The New QAnon and JD Vance’s Choice, with Sam Tanenhaus

_THE INTERVIEW_

This interview was edited for clarity.

Ari: Sam Tanenhaus is an American historian, journalist, and editor whose career spans major media institutions.

He is the author of two major biographies, one on Whittaker Chambers and another, years in the making, on William F. Buckley Jr. He continues to write widely on American politics and culture.

Sam Tanenhaus, thank you so much for joining us today.

Sam: Good to be here.

Ari: I have a quick admission. I have been involved in conservative politics for about four or five years, and I have always heard about William F. Buckley. I do not think I ever got past the first paragraph on Wikipedia about him.

I kept hearing his name but never developed an interest in learning who he was or his influence on the conservative movement.

Everyone always talked about him, and I guess I just blanked out. A few weeks ago, I was watching Woody Allen videos on YouTube and came across an interview Allen did with William Buckley. I thought, okay, maybe there is something more to this guy. He seems very interesting.

Sam: Yeah, that was fun, those two.

Ari: It was a lot of fun. I started reading a little bit more. I watched the documentary first, and then I got your book.

All of a sudden, everyone is talking about William F. Buckley more than ever, specifically in the conservative space, due to what is going on with Tucker Carlson. You cannot get away from the story of Buckley and the Birchers.

That is where I want to start. This narrative, which you wrote about and that everyone is discussing, concerns how Buckley served as a gatekeeper. He made a concerted effort to remove radical elements from the conservative movement.

Can you give a quick summary of what happened there and whether he was effective in the long term?

Sam: When Buckley started out, he was a very young guy and the leader of the conservative movement as it arose during the Cold War. This was the 1950s, the McCarthy period; he was close to Joe McCarthy.

As the movement began to gain traction in the 1960s, some of the more extreme elements started to seem like baggage.

I say "seem" because prior to that, Buckley really did not have a problem with it. One of his colleagues at the time said when they were starting National Review, which still exists, that they needed everyone they could get. It was founded exactly 70 years ago in November 1955.

It was the first great conservative journal in America at a time when the media was totally dominated by liberals. All the great publications we think of as liberal now, and many more like Time Magazine and Newsweek Magazine, were part of the mainstream media.

The term had not been invented yet. Buckley called it the Liberal Establishment, which became a very big term in that era.

The difference now is that there is an alternative conservative media, which did not exist then. When you create that, you have to decide at what point you are gaining enough bandwidth within the broader culture that you start looking closely at the ones whose perceived extremism can make you vulnerable. This is what is really important to understand about Buckley.

It is not just that he said, "These guys are crazy, so we get rid of them." Who is to say who is crazy and who is not? Who is to say who might have a fringe point of view but be a totally effective movement person, someone who will knock on the door, get out the vote, make the phone call, and subscribe to your publication? You need those people.

Here is the formulation Buckley came up with. Robert Welch, the leader and self-described Founder of the John Birch Society, organized a group of conservative businessmen and movement figures in the late 1950s.

Buckley was watching. He knew Welch, an industrialist from the handsome suburb of Belmont, outside Boston, Massachusetts.

Welch was an effective organizer, and the John Birch Society, like all conservative organizations then, was anti-communist. In that consensus era, a lot of liberals were anti-communist, too.

The question was, how anti-communist are you going to be? Let's look at MAGA, let's look at the right. I was reviewing a poll in Politico today. You have people who call themselves Trump supporters who do not identify with MAGA.

They like some of the ideas and policies. Within MAGA, you have different groups and factions. Buckley is surveying all of this. The main thing he wants to do is keep people together, not drive anybody out.

If you have voices or faces in the movement who seem to be easy targets for the other side, then you have a problem. As Buckley said in one of his brilliant formulations, the only thing liberals fear more than a weak conservative movement is a strong conservative movement.

A strong conservative movement is one that is not as vulnerable to attack. What is going on now is not about President Trump anymore.

We are talking about his possible successors. Who is going to lead, who is going to be in, and who is going to be out? Robert Welch was a very effective organizer and a committed anti-communist, but he had some wacky ideas that he circulated privately.

He did not stand up on the rooftops and say Dwight Eisenhower is a communist. That was his most notorious assertion, and it was in a book that most people did not even read.

Enterprising journalists get hold of that book and start writing articles saying, Guess what the leader of this new organization believes. Its membership was somewhere between 25,000 and 100,000 people.

One thing we have learned about politics is you do not have to have millions of supporters. You just have to have a core group of dedicated supporters.

Buckley looks at this and says Bob Welch, as he called him, is a good organizer. He has chapters forming in different cities. People are getting together, reading anti-communist literature, showing up on primary day, and voting for the most conservative Republican. Primaries were just emerging as a way of choosing candidates in this era.

Buckley looks at the landscape and says the problem with Robert Welch is not that he is a bad guy or a dangerous guy. He is kind of a nutty-sounding guy. Buckley wrote a letter that I think is key. If you are an English major, you learn to read texts very closely. When I read some of Buckley's stuff, I turn some of the words into italics in my head.

Buckley has a line where he says, we cannot have a movement whose leadership is seen to be extreme. The key word there is leadership. You cannot have a guy out front who seems to espouse dubious ideas. This is where we get into the issue with Tucker Carlson. Young people have told me he seems like a viable leader.

I talked to students at Yale in September. Conservative groups will often invite me to campus since I wrote the big book about the greatest conservative of them all.

They will say, Who do you think might be a successor to Buckley? And older guys like me say, "You tell me.” A lot of them said, What about Tucker Carlson? He is talented, a good talker, funny, and a master of media the way Buckley was.

We are now at a point where he is platforming someone who pushes many buttons. I do not know Nick Fuentes; you likely know more about him than I do. I only know what I read and hear about him. I go online and listen to him speak. He sounds like a provocateur. That is the nature of provocateurs.

The issue you are facing now is whether he appears to be a leading figure within MAGA or on the right. Many older people will have an opinion, but not only they. A good friend of mine said this is not the old against the young. It is the young against the young. It is the new generation sorting things out.

I do not know where you stand on this. I do not know what you think of Tucker or Fuentes or any of these people. I do not know where you are on Israel and Gaza. This seems to be the issue a lot of it is circling around.

What Buckley did was say we cannot make ourselves vulnerable to attack by the people on the other side.

Buckley met with other powerful figures, some not so well known today but very big in their time. Barry Goldwater, a senator from Arizona, was one. They were already looking at him as their nominee in 1964, which he was. That was the first great inroad the movement made, led by Buckley and a few others.

The meeting was in the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, a few miles from where President Trump has his place. Buckley met with Senator Goldwater, Bill Baroody, who was the head of the newly named American Enterprise Institute, and another brilliant thinker named Russell Kirk.

Kirk wrote a book called The Conservative Mind that was incredibly influential. It drew the first map of a conservative tradition in America.

We are talking about an era where if you said the words "conservative tradition," people would laugh in your face. Buckley and the others got together and said they had to let Welch go. Buckley was a brilliant arguer, so he opened up pages in his own magazine and point by point showed how Welch's conspiracy theories were off the reservation.

He did not say the members of the John Birch Society were bad people. He wanted to keep them in the fold. He said this guy is going to damage us. That is the point. Many people are asking me, "How did Buckley deal with it?” How do you find a new Buckley who can do the same thing?

One answer is he moved really carefully, really strategically. It was not just one guy; it was other people. A new politician in California also signed off on it. His name was Ronald Reagan. He wrote a telegram to Buckley saying, You have done the right thing. Reagan was just emerging as a leader in the conservative movement.

Buckley had known him. All these people were disciples of Buckley. That is what is amazing about him. He would kind of anoint all these people, and they followed his intellectual lead. That is what I think is being fought out today.

As an observer, I admire it. I admire that these debates are happening now, and guys like you are out there trying to work through it. That is the only way to solve it.

Ari: It is really fascinating, especially how you mentioned Reagan got behind it. There is significant pressure, not only from outlets like The Free Press and The Daily Wire, but also from people trying to contact JD Vance.

They are saying, "Hey, JD, you are probably next in line here. We think you have the most influence to set a boundary in the movement."

There is a lot of pressure on him to say something and make that happen. A question for you in terms of comparison.

You said that Robert Welch wrote these things and his conspiracy theories in his books; he did not speak them out loud. If he were, he would have a podcast ranked fourth nationally.

Tucker Carlson is a highly influential figure with one of the largest platforms of his own. He uses these platforms not only to bring on controversial figures like Fuentes, but also to feature much lesser-known figures who discuss conspiracy theories such as chemtrails and historical revisionism. There is a lot of talk about World War II and who was really the villain.

It is a lot of strange stuff that really pushes the boundaries of what conservatism is, since Tucker considers himself a conservative. In a way, is that pushing the boundaries even more than what Welch did?

Sam: Yes, probably, because one thing that everybody could agree on in that era, the late 1950s through the early 1960s, was anti-communism. You could look abroad and say, Okay, we know where the threat is coming from. It is coming from this totalitarian regime, the Soviet Empire.

You are a really young guy. I was a lot older than you when the Soviet Union collapsed, and no one ever thought it would happen. I was only aware of three people who thought it would happen. One was the great dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The second was the Democratic Senator from New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The third was Buckley.

Buckley really thought you could put an end to this. That gave glue to the movement. You knew who the opposition was. You might go after people domestically and say they are not anti-communist enough or they are being too soft, but you knew who the big battle was being fought against. Now it is a little more complicated.

A guy I interviewed for my book, Pat Buchanan, told me that back in the sixties, the only guy they had was Buckley. Buckley was the only one anybody took seriously. People followed behind him.

As you said, we have more people out there with big voices and big platforms. I do not want to be unfair to the left on this. I think often the left undersells the talents and skills and seriousness of the right.

Everyone turned to Buckley and that small circle around National Review. Nowadays, you have a more complicated landscape, so more voices get in, and you can afford to be more provocative.

Welch would develop these unusual statistical analyses. In one of his books, he came up with these calculations, nation by nation.

He would say Albania is 90 percent communist and Yugoslavia is 60 percent communist. He came up with a calculation that the United States government was 40 to 60 percent communist. Everybody knew that was not true.

The few communists left had been driven out. What Welch was doing was saying anybody who is a little left of center is probably a communist agent.

At that point, it sounded kind of crazy. Now we come around and listen to some of the more provocative voices coming out of the movement, and they are throwing terms like "organized Jewry" around in a very broad way.

What do they really mean? They mean that if you look at certain newspaper editorial boards or university faculties, you are going to see a greater percentage of Jews there than you might see of other groups.

Some of us might say, well, Jews worked pretty hard to get as far as they did. We did it by assimilating to America.

It becomes a very easy kind of allegation to make, and it sounds new to some people. One difference between now and then is that the Holocaust was a really recent memory, and Israel was just beginning to form as a nation.

As you probably know from my book, Buckley and company were very opposed to Israel at first. They thought it was run by Labor Zionists, so they were not on the right side of the Cold War. Then came the 1967 war.

Israel essentially defeats the Soviet proxies, and within 10 minutes, Buckley is saying, Let's make them the 51st state. He flies out to Jerusalem to interview Golda Meir.

Buckley had that kind of maneuverability and quickness of mind. Now you can go down that rabbit hole and pull other people with you.

You can say, I have a million people on my YouTube channel or a couple million people reading my newsletter. I saw your newsletter; it has a larger circulation than National Review had in its heyday.

National Review considered itself lucky when it got 90,000 people to read it. That was their peak. We know it works a lot differently now.

It is great to look at Buckley and see how he thought his way through it, but we also have to acknowledge we are in a different moment. Everyone needs to be strategic about how they do it and also ask themselves what the principled thing to do is.

What is the right thing to do? What is the thing that will keep the country strong, keep conservatives strong, and have a genuine debate between left and right? Let's set aside the ad hominem stuff and figure out what we agree and disagree on.

It is going to be your generation that dictates all of this. You can bring in an old guy like me, and I can tell you what was happening in 1962.

JD Vance was born in what, 1978 or 1979? It is interesting. I am going to be your interviewer now. I want to ask you why so much of this is about JD Vance. You confirmed my feeling. You tell me why that is.

Ari: I think a lot of people trying to do something about Tucker Carlson being the leading figure of this new, unkempt conservatism are realizing it gives people someone to attack, someone to represent all conservatives.

I made this point when Nick Fuentes was starting to get picked up in the New York Times. The New York Times has been attacking conservatives for a long time, and if they have someone like Nick Fuentes, who is actually popular, they will be able to smear more people.

They are going to say that this is what the conservative movement is now.

Sam: Exactly. That is what Buckley warned the problem was with Robert Welch.

Ari: A lot of the people trying to warn conservatives that going down this path will be bad electorally and for the nation are realizing Tucker is here to stay. He has a really big audience.

There is not much you can do about it. Sure, you could try to warn people and break down Tucker's ideas, but at the end of the day, this is a guy with a lot of influence who does not seem to be going anywhere.

JD, who is for sure the guy that Tucker would have backed normally, is probably the next guy in line for the Republican nomination. He is going to be the one who sets the tone of where the Republican and conservative movement goes.

He is this new right guy, but he is not extreme enough to deviate too much from the old guard Republicans, similar to Trump.

People look at him and think, JD is going to be the person who sets the boundaries when he campaigns. He has a choice whether he is going to say, "We are represented by Tucker Carlson and people like him," or "We are not."

I think that is why a lot of people are looking at JD to do something. Even some of his closest friends, like Christopher Rufo, have been issuing public statements to see whether JD would take action, but it does not appear he has yet.

Sam: I would add Ross Douthat also seems to be trying to do this in the New York Times. I know he got a lot of praise for his interview with Yoram Hazony. Hazony sent me his big book on conservatism a number of years ago. I thought he was a smart guy. I was not sure where it was going. That was before he got into the national conservative, the NatCon thing.

Ross was really aware of the issues and the angles there. For people who are interested, Ross reminds me a little bit of Buckley, not in his manner and style. Buckley was off-the-charts charismatic. Buckley was a movie star. Nobody could match that. Ross was one of the zillions of protégés Buckley had way back in the day.

Ross looks like a guy who is trying to see where the movement goes next and who has the liberal platform to do it. He is aware of being the conservative in the liberal room. You want to keep your status there and reach people through that powerful medium. At the same time, you want to try to exert some control, kind of like what Ezra Klein does on the left.

Ross and Ezra make an interesting pair. They are friends, they interview each other, and they came up at the same time as early great bloggers. You have to remember, when I was editing the New York Times Book Review, we would not consider doing anything online that was separate from what went into print.

Reporters at the New York Times were shocked if you said, why don't you write something online? They thought it was a diss.

It took years for the reversal to happen. It was very much a print culture. Now, of course, it is shifting more to podcasting and social media. For those who remember the older way of doing things, someone like Ross is a transitional figure. He still writes the classic column, but he is shifting more toward podcasting.

One of Ezra's producers told me Ezra thinks podcasting is much more important now than writing. A columnist just does not mean as much. To tell that to an old reader of the New York Times, you just cannot wrap your mind around it. You come out of a different era where this is how it happens now.

I look at Ross and say, okay, he is trying to manage this transition and, in his own way, keep the factions together. He is not an activist the way many others are. He is more an outside observer. He is trying to reach a certain constituency out there. That is what a lot of this politics seems to be about.

I look at JD, and I used to hear from him before he got involved in politics. He followed some of my writing about the movement. Years ago, I wrote a cover story for Time magazine titled "Trumpism After Trump." It was done in 2018. It had placards on the cover like Trump 2024, Trump 2028. He tweeted it, and after that, I never heard from Time again.

I was not endorsing it; I was simply describing it. I interviewed people and asked them what they had to say. I heard from people around JD Vance, and they said at least somebody is writing about this stuff seriously.

You can talk to these policy guys about ideas for helping the economy in certain zip codes. Forget the personalities. What is the industrial policy going to look like?

I looked the other day at an email JD sent me. It said the problem we have is that the funders and think tanks are not with us now. They do not get that immigration is a big issue. We will need to start our own operations and conduct our own fundraising.

That became the Rockport thing. I had no idea about any of this until I went back and reviewed the email after he was nominated for vice president.

My friend Michael Lind, who is a really great writer, did a thing on JD Vance. Mike thinks JD is the most intellectually sophisticated political figure since Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He is an original thinker. He absorbs the texts. He knows all this stuff. That is another reason we are looking at JD.

Tom Edsall at the Times conducts roundups in which he asks writers for their thoughts. He asked me about the calculations for JD. I said I think they are very serious calculations. He is a thinker on the one hand, and he comes out of the movement, the heartland base, on the other. He has to hold those two in balance.

We know now in politics, you do not get anywhere if you cannot organize your own people first. To me, that is what he is doing. I have more sympathy than some people do. Some people say, get up there and say the right thing, JD. I am thinking, yeah, you can say the right thing and you have lost the New Hampshire primary before you have even gotten off the ground.

You do have to be strategic in this way. That is where people should look at Buckley. They should see how strategically he managed it. It is step-by-step in my book. First, he is reluctant to go after Welch. Then he meets with all these guys. He flies to Indianapolis for a secret meeting with top-ranking people across all aspects of the movement.

They are pleading with him not to go after Robert Welch. They say all you are going to do is drive a wedge within the movement. Buckley just made the calculation. Years later, I talked to the publisher of National Review, William Rusher, who in some ways was more of a pre-MAGA figure than Buckley was.

He said, "I was wrong, and Bill was right. We did have to push Welch out because we had to be taken seriously by the centers of power."

I think now it is harder to figure out. If I were JD Vance, I would be thinking, Where is the center of power? Cultural power. Buckley was all about culture. It is not just about elections; it is about who controls the debate. That is what my book is about.

Buckley realized this is what politics was about: how you frame the debate, how you control the debate.

If you set the debate terms early, they can go your way. If you do not set them, it definitely will not go your way. National Review was founded because Joe McCarthy had been brought down by the liberal media.

Buckley said we have to find a better way to make our argument. He thought he had to do it by reaching liberals since they were everywhere. Now you look at a different environment.

Ari: That was really good. One of the things you talked about is how when Buckley did all this, he did not intend to attack the Birchers or the people that were part of the group, but rather just Welch himself.

I am trying to rethink the MAGA movement over the past ten years. For a long time, it was definitely conspiratorial, but I think it mostly manifested among the QAnon community.

There was no clear leader for that, and no one could point to anyone. It was this decentralized conspiracy network of people who were saying all sorts of crazy things. For someone in politics, you did not really have to condemn it too much since it was not a person that could hurt you or your campaign.

I feel like now with the rise of these right-of-center podcasters engaging in this conspiratorial bent, there has been a shift. The people who were into QAnon are now shifting to people that are real people with voices. The question is, as you said, JD is being very strategic.

Fuentes has directly attacked JD and his wife with really vocal, racist comments. It does seem like JD has some kind of restraint. He is thinking this through.

In your opinion, after knowing the way Buckley did all this, do you think at some point JD will have to lay down the boundaries? Or do you think it is in his political interest not to address it?

One thing to add is that I have recently heard from people on the new right that they view what Buckley did with the Birchers as shortsighted.

They will argue that Goldwater did not win the election, and they point to how many elections Republicans lost after that until they won with Reagan. That is the framework I wanted to hear your thoughts on.

Sam: That is a totally fair argument. There are guys from Buckley's own era, like Paul Gottfried and Murray Rothbard, who said exactly that about Buckley. Why are you driving out a guy who is two steps to your right? You do not even disagree with him about that much.

I describe in the book how Buckley's own crew at National Review, including their most august writer, James Burnham, felt about it.

Burnham wrote one of the most important books of the 20th century, The Managerial Revolution, which was the first major work to lay bare what we now call the deep state. George Orwell modeled 1984 on James Burnham's Managerial Revolution. That is how big a guy he was.

Burnham wrote a long piece in National Review in the early 1960s. He said, Yeah, there is a conspiracy. It is a liberal conspiracy. Look at the media. Look who is in the big institutions, the think tanks, who is running the State Department.

It will sound like the deep state to us. In the book, I say Robert Welch, with his conspiracy theories, looks at Burnham and says, he is not saying anything different from what I am, but nobody is calling him a nut.

Maybe what JD and those around him need to do is reframe the argument so it is not about marginalizing a particular group. The difference between Burnham and Welch was that Welch was calling everybody secret communist agents. Burnham was saying, no, they are liberals right out there in full view.

I think this is what JD is trying to do. Let's add a third variable that makes it really complicated. JD Vance is Vice President, serving under the most personally forceful, charismatic politician in our history since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

If you are JD Vance, you have to maneuver there, too. Everybody knows what a powerful figure Trump is and how solid his base is.

It remains the largest single constituency for any politician in the US. This is where the pollsters mess everything up. They said only 35 percent of the people are really die-hard MAGA Trumpists.

Okay, now let's have all the big politicians in America stand up and have everybody line up behind them. Suddenly, Trump's 35 percent looks like more than the combined total of the other three contenders.

Nobody knows that better than JD Vance. The first time I interacted with him was on a radio interview when his book Hillbilly Elegy came out. He was a bestseller. He was incredibly smart and insightful about American politics. This is before he was supporting President Trump. He gave these very brilliant, incisive critiques of liberals, especially geographical stuff.

I thought there was an exceptional political mind. The first calculation he is making is the big guy in the White House.

You have probably picked up the same things I have, that my friend Steve Bannon has doubts about JD Vance, and some other people do too. Apparently, the president himself is not sold on him. That is the first base he has got to lock up or at least wait out.

If I were JD Vance, knowing President Trump as well as he does, the one thing he would be very careful about is that we are entering the post-Trump era.

Who is going to be the guy who sits in the Oval Office and looks at him and says, your day is done? It is not going to be me, and I do not think it is going to be JD Vance either. He has to be really careful there.

You could do a very interesting thing if you look at the history of vice presidents who have gone on to become president and see how they handled themselves. Richard Nixon, how he got out from under Eisenhower. Lyndon Johnson, he was helped by an assassination. The first George Bush had to deal with Ronald Reagan. Then the ones who failed, like Al Gore.

Biden at first did not make it work, and then he was able to come around later and do it. I have a feeling JD Vance, who knows a lot of history, is probably looking at some of those examples too, trying to figure out how you pick your spot. You have to weigh your private self versus your public self. Nobody watches public media more than Donald Trump does.

If JD Vance goes out and says something that is impolitic or not well thought out, or that just rubs the president the wrong way, that is a problem. It is fascinating to watch.

Ari: What you mentioned about Steve saying the president might not be sold on JD, it reads to me very cynically. It seems like they are the ones setting up this narrative to make it so. It is not very clear that JD is going to be the guy they support on their airwaves.

This is their way, in my opinion, of putting pressure on JD in the opposite direction. You have all the Ben Shapiros and people like Christopher Rufo and Rod Dreher saying, "Hey JD, you should say something about this." It seems to me that Steve Bannon and his team are exerting reverse pressure on him to put him in this difficult position.

Sam: I think maybe they are. It is interesting too because one thing that has changed is that the parties are not as institutionally strong as they were.

You do not have marching orders from the RNC. It is just not going to happen. We know the Republican Senate and Republican House; none of those guys are leaders. They are all followers.

So who are the leaders? It is the guys you are talking about. It is those who have their own platforms and constituencies. One thing that set Donald Trump apart early was that, when others were talking about the electorate, I do not think I have ever heard him use that term. He was talking about the audience.

There was a big deal made back in 2015 with the first all-Republican debate. It had 24 million viewers, which was the most ever for a one-party debate. Donald Trump had 20 million viewers a week on The Apprentice. He understood the media. He would go on MSNBC, which he liked at that point, and they would ask him about the debates.

He said it is about the sponsors. If I show up for the debate, they can add another hour. They are going to get the advertising.

He was so far in advance of where everybody else was that people deluded themselves that he did not know what he was talking about. If you are coming in next, one way to think about this is that figures like Tucker and Ben Shapiro have the status in our politics that elected officials once did.

They can just point to their viewers. I think I saw somewhere that Tucker was looking at Nick Fuentes's numbers and said, "I want this guy with me.” I will not have him on the other side.

The famous expression from Lyndon Johnson, I think he was talking about J. Edgar Hoover, was, "I'd rather have him inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in." It is cynical, but it is also practical. It is how politics works.

Ari: Where do you think this goes? Do you think JD will set boundaries, keep the tent big, or try to stay above it?

Sam: I think for now he will keep the tent as big as he can, counting also on people's short memories, which is useful for politicians.

Ari: Sam Tanenhaus, thank you so much. It has been a privilege and an honor to talk to you about this. I encourage all of our listeners to get your book on Buckley. I will also get The Death of Conservatism. I need to read that. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Sam: This was really fun. I learned a lot, Ari. That does not always happen, but this time I did. It was great talking to you.