Not A Big Tent … Just a White Sheet: Pat Buchanan’s Invisible Empire

The problem with The American Conservative is that it is neither.

This slickly updated Jew-baiting, Beobachter-ish rag of Patrick J. Buchanan’s is, rather, the Left’s last, best hope, and a material aid and comfort to the foreign enemies of this country. If La Belle Garofalo truly thinks that the media somehow conspires to discredit the ‘anti-war’ movement by luring* inarticulate Hollywood halfwits into speaking out against the US, so that we all may snigger at them, and, by extension, at their cause … well, let her imagine the harm it does to conservatism to be identified, even falsely, with the public spectacle of Pat Buchanan’s final, gurgling descent into the mud of the fever-swamps of lunacy.

Not that he’ll be regretted, mind you.

If I were to adopt the tone, manner, and modus operandi – an appropriately criminal term – of Paddy and his Brownshirts, I would begin by insinuating that his magazine is a front for that old, discreditable and discredited American fear of foreign – read, ‘Vatican’ – influence. After all, as I write this, the Holy See is irretrievably tarred with the brush of its apparent reflexive dislike for the State of Israel and its unpardonable support – mere ‘appeasement’ hardly describes its recent actions – for the criminal regime of Saddam Hussein and for the terrorists and suicide bombers of the PLO. And Paddy-an’-th’-Bhoyos have been singing the same ould song every night at their wee shebeen, ‘Th’ Amerryc’n Consarrrvitif,’ bawling out how the US deserved 9-11, and how the whole war on terror is part of the Great Zionist Conspiracy (Buchanan to Chris Matthews, 30 SEP 2002: ֳ/11 was a direct consequence of the United States meddling in an area of the world where we do not belong and where we are not wanted. We were attacked because we were on Saudi sacred soil [!] and we are so-called repressing the Iraqis and we’re supporting Israel and all the rest of it’. And, faith, Paddy and his mate, Robbie Novak, are th’ lads who’re more Catholic than the Holy Father himself, it is, it is….

Item: Paddy-boy on the Iraqi operations:
When the Cold War ended, these neoconservatives began casting about for a new crusade to give meaning to their lives. On Sept. 11, their time came. They seized on that horrific atrocity to steer America’s rage into all-out war to destroy their despised enemies, the Arab and Islamic ‘rogue states’ that have resisted U.S. hegemony and loathe Israel.
[And that are rogue regimes engaged in the regular state support of terror against this country. Which is rather the point.]
***The War Party’s plan, however, had been in preparation far in advance of 9/11. And when President Bush, after defeating the Taliban –
[Which PJB and The American Conservative opposed, as it happens.]
– was looking for a new front in the war on terror, they put their precooked meal in front of him. Bush dug into it.
versus
Padhrick-me-lad on the Serbs and the Croats:
Croatia is not some faraway desert emirate…. It is a ‘piece of the continent, a part of the main,’ a Western republic that belonged to the Habsburg empire and was for centuries the first line of defense of Christian Europe. For their ceaseless resistance to the Ottoman Turks, Croatia was proclaimed by Pope Leo X to be the ‘Antemurale Christianitatis,’ the bulwark of Christianity.

Dual loyalty, there, PJ (not to mention a bit of ethnocentrism)? The sort of thing you accuse the neocons of? It would be plausible to identify in Bucky-boy’s ravings a certain strain of what used to be Roman Catholic thought (if you can call it that) that was tainted with an almost mystical Judenhass: the taint that so troublingly stained GKC for much of his life, though Chesterton, typically more manly than Paddy’s Provos, had begun to repent before he died, having finally seen what he had not seen in himself once it began to be writ large in Hitler’s early rise to power, which he manfully castigated. (We Anglicans tend not to suffer as much from this vice: ask me to name three Anglican conservatives and I’m quite likely to name Disraeli, Goldwater, and Cap Weinberger, all Anglican by religion and all Jewish by heritage.) If I were the sort of hack who would write for ‘The American Conservative,’ I might well accuse Patrick and th’ Lads of being ‘a bunch of drunken, Jew-baiting, priest-ridden Micks, half-smashed on incense, poteen, and hatred.’ Their own methods are precisely as offensive, as I am seeking here to demonstrate.

But I don’t treat issues the way the paleo-Kluxers at The American Conservative do, so I won’t say that. What I will say is that the preceding paragraphs are barely a pastiche of the way Those People operate, think, and write (I use the term ‘Those People,’ by the way, differently than Patrick J. would: for him, that would be yet another barely-covert bit of anti-Semitism; from me, it is a deliberate echo of R. E. Lee’s way of speaking of the enemy without granting them social recognition by naming them).

Item: Buchanan on the ‘neo-conservative,’ um, cabal (wink, nudge):

We charge that a cabal –
[sure enough, folks, he came right out and said it. Why not just say ‘a Sanhedrin’ and get it over with?]
– of polemicists and public officials seek to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America’s interests.
[According to whom, pray? A man who in the same article identifies isolationist Robert Taft as a hero of ‘true conservatism’ – Taft, of course, being an early proponent of the belief that we wouldn’t have world problems if we ‘stopped being a Meddlesome Mattie’ internationally, a policy position otherwise best known as being held by Sheryl Crow; Taft, a US Senator, God help us, who as late as 1942 wasn’t convinced that the US should be fighting the Second World War?]
We charge them with colluding with Israel to ignite those wars –
[Oh, of course. It’s Those Damned Jews Again. I guess in between raping Aryan women and charging usury, the Elders of Zion spend their days planning war in the Middle East: after all, it does them so much good to have suicide bombers drop by in the midst of dinner and to live with the prospect of Scuds raining gas on their country. But, hey, Paddy-boy, what do you expect of them? I mean, they’re all Christ-killers,** too, right? What was it the ‘good Germans’ said as the trains rattled by, heading for the camps? Something about, ‘Those verdammt Jews, they won’t even let us sleep at night,’ wasn’t it?]
– and destroy the Oslo Accords.
[Which, of course, Kindly Old Uncle Yasser would otherwise have kept, right?]
We charge them with deliberately damaging U.S. relations with every state in the Arab world that defies Israel or supports the Palestinian people’s right to a homeland of their own.
[Someone want to explain to me why anything short of Cold War necessity would prompt any real Jeffersonian conservative to want the friendship of the Arabs’s tinpot tyrants? And there is no ‘Palestinian people.’ Never has been. Just a bunch of displaced Jordanians who are suffering the just consequences of having waged – and lost – a war of genocidal aggression. These are your friends, PJ? Um-hmmm. That explains a lot.]
We charge that they have alienated friends and allies all over the Islamic and Western world through their arrogance, hubris, and bellicosity.
[Oh, glorious day, for I have now seen it all. The arrogant, bellicose former Nixon operative Patrick J. Buchanan – a man whose afflated self-regard helped, along with the equal monstrous egotism of H. Ross Perot, to subject this country to eight years of Bill Clinton, in which the image of US weakness created the environment for Osama’s terror to strike and in which Clinton’s Bright Young Things managed to foment the North Korean nuclear crisis, is protesting ‘hubris.’ And – like everything else Buchanan writes, including ‘the’ and ‘and’ – it is a lie. We have few if any ‘friends and allies’ in the Arab, though not technically the larger Muslim, world. And the only Western ‘allies’ who claim to have been ‘alienated’ by the administration of a hymn-singing Methodist from Texas (that Stetson ain’t covering no yarmulke, Paddy) are France, Belgium, Germany, and Greece, all for the most transparent reasons of cupidity, cowardice, and covetousness. Frankly, when I look at the enemies we have acquired, I rejoice, for I would not have us be their friends: I glory in the halo of their hatred, for they are hateful themselves. Not unlike Paddy and his Provos, I would add, were I to adopt the Buchanan method; but I won’t.]
Cui Bono? For whose benefit these endless wars –
[Oh, I dunno, Bucky-boy. We seem to be ending this one, finally, after twelve years of a collapsed cease-fire. The 3d INF DIVN is acting positively Pattonesque.]
– in a region that holds nothing vital to America save oil, which the Arabs must sell us to survive?
[Tell you what, pal, howsabout we leave the strategic analysis and the military history to me – or to anyone who can read a map? Edirne, once Adrianopolis, outside Istanbul, is the most fought-over ground on earth in the long history of warfare, not because it has oil or any resources (it doesn’t), but because it is in a strategic position vis-à-vis the approaches to Constantinople, which in turn is the hinge that joins Europe and Asia Minor. Similar considerations, even aside from state support of terror, apply in the ‘region that holds nothing vital to America,’ and if you haven’t the wit to see that, you’ve no business in, pardon the term, pontificating on this subject. And just what do you thing these regimes are buying with those petrodollars anyway? Arum lilies? Or anthrax?]
Who would benefit from a war of civilizations between the West and Islam?
[Well, it ain’t the Jews, Patrick, that we do know. The last place they’d imaginably want to be is between the upper and nether millstones. Of course, the whole rhetorical question is founded on false premisses anyway.]
Answer: one nation, one leader, one party. Israel, Sharon, Likud.

Well. That certainly has a ring to it. The ring of Hitler ranting into one of Goebbels’s microphones, right down to the ‘Ein Volk! Ein Reich! Ein Fuhrer!’

Item: Scott McConnell, another Kleagle, in the 24 FEB 03 issue, in a piece of drivel entitled ‘The Madness of Empire’:
If America invades Iraq, the bottom will fall out of this argument. The first consequence would probably be [a] sharp drop in international co-operation against terrorism, especially terrorism directed against the United States. After that, we can contemplate new alliances: Russia and China, Europe and the (unoccupied) Middle East, an international system in rapid flux but increasingly focused on restraining American power. Of course, the United States will always have Israel as its friend.

Wink, nudge.

What it comes to is this. The final descent into gibbering on the part of Pat Buchanan is unfortunate, though he never attained such greatness as to make it tragic, but it is not unexpected. What is tragic and unexpected is that he is taking others with him.

For example, there was the 2 DEC 2002 issue of the Volkischer Beob- – I’m sorry, I mean The American Conservative – that had a fawning cover profile of that ‘Left-Conservative’ (I am not making this up, folks), Norman Mailer. No, seriously. If I told you there was a magazine that alleges it holds a place on the Right, and that it printed a gushing (as in Barbara-Walters-Talks-With-Barbra-Streisand***) interview in which Mailer let drop such pearls of wisdom as,
Americans need mythos, certainly, in the literary world. Nationally, we have Abraham Lincoln and George Washington and FDR and Camelot, and in some quarters I fear there is Ronald Reagan… (emphasis added)
and
I, too, am not for going to war, so we certainly meet there.
[At Hecate’s crossroads, evidently.]
What I thought from the beginning is that there is a most peculiar subtext under the Bush administration’s approach on what has to be done with Iraq….
and
Incidentally, the political seat from which I speak is as a Left-Conservative. ***I have to redefine the term for myself every day because on its face, we have an oxymoron. But, it does have meaning for me.
[There’s a shock. ‘Nonsense, be thou my sense,’ as Satan says in Milton’s Paradise Lost.]
But lately, there are two profoundly different kinds of conservatives emerging, as different in their way as the communists and the socialists were before and after 1917, yes, two types of conservatives in America now. What I call ‘value conservatives’ because they believe in what most people think of as the standard conservative values – family, home, faith, hard work, duty, allegiance – dependable human virtues.
[For none of which virtues, I note, is Mailer particularly celebrated.]
And then there are what I call ‘flag conservatives,’ of whom obviously the present administration would be the perfect example.
I don’t think flag conservatives give a real damn about conservative values. They use the words. They certainly use the flag. They love words like ‘evil.’ One of Bush’s worst faults in rhetoric (to dip into that cornucopia) is to use the word ‘evil’ as if it were a button he can touch to increase his power. When people are sick and have an IV tube put in them to feed a narcotic painkiller on demand, a few keep pressing that button. Bush uses evil as his hot button for the American public. Any man who can employ that word 15 times in five minutes is not a conservative. Not a value conservative.
[Aren’t such categories as ‘good’ and ‘evil’ moral categories – i.e., ‘values’ issues? (Wait, I’m asking Norman Mailer to be logical?!? Have I gone mad?!?)]
A flag conservative is another matter. They rely on manipulation. What they want is power….

– if I told you that appeared in a ‘conservative’ magazine, no sane person would believe me. But then, no sane person reads Patrick J.’s sordid little rag, save as it may be in the course of duty.

I have also stated that PJB and his gauleiters give hope to the enemies of this country. They do, not least by seeking common cause – and making common cause – with the anti-American ‘anti-war’ Left. There may be times when a true patriot must enter into alliances of convenience with truly base people, as when the US and the British Empire joined hands with Stalin in the Second World War; but Buchanan’s and his magazine’s alliances with the America-haters of the Left resemble nothing so much as the Ribbentrop-Molotov Non-Aggression Pact.

Similarly, it is unjust to say that Buchanan and The American Conservative are the heirs of the ‘America First’ isolationists of the Thirties – unjust, that is, to the America-Firsters. They are the heirs and assigns of George Lincoln Rockwell and his Bundist brethren: American Nazis. Nothing more.

And by encouraging the Saddams and the Kim Jong-Ils of the world to think that there are rifts within the determination of this nation to maintain her interests and the security of her citizens, they not only disserve the country, they provoke resistance and aggression. In a very real sense, Patrick Buchanan will have some portion of the blood of our casualties in Iraq on his grubby paws.

In the forthcoming issue of National Review, David Frum shreds Patrick, ‘TAC,’ and the ‘paleos’ pretty much unanswerably. But I write to make another point. Frum essentially gives the neocon’s answer to Buchanan and the Brownshirts (which is not to say, as Paddy’s Provos falsely say, that NR ‘is a neocon magazine these days’). For me, the issue is deeper. Patrick J. likes to masthead a typically self-indulgent whine (his macho posturing would be funny if he weren’t so vicious a contemptible little man, and so dangerous: no one is a bigger cry-baby than Pat Buchanan), to the effect that ‘[t]he conservative movement has been hijacked….’

Yes, it has, and Pat Buchanan is the Mohammed Atta of that hijacking. Bucky identifies the ‘neocons’ as pallid, bookish, scheming, nancy-boy Jews:

Who are the neoconservatives? The first generation were ex-liberals, socialists, and Trotskyites, boat-people from the McGovern revolution who rafted over to the GOP at the end of conservatism’s long march to power with Ronald Reagan in 1980. *** A neoconservative, wrote Kevin Phillips back then, is more likely to be a magazine editor than a bricklayer.
[Now, if I wanted to descend to Patrick’s level, I’d make a hod-carrier joke. But I won’t. His sort would. That’s the difference.]
Today, he or she is more likely to be a resident scholar at a public policy institute such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) or one of its clones like the Center for Security Policy or the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). As one wag writes, a neocon is more familiar with the inside of a think tank than an Abrams tank.
[Don’t look at me: I was straight leg infantry. Let’s see … did Paddy serve?]
***Almost none came out of the business world or military, and few if any came out of the Goldwater campaign.

Now, there is some minor taxonomic difference between neocons and, well, me. To the extent there is such a thing as a neocon anymore: twenty years is more than long enough for people who had the sense to repent of prior, non-conservative views, to have been integrated into the conservative ranks.

But let’s think about things here. In a sense far more meaningful than that in which Bucko abuses the term, I am a paleo-conservative. I have, that is to say, been an active conservative all my life (I was a Nixon Democrat at the age of six, rather to the discomfort of my Yellow-Dog Southern Democrat grandmother, not that she could stomach Hubert Humphrey – and George McGovern thereafter – either). I am no racist, and am glad that slavery was abolished, obviously, but I am a Southerner who doesn’t believe in the Northern Treasury of Virtue, either. To the extent there are neocons, they tend to be urban, and Northeastern, and, yes, some are Jewish just as others are Christian by faith or Gentile by heritage; I am a Southerner, of course. They all of them have a certain fondness for Hamilton and a reverence for Lincoln; my heroes are Jefferson and Lee and the Mighty Stonewall. As an historian, I don’t believe in easy pigeonholing on either side of the Late Unpleasantness, and am occasionally irked by the ‘neocon’ assumption, if you care to call it that, that the North has always been right about everything: I am too aware that Lord Dunmore would be ‘the Great Emancipator’ had the Revolution gone Britain’s way (he was the Royal Governor of Virginia, and used emancipation promises for tactical reasons during the Revolution just as Butler and later Lincoln did in The War), and that any criticism of the Confederate ‘rebellion’ is just as applicable to the American Revolution or Texas’s war of independence against that other poseur-emancipator, Santa Ana. I – but it is folly to go on with my credentials.

The point, simply, is that the ‘neocons’ can, in essence, tell Pat Buchanan that his movement and his magazine are repugnant to them and to what they understood conservatism to represent when they became conservatives. I can tell him and all of you that I am what Bucky pretends to be, a conservative out of the old rock, in the historic tradition dating back to the Anti-Federalists, not a few of whom were my kinsmen. And as such, I say that ‘The American Conservative,’ its repugnant editor Patrick J. Buchanan, its hack writers and its drooling fans, are neither American nor conservative, nor fit for the company and attention of respectable and decent people. The neocons can say that they are not part of Buchanan’s alleged ‘conservatism.’ As the most paleo of true conservatives, I can say, and do, that PJB and the dishonestly named The American Conservative are no part of us: no part of conservatism and no part of the American spirit and true patriotism.

The American Conservative is a poorly written magazine, its sham-Augustan rhetoric concealing intellectual dishonesty, paucity of thought, and the most base and virulent of bigotries on almost every page. And both in its intentions and in its effects, it is, to use a word Norman Mailer revealingly flinches from, evil. Evil, base, and contemptible. Avoid it as an ‘occasion of sin.’

______________________
* ‘Luring.’ As if any power on earth could hope to stand between a ‘celebrity’ and a TV camera. Riiiiiiiiiight.
** Hey! Pat! Question. Are the modern Greeks guilty for the death of Socrates? And what about the Italians – any blood guilt there? If I recall, Pontius Pilate was Roman….
*** Barbra is against the war? But … but … but she’s Jewish! Did she not get the memo – I mean, the Protocols? Quick! Call Paddy for guidance!