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.
Bless your heart!
The JBS was ridiculed a lot by the mainstream media of the day...there was even a popular song making fun of them ("if your mother is a Communist, you'd better turn her in") and the attorney general of the state of California called them a bunch of "little old ladies in tennis shoes."
The organization was named in honor of an American killed by the Communists in China shortly after the end of WWII.
You sound like a highly educated mature person. Yes sir, very impressive indeed.
I'm from the South. I know what "Bless your heart" really means ... :)
I beg your pardon?
I used to enjoy listening to him, too. He has joined the ranks of the loose nuts like Howard Dean, Algore, John McLaughlin and Kitty Kelley. To name a few
LOL
Don't forget the Terminator. We need to flush the above Liberals before 2008, else the GOP will get flushed.
What possible good would have come to the US by staying in Lebanon at that time? This was 1983, with the memories of Vietnam still fresh in the public's memory. There would have been no reason to get involved in a civil war in that part of the world while the Cold War was going on. Reagan's mistake was not in leaving Lebanon, it was in entering in the first place. Staying would have been untenable, as even Israel was forced to withdraw. Trying to stay would have resulted in President Mondale. It is better to bite the bullet and correct a bad decision rather than stubbornly sticking to it, particulary when lives are at stake.
For a young fella, you have certainly "got it"...The insults listed (except racist) used to identify Republicans...What would you call em' now??? Recently saw a photo of a parade here on FR...Bunch of people sittin' there watching...As the Flag went by, the only one who saluted the flag was a fella in a wheelchair...In fact, he's the only one who stood up...
America First, money, second...
One idiot criticizing another. What's the point?
The problem is that I never see anyone actually refute his supposedly fallacious logic and the conclusions that arise from it. I see vicious ad hominem attacks and unwarranted charges of "racism," "anti-Semitism," "nativism" and the like--attacks, I might add, that used to be heard mainly from people of a progressive persuasion. People should debate the merits of logic and arguments, not play the "race" card whenever it suits them.
And I will say this: it seems like there are a few people on FR who, whenever anyone starts to question Ariel Sharon, the Likud Party, or dispensationalist theology, react as if that person were about to say something "anti-Semitic," "Arabophilic," or "pro-terror." It may well be the case that Sharon/Likud/dispensationalists are right, but it is not healthy to blindly assume that. I always feel like I'm treading dangerous waters even bringing up the remote possibility that they aren't.
His trek to the Reform Party peeved me, not because he went, but because he seemed to jump the Republican ship based on what he said was a faulty platform. How could the Reform Party have possibly satisfied that lack? It couldn't, and so he came off looking like a regular, run of the mill politician, and the pity was that his early allure was due to a perception that he was anything but such a politician.
Having said all that though, listening to him on Laura's show reminded me of why I originally liked and respected him, and replenished that like and respect that had diminished.
He's a very smart guy, and I know that it's popular to dismiss him with calls of anti-semite, bigot, but I don't think that's really fair. I don't think he's an anti-semite, I just think he thinks we should unhitch our wagon to Israel's star. I don't happen to agree with him, but I think he comes by his opinion honestly.
Actually, I left him out for a reason. Although I wouldn't have voted for him, I must admit that he's at least doing a half-adequate job of keeping the Sacramento Democrats at bay.
We need to flush the above Liberals before 2008, else the GOP will get flushed.'
Agreed. I'm thinking Giuliani looks poised to seize the nomination for President, which would seal the fate of the party once and for all.
Yeah, you're right. Rush has changed.
Someone who hates Israel so much he makes common cause with terrorists.
Someone once noted that a Southerner can get away with the most awful kind of insult just as long as it's prefaced with the words, "Bless her heart" or "Bless his heart." As in, "Bless his heart, if they put his brain on the head of a pin, it'd roll around like a BB on a six lane highway." Or, "Bless her heart, she's so bucktoothed, she could eat an apple through a picket fence."
There are also the sneakier ones that I remember from tongue clucking types of my childhood: "You know, it's amazing that even though she had that baby 7 months after they got married, bless her heart, it weighed 10 pounds!"
As long as the heart is sufficiently blessed, the insult can't be all that bad, at least that's what my Great Aunt Tiny (bless her heart, she was anything but tiny) used to say. I was thinking about this the other day when a friend was telling me about her new Northern friend who was upset because her toddler is just beginning to talk and he has a Southern accent. My friend, who is very kind and, bless her heart, cannot do a thing about those thighs of hers, was justifiably miffed about this. After all, this woman had CHOSEN to move to the South a couple of years ago. "Can you believe it?" said my friend. "A child of mine is going to be taaaallllkkin liiiike thiiiissss."
Now, don't get me wrong. Some of my dearest friends are from the North, bless their hearts. I welcome their perspective, their friendships and their recipes for authentic Northern Italian food. I've even gotten past their endless complaints that you can't find good bagels down here.
The ones who really gore my ox are the native Southerners who have begun to act almost embarrassed about their speech. It's as if they want to bury it in the "Hee Haw" cornfield. We've already lost too much.
I was raised to swanee, not swear, but you hardly ever hear anyone say that anymore, I swanee you don't. And I've caught myself thinking twice before saying something is "right much"; "right close"or "right good" because non-natives think this is right funny indeed. I have a friend from Bawston who thinks it's hilarious when I say I've got to "carry" my daughter to the doctor or "cut off" the light. She also gets a giggle every time I am fixin to do somethin'. My personal favorite was uttered by my aunt who said, "Bless her heart, she can't help being ugly, but she could've stayed home."
To those of you who're still a little embarrassed by your Southernness: take two tent revivals and a dose of redeye gravy and call me in the morning. Bless your heart!
And to those of you who are still having a hard time understanding all this Southern stuff, bless your hearts, I hear they are fixin to have classes on Southernese as a second language!
Bye Bye Y'all!
Bless your hearts.
I believe a little more accuracy is called for...Pat has never said he was anti-Jewish...He has stated at times that the people that seem to be in control of things are Jewish...IF that's not true, refute it...That's not an anti-Jewish statement...
He's also rabidly anti-free market, and wants the U.S. to never become engaged in anything outside our borders.
Now that's not true at all...Time and again, Pat says he believes in FAIR trade...not free trade...He and I are tired of seeing the Communist Chinese control the economics of the U.S...Quit making stuff up...
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