That's correct. While they may be socially conservative, in economic matters they swing wildly to the left.
So, to me, they are lefties who have morals. Well, sorta.
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 me too...I use to enjoy the ideology of the conservative formerly known as Pat. Now we just know him as clymer.
That's a lot of air to blow out at once.
who we don't want associated with the party of Reagan. The big tent only stretches so far, and we need to make sure he's on the outside looking in.
Funny that proponents of the "big tent" theory would use it to justify the inclusion of flaming liberals like Rudolph Giuliani, Arlen Specter, George Pataki, Jim Jeffords, John McCain, etc. in a supposedly center-right political party, but absolutely refuses to include a man who expressly condemns abortion, homosexual marriage, and mass immigration invasions.
Critics, of course, insist that Buchanan has become increasingly "alertist" and negative about the state of the Union (no pun intended) over the last fifteen to twenty years, and cite this as proof of "anti-Americanism," which they then claim discredits anything he says. But as someone who grew up in the 1990's and is being educated in the mid-2000's, I can tell you why Buchanan's incresing alertism is totally warranted: frankly, this country has deteriorated severely even over my own lifetime. What remained of this country's moral identity when I was born has been relaxed to be barely recognizable in many places. We are constantly being invaded by our good neighbors to the South. As a result, I worry that I might not have a good homeland to pass on to my children.
I don't agree with Buchanan on everything. But he is frequently correct about many issues, and what's more, I have never seen anyone actually refute anything he wrote. At best, they call him "anti-Semitic," "nativist," "isolationist," "protectionist," or, my favorite, "RACIST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
Couldn't find anyone more balanced to review it, apparently.
Just curious ... Have you ever read anything more complicated than a bumper sticker?
That's correct. While they may be socially conservative, in economic matters they swing wildly to the left.
So, to me, they are lefties who have morals. Well, sorta.
"The guy who lost an uncle in Germany during WWII. He fell out of a guard tower and broke his neck."
Better version:
The guy who lost an uncle in a Nazi concentration camp. He fell out of a guard tower and broke his neck.
Does Buchanan know that yet?
(Bet he does, snicker, snicker).
LOL! I'm sure you're cute, too - in a totally different way, of course :-).
All right. I've heard the "anti-Semitic" remarks before; I still don't buy it. We'll have to agree to disagree.
He's also rabidly anti-free market, and wants the U.S. to never become engaged in anything outside our borders. We saw several times in the past century exactly where that kind of thinking leads us.
If you want to criticize his positions, fine, but don't go on a smear campaign. He's "anti-free trade," not "anti-free market." The United States was always fairly heavy on the tariffs until after WWII. In fact, prior to income tax, they were the federal government's primary source of revenue.
Many people will claim that "anti-free trade" is anti-property rights. Not true. Number one, why do you think borders exist to begin with? Particularly in this age of high technology and fast transportation, the day national governments no longer have a right to regulate movement between them--goods or people--is the day nations cease to exist. Number two, that argument blindly assumes that societies do not exist, only individuals. Historically in Western Civilization, a man's first responsibility was his devotion to God, then his obligations to his household, then to his lord, and finally to his king. But this is not an exclusively Western concept; human beings have always been social animals.
But back to the trade issue. Free traders argue that a larger economy (i.e., more people) allows for further specialization of labor and therefore more efficient production and a better lifestyle for all involved. There are several problems with this argument. Number one, an economy of three hundred million people would probably allow for all the specialization you could ever want. Number two, this theory only works if all parties have access to each others' products. When we outsource manufacturing jobs to third-world countries, what ends up happening is that Americans are buying the products made by the third-world, but the third-world cannot buy anything the United States makes. The people who benefit the most from outsourcing are not the third-world inhabitants, but already wealthy C.E.O.s.
Finally, it should be noted that our economy was doing just fine before NAFTA, the GTAA, and the WTO.
Lastly as someone who grew up in Texas, and is now seeing my new home of Arkansas being overrun by illegals, I can agree that we have to do something about this issue. I am just unwilling to sell my soul to an anti-Semite to do it.
Again, I suppose we'll have to agree to disagree on the "anti-Semite" bit. Still, it is getting rather old; the fact that I see the charge repeated time and again by many of the same people, along with the same fallible arguments used to substantiate it, is what makes me yawn or even groan when I hear someone make charges of "anti-Semitism." Abuse of the word betrays the concept. When it becomes as cheap as some neocons have made it, people might eventually be so indifferent as to shrug off charges of ACTUAL anti-Semitism.
Sorry, but Reagan hit the Colonel in Libya because he killed several U.S. soldiers in a bombing in a German pub. I know. I was in the administation at the time. And the reason Reagan didn't strike back after our Marines were killed by car boms in Lebanon is because he wasn't exactly sure where or how to hit them. It's becoming an urban myth that he just turned tail and ran, which is false. It doesn't even make any sense. Reagan was never of such a mind in anything he did.
Buchanan may be wrong about Iraq and his ideas about neocon/Israeli alliances. He may be wrong about trade. He is definitely wrong for speaking up Ralph Nader.
But he is right about the social issues, especially immigration. My guess is that one of Buchanan's points is that the ruling GOP has proven less conservative in practice than in what they promised.
The GOP has abandoned any pretense of representing the views of their own base (and the majority of Americans as it turns out) on immigration. Most Americans want less legal immigration; Bush proposes increasing legal immigration. Most oppose rewards for illegal aliens like amnesty, drivers' licenses, and in-state tuition; Bush supports amnesty and the GOP refused to even discourage the granting of licenses to illegals in their platform. They refuse to give political expression to the conservative, majority views on immigration and will eventually pay the price when it dooms them demographically.
Bush has abandoned the base (and again--the majority of Americans) in his support of racial preferences. Yeah, he is against 'quotas', but so what? Everyone claims to be against quotas. The question is of preferences, and Bush said a few weeks ago that he supports using race as a factor if other measures fail to 'achieve diversity.' In other words, he backs the absurd, leftwing notion that achieving diversity is a compelling state interest, so much so that it justifies discrimination against whites.
Bush has been good on abortion. He signed the partial birth abortion ban. He reinstated the gag rule.
So far Bush has been good on gay marriage, but the question is how hard he will fight when the Sup Court imposes gay marriage/civil unions on the nation in a possible second term.
But what is so frustrating about GOP timidness and even betrayal on these social issues is that the conservative view is the mainstream, majority view of Americans. It could yield electoral gains if they actually embraced conservatism on these.
As to the Senate: There is no conservative majority. Even if the 51 GOP senators were conservative (plus Zell Miller), that is undone by the rules of the Senate that allow a minority of 41 to kill votes. And who knows what will happen in Nov. Of the 5 open seats in the South that the GOP should win -- NC, SC, Ga, Fl, La -- they may only win SC and Ga. A sure hold in Oklahoma has become less sure this week. They will lose Illinois, and they may lose states they should hold in Colorado and Alaska.
And remember, they must at least break even and keep 51 seats so as to remove the temptation for Sen Chafee of RI to pull a Jeffords.
Yes, I know I've left out the race in South Dakota. Recent polls are encouraging, but Thune must beat the insufferable Daschle by a large enough margin so as to prevent the possibilty of late-arriving Indian Reservation votes from robbing him once again.
The House: Let's hope that the Texas redistricting delivers the additional 5-7 seats as has been advertised.
But anyway, if Bush wins, and I hope he does considering who his opponent is, then he can go a long ways to make up for some of his liberalism if he makes sure to put Scalia/Thomas type conservatives on the Sup Court. It is unlikely that O'Connor, Rehnquist, Stevens, and Ginsburg can all go another 4 yrs. Bush must nominate a conservative, then fight for him or her until they get an up or down vote from the full Senate. If the nominee bows out, then Bush must pick another equally conservative judge to take his place.
Oops ... bombs. And, yes, Buchanan lost it a long time ago. He has Hoerge McGovern's foreign policy, John Sweeney's dometic policy, and Hugy Long's delivery.
God, I only wish I could tupe!
Here. You may need these ...
No one questions the facts he uses, just the remedial conclusions he reaches from those facts. And most of us strongly disagree with those remedies and think we see an obvious prejudice that leads him to those conclusions (to which we disagree) So some of us voice that opinion here at FR. What's the problem?
Cool typso!
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