The Buckley Party
CANNATO, VINCENT J.
The Buckley Party The success—and failure—of New York's conservatives. BY VINCENT J. CANNATO The battlefield of American politics is littered with the corpses of defeated third parties....
...But his luck finally ran out in 1994 when a little-known state senator named George Pataki, whose sudden rise to power was aided by New York Conservatives, ousted him...
...In New York, the Conservative party had amassed a decent political track record...
...Today, the Conservative party finds itself faced with a Republican party that takes conservatives for granted...
...D'Amato and Pataki now had complete control of the state Republican party and they offered the Conservatives a seat at the table...
...Maybe he's right...
...Conservatives were involved in Pataki's transition team, and some received political jobs...
...More political success came in 1980, when a scrappy local politician from Nassau County named Al D'Amato defeated liberal Republican stalwart Senator Jacob Javits in the Republican primary...
...New York's suburbs are becoming more liberal and the state as a whole is trending even more Democratic...
...Almost thirty years later, Marlin himself was the Conservative candidate for mayor of New York and he still remains active in the party...
...But by far the most prominent Conservative politicians were the Buckley brothers...
...So a pair of Irish Catholic lawyers in their thirties, Dan Mahoney and Kieran O'Doherty, decided to shake up New York politics and create the Conservative party in 1962...
...Reasonable observers can ask whether there is a future for the party...
...Although the party's most famous candidate was William F. Buckley, its most successful candidate was his quieter brother, James...
...Now, for the fortieth anniversary of the party's founding, George J. Marlin has written a sympathetic history, Fighting the Good Fight...
...Giuliani's views on abortion and gay rights made him anathema to the Conservative party...
...Then there was the 1977 New York mayoral candidate Barry Farber, a Jewish conservative talk radio host who spoke with a southern accent and was proficient in a dozen languages...
...First D'Amato and then Pataki trimmed their conservative political sails in order to survive in an increasingly liberal New York...
...The founding of the New York Conservative party was thus the culmination of more than a century of battles between progressive elites and working-class, traditionally minded Catholics...
...The margin of victory, as with so many other political races in New York, came from the Conservative party line...
...One of the earliest party members was Charles Edison, a former New Dealer, Democratic governor of New Jersey, and son of the inventor Thomas A. Edison...
...Pataki has pandered to Puerto Rican voters on the issue of the Navy base at Vieques and cozied up to left-wing labor leader Dennis Rivera...
...But the revolt of the white ethnics goes back to the mid-nineteenth century, when Irish immigrants clashed with native-born Protestants on the streets of New York and Thomas Nast's infamous cartoons portrayed the Irish as apes...
...Many Americans from the "responsible classes" feared that these immigrant hordes—"beaten men from beaten races," according to the then-president of MIT—would overrun Anglo-Saxon society...
...As his Fighting the Good Fight shows, it has always been a little too easy to count the Conservatives out...
...Conservative party leaders gained influence by offering their party's line on the ballot to favored candidates and withholding it from Republicans deemed too liberal—with the consequence that those liberal Republicans sometimes found themselves on the losing end of a three-way race...
...The Nassau County Republican machine that nurtured politicians such as D'Amato is in tatters...
...Kieran Mahoney, the son and nephew of the Conservative party's founders, became a top Pataki adviser...
...But by concentrating on one state, it found itself on the cutting edge of American politics, a precursor to great changes that would sweep the entire country...
...Marlin, for instance, lashes out at him as a liberal McGovern Democrat and a fake street-corner conservative because the Giuliani family left Brooklyn for the "high-rent" district of Garden City, Long Island, in the 1950s...
...And their shelf life is depressingly short...
...The deeper the divisions in the country, the more successful the Conservative party became...
...Forty years later, despite the ups and downs of political life, those Conservatives have the last laugh...
...To Marlin, the rise of the Conservative party is as much a story of ethnicity and class as it is of political ideology...
...At home, he repeatedly stymied Republicans and Conservatives at the ballot box and in the state legislature...
...Marlin himself became head of the Port Authority...
...William F. Buckley put the Conservative party on the map when he ran for mayor of New York in 1965...
...The roster of third parties is filled with kooks, demagogues, extremists, egomaniacs, and naive dreamers...
...The 1980s brought another villain: Mario Cuomo...
...With characteristic style and wit, he made the case for what was then considered an exotic political philosophy...
...Giuliani did push ideas that had been dear to the political right: reducing crime, reforming welfare, and rolling back some taxes...
...The Conservative party's archenemy Nelson Rockefeller dominated state politics in the 1960s and early 1970s...
...Because of their close alliance with Pataki, though, Conservatives have had difficulty criticizing Republican excesses...
...Getting not-so-secret support from the Nixon administration and public endorsements from many New York Republicans, Jim Buckley rode the anger of the "street-corner conservatives" to victory by winning 40 percent of the vote in a three-way race...
...Protestant elites supported Margaret Sanger's birth control movement, fearing "race suicide" if large immigrant families continued to grow unchecked...
...He soon became frustrated by the "tyranny of the status quo" at the Port Authority, unable to move its lethargic bureaucracy toward much-needed reforms...
...Success, though, has turned out to be a problem for the Conservative party...
...Keating won 16 percent of the vote against Jacob Javits in the 1974 Senate race...
...It even managed to get a conservative Democrat elected mayor of Buffalo...
...Some wags joked that the letters stood as much for the politicians' religion (Roman Catholic) as for their political affiliation (Republican-Conservative...
...Though he began his career as a prolife Queens lawyer who ran for mayor in 1977 on the "Neighborhood Preservation party" line, Cuomo soon became the darling of liberal Democrats and a vocal critic of Reaganism...
...Enrollment increased tenfold during the 1960s...
...He then went on to defeat Jav-its (running on the Liberal party line) and Democrat Liz Holtzman in the general election...
...D'Amato's margin of victory came from the Conservative and Right-to-Life party lines...
...All this makes the history of the New York Conservative party seem all the more exceptional...
...Buckley lost his reelection bid in 1976, but the man who beat him—Daniel Patrick Moynihan—was himself an Irish Catholic from a working-class background who made a name for himself as one of the first voices warning about the dangers of out-of-wedlock births in the black community...
...It was the year of Kent State and the hardhats riots on Wall Street, as well as the year that New York passed the nation's most liberal abortion law...
...He argued for a restoration of law and order, welfare reform, lower taxes, less government spending, and an end to school busing...
...Eugenics became fashionable...
...Occasionally, such parties might sway the outcome of a presidential race, but mostly they live their all-too-short political lives in vain...
...It had helped elect two senators, a handful of congressmen (including Jack Kemp, Gerald Solomon, and Guy Molinari), and scores of state legislators and local officials...
...Arguably one of the most influential third parties of the twentieth century, it has never fielded a candidate on the national level...
...Long dismissed as the rantings of a bitter old politician, Smith's criticisms were actually a precursor of the complaints of the Reagan Democrats years later...
...The Conservative party's troubles with Giuliani and its acceptance of the D'Amato-Pataki Republican party have led to an identity crisis...
...their opponents largely upper-class and upper-middle-class Protestants—the dreaded "goo-goos" and "blue bloods...
...The city's white ethnic neighborhoods, long a backbone of the party, are graying and shrinking...
...Variously called Reagan Democrats, blue-collar Catholics, or white ethnics, these conservative New Yorkers had grown angry and disillusioned with liberalism by the 1960s...
...Yet one goal remained elusive: New York's governorship...
...Marlin grew up with the Conservative party...
...It's true that our electoral system makes it difficult for these minor parties, but they are often their own worst enemies...
...For forty years they have shown an uncanny knack for proving their critics wrong...
...He won 13 percent of the vote running against an unimpressive machine Democrat named Abe Beame and the golden boy of liberal Republican politics, John Lindsay...
...The battle continued as Al Smith, the great Democratic hero-martyr of 1928, grew disillusioned with Franklin Roosevelt and his liberal New Dealers...
...The party's appeal was largely to those "street-corner conservatives" of the old ethnic neighborhoods...
...Looking back on his experience, he writes: "Sometimes being in the winner's circle is not all it is cracked up to be...
...Yet the Conservatives still have not forgiven Giuliani's apostasy...
...are mostly working-class and middle-class Irish, Italian, and German Catholics...
...The result was a city on the road to recovery after forty troubled years...
...The old villains—Nelson Rockefeller, John Lindsay, Jacob Javits, Mario Cuomo— are gone...
...By the 1950s, many Catholic Democrats no longer felt comfortable in a Democratic party increasingly run by liberal, college-educated, uppermiddle-class reformers who worshipped Adlai Stevenson and ridiculed machine politicians...
...By the turn of the century, Southern and Eastern European immigrants coming through Ellis Island took their place beside the Irish on the list of undesirables...
...Another was a suburban housewife named Barbara Keating who had lost her husband in Vietnam and was outraged by the antiwar attitudes of her children's public-school teachers...
...Those may be fitting words for the Conservative party as a whole...
...His endorsement of Mario Cuomo in 1994 sealed his fate...
...By the 1980s, Ronald Reagan was setting the national agenda, and anti-communism, tax cuts, welfare reform, and traditional values were now a respectable part of the political debate...
...In 1962, Jacob Javits called the Conservative party "freakish," "crackpot," and "wholly out of step with the twentieth-century...
...Marlin acknowledges these problems, but is still bullish about the party's future...
...He has also jettisoned his pro-life views...
...The trouble was that the Republican party in the northeastern states, run by people like the Rockefellers and the Lodges, was little better...
...They also found liberal elites insufficiently tough on communism...
...In Marlin's words, "the heirs of Al Smith's common man and F.D.R.'s forgotten man became members of Richard Nixon's silent majority and Ronald Reagan's moral majority...
...Still, the party attracted an unusually diverse array of candidates and supporters over the years...
...As a Brooklyn teenager, he campaigned for Bill Buckley during his 1965 mayoral campaign...
...Marlin writes that for conservatives, "the most difficult realization is that many in government have little interest in implementing sound reform policies, preferring instead to hold on to power for its own sake...
...In his days in the state senate, Pataki made a name as the lone Republican vote against the Cuomo budget deals, but he now produces budgets that would make even Nelson Rockefeller blush...
...New York is now home to scores of new immigrants—Koreans, Chinese, Dominicans, Russians, Pakistanis—whose beliefs and needs are very different from those of older ethnics...
...Soon, a new breed of politician began popping up in New York with the letters "RC" following their names...
...The New Yorkers Marlin writes about Vincent J. Cannato is the author of The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York...
...The party served as a voice for staunch anti-communism and for opposition to the big-government welfare state, which were being ignored by both major parties...
...Taking time out from running the family oil business, Jim Buckley stood as the Conservative party candidate for Senate in 1970...
...There was even the occasional "DC...
...Rudy Giuliani, however, is another story...
...As many conservatives across the country cheer the New York City success story, New York Conservatives are silent at best...
Vol. 7 • May 2002 • No. 36
