American segregationism was explicitly linked to defense of European colonialism
Evidence
Historians have shown how the National Review tacked to the right on issues of race in the late 1950s, culminating in Buckley’s 1957 editorial opposing desegregation on the grounds that whites were “the advanced race” and that science proved “the median cultural superiority of White over Negro.” Yet they rarely note that Buckley’s editorial is couched in a defense of European colonialism in Africa. Buckley defended British actions for maintaining colonial control in Kenya (which continued until 1964) as an example to the U.S. South that “the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage,” and concluded with an openly antidemocratic argument for white supremacy: “It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.” Buckley’s racial views “did not stop at the water’s edge,” as one scholar notes. He visited South Africa on paid fact-finding missions in the 1960s and distributed publications supporting the apartheid government. Buckley’s exhortation that “the South must prevail” also meant that whites had to prevail in the Global South. — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists, 551
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: Slobodian’s key move — showing that American domestic racism was structurally connected to global colonial white supremacy (‘the South must prevail’ playing on both the U.S. South and the Global South) — reframes how we understand the transnational logic of conservatism.
- XREF: Directly parallels the scholarly argument about ‘global white supremacy’ connecting U.S. segregation and colonial empire; also echoes the reader’s focus on insulating markets from democracy, since Buckley’s antidemocratic argument justifies white supremacy as ‘civilized standards’ above suffrage.
- SEED: Essay angle: Buckley’s 1957 editorial as the hinge where domestic American segregationism and European colonial civilizationalism fuse into a single global white-supremacist argument.