wasn’t so principled in the first place.”

Now, the premise that Trump and his brand of populism is a negative for conservatism is one that Lu assumes rather than demonstrates, and no doubt it is a premise many NR readers are not inclined to agree with. However, even if you accept that premise, over half a century elapsed between Schlafly championing Goldwater and Trump getting elected. The strain of post-Goldwater populism in the GOP had a major impact on many things where Schlafly’s populist legacy could be seen as quite positive. Again, Lu’s casual dismissal of the link between the new direction the party took under Goldwater and Reagan’s eventual success is very damning in this regard.

And certainly progress on social conservatism — causes at the very heart of Schlafly’s life’s work — have pretty consistently been driven from the bottom up. For instance, Republican leaders have historically kept abortion at arm’s length, in spite of it being one of the most passionate causes of the GOP base. George W. Bush, a professed evangelical and Republican president, would not appear at the annual March for Life for fear of negative political ramifications. By contrast, the thrice-married Donald Trump, who once appeared on the cover of Playboy and famously had to litigate his dalliance with a porn star, did appear at the March for Life.

Trump also made specific commitments to appointing Supreme Court justices, eventually appointing three new justices, which directly led to the repeal of Roe v. Wade — a victory for social conservatives 50 years in the making. (Also worth noting the Dobbs decision repealing Roe was authored by Samuel Alito, who was appointed to the high court only after Bush tried to appoint his White House counsel, Harriet Miers, to the court. The conservative legal community and pro-life groups balked at the Miers pick, forcing Bush to choose someone more serious. After 20 years of Alito on the court, it’s fair to say the grassroots were right, and Bush was wrong.)

While Trump’s record on abortion might be ultimately mixed, as it’s hard to imagine any politician being immune to the fallout from a massive event such as the repeal of Roe, it’s also fair to say thousands of children are alive because Trump was more of a populist president, not an ideological one. Unlike previous Republican leaders content to signal their principles to voters, Trump had to prove his commitment to the initially skeptical socially conservative voters who supported him.

In this respect, populism can be understood as a tool voters can use to hold politicians accountable. Schlafly isn’t around to elaborate on the fine points of why she endorsed Trump, but I would wager she understood the transactional nature of Trump’s populism better than most. And I would be willing to further bet that Schlafly, who believed “abortion is the right-or-wrong issue of our time,” would have no cause to regret her Trump endorsement for this issue alone.

Regardless, there are certainly pitfalls that accompany embracing populism, and many aspects of Donald Trump’s tenure as president are proof enough of that. If Lu wanted to talk about Schlafly’s role in pushing the conservative movement toward a place where propaganda and populism have an unfortunately outsized role, there probably was a way to do that respectfully, though I’m afraid she tries and fails at this. At the very end of the piece, Lu rather tidily concedes things are more complex than she’s thus far suggested, before attempting to credit Schlafly and ultimately retreating back to doubting her legacy:

It’s not necessary to choose among these possible morals. All hold some measure of truth. Mid-century movement conservatives did have some noble goals and principles, many of which bore fruit in later years. Schlafly herself had immense gifts, among them a truly extraordinary level of moxie (reminiscent of our current president’s), which sometimes gave her an awe-inspiring ability to carry the whole world before her. Her achievements were genuinely remarkable, especially for a mother of six. Unfortunately, her defining story was not true, or not true enough. It has echoed across the decades, but some of those echoes have been noxious.

Schlafly’s defining story was not true? What defining story? Is it just the rhetoric in A Choice Not An Echo we’re objecting to? Because there’s an argument that the overarching narrative of the book was basically correct. Schlafly also had very tangible accomplishments. Was there something not “true” about the fact that she almost singlehandedly stopped the Equal Rights Amendment, which had a real chance of being ratified and would have been devastating to traditionally conservative notions of constitutional governance? Next to Schlafly and her accomplishments, who exactly is Rachel Lu to judge her legacy as somehow untrue or a betrayal of conservative principles?

Insofar as I feel qualified to assess Lu’s own perspective here, I do think it’s interesting that Lu, who is a faithful Catholic and has real conservative bona fides on a great many issues, regularly writes for conservative intellectual journals while still maintaining an ambiguous or sometimes positive relationship with the word “feminism.” Of course, the feminist movement is something that Schlafly vehemently rejected, as have many of the contemporary conservative women who count Schlafly as an inspiration. (Though Schlafly, who attended Harvard and had a J.D., was obviously not so radical she was opposed to, say, women getting involved in politics or working outside the home.) And, interestingly, Lu has been involved in debates with other conservative writers who are pretty vocal about their own rejection of feminism.

Maybe that context is unfair to note, as I don’t want to read too much into Lu’s motivations or why she arrived at the conclusions she did about Schlafly based on something other than what she’s written here. But I do think I can say, based on the reaction to her piece, I’m not alone in concluding it is vague and imprecise about 50 years of political and intellectual history. This imprecision contrasts rather glaringly to her comfort offering some startlingly definitive and harsh judgments, which include throwing around pejoratives such as “sophist” and “propagandist” and embracing a notoriously dubious assessment of the conservative movement from Hofstadter, a pseudo-Marxist who George Will, no fan of Trump or populism, once called “the iconic public intellectual of liberal condescension.”

Anyway, I have read Lu for many years and National Review for the vast majority of my life and have obviously benefited from both. I don’t expect this to do much to tarnish either of them, but I do think the appearance of this article in the 70th anniversary issue in particular is very unfortunate. From various personal conversations I’ve had to assessing the chatter online, it has upset a lot of people. After 70 years, it’s worth noting that National Review has a long history of kickstarting spirited debates — and this certainly is one of them.  

Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator