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!"

People who live in glass houses, should really not only refrain from throwing rocks, but also from LYING , dear. : - )

If you send impolite / harassing / unasked for FREEPmail, in order to have a falme war,then you have lost your right to complain about what you get in return. I did NOT use any vugarities, in my reponse to you. Keep this behavior up, and you'll soon be the recipient of some unwanted FREEPmail, from the powers that be. Have a good evening. :-)

To Pelham , I saw 'nopardons' post to you . She had sent vugarities and abusive language to my e-mail when I criticized Bushs' weakness against the Arafat , and other positions which Bush ruled on as a liberal( and Rush Limabuagh later that week criticized him )

She states thaat it is against the rules to use bad language. I told her the same thing a month aand a half ago !Well maaybe shr repented ( LOL) P.S .- I am voa -davidk .Look up higher (scroll up )the posts from this one of yours and see my post to her with ....LOL, LOL , aand triple LOL and asking at the end if she would like to hear my impression of a dolphin ? " eeee-Er ! eeee - Er ! eeee-ER ! eeee- Er ! eeeee- Er ! ( then I wrote ) Half My Brain tied Behing My Baack , Just To Make it Fair . "

The founding fathers lived in another age. An age where boundless oceans provided a natural moat. An age without intercontinental flight. An age without weapons of mass destruction. They also founded a country that was one of the weakest in the world, leaving them little choice but to avoid the world's stage.

True in every regard.

None of the conditions they founding fathers faced continue to exist.

Not true.
They faced and delt with the imperial designs of England and France, We have faced and delt with the imperial asperations of England and have not done as well. Their machinations got us into two world wars that were not in our national interst.
As with France, we have finessed Russia very nicely. Thank you GW Bush.

I agree that we are no longer a nation of little power and influence. I do not agree that we should be invegled to solve europe's problems in eastern europe, Africa, and the middle east.

We have the means with our missles, B-52s, and a blue-water navy to impose our will whenever it suits our national interests. The Marines and Army are need to defend our borders, not Kosovo, Isreal, etc.
Ground troops win, keep, and hold territory. They are not needed to punnish those who would do us ill. They are needed to maintain the sovreignty of our nation.

"They faced and delt with the imperial designs of England and France, We have faced and delt with the imperial asperations of England and have not done as well. Their machinations got us into two world wars that were not in our national interst."

You're mixing apples and oranges. We may now be facing similar problems faced by France and England but it does not follow that our Founding Fathers faced these same problems. In fact, the opposite is true since they were on the receiving end of those problems.

Do you really believe the destruction of Nazi Germany, of Imperial Japan, were not in our best interests? Do you believe it was not in our best interests to respond to unrestricted submarine warfare against our merchant vessels (WWI)?

"I agree that we are no longer a nation of little power and influence. I do not agree that we should be invegled to solve europe's problems in eastern europe, Africa, and the middle east."

Nor have I proposed we attempt to solve the worlds problems. We should become involved when the worlds problems become serious threats to us. International terrorism would seem to fit that description.

"We have the means with our missles, B-52s, and a blue-water navy to impose our will whenever it suits our national interests. The Marines and Army are need to defend our borders, not Kosovo, Isreal, etc."

Oh, yes, let us retreat behind the walls of a "Fortress America". Sooner or later the world will come knocking. (Not that I support Kosovo, a place where Bill Clinton and Madeline Albrights idealism got the best of them.)

"Ground troops win, keep, and hold territory. They are not needed to punnish those who would do us ill. They are needed to maintain the sovreignty of our nation."

Wonderful. Let us resort to a few cruise missile attacks. Ground troops are the only way to root the terrorists out of the nests. Surely, Bill Clinton's cruise missile retalitation should have proved how misguided response of the types you propose are and how fruitless are their results.

You propose nothing more than a goal line defense of our borders. I prefer to play the game on the other side of the fifty yard line. It produces so much less destruction on our home turf. If you doubt this compare photographs of Berlin, Tokyo, and Washington DC immediately following WWII.

Do you really believe the destruction of Nazi Germany, of Imperial Japan, were not in our best interests?

Do you think that Hitler was more vicious or killed more innocents than Stalin? Was Tojo more henious than Mao? If so, use other sources of information than the NY media and your HS history book.

Do you believe it was not in our best interests to respond to unrestricted submarine warfare against our merchant vessels (WWI)?

Do some research on the topic and get back to me. Until the the teeth of the British lion were pulled, the UK was the most reprehensible empire (among other atrocities, they were the first to incarcerate civilians in concentration camps) until the birth of the USSR.

Wonderful. Let us resort to a few cruise missile attacks.

A few? Use as many as it takes.

Ground troops are the only way to root the terrorists out of the nests.

Ground troops get killed. Surviving terrorists will have a tough time keeping their footing on glass.

You propose nothing more than a goal line defense of our borders.

Damn betcha.

I prefer to play the game on the other side of the fifty yard line.

Get back to me when you volunteer to put your, or your son's, ass on that side of the line.

"Do you think that Hitler was more vicious or killed more innocents than Stalin? Was Tojo more henious than Mao? If so, use other sources of information than the NY media and your HS history book."

That response totally avoids answering the question: "Do you really believe the destruction of Nazi Germany, of Imperial Japan, were not in our best interests?" Why don't you try responding with something more than gratuitous insults?

"Do some research on the topic and get back to me. Until the the teeth of the British lion were pulled, the UK was the most reprehensible empire (among other atrocities, they were the first to incarcerate civilians in concentration camps) until the birth of the USSR."

More gratuitous insults instead of responding to the question: "Do you believe it was not in our best interests to respond to unrestricted submarine warfare against our merchant vessels (WWI)?" I'll add one more question: "Since the British Empire was so evil, would you care to explain how it's dissolution lead to peace, prosperity, and universal brotherhood through out the world?

"A few? Use as many as it takes."

I would have thought you'd have noticed after eight years of cruise missile diplomacy ala Bill Clinton that bombing mud huts does not eradicate terrorism.

"Ground troops get killed. Surviving terrorists will have a tough time keeping their footing on glass."

Ground troops also kill terrorists. Now who has the best record of killing terrorists, Bill Clinton or George Bush?

"Get back to me when you volunteer to put your, or your son's, ass on that side of the line."

More gratuitous insults. My friend, I was wearing Army green when you were still in diapers.

Please forgive my attemps at understatement and subtlety. Your perserverance deserves better.

The Brittish gave Goebells lessons in effective propaganda. Truely effect propaganda does as intended without notice. The Britts convinced us with help of Pres. Wilson to sacrifice our treasury and our young men for the preservation of UK hegemony.

As for my comparisons, Hitler vs. Stalin and Tojo vs. Mao, without the connivance of Churchhill and FDR, would have been moot.
If we would have kept out of WWII, Stalin would have been overthrown and would not have been able to arm Mao. Hitler would have found Mother Russia indigestible and his socialist empire would have fallen apart by 1950, if not sooner.

As far as the Japanese are concerned, they killed fewer Chinese than Mao, and they would have been less a threat than the ChiComms are now. Without the goading of FDR and our trade embargo, they would have had no quarrel with us.

"Since the British Empire was so evil, would you care to explain how it's dissolution lead to peace, prosperity, and universal brotherhood through out the world?

Do you mean the British Empire that introduced the international trade in opium, pushed us into WWI, abandoned its colonies in the Indian subcontinent and Africa to anarchy? The reference to civilian concentration camps was not gratuitous, it was practiced during the Boer War.

Gratuitousness is epitomized by your continual references to Clinton. Clinton, was and is, an ass. As indicated by my reference to glass, I did not have his half and quarter measures in mind.

As far as service is concerned, I put in my eight years of obligation that ended with nine months in France in '61-'62.

What seems to be the main point is that some on the Right are willing to make common cause with some on the Left to fight threats to American Sovereignty.

What concerned me about the article was learning that Buchanan had marched with the anti WTO group. Most of those groups pretend that they are against globalization, but in reality they have some really hard-core communist organizers who want to bring down all trade and all society so that they can once again create the Utopian Paradise here on earth.

You speculations on alternative histories are merely that, speculation. One can build all sorts of theortical possibilities since one does not have to be constrained in any practical sense.

"Do you mean the British Empire that introduced the international trade in opium, pushed us into WWI, abandoned its colonies in the Indian subcontinent and Africa to anarchy? The reference to civilian concentration camps was not gratuitous, it was practiced during the Boer War."

I was well aware of the concentration camps during the Boer War. I'm not historically illiterate. Focusing on a few reprehensible outcomes does not establish that the world would have been a better place without the British Empire or it's dissolution made this world better. Even you admit that it's removal from India and Africa produced unfortunate outcomes.

"Gratuitousness is epitomized by your continual references to Clinton. Clinton, was and is, an ass. As indicated by my reference to glass, I did not have his half and quarter measures in mind."

I was not referring to Clinton, per se, but to the idea that airpower or cruise missiles has evolved to the point that it can replace boots on the ground. After every war, we find that it has not. But, what did you have in mind, nuclear weapons?

"As far as service is concerned, I put in my eight years of obligation that ended with nine months in France in '61-'62."

Then my apologies. I made the same error you did. You beat me to active duty by about eight years. I did spend eight years active and another 14 in the Guard.

A blanket dismissal of my points of contention with those that are appologists of Brittish attrocities (being of Irish and Scottish descent, they remain evergreen), FDR, Stalin, and Mao does your creditability ill.

I was not referring to Clinton, per se, but to the idea that airpower or cruise missiles has evolved to the point that it can replace boots on the ground. After every war, we find that it has not. But, what did you have in mind, nuclear weapons?

We got 'em, let's use 'em. To quote a proponent of the Inquisition, "God will know His own".

"A blanket dismissal of my points of contention with those that are appologists of Brittish attrocities (being of Irish and Scottish descent, they remain evergreen), FDR, Stalin, and Mao does your creditability ill."

I didn't dismiss your arguments so much as to say that they remained unproven. I don't really expect you to prove them either. I'm not saying you cannot but recognizing the extent of the argument that would be necessary.

"We got 'em, let's use 'em. To quote a proponent of the Inquisition, "God will know His own"."

Granted that He will, but God will also call them in His own time. He doesn't need you or I to determine that time or the method of His calling. Since neither you nor I know who He is calling, I would suggest something a bit more discriminating since He just might resent our doing too much of the calling for Him.

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