'Where The Right Went Wrong' (Patrick J. Buchanan)- New York Times Book Review

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.

Maybe you will listen to this man because he is a Christian. I doubt it, but it removes your flimsy excuse.

Do We Really Want a "Poison Pill?"

I think it's time to comment on the presidential candidacy of Pat Buchanan.

I dislike doing this because every time I talk about politics, I get a tremendous amount of argument from our very alert and energetic readers. But Pat Buchanan is a topic from which we can learn a great deal.

First of all, I don't trust the man as far as I could throw him (and I'd like to throw him very far). Pat Buchanan is an anti-Semite, a racist, and a hater through and through. He dislikes all minorities, including women, and immigrants, which we virtually all are. A compendium of his quotes on America's position in the world shows a xenophobic, Fascistic mind at work. He would fit right in with the administration of the Antichrist.

I do not use the term anti-Semite lightly. Arafat in the West Bank, Farrakhan in the United States, Zhironovsky in Russia, almost 100% of the world's Arabs, and a few choice others truly hate the Jews these days. Millions of other people merely dislike them. But Pat Buchanan's anti-Jewishness and anti-Israel bias are well known and documented. I personally watched Crossfire for years while he was a host, and in all that time I never heard him say a kind word about Israel. The editorialist A. M. Rosenthal of The New York Times devoted a column to Buchanan's anti-Semitism, and columnist Molly Ivins said that his right-wing address at the 1992 Republican Convention was "better in the original German." We have in our office William Buckley's excellent and well-researched magazine on anti-Semitism, in which Buchanan gets more than a little space. We will present quotations from that article below.

On the issue of Larry Pratt, co-chairman of Buchanan's campaign, addressing rallies at which Nazi salutes were given, Buchanan only clumsily defended his friend rather than repudiating and firing him. Bob Herbert's February 16 column in The New York Times spoke about Pratt's association with Pete Peters, "the leader of Christian Identity, a movement that supports violence to promote white supremacy. Pratt was a regular guest on Peters' public access cable television show." A report released by the Anti-Defamation League states the following: "Peters proclaims that Jews pose a Satanic threat to American civilization; that they are conspiring to control America; that blacks and other people of color are inferior to whites; that homosexuals should be executed; and that northern European whites and their American descendants are the Chosen People of scriptural prophecy."

Sam Donaldson, George Will and Cokie Roberts on the February 18 [1996] showing of This Week, asked Buchanan about this issue and other such questionable behaviors, and Buchanan sidestepped every question. On Pratt's obvious connections to the most loathsome elements in American democracy, Buchanan basically said that Pratt was a good supporter of his and he would stick by him. A key question had to do with why the Nazis in Louisiana, the state of David Duke, rejoiced so at Buchanan's victory. The candidate was obviously miffed by the question, but had trouble denying it. He finally implied that the Gramm campaign had planted the story.

Buchanan is able to pander to a crowd in the way that David Duke and Adolf Hitler before him were able to do. People are captivated when they hear mottoes and slogans that agree with their thinking. But Buchanan, who has never held any government office, isn't beginning to say all that he would do to this country. Let the voter beware.

Anti-Semitism is a spiritual sickness, seldom curable over time. I have usually found that those I knew who despised the Jews in my youth despise them still today. This is not a normal hatred, since the Jews have really done so very little throughout history to deserve the persecution that they have constantly received. But Bible people understand that there are larger issues here than mere racism and bigotry. The day that God chose the Jews, the devil chose them too. Look at it from the enemy's point of view: if he could get rid of the Jewish people, or at least most of them, then the Bible would become the relic book of an extinct people and would take its place along with the holy writings of the Babylonians, the ancient Persians, etc. And the God of Israel would be exposed as a God who did not keep His promises to His Chosen People. The Jews are in Satan's way, and all of those who consciously or unconsciously follow Satan hate the Jews.

Along with disparaging Jews goes denouncing their homeland, and we are living in an age of watching Israel being dismembered in favor of a police state in the Holy Land. Christians watched as Bethlehem was given to Moslems, and some Christians — unbiblical, denominational church-goers — actually rejoiced, imagining they were promoting peace.

I don't believe that the vast "liberal" church, the mainline denominations, have enough Bible knowledge or enough of a sense of Christ to understand what's going on in the world today. We are at what appears to be the very end of a lengthy spiritual battle over each soul in the world, and especially over the Chosen People. I am not at all surprised to see a racist appealing to people in primary elections, and it wouldn't be a total shock to see him installed as the president of this country, though that would be a disaster indeed. God's plan marches on, and we can only testify of His Son and get some people saved. And in this case, "saved" really means saved! The catastrophe that is coming down on the world very soon will be beyond anything it has ever seen, or as our Lord put it, "except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved" (Matt. 24:22).

Following are quotes from a special edition of William Buckley's National Review dated December 30, 1991, and entitled "In Search of Anti-Semitism." Section two of this edition is devoted to Pat Buchanan, and begins with the incident that initially stirred concerns regarding Buchanan's anti-Semitism: an appearance on the McLaughlin television program during the Persian Gulf crisis. On this program he said, "There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East — the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States." Later on the same telecast he stated, "The Israelis want this war desperately because they want the United States to destroy the Iraqi war machine. They want us to finish them off. They don't care about our relations with the Arab world." Buckley points out that while it was true (and quite natural) that the Israelis wanted the Iraqi aggression stopped, by singling out Israel and its "amen corner" in the U.S. as the only proponents of the war, Buchanan was being profoundly inaccurate. And, Buckley writes, "inevitably, when an intelligent person makes an assertion that is manifestly absurd, he arouses suspicions."

In a later television appearance, Buchanan "came in with the wisecrack that Congress was 'Israeli-occupied' territory." Buckley warns that "any reference to Congress as Israeli-occupied' territory can be taken as encouraging resentment against the Israeli lobby and its backers. Breeding hostility, etc."

Following this incident, Buchanan "pronounced the names of four important men who influence public policy, whom he identified with the hyper-bellicose wing of the anti-Saddam forces." Those men were columnist A. M. Rosenthal, former assistant secretary of defense Richard Perle, columnist Charles Krauthammer, and Henry Kissinger. Buckley writes that these men have many things in common, but "the most conspicuous of these is that they are all Jewish. . . . The evidence that the Jewish factor was engrossing Buchanan mounted. And then whatever coincidence might in desperation have been pleaded for this aggregation of all-Jewish anti-Hussein activists, its usefulness expired when Pat Buchanan went on to write that if we went to war, the fighting would be done by 'kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzales, and Leroy Brown.' There is no way to read that sentence without concluding that Pat Buchanan was suggesting that American Jews manage to avoid personal military exposure even while advancing military policies they (uniquely?) engender."

Further on in the article, Buckley writes that "in recent years and months Buchanan seemed to have been attracted one after another to positions in which Jews had a special interest, almost always taking the contrary position. A summary of these was done by Joshua Muravchik . . . [and] was published in Commentary in January 1991." Muravchik's article on Buchanan concludes:

". . . when he is hostile to Israel; when he embraces the PLO despite being at adamant odds with its political philosophy; when he implies that Jews are trying to drag America into war for the sake of Israel [alone]; when he sprinkles his columns with taunting remarks about things Jewish; when he stirs the pot of intercommunal hostility; when he rallies to the defense of Nazi war criminals, not only those who protest their innocence but also those who confess their guilt; when he implies that the generally accepted interpretation of the Holocaust might be a serious exaggeration — when a man does all these things, surely it is reasonable to conclude that his actions make a fairly good match for [conventional anti-Semitism]." (Brackets in original.) William Buckley's article is extensive and tries to evenhandedly present all sides of the situation; but even so, he concludes the article by stating, "I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism. . . ."

More recently, on February 13 Lisa Meyers of NBC News with Tom Brokaw pointed out that Pat Buchanan made derogatory remarks against women, Jews and other minorities in the past. Also on February 13, David Letterman joked about where the various presidential candidates shop for clothes. He quipped that Buchanan goes to "the Gap for Fascists." The audience's laughter indicated that his meaning was clear to them. And A. M. Rosenthal commented in his February 20 New York Times article that Buchanan "offers isolationism, division, bigotry — his customary poison pill."

Once again, please don't spend time lecturing me on my views. I'm barely interested in American politics compared with what's going on in Israel and the hearts of Christian people. I would just have felt very much remiss not to sound this warning. We have had a considerable number of letters about Buchanan, and all of the above is my answer.

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