Posted under Conservatism
Tom Piatak has started a good discussion thread over on the Chronicles website concerning some comments Jonah Goldberg made on The Corner concerning the revival of Buchananism and Sam Francis’ Middle American Radicals or MARs, complete with snide, smartass comment about Francis rotting in hell, which is typical of man who would be nothing if he wasn’t in the right place at the right time.
It’s been over 10 years since Pat Buchanan was in his moment of triumph after winning the New Hampshire primary. I see that Bay Buchanan is joining the Tancredo campaign. I hope she’s not counting on Buchanan Brigades re-forming to join Tancredo. Some will be with him I’m sure. Some will be with Paul or Duncan. Some are now with the CP, some scattered to the four winds and out of politics and some are no longer with us.
I’d like to hears some thoughts about Buchananism from those who were a part of his campaigns or supporters, I think that would be a good topic for an article on Etherzone.com. Looking back, it was a mish-mash of different ideas, not all cohesive but few movements are. It was a coalition of different conservative groups and even some libertarians but once Murray Rothbard died in 1996 the whole thing began to fall apart and by 2000 what had happened in New Hampshire died on Election Day when Buchanan got snared in the Florida re-count mess.
Please chime in with some reflections……
St. Louis CofCC Blogmeister on 28 Mar 2007 at 8:35 pm #
1. I personally was part of the effort that helped Buchanan win the Missouri caucuses in 1996, they were held well after Dole had it locked up.
2. I’m personally for Duncan Hunter. Ideologically, I’m more for Ron Paul, but Paul, the ideologue that he is, is unelectable. Duncan Hunter can be taken seriously.
3. Tancredo just doomed his candidacy by bringing in Bay Buchanan. She screwed up Pat’s three campaigns, especially 1996 and 2000. ’96 was the year when Pat tried to expunge “racists” from his campaign, and 2000 was the Ezola Foster dunderhead year. I’m sure both of those were Bay’s grand ideas.
St. Louis CofCC Blogmeister on 28 Mar 2007 at 8:51 pm #
Two more things:
(1) As much as I revered Sam, and elevated him to almost godlike status in my mind, I have some choice, personal, private words for Mr. Goldberg there. Use your own imagination.
Just to show you what kind of a flake Goldberg is, he had a column in NR back in November where he (rightly) came out against diversity and affirmative action, but then said that the reason he did is that the people who are affected by AA negatively are Jews, Indian-Americans, Asian-Americans and Chinese-Americans. I think he forgot somebody, and the somebody he forgot is a big field.
Speaking of Indian-Americans, D’nesh D’Souza, whom NR just loves so much, wrote in one of his recent books, (“The End of Racism”), that he thought that in 1500 AD, western African kingdoms were qualitatively superior to western Europe. That should tell you everything you need to know about the Goldberg/D’souza/NR mentality. If they think Sam is “rotting in hell,” then I’ll be happy to “rot” with him.
(2) I don’t think Murray Rothbard’s passing had anything to do with the fall of Buchananism, as much as it would pain Lew Rockwell to hear that. First off, Buchanan himself was not a Misesista, and even though Rothbard, Rockwell and many Misesistas were for Buchanan, his own economic proposals reflected his own Ropkeist ideology. Second, virtually everyone outside of the professional right wing couldn’t have told you who Dr. Rothbard was to save their lives.
I think Buchanan in 2000 was a victim of Bay, Ezola Foster, and the fact that conservative voters, with Clinton-Gore fatigue, found Bush to be acceptable.
Bede on 28 Mar 2007 at 10:21 pm #
I knew of Buchaninism way before I had even heard of a “paleoconservative,†and I always knew Buchanan was right. I voted in the primary for Buchanan in 1996, and have always been a fan. I think that Buchanan is right on almost every issue. Right on immigration, the war, trade, affirmative action, education, etc. He is a true conservative and patriot.
By far, Buchanan is one of the most intelligent statesmen of our age, and it is a great loss for our country that he will never be president.
I think that we could get coalition again around the core ideas of paleoconservatism, which Buchanan embodied, but it may take some years. Both Ron Paul and Tancredo overlap with Buchanan in some respects, but neither is perfect fit.
I’ll write more on this later.
Bede on 28 Mar 2007 at 10:28 pm #
Mind you, Goldberg is an idiot. This is the same who did not know what the Austro-Hungarian Empire was.
St. Louis CofCC Blogmeister on 28 Mar 2007 at 10:35 pm #
But I don’t think the “paleoconservative” label fits Buchanan nor did it fit Sam very well. I prefer “comprehensively populist and nationalist,” more racially so in Sam’s (and my) case.
Filmer on 29 Mar 2007 at 2:31 am #
Blogmeister,
I think where paleos and the “racially” conscious nationalists end up butting heads is on the issue of nationalism. Paleos are patriots, but they are not nationalists. They are regionalist and decentralist. I think Sam, who bridged the gap better than anyone, was philosophically a paleo, but didn’t think it was a viable political strategy. He saw the nationalistic, populist, MAR, issues as something you could potentially make a movement around.
Bede on 29 Mar 2007 at 2:42 am #
Here’s my two cents on the libertarian element….
In the modern world, conservatism too often has come to mean defending last year’s revolution. This is just reactionary, without any real vision. I like the word ‘paleoconservative’ in the older sense of ‘conservative’ in that one is trying to conserve / preserve one’s people, ancestral traditions, and progeny. Now this is real traditionalism.
The problem with libertarianism is that it wants to preserve nothing. It often results in a type of economic reductionism, not philosophically unlike Marxism. At its ugliest, it is an apologetic for big business, globalism, and rife consumerism.
Buchanan said it best: “To me, the country comes before the economy; and the economy exists for the people. I believe in free markets, but I do not worship them. In the proper hierarchy of things, it is the market that must be harnessed to work for man – and not the other way around.”
I am not optimistic about the long-term prospects of libertarian / conservative fusionism. I think the two philosophies are too different.
Libertarians worship of the free market, and by extension big business, and hatred of any form of state seems to be to be a form of utopian ideology. Thomas Fleming said it best: “[Libertarians] hate not just war but the military itself. They reject not only imperialism but also patriotism; they are not merely opposed to nationalism but reject the concept of the nation.”
Russell Kirk saw the deeply ingrained differences between conservatism and libertarianism, and was not optimistic. He was not a fan of the 1980s fusionism, which really just turned out to be a form of big-business worship.
Personally, if I had to choose between
(1) a socially conservative, closed-borders socialist state
or
(2) a socially liberal, open-borders libertarian state
it would be a no brainer. I would choose 1. Freedom for the sake of freedom is naive. If you do not preserve your tribe, ancestral traditions and progeny, what is the point?
St. Louis CofCC Blogmeister on 29 Mar 2007 at 6:27 pm #
I have always wondered why some think a fusionist school is necessary. Think of populist/nationalist voters as the elephant, and ideologues like paleos and libertarians as the mosquito. An elephant does not need to merge with a mosquito.
Sam held to paleo beliefs, but as Bede above said re Buchanan, his paleoconservatism was not an end unto itself, but as a means to an end, the end being improving a particular people.
The paradox of “anti-racist patriotism” is that devoid of any attachment with any particular people, “patriotism” becomes being “patriotic” only about creeds, ideas and principles, hearkening to the “credal nation” Lincolnian BS. As Sam said, the Soviet Union was a credal nation, and those that dissented from the creed were persecuted, and I suppose if modern day paleocon anti-racist Patriots won power, their treatment of leftist dissenters would be only slightly better.
Patroon on 30 Mar 2007 at 3:29 pm #
Thanks one and all for your replies, they certainly were thought-provoking.
There’s no question the essence of Buchananism and his “nationalist” faction of conservatism (as it such labebled back in the 1990s) was about preservation of national identity, culture, customs and industry in what was becoming a globalized world from an intellecutal standpoint while calling for a traditional U.S neutrality in a post-Cold War world. Politcally, its biggest appeal was to those “Reagan Democrats,” culturally conservative but economically liberal white ethnics and blue collar workers. That’s because that’s what Buchanan was too, an Irish Catholic ethnic from an eastern seaboard city, Jesuit education and Catholic authoritarian. As George Will once remarked about Buchanan, which I truly believe, “I don’t think Buchanan likes Republicans very much.” No doubt Buchanan’s loyalities growing up were to the Catholic party, which was the Democrats but also to such anti-stalwart Catholic anti-communists like Joseph McCarthy.
Unfortunately, the bulk of the GOP would not tolerate a takeover of the party from Buchanan’s wing. As Norman Mailer once said to him “You can’t be the GOP nominee. They’re they corpratist party. They’ll never let you be their nominee” and that’s exactly what happened although he came closer than people wish to realize or admit. Had he beaten Dole in Iowa or had Dole finished third in New Hampshire, there was nothing that could stop Buchanan from winning the party’s nomination short an all-out fratricide within the GOP.
There were several things that did in Buchanan. The first the very Reagan Democrats began to disappear as their union jobs and manufacturing jobs began to disappear in the 1990s. The decline of the industrial unions hurt Buchanan because the dominant public section unions where never going to support Buchanan and were tied to the hip to the Democrats. And those industrial unions that did remain like the UAW or the United Steelworkers of United Miners Association or the Teamsters, never officially supported Buchanan even if certain members did because they were too afraid to kicked out of the establishment if they did so. Plus they never got over Pat’s ties to the anti-union GOP. In the end only one union, an indepednent steelworkers union in Weirton, West Virginia, supported Buchanan, largely because they were independent.
And while Pat certainly was paleo in much of his ideology, other parts of his thinking were not and he dangerously slid towards right-wing social democracy. If you asked Pat if he approved slashing government bureacracies he would say yes of course, but that was not a topic that animated him very much or even entered into his speeches and even Sam Francis had, by the early 1990s, had given up any hope of slashing the Federal leviathan and said that conservatives needed to forget about reducing government and focus on making government do its bidding. All of these contradictions were sadly and correctly pointed about by David Frum in his book Dead Right,like it or not, which inevitably sunk Buchanan. Burkian/Kirk conservatism was not something he thought about a lot.
Which was too bad because it could have cemented the paleo coalition around him. I thought having Rothbard and Raimondo in his corner broadened Pat’s electoral appeal, which is essence of politics. You can’t get elected from an enclave, you have to stack up different voting blocs that have some common interests. Goldwater would have never been nominated in 1964 if it wasn’t for fusionism because different conservative factions would have had their own candidates much like they do now. Rothbard kept the von Miesians in line but when he died in 1996, the gloves came off and soon Rockwell and Hans Herman von Hoppe were attacking Buchanan over his protectionism. The whole essence of the John Randolph Club was to having a paleo debating forum between conservatives and libertarians, but that was lost over some pretty nasty JRC debates in 1996 and in 1997 that saw the von Miesians go their own seperate ways. As Buchanan’s coaltion was unravelling, as the economy boomed in the late 1990s, Pat blissfully went back to work for CNN and failed to build a political movement away from the larger conservative establishment and the GOP and the momentum he had from his 1996 campaign evaporated. Just winning the Reform Party nomination in 2000 was an acomplishment for him, because he easily could have lost it. But, by that point, the Reform Party became a joke to most voters and basically turned into a political version of Somalia its nomination availed him nothing but the end of his political career.
I can understand why people are down on “fusionism” for obvious reasons. To me, it’s not a question of trying to meld unlike ideologies to be united against a hated foe, which is what the original fusionism was all about, its about building a broader political coalition and building a new kind of movement. That’s my great hope for the Ron Paul camapaign regardless what happens. The question for paleocons is what kind of libertarians can we work with? Certainly not the market uber alles types. Certainly not the Virginia Postrel “Gee, aint’ progress wunnderful?” types. Certainly not the Brink Lindsay, Eric Dondero warmonger types and certainly not the Reason magazine “Let’s legalize crystal meth!” types either. Yes it comes back to working with the von Miesians and Antiwar.com crowd because while there are differences between us all, they are not so great that we can’t work together to fight against neoconservatism, the federal leviathan and globalism.
Ron Paul hates NAFTA just as much as Buchanan does and Lew Rockwell.com is not filled with articles celebrating CAFTA or GATT, for these trade agreements are what Paul describes as “managed trade” designed to benefit big, multi-national corporations, not the average America. Von Miesians believe that they are upholding the free-trade tradition of the South before it became industrialized. If we believe that the War Between the States was as much about tariffs as it was about slavery or even more, then we must remember it was the South that was a believer in Adam Smith and free trade. Remember the Tariff of Abominations in 1831? John C Calhoun certainly does. If we claim to be Calhoun’s heirs, we can’t just whitewash this legacy because we happen to hate cheap Chinese imports filling the shelves of the local Wal-Mart. What Calhoun believed, and certainly we should support, was that state’s and regions and local communities should have the right to opt out of trade agreements, or form their own trading blocs to look out for their own economic interests or be able to opt out of national agreements or tariff system that don’t reflect the economics of their own respective locality. I’m certain Ron Paul would support that.
Decentralization isn’t just about reducing the size government, but the national market structure and soon to be global government and business structures that threaten distinct localities around the country. I think Paul realizes, as did Rothbard, that the twin swords of Democales that hang over the U.S are big government and big business. The union between them that began with the New Deal and opposed by old Democrats like Bryan and Cleveland and Progressives like LaFollette, destroyed the old Republic and is the cause of our misery today, whether its the military- industrial complex or government privitazation schemes which just draws the business community more and more into government’s web and creats lobbies for bigger government to satisfy their profit margins. It wasn’t coporate executive at GM and U.S. Steel that helped get the conservative movement off the ground in 1950s and 60s, it was small industrialists from the Midwest and Texas wildcat oilmen who hated government regulations that they couldn’t pay for and made them uncompetitive.
Buchananism had its day in the sun but now a now movement is needed to challenge the establishment.
Bede on 31 Mar 2007 at 5:52 pm #
Patroon, Filmer, and Others,
If you had to choose between
(1) a socially conservative, closed-borders socialist state
or
(2) a socially liberal, open-borders libertarian state
which would you choose?
Patroon on 02 Apr 2007 at 2:21 pm #
Bede that’s like a choice between cyanide and ricin.
If you put a gund to my head I would have to choose No. 1 but what does that say about our politics when these our the choices we have.
In a decentralized nation you can have as many choices as you want and live where you want.