392
PARTISAN REVIEW
would no longer be tolerated on the American right - certainly not to
the degree that it was being tolerated on the left both among blacks and
whites. For example, the Holocaust deniers and the nco-Nazis were un–
able to make any headway within the conservative community at large -
in sharp contrast to the influence lunatic black anti-Semites were achiev–
ing in the black community.
But then came Joseph Sobran and Patrick
J.
Buchanan, both of
whom began publishing anti-Semitic pieces a few years ago, while, ex–
actly like their counterparts on the left, responding with indignant de–
nials when they were called anti-Semitic. Now, to a considerable extent,
the way Sobran and Buchanan were treated by the conservative com–
munity vindicated my belief that the right would no longer tolerate
anti-Semitism among its own . Though Sobran was not fired from his
position as an editor of
National Review,
he was publicly chastised by his
then-boss, William F. Buckley, Jr., for writing columns that might rea–
sonably be taken as anti-Semitic, and he was forbidden to write on
Jewish subjects in the magazine (he did continue, however, to extrude
anti-Semitic diatribes from time to time in his syndicated column).
Buchanan was also chastised by Buckley for having made statements that
- in Buckley's own words - amounted to anti-Semitism.
So far so good. (Incidentally, when Buckley, one of the leaders of
the conservative community, was condemning Pat Buchanan for writing
things that might reasonably be taken as anti-Semitic, some on the soft
left such as Michael Kinsley were defending Buchanan against the charges
of anti-Semitism. It's an interesting wrinkle.) Yet having agreed that
Buchanan had made anti-Semitic statements, Buckley nevertheless went
on to endorse him "for tactical reasons" when Buchanan challenged
George Bush in the New Hampshire Republican primary. In other
words, being anti-Semitic was not in itself enough to rule Buchanan out
as a candidate for political office, any more than a book by Gore Vidal
containing a blatantly anti-Semitic essay was enough to rule it out as a
candidate for a literary prize. And while Sobran has by now disappeared
into the loony right, Buchanan is still very much an accepted presence in
the respectable journalistic world. So the right has not, after all, achieved
zero tolerance for anti-Semitism, though all things considered, I still
think that in recent years the record of the right has been better than the
record of the left in resisting and containing and quarantining anti–
Semitism within its own precincts.
But the question arises: does any of this matter? After all, the fears
some of us had that the institution of quotas would lead to discrimina–
tion against Jews have not been realized, in spite of the fact that the
resurgence of anti-Semitic ideas might well have served to rationalize
