Writing in Politico on Sunday, historian Geoffrey Kabaservice argued that liberals, and particularly liberal historians, have done conservatism a profound disservice in recent decades. Under the headline “Liberals Don’t Know Much About Conservative History,” Kabaservice lamented the “veritable tsunami of historical literature on conservatism” in the past 20 years, “virtually all” of which “have been written by liberals.” Kabaservice, author of the fine book Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, believes that these works “reveal the pitfalls for liberals writing about a movement with which they have no personal experience. If you’re a historian who has not a single conservative colleague—and perhaps not even one conservative friend—chances are you’ll approach conservatism as anthropologists once approached tribes they considered remote, exotic, and quite possibly dangerous.”

While Kabaservice specifically faults scholars like Corey Robin, Lisa McGirr, Nancy MacLean, Heather Cox Richardson, and Rick Perlstein, the burden of his critique is far broader. At heart, Kabaservice is angry that liberal writers treat conservatism unsympathetically, emphasizing the dark side of the movement. Further, he feels liberals ignore the intellectual achievements of conservatism and focus excessively on the role of popular pundits and political organizers (although, if the point, as Kabaservice says, is to produce historical scholarship that explains the rise of Trump, than a focus on these individuals would seem appropriate).

As an example of liberals painting too negative a picture, he claims that Cox Richardson “contends that racism was the essence of Buckley’s New Right, and further that the Birch Society spread his ideas to ordinary voters.” Kabaservice doesn’t see it that way: “Buckley’s endorsement of Southern segregation,” he writes, “was a moral blot on the conservative movement, and he later acknowledged it as his gravest error. But it’s anti-historical to assume that Buckley was little more than a Klansman with a large vocabulary, or to dismiss the monumental divisions on the right as minor quarrels within a united white supremacist alliance.”

The problem with the straw man Kabaservice has chosen to fight against here—few people would go so far as to call Buckley an erudite Klansman—is not so much that it distorts liberal historians’ position (although it does) as that it ignores the vast array of troubling episodes in conservative history. Buckley did move away from overt racism after it became socially unfashionable, but the entanglement of his magazine to racism is far deeper than Kabaservice’s glib words acknowledge. Nor is Kabaservice alone in this. For the fact is that it’s not invariably liberals who write about conservatism. There have been plenty of conservatives who write about the histories of their own movement. And when conservatives do delve into the history of Buckley and National Review, they almost always (with a few brave exceptions) whitewash the past to ignore or minimize the role played by racism.

Consider the example of Willmoore Kendall, the mentor to the young William F. Buckley at Yale and a founding editor of National Review. In 1960, in the pages of National Review, Kendall cited with approval a book by Nathaniel Weyl arguing that “the Negro” suffers from a blighted “biological inheritance.” Influenced by Weyl’s biological racism, Kendall asked, “Could it be we shall never do justice to the Negroes in our midst, or the Negroes to themselves, save as we all recognize that as a group they may have a lesser capacity than the rest of us for civilizational achievement?” Answering his own query, Kendall wrote, “When we impose upon them equal responsibility for civilizational achievement we may be doing them not justice but injustice.”