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

National Review, Oct 11, 1999 by Ramesh Ponnuru

Conservatives tend to place a lot of emphasis, maybe too much, on the idea that ideas have consequences. They hoist their ideas up the flagpole and then see who salutes. Buchananism puts its idealized social base first, and lets it drive everything else. For Buchanan, loyalty to the tribe trumps any idea. On this point at least, Buchanan may justly claim not to have changed his views. His recent, tentative proposal that elite universities institute quotas for Italian-Americans builds on an idea first expressed in his 1975 book Conservative Votes, Liberal Victories. Buchananism is a form of identity politics for white people-and becomes more worrisome as it is married to collectivism.

If Buchananism is a novelty as ideology, it does have an antecedent as political strategy. Buchanan's mentor, Richard Nixon, succeeded in winning over the same constituency-it was then known as the (George) Wallace vote-by exploiting its cultural grievances while tacking left on the size and role of government. Buchanan wants to recreate Nixon's coalition of 1972. Just as Nixon got AFL-CIO president George Meany not to oppose him, so Buchanan is reportedly courting Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa Jr. to be his running mate. But the Nixon coalition was not a conservative coalition, as Nixon's policies amply proved.

Wage and price controls, the EPA, quotas, arms control-these just begin the list of Nixon's statist-liberal policies. Lyndon Johnson created the Great Society, but Richard Nixon funded it. M. Stanton Evans, the conservative journalist, cracked at the time that he had only two objections to the Nixon administration: its foreign policy and its domestic policy. Watergate, he said, was the only thing Nixon had done that he liked. Now that the passions of Watergate have receded, observers of all political persuasions are coming to recognize that Nixon achieved more for liberalism than any of his successors.

It must have become increasingly clear to Buchanan that the Nixon coalition could no longer be built from within the GOP. The exit polls from the Republican primaries of 1996 suggest that he would have been better off running as a Reaganite. Buchanan barely won the self-described "very conservative" vote and got crushed among voters who care primarily about taxes, i.e., economic conservatives; he didn't get any more independents and Democrats to vote for him in the primaries than Bob Dole did. Voters who cared about trade were heavily against Buchanan on the west coast, and leaned toward him only slightly elsewhere.

IN THE BEGINNING, ABORTION

What actually motivated the Buchanan brigades to pick up their pitchforks was, above all, their opposition to abortion. Buchanan won the 1996 New Hampshire primary because 64 percent of those voters whose top issue was abortion rallied to him. These pro-lifers must now be astonished to learn that Buchanan, in pursuit of a national ticket and $12.6 million in federal matching funds, cares more about trade and foreign policy than he does about abortion. He is apparently willing to join a pro-choice party and to risk helping the Democrats appoint two or three more Supreme Court justices in a post-Clinton administration.But even Christian conservatives, many of whom are also economic conservatives, have deserted him. Buchanan's vote peaked his first time out: He has never equaled his showing in February 1992, when he won 37 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary. There were, of course, non-ideological reasons for Buchanan's subsequent burnouts. To begin with, he was surprisingly lackadaisical about politics for someone who wants to reshape it. After losing in 1996, Buchanan went back to CNN; Steve Forbes, by contrast, never left the hustings. Gary Bauer has raised money for other candidates; Buchanan has done nothing to nurture a like-minded cadre in Congress. Buchanan's showing in the Iowa straw poll in August-Bauer placed higher-underlined the point that he has no future in the Republican party. The most recent poll shows him with the backing of only 3 percent of Republican voters, and he has the support of no acknowledged conservative figure.