It can't be a good omen for Pat Buchanan. The man who will now carrythe pitchfork for his "America First" peasant populism is a Europeanaristocrat. Taki Theodoracopulos (or Taki, as he signs his byline),scion to a Greek shipping fortune, will fund and contribute essaysto Buchananism's new house organ, The American Conservative (TAC),a Washington-based biweekly set to launch this September. It is, tosay the least, an odd match. While Buchanan venerates the workingclass, Taki is an unabashed yacht-owning, nightclub-going socialsnob with homes in the Swiss Alps, London, and Manhattan's UpperEast Side. While Buchanan rails against the fraying of God-fearing,law-abiding, traditional American culture, Taki was convicted in1984 for smuggling cocaine. His most penetrating meditation onAmerican cultural decay was a 1982 essay in The American Spectatortitled, "Why American Women are Lousy Lovers."Still, this unlikely pair is bound by a common goal: to rescueAmerican conservatism from the false gods of internationalism,immigration, free trade, and Zionism. And Buchanan's disastrous2000 presidential run notwithstanding, as recently as one year agothere was reason to believe such a mission might elicit popularsupport. After all, in his quest to woo Hispanics, George W. Bushfloated a blanket amnesty for Mexican immigrants--an idea thatsparked a sharply negative reaction from the conservativegrassroots. He called fast- track trade authority a top priorityand declared himself "committed to pursuing open trade at everyopportunity," despite evidence that the American right was souringon free trade. He reneged on campaign promises to pull U.S. troopsfrom Bosnia and Kosovo. And against conservative orthodoxy, heembraced the spirit of multiculturalism, hardly lifting a finger toundo affirmative action and apparently practicing it himself,packing his Cabinet with minority appointments. In short, the mostcorporate president in recent history seemed the perfect foil forthe anti-corporate conservatism Buchanan had been preaching foryears.
And at first glance, September 11 seemed to add fuel to Buchanan'scritique. What better evidence for Fortress America than thespectacle of visa-finagling foreigners blowing up lower Manhattan?Buchanan wrote a quickie book, The Death of the West, about theswarthy menace; and across Europe his brand of nativism beganharvesting votes in record number. But over time it has become clearthat on this side of the Atlantic, 9/11 hasn't boosted theisolationist right; it has extinguished it. Instead of AmericaFirstism, September 11 has produced a war on terrorism that hasvirtually ended conservative qualms about expending blood andtreasure abroad. And as a corollary, it has produced anunprecedented eruption of conservative and evangelical support forIsrael. The conservative establishment has co-opted post-9/11 fearsof Muslim immigration, and Bush has covered his protectionist flankon trade. In short, Buchanan and his rich friends couldn't havechosen a worse time to start a journal of the isolationist right.
TAC thinks conservative support for the war on terrorism is hollow;indeed it plans to make the issue its raison d'etre. According toScott McConnell--a former editorial-page editor of the New YorkPost, an heir to the Avon cosmetics fortune, and TAC's thirdproprietor--"Garden-variety conservatives pretend that the movementspeaks with one voice on foreign policy. But foreign policyrepresents a significant fissure among conservatives. [TAC] willchallenge the orthodoxy." It would be more accurate to say it usedto represent a significant fissure among conservatives. Inlate-'90s debates over the Balkans, for instance, a growing numberof congressional Republicans broke from the internationalism of GOPelders like Bob Dole and George H.W. Bush and echoed Buchanan's1999 critique of America's "utopian crusades for global democracy."One year later Tom DeLay delivered a speech at a Washington thinktank decrying Clintonite foreign policy as "social work." And TrentLott took to CNN to accuse the president of neglecting diplomacy,urging him to "give peace a chance" in Kosovo. Even some normallyhawkish neoconservatives like Charles Krauthammer condemned theBalkan interventions as "a colossal waste-- and drain." A poll inlate 1999 taken by Mark Penn showed that 57 percent of Republicansconsidered the United States "too engaged in the world's problems."
Buchanan has continued that line of argument. Then, he argued theUnited States had no right to interfere in Balkan tribal feuds. Nowhe writes, "Where does Bush get the right to identify and punishevery [terrorist] aggressor? Who believes any president can liftthe `dark threat' of aggression and terror from all mankind?" Butno one on the right is listening anymore. A "CBS News" poll fromlast month shows that 94 percent of Republicans approve of thepresident's handling of the war. If anything, the conservativecritics of Bill Clinton's foreign policy--Krauthammer and DeLayamong them--are demanding that Bush intervene more aggressively toroot out global terrorism, starting with Yasir Arafat.
The Buchananite critique has fallen flat for three reasons. First,the Clinton administration justified its interventions ashumanitarian necessities. In the war on terror, by contrast, Bushhasn't needed to appeal to altruism. He has employed the rhetoricof national interest--fulfilling the Buchananite criteria forintervention. And, in the process, he reestablished the connectionbetween national security and the hawkish internationalism thatdefined conservatism during the cold war. Second, Bush haspreempted charges of Wilsonian internationalism by obsessivelyguarding against encroachments on national sovereignty--yanking theUnited States out of the Kyoto agreement on global warming, raisingobjections to the International Criminal Court, and ditching theanti-ballistic missiles treaty. Thirdly, the Buchananites have shotthemselves in the foot by blaming September 11 on America's"indiscriminate support for Israel" (McConnell's words in the NewYork Press last fall) and pining for the days "when America wasloved by Arabs" (Taki's words, also in the Press). TAC's supportershave the misfortune to be espousing anti-Zionism at the very momentthe conservative rank and file, driven by evangelicals, viewsIsrael as America's kindred spirit in the battle against terrorismand radical Islam. According to the most recent batch of polling,64 percent of Republicans say they actively sympathize withIsrael--as opposed to 38 percent of Democrats. And 83 percent ofRepublicans applaud Bush's aggressively pro-Ariel Sharon policy onthe Middle East.
The rest of the political landscape is equally inhospitable toBuchananism. Trade--an issue on which Beltway conservatives andgrassroots conservatives genuinely were out of step--has lost muchof its salience now that national security, not economics,dominates foreign policy debates. With Senate Democrats adding theDayton-Craig labor protections to trade promotion authority, Bushhas threatened to veto the legislation altogether, leaving theBuchananites nothing to shout about in the short term. And when theadministration has tinkered with trade policy, it has done so inBuchananite ways--raising tariffs on domestic steel, supporting afarm bill loaded with subsidies for U.S. agriculture, and generallyproving that Karl Rove is far too in touch with electoral realityto leave Bush vulnerable to protectionist attack.
Bush and the conservative mainstream have also masterfully preemptedthe anti-immigration backlash Buchanan would like to foment.Although Bush still talks about tolerance for Muslims and eventried to restore food-stamp benefits to legal aliens, he hasendorsed a major overhaul of the border patrol, tougher enforcementof student visas, and a fingerprinting system that amounts toracial profiling. Similarly, pro-immigration magazines like TheWeekly Standard and National Review have turned racial profilingand a tougher visa system into crusades, leaving Buchanan and hisallies little room to accuse the conservative establishment ofsacrificing American security for political correctness and cheaplabor. When McConnell told me that the American right considersimmigration a "verboten issue," he sounded as if he hadn't touchedthe stack of magazines by his bed for months.
The way the Buchananites see it, they're still battling theneocons--the largely Jewish group of former leftists who migratedright after the Vietnam War. But the neocons are no longer a wingof the conservative movement; they are the conservative movement.Supply-side economics, Israel, welfare reform, vouchers--all theold neocon pet causes have become enshrined in conservativeconventional wisdom. As Norman Podhoretz triumphantly declared inThe New York Times in 2000, "The time has come to drop the prefixand simply call ourselves conservatives." This presents a hugeproblem for the Buchananites: There's no constituency on theright--not evangelicals, not gun nuts, not libertarians-- who wantsto send the neocons back to City College or who even remembers theycame from there. It's a fact McConnell seems to acknowledge when helumps together National Review, FOX NEWS, and George W. Bush as the"neoconservative orthodoxy." There's barely anyone left on theright to embrace TAC.
There is, however, one group that shares the Buchananite docket ofsuspicions--of Wall Street, capitalism, Zionism, American power: theanti- globalization left. Indeed, Buchanan has fitfully wooed them.He marched in the streets at the 1999 Seattle protests of the WorldTrade Organization, and he has spoken at labor rallies against freetrade. During his 2000 presidential bid, he said he hoped to turnthe Reform Party into the "Peace Party." Some of his aidesde-camphave gone further, taking Buchananism to its logical left-wingconclusions. Justin Raimondo, an adviser to Buchanan's 1996 campaignand a historian of the old right, runs Antiwar.com. The site postsscreeds against American interventionism that complain about"empire" and "increased military spending." And by lifting thelanguage of the left, he has acquired an audience on the left: TheNation's Alexander Cockburn has published a column on the site, andSalon and alternative newsweeklies plug his work. For his part,Raimondo is unabashed about his ideological transformation. Lastmonth he wrote on his site, "The only voices of dissent are heard,today, on the Left. ... This is where all the vitality, therebelliousness, the willingness to challenge the rules andstrictures of an increasingly narrow and controlled nationaldiscourse has resided."
And Raimondo is not the only one trying his hand atfar-left/far-right synergy. On the University of California, SanDiego, campus, David Duke's supporters have distributed flyers on"Israeli genocide." Lefty Pacifica Radio broadcasts right-wingerswho rail against elites, including recordings of the lateconspiracy theorist Anthony Sutton. Thomas Fleming, the editor ofthe paleocon Chronicles, told me, "I agree with environmentalistson chain stores, fast food, and the Americanization of Europe. Idon't even bother calling myself a conservative anymore." Over thecourse of the '90s the anti- globalization critique that started onthe right with Buchanan's 1992 and 1996 presidential runs migratedleft. And 9/11, which has forever linked opposition toglobalization to opposition to the war on terrorism, was the finalstraw. The Buchananites may not want to admit it, but in thepost-9/11 era, as during the cold war, the prominent critiques ofAmerican internationalism will come from the left. TAC contributorSam Francis says he has already privately advised the new magazine"to forget about the social issues" that divide them from theiranti-globalization comrades on the left. Announcing the magazine ina New York Press column, Taki wrote: "Our motto for the magazine isthat we are traditional conservatives mugged by the neocons." He'dbe better off trying something different: closer to, say, "Workersof the world, unite!"
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