A Conservative No More: The tribal politics of Pat Buchanan - analysis of Buchanan's political beliefs

National Review, Oct 11, 1999 by Ramesh Ponnuru

Patrick J. Buchanan's impending departure from the Republican party is attracting interest as the only surprise of the political season. The real surprise is that it took him so long. It has been clear for some time that Buchanan's ideological wanderings have taken him far from the heartland of the Republican party and the conservative movement. As early as 1992, William McGurn was warning in these pages that while Buchanan described his presidential campaign as a "theological debate," "many a voice that starts off promising reformation finds itself swept along into schism."

Buchanan's intellectual fellow travelers certainly foresaw the possibility of such a schism; indeed, they egged it on. In a March 1996 column, Samuel Francis wrote that he had been telling Buchanan for years that his "refusal to break even more definitely with a more conventional conservative identity and with the Republican Party . . . is a serious error." Buchanan's identification as a Republican and a conservative, Francis continued, "dilutes and deflects the radicalism of the message."

That message has been diluted as well by some of Buchanan's conservative fans. They persist in seeing him as a comrade-in-arms. They insult him by pretending that his apparent heterodoxies aren't meant seriously. Some of them still deny even that he is a protectionist. He is merely a "fair trader," they say, though his book The Great Betrayal advocates that America 1) destroy the institutions that have promoted free trade since World War II; 2) impose across-the-board 15 percent tariffs on products from every country on earth, with the possible exception of Canada; and 3) impose heavy additional tariffs on poor countries.

Buchanan's protectionism, like his near-isolationism, might not matter were it a mere idiosyncrasy. Both positions have conservative pedigrees. His promise to run both a trade surplus and an investment surplus-which is impossible as a matter of simple math, not just theory-might be passed off as a quaint example of the literary intellectual's indifference to economics. (Early in his poignant memoir, Right from the Beginning, Buchanan remarks that he agrees with the wit who said that "voodoo economics" is a redundancy.) His view that Hitler and Stalin should have been left alone to duke it out might be a stimulating provocation.

But Buchanan's views on trade and foreign policy have become central to his politics; it's hard to dismiss them as incidental to Buchananism, now that he has written a book on each and apparently decided to bolt the Republican party because of them. He talks more about these views than he does about immigration control, where he would have a better case. Moreover, as Buchanan's conservative critics predicted, his shift on trade has led him inexorably to the left on domestic matters.

In The Great Betrayal, Buchanan compares free markets to the law of the jungle and writes, "Better the occasional sins of a government acting out of the spirit of charity than the constant omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference." Conservatives who grind their teeth every time George W. Bush uses his favorite adjective should remember that Buchanan was the very first compassionate conservative-"I may charge him with plagiarism," he says. Buchanan has been slow to grasp the full implications of his new political stance. He still, for instance, opposes increasing the minimum wage. But his "conservatism of the heart" has moved him to favor higher unemployment benefits, to support a cap on executive pay, and to condemn Republicans' brave efforts in 1995 to curb the growth of Medicare.

Buchanan almost never talks about cutting government any more, certainly not about ending specific programs or programs that benefit the middle class. It is true that most Republicans these days share this reticence. But only Buchanan says that advocates of the flat tax have spent too much time with "the boys down at the yacht basin." Not even liberal Democrats bash corporations with his gusto, deploring as he does their greed, questioning their loyalty, and second-guessing their decisions. (For all the anti-corporate rhetoric, of course, a Buchananite economic policy would in practice involve an alliance between Big Government, Big Business, and Big Labor-as every country that has tried to implement such a policy has found out.)

THE LAST NIXONIAN

This is not the conservatism of Ronald Reagan, or Barry Goldwater, or William F. Buckley Jr. It is not even, as is so often incorrectly said, a revival of Robert Taft Republicanism: Taft didn't play to the union halls, and Medicare would have horrified him. Every writer creates his own precursors, wrote Borges, and Buchanan seems to have taken the remark too literally: He likes to imagine that his views are the same as those of the Founders, as though Hamilton's nuanced and moderate protectionism were the same as his blunderbuss kind. No, his politics are a new phenomenon.

In his book Revolution from the Middle, Francis argues that Buchananism, unlike conventional conservatism, has a social base: the "Middle American Radicals" (MARs), lower-middle-class whites who feel culturally and economically dispossessed. For these people, the trouble with the federal government is not that it is too big but that it is run by elites who are disloyal to them. Writes Francis: "Only Buchanan managed to capture the strange synthesis of right and left that characterizes the political beliefs of MARs-their combination of culturally conservative moral and social beliefs with support for economically liberal policies such as Medicare, Social Security, unemployment benefits, and economic nationalism and protectionism."