The Conservative Bully Boy
Frum, David
THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR VOL. 24, NO. 7 / JULY 1991 David Frum THE CONSERVATIVE BULLY BOY Pat Buchanan's critique of "neoconservatism," whatever he understands it to mean, rests on...
...It can't be fully joined until there's a little more candor about who's on which side and what the fight's about...
...Nicholas Lemann's new book The Promised Land quotes a March 1970 note of John Ehrlichman's, which records President Nixon saying of his then-speechwriter: "No good politics in PB's [Patrick Buchanan's] extreme view: segregation forever...
...And while Sad-dam Hussein—poison gas and all—was, according to the great isolationist, someone the world could live with, the Sandinistas in sleepy Nicaragua and the Marxist government of distant Angola were imminent threats to the security of the Free World...
...Could it possibly be that Ronald Reagan—himself pro-Israel, pro-globalism, pro-immigration, pro-civil rights, and, on top of everything else, pro-FDR—is a third...
...The man's opinions are carried by half a thousand newspapers and two networks, PBS and CNN...
...14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1991...
...If anything, a concern that the ethnocultural character of the United States is being changed in unwholesome ways is the quality that distinguishes the conservativism of Commentary and the Public Interest from the more economically minded conservatism that pervades the Washington think tanks...
...Another is to elect more Republicans to Congress, in the hope that a Republican-controlled legislature would be less spendthrift...
...A third is to effect institutional reforms—term limits, new parliamentary rules in Congress, a balanced budget amendment, a line-item veto that would impose discipline on Congress's spending...
...From whom...
...They are pro-foreign aid, especially for Israel...
...Buchanan darkly observed "the capture of the four big conservative foundations by neo-con staffers who are steering $30 million a year to front groups, magazines, scholars and policy institutions who toe their party line...
...They want to use America's wealth to promote "global democracy" abroad and impose "democratic values" in our public schools...
...Conservatives have suffered that lack of success not because they have entered into compromising affiances with "ex-Trotskyists" who complacently accept Big Government, but because they have failed to win control of Congress, the branch of government that actually decides how much of the taxpayers' money Washington will spend...
...Buchanan is being uncandid, first, because the litmus tests he has borrowed from Gottfried, Rothbard, and Chronicles to distinguish good, true conservatives from bad neoconservatives are not very useful...
...Is Richard Nixon—who considered Woodrow Wilson the greatest of twentieth-century Presidents—now a neoconservative...
...So in two May columns, Buchanan invited the pantywaists, bookworms, and wiseacres in the conservative movement to step outside...
...While they supported Reagan against Carter, their heroes are Woodrow Wilson and FDR, globalists and architects of the mammoth modern state...
...In the second column, Buchanan lamented that Reagan-era conservativism had ended in failure...
...Editor's note: The actual figure is about half that amount.] T he party line these mysteriously 1 powerful people enforce is subverting what Buchanan understands as true conservatism: Ex-Great Society liberals, almost all of them, they support the welfare state and Big Government...
...With grim satisfaction Buchanan concluded, "The new battle for the American right has been joined...
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...There are four possible remedies to this failure...
...Like the Lithuanian bubbies who haunt the stories of Philip Roth, embarrassing the young folks with Yiddish and garlic when they bring their gentile friends home, Patrick Buchanan is everything that couth conservatives want to escape...
...This is a question bigger than any one personality, however notorious...
...Normally, highly successful and well-paid journalists are the most immune to Kookery...
...Twenty years later, Martin Luther King's name still makes Buchanan twitch...
...7 / JULY 1991 David Frum THE CONSERVATIVE BULLY BOY Pat Buchanan's critique of "neoconservatism," whatever he understands it to mean, rests on bitterness, inconsistency, and a kooky obsession with ethnicity and culture...
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...His real message is inseparable from his sly Jew-baiting and his not-so-sly queer-bashing, from his old record as a segregationist and his current maunderings about immigrants and the Japanese...
...Buchanan chooses his targets in, shall we say, a remarkably prudent way...
...One is to embrace the Big Government conservatism that Buchanan execrates...
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...Some journalists, though, get to know it better than others...
...Not Buchanan...
...He blamed this dismal situation not on a free-spending Congress, nor on a namby-pamby President, but on the true right's fatal dalliance with neoconservatism...
...Indifference to the question of who rules 40 percent of the world's known oil reserves is, in Buchanan's mind, chest-thumping nationalism, but indifference to the question of who rules downtown Vilnius is appeasement of a brutal dictatorship...
...They ought to be reproved...
...and the hell with the future...
...The legend is false...
...It is a question whose answer will tell a lot about whether conservatism after Reagan is to be a real alternative to the political status quo, or merely a protest movement...
...Buchanan's warnings against forgetting that American conservatism is, first and foremost, about limited government should be heeded by all of them...
...Though most neo-cons were opposed to America's war in Vietnam, they were wildly pro-war against Iraq—even in August...
...One of the greatest intrusions of state power into private life during the Reagan and Bush years—the war on drugs and the concomitant enlargement of federal powers to seize assets and scrutinize financial transactions—has escaped his censure...
...How much mutual cooperation can be expected from the various conservative factions...
...And it's not a message that can be accommodated in any conservatism—Big Government or Small—that seriously hopes to govern a great and diverse country...
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...skillful...
...Of late, though, Buchanan's outbursts have been directed at an unusual target: conservatives whose conservatism differs from his own...
...His faith in free enterprise peters out at the water's edge...
...in fact, it's exactly the kind of message that William F. Buckley thought he had purged from American conservatism back in the 1950s and early 1960s, when he chased Gerald L. K. Smith and the John Birchers away from National Review...
...As Germany and Japan capture markets once held by the United States, the predators slash R&D to paint up the profit-and-loss statement for the lenders...
...The first column cited at length a book chapter by Paul Gottfried of ElizDavid Frum is an assistant features editor at the Wall Street Journal...
...Many foreign-policy conservatives—both political figures like Jeane Kirkpatrick and Max Kampelman and commentators like Abe Rosenthal and Charles Krauthammer—seem willing, or even eager, to live with a meddlesome state at home as the price of an activist government abroad...
...He earns an income that's rumored to exceed half a million a year...
...They weigh the charges of conspiracy a little more thoughtfully...
...as the most visible conservative in the country...
...Many liberals," Buchanan wrote in November, "now insist that King's conservative critics bend the knee, pay homage, honor him with a holiday, or be dismissed as bigots...
...He earns an income that's rumored to exceed half a million a year...
...What his conservatism seeks is to keep its followers constantly on the boil—to keep their checks coming to his newsletter and their eyeballs glued to "Crossfire...
...But they do have to agree on what should be done tomorrow morning...
...Yet they're available to you at 50-80% less than their original published prices...
...Quite the reverse...
...Iisbeen opened, at least...
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...How adventurous a foreign policy is compatible with limited government...
...He has replaced George Will and William F Buckley, Jr...
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...A foreign policy that looks out for America First should be married to an economic policy that considers first the well-being of our own workers...
...They write back a little more promptly...
...But coalition-building requires a certain etiquette...
...If only he remembered to heed them himself...
...The magazine you are holding in your hand, according to Gottfried, gets a princely $450,000 a year from these foundations...
...Buchanan's taste for limited government and free markets is as inconsistent as any ex=frotskyist's...
...But just as it's the little guy in glasses, not the ugly hulk in the corner, that the barroom bully prefers to pick on, so Buchanan nods politely to conservatism's 800-pound gorillas as he sidles daintily around them to knock poor old Norman Podhoretz's hat onto the floor and ask him whether he cares to make something out of it...
...Almost clairvoyantly, they detect the gnawing resentments, the hidden status anxiety, the carefully concealed sense of unrewarded merit that renders journalists susceptible to the Call of the Kooky...
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...And Buchanan is doing exactly the right thing to achieve that goal: blowing wind...
...Buchanan's pals at Rockford, for instance, never tire of repeating the legend that their quarrel with people they label "neoconservatives" erupted when Irving Kristol, whom they consider the Gavrilo Princip of the conflict, persuaded President-elect Reagan not to nominate the historian M. E. Bradford to the chairmanship of the National Endowment for the Humanities...
...In April 1990, he complained: What have the vulture capitalists of the leveraged buyout left us but an endless pile of clippings from Women's Wear Daily of their grinning selves and painted women...
...There are conservatives who recklessly set no limits on the scope for American activity overseas, who can't pronounce the word "interest" without prefacing it with the word "vital...
...They favor higher immigration quotas...
...But there does come a point—it's not always precisely indicated, but most of us know where it is—where ethnocultural conservatism shades into Kook-land...
...The postwar Old Right came together to roll back the New Deal, to dismantle the welfare-warfare state of FDR...
...Ecological crisis causes aggression in white mice, and, as any cancer researcher can tell you, Man is just a big, hairless white mouse...
...But if the efficient allocation of resources means America's unskilled go jobless, while Mexico's unskilled get work, why not come down on the side of American workers...
...There is in fact nothing particularly "neoconservative" about the pro-inter12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1991 nationalism, pro-immigration, pro-democracy ideological position Buchanan has set himself against...
...And still he's an easy mark for every Holocaust-denial nut in the country...
...Visa 1 1 1 1 1 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1991 13 excessive preoccupation with budgetcutting...
...they have established a cozy relationship with the leftist establishment media who recognize them for what they are, well-groomed lap dogs who bark brit never bite...
...It's expecting rather a lot to ask a newly elected President to wreck his political honeymoon in order to refight the Civil War.' T he willingness of the sort of 1 conservatives who congregate at Chronicles and around Patrick Buchanan to take offense at such insubstantial slights can best be explained ecologically...
...But the more you want bubbie to go away, the more determinedly she hangs around...
...In Congress, Newt Gingrich and Jesse Helms throw money at their favored constituencies with nearly as much abandon as their opponents across the floor...
...Small Government, though, is hardly Buchanan's real message, as the inconsistency of his writing about it shows...
...Before true conservatives can ever take back the country," he snarled in the first of the columns, "they are first going to have to take back their movement...
...The job was given to Kristol's friend William Bennett instead...
...Good for Arizona for rejecting this hypocrisy...
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...Since the early 1980s, the environment has grown harsher for conservatives: their numbers are booming, their feeding range is shrinking, and their predators are growing steadily more 'Gottfried repeats even more often the weird allegation that he himself lost a tenured appointment at Catholic University of America because a very junior faculty member named Jerry Z. Muller told the university authorities that Gottfried was "anti-Zionist" —at the behest, Gottfried believes, of Norman Podhoretz...
...By his own admission, Edwin Feulner of Heritage (who never in his life had a good word to say for the Great Society) was much more instrumental than Kristol in kiboshing the Bradford appointment—and for the very good reason that Bradford, although a fine mind and a graceful writer, had published essays that could reasonably be understood by an unfriendly reader to liken Abraham Lincoln to Hitler...
...Rockwell—in the pages of Ludwig von Mises...
...Is Jack Kemppro-Israel, pro-globalism, pro-immigration, pro-civil rights—another...
...You'll find it espoused at the Heritage Foundation and on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, in the University of Chicago faculty lounge and—yes, Mr...
...Turn on the TV and there he is again, sputtering and going red in the face about the threat of colored immigration...
...And what is this anti-neoconservative position that Buchanan is summoning his admirers to...
...Who wouldn't be "viscerally hostile" to a capital A, capital F "America First" policy—a policy that as late as the dangerous summer and fall of 1941 denied that a Nazi-dominated Europe from Moscow to Madrid was anything the United States ought to be bothered by...
...Buchanan endorses the withering opinion of these conservatives held by Tom Fleming, editor of the Rockford Institutes Chronicles magazine: "They have a lock on all money and the institutions created by the right...
...Nor is Buchanan a consistent smallgovernment man on non-economic topics...
...Despite his vast material success, it seems, Buchanan is a man with a festering grievance: smart people, on the right as much as on the left, don't respect him...
...It is indeed true, as Buchanan says, that quite a number of influential and visible conservatives have shown a dismaying willingness to throw in the towel on the Big Government issue: Fred Barnes in the April 1990 issue of this magazine identified John Sununu, William Bennett, Jack Kemp, and Dan Quayle as the administration's leading Big Government conservatives...
...Undoubtedly...
...Buchanan is uncandid, second, because so many of the anti-neoconservative grievances he airs are pure flimflam...
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...abethtown College, which appeared in the March issue of a newsletter edited by Murray Rothbard and Llewellyn Rockwell of the Ludwig von Mises Institute...
...The members of an electoral coalition do not have to like each other...
...They certainly do not need to be of one mind on fundamental philosophical principles...
...Like the blast-furnace left, he's suspicious of economic activity he finds hard to understand...
...As Greg Jarrell of the University of Rochester and Steve Kaplan of the University of Chicago have amply documented, the "vulture capitalists" have left us, along with the usual human quotient of mistakes and bad deals, a corporate economy that is considerably more efficient and profitable than it was ten years ago...
...T here is, however, one bone that Bu- 1 chanan has to pick with other conservatives that he never lays aside: his determination to preserve the present ethnocultural character of the U.S.—or, better yet, to return to the ethnocultural character that prevailed before the social revolutions of the 1960s...
...Why doesn't he pick on somebody his own size—say, the Heritage Foundation or the Wall Street Journal's editorial page...
...Now, the preservation of the existing ethnocultural character of the United States is not in itself an illegitimate goal...
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...But silly and self-interested as the people who articulate them may be, genuine internecine quarrels do exist in conservatism: How big a government should conservatives be prepared to live with...
...They are pro-civil rights and affirmative action, though anti-quota...
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...And, as readers of Buchanan's tough-guy memoir Right from the Beginning will recall, Buchanan knows only one thing to do with people who don't respect him: stomp them...
...But Buchanan, who argued for six months against President Bush's determination to use all possible means to eject Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, spent the first half of January denouncing the President's refusal to use all possible means to eject the Soviets from the Baltic republics...
...Shorn of Buchanan's more unhygienic rhetoric, and with the emphasis on culture rather than ethnicity, it's a goal that many conservatives share...
...And still he's an easy mark for every Holocaust-denial nut in the country...
...This exclusion will not disappoint Buchanan very much, since actually governing the country is about the last thing that his sort of conservatism has in mind...
...On May 18, he fretted: Does free trade make for the efficient allocation of resources...
...Many are viscerally hostile to the Old Right, and to any America First foreign policy...
...and some demand open borders...
...Today's new "conservatism," by whatever fancy name it is called, is devoted to Big Government, minority rights and globalism...
...So, while the questions of the appropriate size of government, the appropriate reach of U.S...
...Journalists like Irving Kristol in his occasional columns in the Wall Street Journal and Jude Wanniski in the editorials he wrote for the paper in the 1970s have warned Republicans against With this purchase get a FREE Barnes & Noble catalog...
...Open the local tabloid and there is Buchanan defending a Nazi war criminal...
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...When Soviet tanks entered Lithuania the week before the beginning of the air war against Iraq, Buchanan thundered, "Are we with them [the Lithuanians], or with Mikhail Gorbachev...
...He answered that question a week later in a second column: from the "neoconservatives . the ex-liberals, socialists, and Trotskyists who signed on in the name of anti-communism and now control our foundations and set the limits of permissible dissent...
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...What decent person is against "civil rights...
...W bile conservatives have been more or less in charge of the executive branch for more than a decade, they have not enjoyed much success in reducing the burden of government...
...Kook-land is a terrain that every journalist has seen...
...others don't...
...Our editors, armed with their M.A.'s and Ph.D.'s and a knowledge of our readers' background and interests, search the dusty nooks and crannies of the book world both here and in Europe...
...If the story is true, the only thing more astonishing than Podhoretz's sway over the Catholic Church is Catholic University's amazingly respectful treatment of its junior faculty...
...Sort through the mail and there's his newsletter, bringing you the straight dope on how Communism inspired the civil rights movement...
...They take a little more care reading the long, handwritten letters from paranoid readers...
...Conservatives today cheer a regime that spends a record 25 percent of the GNP, that is using our wealth to erect a Wilsonian New World Order, that has given us two wars, a tax increase and a dramatic increase in state power...
...If some conservatives continue to think that the highest priority remains what it was—a reduction in the burden of government—while others have come to feel that the present burden is perfectly tolerable, so long as the right people are in charge of it, then the conservative coalition is, as Buchanan says, dead...
...Some of these conservatives attach the "neo" prefix to their politics...
...Buchanan has trouble, too, in grasping Adam Smith's and David Ricardo's lesson that we prosper when foreigners do...
...And the inhabitants of Kook-land have a curious power to anticipate which journalists will be friendliest to them...
...Mind you, we've not stinted on quality in our reprints...
...foreign policy, and the appropriate rate of change in the ethnocultural character of the United States all matter, the question that matters most in the recurring Buchanan controversies is an easier one: How deeply into kookery can a man who claims to speak for conservatism go before other conservatives are obliged to repudiate him...
...Neither is a more modest foreign policy...
...Another of Buchanan's challenges to the mainstream of contemporary conservatism, his isolationism, might also have been a needed corrective—if only it didn't have the same now-you-see-it, now-you-don't quality as his opposition to Big Government...
Vol. 24 • July 1991 • No. 7
