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.
Yes it is true -- he is anti-semitic. He and Hillary would get along in that regard. While Pat bounces off the walls alot in his manifesto, he does have a core of true conservatism, a lust for a return to "real" America, but with alot of rough edges, and a bit of myopia.
Bill Buckley drummed Pat out of the respectable wing of the conservative movement for his anti-semitism, just as he excised the John Birch Society from our ranks.
Puppies are cute. Kittens are cute. Baby ducks are cute. I would not put Pat Buchanan in that category. *shudder*
The guy who lost an uncle in Germany during WWII. He fell out of a guard tower and broke his neck.
(Don't blame me, I heard in on Imus years ago)
Everytime a bus, pizza parlor or anything along that line
that a suicide murderer destroys in Israel I try to send Pat a photo for his scrapbook.
How does this moron know that president Bush needed no prompting??? This guy seems to think that his opinion is a legitimate critique of P. Buchanan...It reads more like an advertisement...I'm going to buy the book...
Everyone has a deep, dark secret, and mine is thinking Pat Buchanan is cute ... I didn't say I think he's right, or even sane, just cute.
More like who gives a royal crap what Buchanan has to think or say!
Pat, Pat, Pat. All the good gets flushed out with the bad...
"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."
Fair enough. I respect that. And besides, it gives me some hope. If there's someone out there who thinks Pat Buchanan is cute, there's bound to be someone out there who thinks I'm cute. Yay! : )
His title actually elecits a belly laugh.
Second term for concervative president coming up. Both houses with conservative majority.
And to this idiot it all went wrong.
And how did it go wrong. The right are not leftiest like he is.
Few bigger lying hypocrites than pat Buchanan areound these days.
Maybe its a mental thing with him, I don't know.
(To quote Samuel Goldwyn, include me out, please!)
I'm glad Savage came out against Buchanan, calling him a defeatist. Even after having him on his show a few times.
Buchanan is Deepthroat.
He does raise a good point -- Cheney and Rumsfeld were far more central in the move to war than Kristol or Krauthammer. But this book grew a lot out of journalistic polemics and reviews of books. Rightly or wrongly, politicians and administrators are usually given a pass, in that they're allowed to disassociate themselves from their policies more than those who simply advocate, propose, or agitate for such policies. People extend more chances to elected officials than to polemicists and ideologists, who are tied to the policies that they've promoted. It's not necessarily anti-Semitism, just the age-old need to believe in the "good" but misled king.
Buchanan's ideology does have inconsistencies, as Kazin points out, and it's unlikely that any future Republican or conservative leadership would follow him in everything. The "Old Right" package never persuaded a majority of Americans and didn't provide workable answers to foreign policy. But the ability of leaders like Reagan to win over those with more realist or non-interventionist or continentalist views shouldn't be dismissed. In the past, Republicans showed much skill in uniting disparate groups under the same banner, and their ability to do so seemed to be in question in the last few years when this book was written. The outlook has gotten brighter for the Bush Administration in the last few weeks, but whether that will last isn't yet clear.
Who was or is the John Birch society? I've heard the name, but don't know anything about them. What did they do and whats the bad thing about them?
Oh, you mean the people who believe in a limited government that is not quite so limited that it can't provide them a job?
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