And that's a table in which I will consciously never find myself seated.
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.
I'm not a Buchanan follower; in fact, I was unfamiliar with him until a few years ago. I disagree vastly with his view on Isreal; agree with some of his assertions about trade & immigration.
That said, Reagan (a conservative) would most likely NEVER have made that statement had he seen today's crop of "Republicans", who are really comparable to the moderate Democrats of the 80's. The Democrats of today are simply socialists. We have a good number of conservatives in the House, some in the Senate, and few in this administration.
Yeah, but the Times' bashing of neocons has been indistinguishable from Buchanan's, and just as nasty and ridiculous.
And that's a table in which I will consciously never find myself seated.
No problem. That's your choice, and I respect that.
IMO, defending Buchanan is akin to defending Hitler.
Finally, an honest statement...And that, fellow Republicans, is the crux of the isue...
You've got to love it.
Yeowza!
Thus, Jefferson was mostly concerned with domestic political struggles. The next generation or two occupied itself with territorial expansion, and didn't take well to major changes at home. A century later, William Jennings Bryan sought to keep America neutral and an idealistic model for other countries. But intervention proved too strong a temptation for the liberal idealist Woodrow Wilson to resist. Not only Wilson, but also FDR/Truman and Kennedy/Johnson turned overseas to fulfill their vision of social improvement. Sometimes they didn't have a choice, but sought or compelled, the focus on international relations soaked up the energies and passions that had earlier gone into reform at home.
And today in the Bush era, conservatives and evangelicals feel the same pressure to fight a cultural war overseas, rather than at home. Historically, the turn to foreign affairs has marked the highwater mark of reform movements. One can't simply change directions and apply the same energy to domestic questions as one once did. Thus Harding and Coolidge followed Wilson, Eisenhower's Fifties followed twenty years of FDR and Truman, and Republican control of the White House followed the Sixties of Kennedy and Johnson. Turning from domestic policy to solving foreign or international problems is a way of applying one's beliefs, but also signals a reconciliation with the status quo at home, and the decline of reformist impulses.
So it's unlikely that Pat's prescription will work. Eventually, the country will look inward again, but it won't be with the same energy or desire to change things that we once had. If the past is any indication, Iraq may be an indication that we have entered a new era of domestic politics, and older slogans and strategies may be less successful in the future.
I thought as much.
You seem paranoid. If you start seeing nazis under your bed, you may want to do something about that. Sheesh.
"IMO, defending Buchanan is akin to defending Hitler"
I'll assume you're joking; otherwise that's quite absurd and insulting.
I disagree with Buchanan about Israel. I think the Palestinians are clearly to blame for the troubles there. Their institutional hatred of Israel and their refusal to accept reasonable compromise and insistence on getting all they want and of giving up nothing are probably the biggest problems.
I also think that Buchanan could criticize the neoconservatives w/o making assertions about them allegedly putting Israeli interests ahead of American ones.
But his criticism of Israel does not automatically equal some sort of animous or bigotry towards Jews. It is possible to not hold ill will towards the Jewish people and the Jewish state and still find fault with their policies. Again, I happen to think Israel is mostly in the right, so I disagree with Buchanan, but I'm not going to cast evil aspersions on him.
It is a tactic of the left to do such things.
I'm not a big fan of Buchannan, but I must say that your debating skills on this thread have been atrocious.
''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.''
True or false?
Grace & Peace, Brigadier
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