Bill Buckley and National Review: Whites Are 'the Advanced Race'

Bill Buckley and National Review: Whites Are 'the Advanced Race'
Posted by Ryan W. McMaken on December 24, 2011 02:00 PM

I find it interesting that the remnants of the Buckleyite wing of the right wing are trying to read Ron Paul out of the movement for his alleged racism. Yes, much better to profess a belief in equality for all ethnic groups, and then proceed to favor policies like the drug war that overwhelmingly punish non-whites more than whites. And then there is the mass murder of various brown-skinned foreigners by Obama, which will no doubt continue under any successor to Obama who is not named Ron Paul.

The disciples of Buckley of course conveniently forget National Review's position on civil rights. Let us remember Buckley's comments on how the whites in the South have a right to government-enforced segregation because they are "the advanced race":

"The central question that emerges­and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalog of the rights of American citizens, born Equal­is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes­the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race."

Buckley and NR then go on to defend the use of government violence against anti-Jim Crow protests:

"National Review believes that the South's premises are correct. If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened. It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority. Sometimes it becomes impossible to assert the will of a minority, in which case it must give way; and the society will regress; sometimes the numerical minority cannot prevail except by violence: then it must determine whether the prevalence of its will is worth the terrible price of violence"

Note how NR contrasts alleged "civilized standards" with opposition to the brutal use of government force, via Jim Crow, against tax-paying blacks strictly on the basis of race. In other words, voluntary free association among individuals is not the "civilized" choice. And, if need be, the white minority, which asserts segregation, is entitled to use violence to preserve its state-enforced prohibition on free association. Thus is the ideological patrimony of Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru and all the other scions of conservatism who now try to crush the libertarian Ron Paul who has always opposed such collectivist nonsense.

Later, Buckley said that Martin Luther King may have been to blame for his own assassination:

"the cretin who leveled his rifle at the head of Martin Luther King may have absorbed the talk, so freely available, about the supremacy of individual conscience, such talk as Martin Luther King, God rest his troubled and compassionate soul, had so widely and indiscriminately made."

­ (Found in Buckley's 1969 book The Jeweler's Eye)