Conservative Cancel Culture: Paul E. Gottfried et al’s “The Vanishing Tradition: Perspectives on American Conservatism”

Scores of other right-wing intellectuals were purged by the establishment, as the book relates. From the founders of American libertarianism, such as Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard, and the fathers of post-war US conservatism like Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver to proto-Trumpians like Samuel Huntingdon, Pat Buchanan, Samuel T. Francis and John Derbyshire, dissenters were shown the door and sometimes publicly and needlessly attacked for their views on globalism, mass immigration, foreign interventions and other issues on which they failed to fall in line with the neoconservative agenda.

Then there’s Gottfried’s own cancellation. Despite having written numerous scholarly works on American conservatism, he was labelled unpatriotic by David Frum for his criticism of neoconservatism. Detractors also managed to get him excluded from consideration for a professorship at Catholic University and persuaded Modern Age to no longer allow him to contribute to the magazine.

It would be easy to write off some of the cancelled as isolationists, unreconstructed traditionalists or chauvinistic cranks. Many, however, articulated issues that later found resonance with millions of voters. And since Trump’s 2016 victory, many of them have enjoyed renewed recognition.

Furthermore, such cancellations are troubling, independent of one’s opinion of their victims. As Gottfried notes, it is worse to be cancelled as a conservative than as a liberal because of the relative paucity of right-wing media outlets—indeed, many of the cancelled languished and died in obscurity following their ousters.

Many of these people were cancelled in response to left-wing pressure. Yielding to your opponents in this way is poor political strategy, as it just encourages them to demand further cancellations. As Mark Steyn puts it in his own defense of John Derbyshire: “The more sacrifices you offer up, the more ravenously the volcano belches.”