First They Came for Mel Bradford

The Paleocon/Neocon Divide and Its Enduring Significance

By Robert Stacy McCain
(This is the text of a speech delivered at the 11th annual conference of the
H.L. Mencken Club, November 2, 2018.)
A man who is not willing to be slandered by the Left is of no use to the Right. It
goes without saying, and can be demonstrated from history, that every successful
proponent of the conservative cause becomes a target of the Left’s character
assassins. Knowing this, we should be prepared in advance to meet the enemy’s
accusations. Furthermore, conservatives must be prepared to defend our allies
against the predictable defamation that will be directed against them, just as soon
as they achieve any prominence on the Right, and if by any means the Left can
obtain some “evidence” that they are guilty of Wrongthink.
Some of our friends, unfortunately, make the mistake of assuming that they could
never be targeted in this way, and therefore they are willing to join the circular
firing squad, assisting in the destruction of other conservatives. Several years ago,
when a certain foreign-policy analyst critical of the Bush administration’s policy in
Iraq was purged from the Heritage Foundation, I joked to a friend that I ought to
write a book about this internecine war among conservatives. Pondering a possible
title, I first thought of Jerome Tuccille’s book about the libertarian movement, It
Usually Begins with Ayn Rand. Next, I thought about Martin Niemöller’s famous
poem about Nazi Germany that begins, “First they came for the socialists, and I did
not speak out—because I was not a socialist.” Thus I arrived at the idea of a title,
“First They Came for Mel Bradford,” and here I am more than a decade later to
share some of these thoughts with you.
As most of you know, Professor Bradford was a conservative scholar and the first
choice to become chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities after
Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980. Bradford became the target of a
campaign of character assassination, based on certain of his previous writings and
past associations. Among other things, Bradford had written critically of Abraham
Lincoln’s infringement of constitutional rights during the Civil War, and he had
also supported George Wallace’s presidential campaigns in 1968 and 1972. Such
was the excellence of Bradford’s reputation, however, that his supporters were able
to defend him against partisan attacks from Democrats and their liberal media
allies. What ultimately destroyed Bradford’s chances of becoming NEH chairman
was sabotage from within the GOP camp.
Now, I need not recount here the details of that long-ago battle over Bradford’s
appointment. Others have told the story, and Professor Gottfried will soon publish
an excellent 5,000-word essay on the subject entitled, “The Significance of the
M.E. Bradford Affair,” the draft of which he has been kind enough to share with
me. As Professor Gottfried says in that essay, the significance of this long-ago
dispute was “is its foreshadowing of what was to come” in terms of the ascendancy
of neoconservatives who became, in Professor Gottfried’s words, “the undisputed
intellectual leadership of the ‘conservative movement’ and, by extension, the
Republican Party.” It is the methods by which this ascendancy was obtained, and
what it has meant for America over the decades down to the present era, which is
the subject I wish to address today.
How many of you have been “hate-listed” by the Southern Poverty Law Center?
That happened to me more than 15 years ago, when I was an assistant national
editor at The Washington Times. According to the SPLC, I am a neo-Confederate
white supremacist, and I’ve so enjoyed this unsolicited publicity that I usually
refrain from denying these accusations. It is a fact that I have been friends with
people whose opinions the SPLC condemns, and this makes me vulnerable to what
Laird Wilcox has called the “links-and-ties” method of guilt-by-association smear.
What’s remarkable about this tactic is the selectivity involved. For example, I am
friends with all kinds of people with diverse opinions. Being gregarious by nature,
I don’t limit my friendships to people with whom I agree 100 percent about
everything, because then I would have no friends at all. Even my wife disagrees
with some of my opinions.
Well, what about this or that quote which the SPLC might cite as evidence that I
have some kind of ideological affinity for Nazis? This is where it’s important to
understand what a friend of mine has called the “Ransom Note Method” of
selective quotation. If you are someone who writes for a living, as I have been
doing since 1986, your accumulated output might amount to millions of words, and
if you express opinions on controversial subjects, as I have occasionally done, it is
possible for a hostile critic to comb through your work, select a sentence or two
here and a couple of phrases there, and assemble a sort of collage that portrays you
as a demonized bogeyman. If you have ever been a target of this kind of attack,
you know the inexplicable feeling of seeing this kind of distorted caricature of
yourself and not even recognizing any resemblance to your actual self.
The Left has perfected these two techniques – the “links-and-ties” smear and the
“Ransom Note Method” – in an arsenal of weapons they employ routinely against
anyone on the Right who is an effective opponent of the progressive agenda. For
example, David Brock’s Soros-funded operation Media Matters for America
compiles dossiers on conservative journalists and commentators, using these
dossiers to marginalize or discredit the enemies of the Left. One of their most
famous targets has been talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh. For three decades,
Limbaugh has been doing a daily three-hour radio broadcast. If you multiply 15
hours a week by 50 weeks a year (allowing Rush a two-week annual vacation), you
see that he produces more than 700 hours a year of what he calls “Excellence in
Broadcasting.” How many words does Rush Limbaugh say on the radio every
week? Thousands, certainly. Considering that the commodity he’s selling is
political controversy, of course anyone would find it easy to cherry-pick his words
in order to depict Limbaugh as a dangerous perpetrator of “hate speech.”
Now, I’m sure many of those here are not big fans of Rush Limbaugh, but that’s
beside the point. Seeing how someone like Limbaugh can be demonized as a hater,
targeted for advertising boycotts and so forth, we must recognize that everyone on
the Right is vulnerable to such attacks. Because we all are at risk of these smears,
therefore our only hope of survival is to band together in defense against the Left.
Here is where the neoconservative sabotage of Mel Bradford is so significant.
Whatever his merits or faults as a scholar, Bradford spoke for a constituency that
was a vital component of the Reagan coalition. In the 1970s, most Southerners still
maintained their ancestral loyalty to the Democrat Party. Being a native of Atlanta
myself, born and raised among fiercely partisan “Yellow Dog” Democrats, I never
even met a Republican until I was a junior in college. Young people today (and by
“young,” I mean anyone under 50) have no idea what politics was like in the so-
called “Solid South” of my youth. To win the Democratic primary in Georgia was
tantamount to election. When I was in second grade, Lester Maddox was elected
governor as a Democrat, which horrified many respectable Georgians as much as it
would any liberal today. Oddly enough, however, Maddox proved to be a very
good governor who instituted long-needed reforms and, as a matter of fact, earned
the admiration of many in the black community. But my point is that the
Democrats had an iron grip on politics in the South and winning their support for a
Republican running against Georgia’s native son Jimmy Carter was not as easy as
some contemporary historians might have you believe. Students of that era know
that, after Reagan lost his 1976 challenge to Gerald Ford in the GOP primaries,
many conservatives urged Reagan to consider a third-party candidacy in 1980.
Reagan rejected that advice and stuck with the Republicans, but it was still
uncertain whether he could win over the “Yellow Dogs” in the South. Bradford
and other Southern conservatives helped make possible what proved to be a
landslide victory for Reagan in 1980, and the appointment of Bradford to the NEH
post was viewed not only as a personal honor for Bradford, but also a reward to
such of his supporters as North Carolina senators John East and Jesse Helms.
Here we are, in the Age of Trump. Looking back to that long-ago controversy, can
anyone deny that Mel Bradford was the victim of a cruel injustice? And what was
the consequence? As Professor Gottfried says, the sabotage of Bradford’s
appointment signaled the ascendancy of the neoconservatives. However, the
liberals were also watching and what did they learn from that episode? In Latin,
divide et impera – “divide and conquer.” Rivalries within the Republican coalition
could be exploited to impede the implementation of a conservative agenda.
What liberals learned from the destruction of Mel Bradford was that they could
find Republicans to do their dirty work for them. We see how this operates in the
Age of Trump, with anonymous leaks from inside the White House to the liberal
media being used to settle scores among rivals within the administration. Cui
bono? Who benefits from these betrayals of trust? And what happens when people
who call themselves conservatives join the Thought Police in ferreting out
Wrongthink? Every friend of liberty should detest this business of conservative
individuals and groups being branded with a scarlet letter: “Oh, this person is a
conspiracy theorist” and “So-and-so is an anti-Semite” and so forth, in a way that
is as dishonest as how the SPLC caricatured me as an ideological soulmate of
Theodore Bilbo. Perhaps some people wouldn’t mind that kind of notoriety, and as
I say, my bad reputation is a badge of honor in a certain sense: I was a hate-listed
before being hate-listed was cool. Nevertheless, these smears are damaging, even if
they are survivable, and they have a negative impact not only on the individuals
targeted, but also on the conservative movement generally.
Professor Gottfried has addressed this in another forthcoming essay, “The Never
Ending Purges,” the text of which he kindly shared with me. In this essay,
Professor Gottfried supplies context to the recent imbroglio over Kevin
Williamson of National Review, who was hired and then fired from The Atlantic
Monthly. Now, I’ve met Mr. Williamson and have praised his writing and
somehow failed to realize that he was part of the “Never Trump” movement
associated with National Review, until he came under fire after his hiring at The
Atlantic. Some of my pro-Trump friends took the attitude that Mr. Williamson
more or less deserved what he got on the grounds of “what goes around comes
around.” This attitude struck me as unfortunate, because all of us who are not
liberals are harmed whenever any of us suffers the kind of treatment Mr.
Williamson got. In a world where the Left has hegemonic control over all the
major cultural institutions, from Hollywood to Harvard, those of us who are not
liberals have to stick together, or else we’ll be destroyed one by one.
What happens (and this is highly relevant to the Bradford case) is that
conservatives, watching their friends being targeted this way, begin to think
defensively. We become excessively cautious in what we say and who we
associate ourselves with, and this impairs effective teamwork. For five years of my
youth, from ages 9 to 14, I played football for the Sweetwater Valley Red Raiders,
an experience that taught me the value of team loyalty. If only more conservatives
had such experience, or had learned such lessons! The kind of selfishness that
informs the infighting on the Right, going back to the earliest days of the Reagan
administration, is anathema to success in any endeavor that requires teamwork.
The way some people operate in D.C., is so dishonorable that it should horrify any
decent person. Imagine being hired by the President of the United States to work in
his administration, and then dishing White House gossip to CNN or the New York
Times! Repaying your benefactor with betrayal? It’s shameful, selfish and
destructive. Think about those busybodies who worked behind the scenes to
submarine Mel Bradford back at the dawn of the Reagan era. It is their legacy of
selfishness and dishonesty that we are witnessing when President Trump is
betrayed by so-called “administration insiders” who act like third-grade tattletales
with their media leaks.
You may have noticed that I’ve said nearly nothing of the ideological basis of the
paleoconservative/neoconservative divide. This is because so much of this division
is not actually a matter of principle or public policy; rather, it is a matter of people
pursuing selfish goals without concern for the larger consequences. It’s about
people judging disputes not in terms of right and wrong, but instead caring more
about how it affects their image, their ambition, their influence. And what this
does, in so many cases, is to empower the left-wing Thought Police who are
steadily eroding our First Amendment freedoms in America.
Let me read you a quote: “The freedom to hate must be as protected as the freedom
to love. It is only when hate crosses over into action that the law may properly
intervene.” What kind of dangerous right-wing extremist would defend “the
freedom to hate”? That’s lesbian feminist Camille Paglia I just quoted, decrying
the concept of “hate speech,” which is nowadays often used to silence conservative
voices in the media and in academia. Think back to what happened to Mel
Bradford, whose great sin was to express a view of Abraham Lincoln that was by
no means uncommon among Southerners. Professor Bradford was a native of
Texas, who got his Ph.D. at the University of Vanderbilt, home of the famed
Southern Agrarian “fugitives.” If such a man could not be excused for speaking
critically of Lincoln, then we have no freedom of speech on that particular subject.
And think of how the list of off-limit topics has grown in recent years. Nowadays,
you can get suspended from Twitter for daring to deny that a person with XY
chromosomes and a penis is a woman.
The Thought Police are everywhere, and freedom of speech is increasingly
endangered, because the Left has learned how to destroy anyone who opposes
them, and too many on the Right are willing to cooperate with this destruction.
Before I came here, I contacted my editor at The American Spectator to tell him I’d
be speaking to you this evening, and when I briefly sketched my topic, he said,
“Oh, Mel Bradford – we published him!” Yes, never afraid to offend the Left, The
American Spectator welcomed Professor Bradford’s contributions, including a
1984 article entitled, “Sentiment and the U.S. Immigration Policy.” In that article,
Professor Bradford examined what was known as the Simpson-Mazzoli Bill, which
included amnesty for illegal aliens. Let me quote a bit of that article for you:
“For the first law of every society, even the condition of its gestures of
generosity, is that it put the needs of its own members ahead of the needs of
outsiders. Such an order of priorities is part of what we mean by the ‘social
contract’: the commitment to certain persons by the terms of which we are
precluded from establishing an equivalent bond with others. Said another
way, any act of choosing is an act of exclusion as well as of inclusion. We
have no social connection with any man if we have the same obligations to
all. Any goal contrary to the common good of the corporate ‘we’ which
endangers the future of the whole, and sets one of its components or part of
 its value system so far ahead of the rest as to threaten all, is, in essence,
sentimental: indicative of an emotion out of proportion to the context in
which it appears.”
Oh, that we had such students of philosophy writing speeches for President Trump
today! However, if some neoconservative wanted to destroy such a philosophical
critic of open-borders, how easy would it be for him to do so! It wouldn’t take
much, probably. Send that paragraph to a left-wing writer and I’m sure he’d
denounce it as “blood-and-soil” white nationalism. One might as well invoke the
notorious “Fourteen Words” as to quote Mel Bradford, even though Bradford
could cite a vast library of philosophy in support of his arguments.
We need not elaborate every consequence of what happened to Bradford to see the
general trend. It would be a very long list if we were to name everyone who had
suffered this treatment since then. Joe Sobran, Sam Francis, Peter Brimelow, John
Derbyshire – I could go on and on. However, in the interest of inclusion, let me
quote a Yankee: In the spring of 1863, Gen. Joe Hooker’s Union Army made a
bold move, a secret flank march that landed them squarely in the rear of Gen. Lee’s
army at Fredericksburg, Virginia, and threatened to cut off the Confederate line of
supply with Richmond and the Shenandoah Valley. Learning of this, Lee sent
troops marching rapidly westward, where his lead brigade clashed in a fierce
meeting engagement with Hooker’s advanced troops. The Union troops in George
Meade’s corps were holding their own against the Rebels, when word arrived from
Hooker: Pull back to Chancellorsville. Meade was furious about this order to
retreat from a strong position and snapped: “If he thinks he can’t hold the top of
the hill, how does he expect to hold the bottom of it?”
Exactly: If conservatives would not rally in defense of so eminent a scholar as Mel
Bradford, how do they suppose they can defend anyone targeted by the Left? We
have seen, in recent weeks, how the Left has been emboldened to believe that they
can destroy anyone with their character-assassination tactics. When we watched
the bitter battle over Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination, and saw how his good name
was dragged through the mud, those who know history might well have said:
“First, they came for Mel Braford.” If we cannot hold the top of the hill, we can’t
expect to hold the bottom, and we have already retreated too long.