Posted on 09/18/2004 6:07:04 PM PDT by Former Military Chick
Where The Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency. By Patrick J. Buchanan. 264 pp. Thomas Dunne Books/ St. Martin's Press. $24.95.
Underneath the pugnacious hide of Patrick J. Buchanan beats a heart of pure nostalgia. He longs to return to the high-tariff reign of William McKinley, mourns the passing of such budget-slashing icons as Robert Taft and Barry Goldwater and dedicates his new book to Ronald Reagan, who, he says, ''never took precipitate or rash action'' abroad. Buchanan's reverence for late, great conservatives is unbounded by epoch or nationality. He even praises Urban II, the ''extraordinarily eloquent'' French-born pope who inspired the First Crusade.
The former presidential candidate and longtime journalist has a mission, of course. He wants to marshal this glorious past against ''impersonators'' in and close to the Bush administration who have ''hijacked'' his movement. His enemies list of neoconservatives has unsurprising names: Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Irving and William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer and Jonah Goldberg. He detests them most of all for promoting the invasion of Iraq, for arrogantly believing it would spark a democratic revolution throughout the Middle East. But the self-described populist conservative is still fighting a war against un-Christian cultural elites. And he charges most of the same neoconservatives with abetting the godless enemy on nearly every major issue -- from gay marriage to abortion to immigration. To save the nation, the right must be cleansed.
Characteristically, Buchanan blasts away at more targets than he hits. His manifesto includes a stirring, if familiar, call to revive America's heavy industries; those who've allowed the manufacturing base to wither, he declares, are guilty of ''economic treason.'' Elsewhere, however, he writes that China poses little threat of war because its ''prosperity depends on us.'' That confident free trader needs to talk to his agitated protectionist alter ego. When not running for president, Buchanan is a regular participant in the shouting matches the networks call public affairs. In his many illogical moments, it shows.
Such belligerence weakens the main thrust of his book: a vigorous argument against the war in Iraq. A traditionalist to his core, Buchanan despises policy intellectuals who would ''define morality for all peoples for all times.'' He points out, correctly, that devout Muslims do not hate the United States because they envy our wealth and freedom, as President Bush would have it. They resist the erotic, feel-good popular culture Americans celebrate and sell around the globe and don't like being occupied by a military whose definition of evildoers clashes with theirs. But Buchanan's defense of the original crusaders negates his cautious relativism. The religious warrior makes an unconvincing apostle of peace.
Alert readers will have spotted another troubling flaw in Buchanan's worldview. His roster of warmongers is made up exclusively of Jews. But it was Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice and the president himself -- good Christians all -- who sent all those armed Americans into Iraq. Aside from Wolfowitz, the Jewish neocons could only cheer them on from their op-ed pages, think tanks and talk shows.
Buchanan thinks he can explain this discrepancy between conservatives who decide and those who merely advocate. The neconservatives, he claims, saw that George W. Bush was ignorant about world politics and cleverly persuaded him to think like them. At one point, he compares Richard Perle's ''delight at first meeting the future president'' with Fagin's ''initial encounter with the young Oliver Twist.'' After four decades of close political combat, Buchanan seems unwilling to abandon such abusive rhetoric. It may be as essential to him as God and the flag, even while it confirms his status as a political pariah. Strangely, he doesn't realize that the president, a born-again Christian, needed no special prompting after the attacks of Sept. 11 to declare a new world war between good and evil.
Pat Buchanan's perpetual irritation with American Jews suggests a larger problem with his style of conservatism. The past to which he would like to return is full of imagined, often contradictory tales. High tariffs under the old G.O.P. were a giant subsidy to industrial companies and the regions they dominated, which is why most foes of big government abhorred them. And to claim that Reagan favored using force only to ''defend the country he loved'' ignores the proxy armies his administration sponsored in Nicaragua and El Salvador, Angola and Afghanistan and the 5,000 American troops who overwhelmed tiny Grenada.
Since the mid-1950's, when William F. Buckley Jr. created National Review, most prominent conservatives have sought to remake the world in the image of the America they cherish. The fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Market-Leninism in China and Vietnam seemed to vindicate their labors. To demand that they give up this habit now -- when the United States has many enemies but no true rivals -- is naive. Buchanan writes that ''a rebellion is brewing among principled and populist conservatives'' against the quisling hierarchy that rules the Republican Party. But who are these people and why is their revolt so quiet?
The ideologue is caught in a bind of his own choosing. Antiwar liberals can applaud when he writes: ''In 2003, the United States invaded a country that did not threaten us, did not attack us and did not want war with us, to disarm it of weapons we have since discovered it did not have.'' But we cringe at every aspect of his cultural politics. Christian traditionalists love his stands against abortion and gay marriage, but they burn, like President Bush, to convert the benighted. Buchanan is thus left with a casual audience in the millions but a following that is probably a good deal smaller than the 449,000 votes (including those excuse-me ones from Palm Beach County) that he drew in the 2000 election.
In his call to emulate an ideal right that never existed, this tough-talking Jeremiah neglects the practice of leaders from Disraeli to Reagan who managed to thrive in a modern age. Conservatives have prospered only when they adapted their principles to the flow of history. As Tancredi, the young aristocrat in Giuseppe di Lampedusa's great novel, ''The Leopard,'' put it, ''If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.''
Michael Kazin, the co-author of ''America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960's,'' is writing a biography of William Jennings Bryan. He teaches history at Georgetown University.
Yeah we can't afford it. How come 9 billion dollars of that 87 billion dollar package for our soldiers (you know the one Kerry voted for before he was against it) went to Israel? America First damn it. We could have used that money to raise another division here.
Laura likes Pat, she introduced him as instrumental to her Conservatism, and thinks there's a place for him at the table, and I do too.
You are exactly correct. I fear this type of thinking, a sort of rigid favoritism, will someday come to haunt the right. In order for an intellectual and political movement to remain strong, it must be open to the consideration of all things and must be willing to reassess previous beliefs. It is possible to do this while maintaining basic principles.
Which is propaganda identical to all the major unions and the DNC.
You're right.
Well, I can see where your sympathies lie.
BTW, I also have a great deal of respect of Adolf Hitler. That's not to say that I wouldn't shoot the man, or that I don't bitterly hope that he's rotting in hell, or that death camps aren't anything but pure evil, but he was a complete genius. He was a master of control and propaganda. He knew what he want, and he knew exactly how to get it. His visions of a eugenic national socialist utopia, however horrificly it was enacted, represent those of the only utopia that might actually have worked had we given it a fair chance (but thank God we didn't; ends do NOT justify the means).
I respect Adolf Hitler in much the same way that I respect Satan. Satan knows the Scriptures, he knows (as much as anyone can know) how God works, and he knows how to draw people away from God. He's a fascinating creature. So is the King Cobra. Even so, I wouldn't go within a hundred meters of a live one.
Well, I haven't seen that one, although I admit it would certainly be easy enough to refute.
That makes you and Pat ...
The rest of the Republican coalition does not share your sympathies.
Could be that if we gave the entire 87 billion to Israel, they would've taken care of the problem for us...
Ruch hasn't changed? He changes everytime the wind blows.
Perhaps. But when I watch what's happening to my old home city of Rochester, I can't help but wish for the repeal of NAFTA and GTAA.
I loved that city so much. I really worry it might become the Flint of New York.
We probably would have had another USS Liberty episode.
Perhaps not, but I don't think you read the rest of my post, in which I likened my respect for the Fuhrer to my respect for the Devil and the Cobra.
Many hearts will be probed in these days. That is for sure.
Oh, I read you. I know who you respect.
Good question. I don't know the answer to that. I always thought Israel was a country that had a substantial amount of money and arms. Including nuclear weapons.
Buchanan.
Sound all so cyrptic.
Propaganda eh??? Hey, I got a pair of shoes I no longer wear...How 'bout you and I trade...My shoes for your new truck???
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