Can Conservatives Stop Their Movement's Descent Into Madness?

[kevindavis007]

The political right needs more self-analysis and less whataboutism.

One of the modern conservative movement's greatest leaders, the late William F. Buckley Jr., retold a fascinating story from the run-up to the 1964 presidential election. As he explained in The Wall Street Journal in 2008, Buckley and his allies convinced Barry Goldwater to distance himself from the John Birch Society—a conspiracy-minded group that touted his candidacy.

Buckley noted that the society's president, Robert Welch, had at the time a "near-hypnotic" influence on the Right, despite his "wild" ideas: "(Welch) said Dwight D. Eisenhower was a 'dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy,' and that the government of the United States was 'under operational control of the Communist Party.'"

Buckley realized that Welch's fixations did a disservice to the anti-communist cause. So he convinced Goldwater to reject the core fallacy—"the assumption that you can infer subjective intention from objective consequence: we lost China to the communists, therefore the president of the United States and the secretary of state wished China to go to the communists."

Source: https://reason.com/2020/12/25/can-conservatives-stop-their-movements-descent-into-madness/

[mystery-ak]

already posted
http://www.gopbriefingroom.com/index.php/topic,423706.0.html