Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

...In recent years, the magazine has taken to likening liberals and socialists to fascists and Nazis.... Correspondent Kevin Williamson claimed that Senator Bernie Sanders is leading ‘a national-socialist movement, which is a queasy and uncomfortable thing to write about a man who is the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland and whose family was largely wiped out in the Holocaust.’... His National Review colleague Jonah Goldberg authored a lengthy tome in 2008, Liberal Fascism, making essentially the same argument about the supposed links between modern day progressives and the early 20th century European far right. While self-evidently absurd as a line of argument, the Williamson/Goldberg thesis is a fine example of projection, especially interesting because of their magazine’s long history of both publishing pro-fascist arguments and also resenting any accusations of being pro-Nazi....

The conservative pundit’s father and namesake, William F. Buckley Sr., was an anti-Semite and fascist sympathizer who tried his best to pass along his ideas to his large brood. In 1937, four of the Buckley kids burned a cross outside a Jewish resort. The eleven-year-old William Buckley Jr. didn’t participate in the cross burning but only because he was deemed too young to participate and by his own account “wept tears of frustration” at being left out of the hate crime. At this point the young Buckley agreed with his father’s worldview, and would argue, in the words of a childhood friend, that “Bolshevik Russia was an infinitely greater threat than Nazi Germany.” The Spanish fascist leader Francisco Franco was a hero in the Buckley household, celebrated as a bulwark against the red menace....

After forming National Review in 1955, Buckley’s relationship to the European right was complicated: He continued to admire Franco as a hero but drew a distinction between fascism (permissible) and outright Nazism (beyond the pale).... In 1955, National Review had employed a troubled young right-winger named George Lincoln Rockwell to sell subscriptions. When Rockwell emerged as the leader of the American Nazi movement, Buckley took a two-pronged approach, publicly rebuking him and also privately working to find him psychological and religious counselling. But in 1961 editorial, after Rockwell was met by counter-protesters during a march in New York City, National Review criticized the “mob of Jews who hurled insults at him. Some lunged at him, and were kept from Rockwell’s throat only by a cordon of policemen. Are we ‘against’ the Jews whose pressure kept Rockwell from exercising his constitutional right to speak, and who would, if given the chance, have beat him bloody? Of course.”

It would be a mistake to read this editorial as a defense of free-speech absolutism.... National Review was adamantly opposed to... free-speech absolutism.... Moreover, “mob of Jews” wasn’t that editorial’s only target: It lambasted the civil rights movement for their “theatrical” challenge to Jim Crow in the south, a response which was “met, inevitably, by a spastic response. By violence.”... The National Review position was that American Nazis had a right to march in New York, but American blacks should refrain from exercising their first amendment rights in the South....

[The] limits to the anti-Nazism of Buckley and National Review, which became ever clearer when Adolf Eichmann... was... brought to trial in Israel. In 1961, National Review described the Eichmann trial as a “lurid extravaganza” which would produce such dire results as “bitterness, distrust, the refusal to forgive, the advancement of Communist aims, [and] the cultivation of pacifism.” (The idea that Jews in 1961 had an obligation to forgive Nazis is worth pondering)....

National Review’s position was not so much pro-Nazi, as anti-anti-Nazi (in parallel with the anti-anti-racism the magazine also adopted).... This anti-anti-Nazism was combined with outright enthusiasm for fascism. In 1957, Buckley declared that “General Franco is an authentic national hero.” James Burnham echoed this sentiment... “Francisco Franco was our century’s most successful ruler”.... F.R. Buckley (one of Buckley’s brothers) who sang Franco’s praises as “a Spaniard out of the heroic annals of the nation, a giant. He will be truly mourned by Spain because with all his heart and might and soul, he loved his country, and in the vast context of Spanish history, did well by it.”... _National Review editor Jeffrey Hart penned an equally effusive tribute to Benito Mussolini. “His 1922 blackshirt march on Rome brought to an end a period of political deadlock and leftist riot,” Hart asserts. “His domestic achievements were substantial. ... There was repression, the administrating of doses of castor oil, but no Gulags and Belsens or Cambodian-style slaughter.... Mussolini was probably better read than any other national leader of his time.... Mussolini’s leadership made even proletarians take some pride in being Italian, and his addresses, broadcast across the Atlantic, were listened to with respect in American-Italian households.... Mussolini stood 5 feet 6 inches and had a massive, handsome head.... Mussolini liked to interrupt his working day several times with sexual intercourse, often standing up and in his uniform, a very rapid performance.” According to Hart, Mussolini made only “a single error in judgement”: allying with Hitler in 1940.

So why did William F. Buckley react so badly to Vidal’s jibe about being a crypto-Nazi? Why are National Review writers like Kevin Williamson and Jonah Goldberg so eager to prove that liberals are the real fascists and Nazis? The most likely answer is that they have a bad conscience: they know that the history of their political movement has been compromised by pro-fascist and anti-anti-Nazi sentiment, and they want to deflect attention from that toxic legacy.