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!"

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.

Take this one for example. The premise is that involvement in all "interventions" or "wars" are founded in the same events, and that one has to be a "Buchananite" to support a war against Osama et al. It's senseless drivel posing as knowledgable. Just another reason why left wing rags seem more irrelevant these days than right wing ones. They don't address facts, or detail what "rights" we are allegedly losing. They're not talking about anything except about themselves, and how they see themselves in the world.

I can't believe I ever voted for PJB. Can't this guy go back to the McLaughin Report and shut up? He only makes the situation worse, instead of better, by being identified with the side that is right on an issue, giving cover to those that oppose by saying, "Buchanan is for it, so it must be wrong." It would be much better if he would just shut up. When it's all over, in hindsight it will be shown that his contribution hurt rather than helped a cause. I voted for Keyes last time (2000); I hope he doesn't turn into an embarassment like PJB. Good Grief!!!

Don't know. The "paleo right" is the enemy of the America hating left. The left's allies are the neo-cons. Both are factotums of big business and globalism at some level. Neo-cons have a reflexive distaste for American working people's issues - framing those as "left wing" or "anti-Capitalist."

The article seems to want to describe this, and at points does, but gets lost in the identity and faction-naming game.

Goldwater didn't have much in common with Taft and Bricker in the sense that he was an internationalist, and they were isolationists. Neocons tend to favor free trade, a robust defense, internationalism, welfare reform, vouchers and a meaningful affording of equal opportunity to the young, a social safety net to the extent that it is not self destructive of the recipients and doesn't bust the economy, and a tax system that is progressive up to the point that supply side considerations make it counter productive. They tend to be rather permissive on social issues up to the point that it threatens the fabric of the commonweal, but strongly believe faith and religion are a good thing, even if not religious themselves. They are strongly opposed to all forms of irrational discrimination, including certain inane and destructive forms of quotas. It really is a rather clearly defined point of view, and defines my views. And I was never a leftie.

Hey, thats you! I, for one, am glad you're on my side, whatever side that is.

This is just the standard, garden variety smear. You can see it in the reference to David Duke that Foer just couldn't resist slipping in. It must have made a great excitement and commotion at the New Republic, since for months they haven't been able to use Nazi slurs against their new Zionist allies at the National Review. I notice Foer left out the obligatory reference to Chomsky, but Alexander Cockburn is a good stand-in

I suppose Foer does have a point about Taki. I agree with the poor little rich Greek about just about everything, but I'd do just about anything to avoid spending any time with him. That the British aristocracy doesn't simply confirms what people have always believed about them.

But I'd turn around Foer's argument. What ideology isn't exhausted now? What political magazine isn't boring and hackneyed? National Review and the Weekly Standard may be increasing circulation by stoking the war flames, but their philosophy and principles are getting ever more threadbare as they embrace empire. Dittos for the Weekly Standard. Of course antiwar.com and lewrockwell.com are jokes, but who really pays much attention to the political articles in the New Republic? The point seems to be more to generate a buzz and influence a small circle in Washington or New York than to cast any real light on what's going on in the country or the world. The Nation? The American Prospect? No signs of life there. So long as they go on about the "stolen election" their appeal is bound to be radically limited (assuming that is, that Bush copes well with the war and the economy).

So yes, Buchanan will have trouble with his new magazine, but that's not because of anything unique to his ideology. It reflects a more general ideological confusion or malaise in the country today. The New Republic has new Wall Street backers to cushion his berth against the bumps, but that's no reason to be smug about things.

Just so long as you're not adding another Alouatta palliata to the pack at my heels, no sweat.
That's "Howler Monkey" for you clever folk reading this.
I gotta get another hobby. = )

Ain't this article just a 'real world' example of the phenomenon wherein sites such as the World Socialist Web Site and writers such as Jared Israel are used in appeals to authority here on FR?

My tent isn't that big, not by a long shot.

You are simply too much a gentleman to get much pleasure out of a good old fashioned rather well done bash piece, which I think has an element of truth, but is by no means a road map of anything of consequence.

Having said that, I agree with you in large part (as usual), particularly on the bit that ideologies are in a bit of a funk these days. The dirty little secret of course, is that, except at the fringes (and a totally ineffectual effort by some on the religious right to impose a stern parenthood that is going nowhere, and is losing steam steadily), there is a broad consensus on most matters of real consequence in the US now, and so of course flame wars, and personalities, and demogoguery take up the vaccuum.

Of course, as this nation moves more to socialized medicine, which is inevitable, given that the price tag is so high, things may revert a bit back to a politics that we haven't seen for a long time. But the right will lose that one. And innovations in medicine will be degraded, and my hopes of living to 120 will go out the window. Ain't that a shame?

You seemed to miss the main thrust of the article, which was that current events have sucked the oxygen out of Buchanism. Whether or not Buchanism is ultimately right and true over the long term, was not addressed in this article, nor did it purport to. I think Pat is all wet, and Justin ever wetter, both short term and long term, but that is another matter.

Granted, that seems to be the thrust of it, and I kind of missed it at first, looking at what I thought funny.

I don't sense there is a "Buchananism" as a ideology of identity, in the same way their is the phenomenon of "Neo-Conservatism." Buchanan is one guy. I agree with many of the things he says, some not. There is a reflexive distaste for Jewish people in his views, and that seems to be a better mark that distiguishes him, Taki and Raimondo (hey, great press Justin!) as being of the same mind, rather than other views he espouses, but which many share. The other "Buchananite" mark of distiguishment I see is the critique of mass immigration as a cultural threat. I think the threat to the culture comes from the cult of multiculturalism inculcated into immigrants by teachers, an anti-integration ideology of enforcing difference and animosity, a direct attack on an American identity.

If there is a widely held and coherent "buchananism" such would support the construction of the forces at play by this writer. But I don't see such.

BTW, the way I see the "neo-con" movement is that they were lefties that substitute the cult of statism with the cult of the CEO, funded and directed not by the USSR and union front organizations, but executives of corps with their front group NGOs and "think tanks." Nothing has changed, it's just idolization for the personal gain of one elite for another putatively on a different side of the political spectrum. He points out that "Buchanites" may become "left". I don't know, not many examples. The best example of changing putative political idenities while staying effectively the same are neo-cons themselves.

Neocon = cult of the CEO. I don't think so. That is a wild shot, sort of akin to some in the article, which I must admit I enjoyed more, because I am naughty. This neocon for example has agreed with Daschle that Bush is misguided in not showing support as yet for any program that goes about effecting systemic changes in the way audits are conducted for public companies, and the financial incentives of the auditors that attend their endeavors.

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