In an increasingly conservative America, one political figure defiantly resists the historical tide. This .man still denotinces big banks and multinational corporations. Still unabashedly puts the interests of the American factory worker ahead of those of the so-called international trading system. Still refuses even to contemplate any” cuts in the generosity of big middle-class spending programs like Medicare and Social Security. This man is Patrick J. Buchanan, America’s last leftist.
On the airwaves in New Hampshire, it is Buchanan whose ads attack the House Republicans’ Medicare reform and accuse his party of cutting off elderly Americans in order to aid the already privileged. As he told ABC’s Cokie Roberts in October, “Their [the Republicans’] priorities are wrong. Why didn’t they go after foreign aid? Why didn’t they go after this $ 50 billion Mexican bailout which is unraveling before our eyes?” In his campaign speeches, Buchanan bluntly blames the falling wages of laborers like “the single more in a textile plant in South Carolina” on “investment bankers on Wall Street” who want her “to compete with Asian workers who have to work for 25 cents an hour.” While Democrats nervously ingratiate themselves with corporate donors, Mr. Buchanan roars his hostility to big business. In the IVall Street Journal, he blasted “multinational corporations whose loyalty is only to the bottom line on a balance sheet,” and suggested the U.S. government “inform these amoral behemoths they are welcome to bring in their capital and build their plants. But if they shut down factories here to open overseas, they will pay a price for the readmission of their goods to the American market.” Indeed, measured by the traditional New Deal standards — which candidate attacks corporations most violently? which candidate opposes reductions in government most strenuously? — Buchanan has moved to the left of President Clinton. Hey: He’s moved to the left of virtually every Democrat now holding national offxce.
Does that sound implausible? Look at the world for a moment through the eyes of a union organizer. The intense new international competition in manufacturing has forced American companies to be less tolerant of impediments to the efficient use of labor — namely, you. Which presidential candidate is promising to shut that competition down and put you back in the driver’s seat? Only Buchanan, who has called for a 20 percent tariff on Chinese exports, a 10 percent tariff on Japanese goods, and an unspecified “social tariff” on exports from Third World countries.
Now imagine yourself an embittered, downwardly mobile ex-auto worker. Who spe aks to your grievances more directly than Pat Buchanan, who but he laments a “burnt out Detroit, once the forge of the Great Arsenal of Democracy… ghost towns that were once factory towns… the stagnant wages of an alienated working class and a middle class newly introduced to insecurity”?
Or put yourself in the shoes of a marginal southern tobacco farmer, fearful of what the North American Free Trade Agreement and global agricultural trade liberalization will do to his no-longer guaranteed home market. Who is offering a more convincing solution to your problems than Buchanan, with his attacks on trade deals cooked up in order “to ship Mexico tens of billions to pay off its creditors at Citibank and Goldman Sachs.” The party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt now represents a coalition of blacks, working women, public employees, trial lawyers, college professors, and high-tech industry. The party long ago turned its back on the dwindling remains of President Roosevelt’s original farmer/labor/white-ethnic coalition. It’s a constituency without a voice, and Buchanan is cleverly attempting to speak for it.
No doubt, Buchanan enlivens his RooseveltJan politics with some spicy condiments all his own. The adoption of the sinister term “New World Order” to describe what is in fact a half-century-old bipartisan free-trade policy is distinctively Buchananesque. True, too, Buchanan advocates a program of flatter and lower taxes on income and capital that mixes uncomfortably with his anticorporate rhetoric: the elimination of inheritance taxes on estates of less than $ 5 million, for instance. A vestigial Goldwaterism likewise manifests itself in Buchanan’s continued championing of the old social conservative single-issue causes: guns, abortion, prayer in the schools.
But even so, compare the Pat Buchanan of today with the Pat Buchanan of 1992. The core issue of his primary challenge to President Bush was the echt- Reaganire accusation that Mr. Bush had backslid on taxes. Even the notorious speech to the Republican convention-for all its abandonment of the sunny and generous tone characteristic of Ronald Reagan — bashed Governor Clinton for his indifference to foreign policy, his pro-choice views on abortion, his sympathy to gay rights, his opposition to school choice, and the free-spending ways of running mate A1 Gore. All orthodox Reagan doctrines.
Today, Buchanan still forthrightly states his views on abortion and gay rights — if asked. But his campaign speeches stress arresting new themes: the imminent menace of world government, the greed of international banks, the power of tariffs to stop the deterioration in blue-collar wages, the urgency of preserving Medicare in something close to its present form. This isn’t anything remotely like the conservative Republicanism of the Reagan era. What it sounds very much like instead is the militant, resentful rhetoric roared by populist Democrats from William Jennings Bryan onward.
The revulsion contemporary Democrats feel for Buchanan only exposes how far that party has drifted from its own past. After all, on the issues contemporary Democrats really care about — abortion, affirmative action, the environment — big business can often be counted on to cooperate with reasonable grace. The resentments that modern Democrats attempt to appeal to are increasingly sexual (“They just don’t get it”) rather than economic.
But there’s no reason to expect that economic resentment will remain a taboo forever. It’s often said that in good economic times, people are willing to tolerate redistribution, but in bad times they bunker down. Maybe. But put aside the 1960s and you see another pattern. During the other prosperous decades of the century — the 1920s, the 1950s, the 1980s — Americans have trusted in the fairness of their economic system and ignored complaints that the game is rigged. When good jobs are plentiful, voters believe, not unreasonably, that the way to get ahead is to go out and work. It’s in bad times — the 1930s, the 1970s — that voters grumble against big business and big banks. It’s in bad times that voters elect politicians who offer them nostrums to create jobs.
And for one big category of workers — high-school educated men under age 40 — times have been genuinely hard for nearly 15 years. In them, a constituency for resentful economics has reappeared. So far, the politicians who have attempted to exploit this constituency have failed either because they were patent phonies (Richard Gephardt in 1988) or because they refused to reckon with these men’s conservative racial views (Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988) or because they labored under the weight of too much standard-issue Democratic baggage (Tom Harkin in 1992). Buchanan suffers from none of these handicaps, and it may take him far.
The important question for traditional conservative Republicans is how far Mr . Buchanan should be permitted to take the party. The success of Buchanan’s 199 2 campaign has already begun to redirect the Republican party to a more restric tiv e position on immigration and a much harder line on affirmative action. More successes in 1996 — a new poll has him running a strong second in New Hampshire to Bob Dole — -will enhance his influence even more. Should he be welcomed or not?
In 1992, many conservatives suffered excruciating difficulty in deciding. Only a month after William E Buckley concluded in a powerful cover story in National Review that he found it impossible to defend Buchanan against accusations of anti-Semitism, the editors of that same magazine urged a ” tactical vote” [or him in the New Hampshire primary. This time, need to recognize that Buchanan’s politics is neither a throw-back to the Taft Republicanism of the 1930s and 40s (Taft would have hacked up Medicare with gusto) nor a renovation of Reaganitc conservatism for the post-Cold War world. It is something new: a populism formed to seize the political opportunities presented by strident multiculturalism and stagnating wages for less-skilled workers.
Populism, though, seldom offers answers to the problems it exploits. Cutting off immigration won’t unify American culture. It is the alienation of black America from the country’s old norms and ideals that is dividing the United States, and on that subject Buchanan has nothing to say.
Nor will restricting imports improve the lot of the less-skilled: Tariffs are a tax that weighs most crushingly on the poorest people in society. The apogee of American protectionism — the years from the enactment of the McKinley tariff of 1890 to Woodrow Wilson’s turn to free trade in 1913 — was marked by the most extreme income inequality and the most violent labor strife in the nation’s history.
As things are going, it is likely only a matter of time efore Buchanan himself recognizes the rapidly mounting distance between his politics and those of mainstream conservatism. His friend and fellow columnist Sam Francis, whose ideas Mr. Buchanan has increasingly echoed, has already dropped the word “conservative” outright. The danger is not so much that Buchanan will hijack conservatism as that, even after he charges out of it on his way toward some unscouted ideological destination of his own, his statist and populist ideas will seep backward into it. At least one House freshman, Zach Wamp of Tennessee, seems to have been infected already: simultaneously defending the Department of Energy (a big employer in his district) while buffing up his anti-Washington credentials by denouncing Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin’s rescue of the Mexican peso.
Buchanan has never shied from a fight, and neither should those Republicans who oppose him. Republicans who hold fast to the traditions of postwar conservatism that Buchanan is rejecting — small government and American global leadership — should make clear that they understand as well as Buchanan does the immense difference between his politics and theirs. He has turned his back on the fundamental convictions that have defined American conservatism for 40 years, and conservatives shouldn’t be afraid to say so. After all, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, it isn’t we who have left Pat Buchanan; it is Pat Buchanan who is leaving us.
By David Frum
