Buchanan's surefire flop. Home Bound

It can't be a good omen for Pat Buchanan. The man who will now carry the pitchfork for his "America First" peasant populism is a European aristocrat. Taki Theodoracopulos (or Taki, as he signs his byline), scion to a Greek shipping fortune, will fund and contribute essays to Buchananism's new house organ, The American Conservative (TAC), a Washington-based biweekly set to launch this September. It is, to say the least, an odd match. While Buchanan venerates the working class, Taki is an unabashed yacht-owning, nightclub-going social snob with homes in the Swiss Alps, London, and Manhattan's Upper East Side. While Buchanan rails against the fraying of God-fearing, law-abiding, traditional American culture, Taki was convicted in 1984 for smuggling cocaine. His most penetrating meditation on American cultural decay was a 1982 essay in The American Spectator titled, "Why American Women are Lousy Lovers."

Still, this unlikely pair is bound by a common goal: to rescue American conservatism from the false gods of internationalism, immigration, free trade, and Zionism. And Buchanan's disastrous 2000 presidential run notwithstanding, as recently as one year ago there was reason to believe such a mission might elicit popular support. After all, in his quest to woo Hispanics, George W. Bush floated a blanket amnesty for Mexican immigrants--an idea that sparked a sharply negative reaction from the conservative grassroots. He called fast-track trade authority a top priority and declared himself "committed to pursuing open trade at every opportunity," despite evidence that the American right was souring on free trade. He reneged on campaign promises to pull U.S. troops from Bosnia and Kosovo. And against conservative orthodoxy, he embraced the spirit of multiculturalism, hardly lifting a finger to undo affirmative action and apparently practicing it himself, packing his Cabinet with minority appointments. In short, the most corporate president in recent history seemed the perfect foil for the anti-corporate conservatism Buchanan had been preaching for years.

And at first glance, September 11 seemed to add fuel to Buchanan's critique. What better evidence for Fortress America than the spectacle of visa-finagling foreigners blowing up lower Manhattan? Buchanan wrote a quickie book, The Death of the West, about the swarthy menace; and across Europe his brand of nativism began harvesting votes in record number. But over time it has become clear that on this side of the Atlantic, 9/11 hasn't boosted the isolationist right; it has extinguished it. Instead of America Firstism, September 11 has produced a war on terrorism that has virtually ended conservative qualms about expending blood and treasure abroad. And as a corollary, it has produced an unprecedented eruption of conservative and evangelical support for Israel. The conservative establishment has co-opted post-9/11 fears of Muslim immigration, and Bush has covered his protectionist flank on trade. In short, Buchanan and his rich friends couldn't have chosen a worse time to start a journal of the isolationist right.

AC thinks conservative support for the war on terrorism is hollow; indeed it plans to make the issue its raison d'etre. According to Scott McConnell--a former editorial-page editor of the New York Post, an heir to the Avon cosmetics fortune, and TAC's third proprietor--"Garden-variety conservatives pretend that the movement speaks with one voice on foreign policy. But foreign policy represents a significant fissure among conservatives. [TAC] will challenge the orthodoxy." It would be more accurate to say it used to represent a significant fissure among conservatives. In late-'90s debates over the Balkans, for instance, a growing number of congressional Republicans broke from the internationalism of GOP elders like Bob Dole and George H.W. Bush and echoed Buchanan's 1999 critique of America's "utopian crusades for global democracy." One year later Tom DeLay delivered a speech at a Washington think tank decrying Clintonite foreign policy as "social work." And Trent Lott took to CNN to accuse the president of neglecting diplomacy, urging him to "give peace a chance" in Kosovo. Even some normally hawkish neoconservatives like Charles Krauthammer condemned the Balkan interventions as "a colossal waste--and drain." A poll in late 1999 taken by Mark Penn showed that 57 percent of Republicans considered the United States "too engaged in the world's problems."

Buchanan has continued that line of argument. Then, he argued the United States had no right to interfere in Balkan tribal feuds. Now he writes, "Where does Bush get the right to identify and punish every [terrorist] aggressor? Who believes any president can lift the `dark threat' of aggression and terror from all mankind?" But no one on the right is listening anymore. A "CBS News" poll from last month shows that 94 percent of Republicans approve of the president's handling of the war. If anything, the conservative critics of Bill Clinton's foreign policy--Krauthammer and DeLay among them--are demanding that Bush intervene more aggressively to root out global terrorism, starting with Yasir Arafat.

The Buchananite critique has fallen flat for three reasons. First, the Clinton administration justified its interventions as humanitarian necessities. In the war on terror, by contrast, Bush hasn't needed to appeal to altruism. He has employed the rhetoric of national interest--fulfilling the Buchananite criteria for intervention. And, in the process, he reestablished the connection between national security and the hawkish internationalism that defined conservatism during the cold war. Second, Bush has preempted charges of Wilsonian internationalism by obsessively guarding against encroachments on national sovereignty--yanking the United States out of the Kyoto agreement on global warming, raising objections to the International Criminal Court, and ditching the anti-ballistic missiles treaty. Thirdly, the Buchananites have shot themselves in the foot by blaming September 11 on America's "indiscriminate support for Israel" (McConnell's words in the New York Press last fall) and pining for the days "when America was loved by Arabs" (Taki's words, also in the Press). TAC's supporters have the misfortune to be espousing anti-Zionism at the very moment the conservative rank and file, driven by evangelicals, views Israel as America's kindred spirit in the battle against terrorism and radical Islam. According to the most recent batch of polling, 64 percent of Republicans say they actively sympathize with Israel--as opposed to 38 percent of Democrats. And 83 percent of Republicans applaud Bush's aggressively pro-Ariel Sharon policy on the Middle East.

he rest of the political landscape is equally inhospitable to Buchananism. Trade--an issue on which Beltway conservatives and grassroots conservatives genuinely were out of step--has lost much of its salience now that national security, not economics, dominates foreign policy debates. With Senate Democrats adding the Dayton-Craig labor protections to trade promotion authority, Bush has threatened to veto the legislation altogether, leaving the Buchananites nothing to shout about in the short term. And when the administration has tinkered with trade policy, it has done so in Buchananite ways--raising tariffs on domestic steel, supporting a farm bill loaded with subsidies for U.S. agriculture, and generally proving that Karl Rove is far too in touch with electoral reality to leave Bush vulnerable to protectionist attack.

Bush and the conservative mainstream have also masterfully preempted the anti-immigration backlash Buchanan would like to foment. Although Bush still talks about tolerance for Muslims and even tried to restore food-stamp benefits to legal aliens, he has endorsed a major overhaul of the border patrol, tougher enforcement of student visas, and a fingerprinting system that amounts to racial profiling. Similarly, pro-immigration magazines like The Weekly Standard and National Review have turned racial profiling and a tougher visa system into crusades, leaving Buchanan and his allies little room to accuse the conservative establishment of sacrificing American security for political correctness and cheap labor. When McConnell told me that the American right considers immigration a "verboten issue," he sounded as if he hadn't touched the stack of magazines by his bed for months.

The way the Buchananites see it, they're still battling the neocons--the largely Jewish group of former leftists who migrated right after the Vietnam War. But the neocons are no longer a wing of the conservative movement; they are the conservative movement. Supply-side economics, Israel, welfare reform, vouchers--all the old neocon pet causes have become enshrined in conservative conventional wisdom. As Norman Podhoretz triumphantly declared in The New York Times in 2000, "The time has come to drop the prefix and simply call ourselves conservatives." This presents a huge problem for the Buchananites: There's no constituency on the right--not evangelicals, not gun nuts, not libertarians--who wants to send the neocons back to City College or who even remembers they came from there. It's a fact McConnell seems to acknowledge when he lumps together National Review, FOX NEWS, and George W. Bush as the "neoconservative orthodoxy." There's barely anyone left on the right to embrace TAC.

There is, however, one group that shares the Buchananite docket of suspicions--of Wall Street, capitalism, Zionism, American power: the anti-globalization left. Indeed, Buchanan has fitfully wooed them. He marched in the streets at the 1999 Seattle protests of the World Trade Organization, and he has spoken at labor rallies against free trade. During his 2000 presidential bid, he said he hoped to turn the Reform Party into the "Peace Party." Some of his aidesde-camp have gone further, taking Buchananism to its logical left-wing conclusions. Justin Raimondo, an adviser to Buchanan's 1996 campaign and a historian of the old right, runs Antiwar.com. The site posts screeds against American interventionism that complain about "empire" and "increased military spending." And by lifting the language of the left, he has acquired an audience on the left: The Nation's Alexander Cockburn has published a column on the site, and Salon and alternative newsweeklies plug his work. For his part, Raimondo is unabashed about his ideological transformation. Last month he wrote on his site, "The only voices of dissent are heard, today, on the Left. ... This is where all the vitality, the rebelliousness, the willingness to challenge the rules and strictures of an increasingly narrow and controlled national discourse has resided."

And Raimondo is not the only one trying his hand at far-left/far-right synergy. On the University of California, San Diego, campus, David Duke's supporters have distributed flyers on "Israeli genocide." Lefty Pacifica Radio broadcasts right-wingers who rail against elites, including recordings of the late conspiracy theorist Anthony Sutton. Thomas Fleming, the editor of the paleocon Chronicles, told me, "I agree with environmentalists on chain stores, fast food, and the Americanization of Europe. I don't even bother calling myself a conservative anymore." Over the course of the '90s the anti-globalization critique that started on the right with Buchanan's 1992 and 1996 presidential runs migrated left. And 9/11, which has forever linked opposition to globalization to opposition to the war on terrorism, was the final straw. The Buchananites may not want to admit it, but in the post-9/11 era, as during the cold war, the prominent critiques of American internationalism will come from the left. TAC contributor Sam Francis says he has already privately advised the new magazine "to forget about the social issues" that divide them from their anti-globalization comrades on the left. Announcing the magazine in a New York Press column, Taki wrote: "Our motto for the magazine is that we are traditional conservatives mugged by the neocons." He'd be better off trying something different: closer to, say, "Workers of the world, unite!"

Good evening to you and a recommendation to go and read "Albions Seed." By reading Fischer's work you will get a better understanding of the "shining city on a hill" idea and from where and whom it came from, and it certainly does not mesh with your neo-con Machivellian snugglefest with the Left's "diversity" farce. The "shining city" shtick is as worn as the "all men are created equal" shtick and to try and pass it off to anybody but bumpkins is vain overreach to the point of farce.

We stabbed Western Civilization in the back by siding with Muslim terrorists over Christian Serbs. Some payback the Serbs received for "guarding the gates" of the West for centuries against the Islamic hordes.

Very eloquent and well put, Phillip. Thank you.

Article was interesting in the sense the author did a good job of illustrating all the things he didnt like about Buchannon. Or Raimondo. Or Republicans. Or Conservatives. Or Libertarians.

But, just as Ann Landers isnt a good substitute for a self help coach. Neither do opinion pieces make for comprehensive analysis.

Gotta hand it to those Neo-Cons though. They sure learned how to put on a business suit, after marching through the streets demanding the destruction society and western civilization.

Socialism! Interventionism! Big Business! Oh my...

Throw in a healthy dose of nationalism that gives them such a strong foreign policy bent and you've got...lets see if I can peg this in under 50 words.

socialists, with a strong tinge of nationalism (gotta love that foreign intervention), who love big business...Hmmm.

Come to think of it, upon reflection. Neo-Cons sound a little like the olde time left oriented wing of Fas...ah...nevermind.

I'm not here to convince you of anything though. Have a good evening.

We are the closest thing yet in the history of this planet to a shinning city on a hill, but not yet alas co-extensive with it.

On the other hand, this is Buchanan's view of America as expressed in his latest book:

"We are two countries, two peoples. An older America is passing away, and a new America is coming into its own. The new Americans who grew up in the 1960s and the years since did not like the old America. They thought it a bigoted, reactionary, repressive, stodgy country. So they kicked the dust from their heels and set out to build a new America, and they have succeeded. To its acolytes the cultural revolution has been a glorious revolution. But to millions, they have replaced the good country we grew up in with a cultural wasteland and a moral sewer that are not worth living in and not worth fighting for--their country, not ours" (p. 6).

My view is that the difference between Paleos and those they call Neo-Cons (that is, 99% of people who call themselves conservatives) is that Neo-Cons love the America that actually exists, while acknowledging its faults; while Paleos love only the ideal America in their minds, and hate the real America -- this "sewer" which is "not worth fighting for."

Okay, now let's try on Keyes' none payment of bills; shall we,his insufferable ego,the T.V, show tantrum ( which also made long standing Keyes supporters not only wince, but decide that he was NOT whom they had thought he was and turned them into Keyes " no way Jose " / when hell freezes over rejectors of Alan ! ), and Keyes' own, VERY bad reaction ( I'll take my ball and just go home ... even though my ratings tanked ... " I'm a " victim " again " response ) to being shifted to a late afternoon time slot.

I DO ; however, thank YOU, a very great deal, for at least admitting to the easily proven factoid, of Alan's brazen / Sharptonesque playing of the race card, when most of his supporters deny , here, that it ever happened. Actually, he pulled this TWICE, that I know of; neither time, BTW, was it true nor a usful ploy.

the difference between Paleos and those they call Neo-Cons (that is, 99% of people who call themselves conservatives) is that Neo-Cons love the America that actually exists, while acknowledging its faults; while Paleos love only the ideal America in their minds, and hate the real America -- this "sewer" which is "not worth fighting for."

Nice analysis.

Thanks for staying around amid the frenzied paleos. There are a lot of people on this thread who can't handle the implications of

Sam Francis says he has already privately advised the new magazine "to forget about the social issues" that divide them from their anti-globalization comrades on the left.

,|¼,¡?e is going to be a bona fide kook magnet.

It's going to be droll watching some of the people here on the forum singing hosannas to it as though it were holy writ.

The letters to the editor alone will be worth the price of the magazine.

What the devil happened to my post # 108?

The first line was supposed to read "This magazine is going to be a bona fide kook magnet."

I previewed it and that's how it read, but something got scrambled during posting.

"But to millions, they have replaced the good country we grew up in with a cultural wasteland and a moral sewer that are not worth living in and not worth fighting for--their country, not ours" (p. 6)."

i believe ol Pat was just trying to motivate us. I don't believe for a sec that Pat wants to abandon this country.

Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas ( even with the " electronic lynching " remark ! ), Ken Hamlin,J.C. Watts, Condi Rice, Niger Innis, and litterally hundreds ( if not thousands )of other prominant blacks ( especially Conservative blacks ! ) have not and do NOT pull the race card and " victimhood " garbage. Keyes has. I used to be a Keyes fan; no more, and I know quite a few others, who share this sentiment, due to his behavior. He's , now , just the flip side of the coin of the Dem Jackson / Sharpton contingent of arrogant, egomanical, self serving, black preacher carricature. It IS the message, as well as the messenger.

Oh gee .. Pat ? You really are enamoured of people who you " think " sounbd good. You would have been crazy about Stevenson; he too won over the crowds with his oratory skills. The thing is, once read, his speeches revealed themselves to be nothing but twaddle and codswallop. BTW, even Pat didn't bvelieve 1/2 of what he said. He admitted, on T.V., that he was just throwing out " red meat " to his " true believers ", but didn't mean much of what he said.

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