BUCHANAN FODDER
NICHOLS, JOHN
Buchanan BY JOHN NICHOLS Dan Welsh's collar really is blue. A shipping dispatcher at an aging furniture factory in a decaying industrial town, Welsh still wears an old-fashioned blue work shirt....
...The Fortune 500 companies are trashing us...
...Another hero is Francisco Franco, the Spanish fascist who came to power with a boost from Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy...
...conservative hopeful...
...I don't think it's anything else...
...But populism has frequently mixed appeals for economic justice with xenophobia, racism, and other evils...
...It's a shocking indictment of the Democratic Party...
...Buchanan's campaign should serve as a wake-up call to American progressives, Dugger says...
...Ralph Nader agrees...
...It's the jobs issue...
...What propels Buchanan forward is an unexpectedly strong level of support from white workers—many of them union members—who have simply given up on waiting for redemption in the form of a Democratic President...
...the former Texas agriculture commissioner who has battled for years to reinvigorate the Democratic Party with a message of economic populism...
...or a xenophobe...
...And we have to get cracking.' stupid...
...Buchanan is so obsessed with the threat of communism thai he is still defending the witch hunts of the 1950s...
...as long as those people weren't Jews or Gypsies or radicals...
...Claimed American wages would grow...
...He's standing in a classroom at a Dubuque...
...He's seen too many fellow members of his United Steelworkers union local "downsized" and "outplaced" from the middle class into a grim existence on the margins of American society...
...Working people in this country aren't 'We need to advance a populism that is not rooted in haters and hobes and jingoists.' Dugger says...
...There's a base for it...
...But the primary filing deadlines have passed, and despite a loose-knit effort by Greens and left activists around the country to promote a Nader-for-President campaign...
...Buchanan's a smart man...
...he says...
...Perhaps, he says...
...They know they're under attack from multinational corporations...
...Where is his program for a public-works initiative that provides family-supporting jobs...
...We have to otter a populism rooted in the best parts of nineteenth-century American populism—particularly in its fundamental opposition to the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a narrow elite...
...There isn't going to be a challenge from the left to Clinton this year, either in the Democratic primaries or in November," he says...
...Finally they look over on the Republican side and they see a guy who's saying...
...Where is his program for co-ops...
...Kim Moody...
...This sense of economic insecurity represents a very deep and vibrating nerve in the body politic now...
...There are good populisms and bad populisms...
...But there's still an awful lot ot work we've got to do if we're going to lake it somewhere...
...Another Republican contender, talks show host Alan Keyes...
...Ronnie Dugger argues that Buchanan's economic populism is only skin deep "Where is his program for a steeply gradu ated progressive income tax...
...We have to start building from the bottom...
...Buchanan charged...
...Nothing's going to wake the Democrats The are authentically lossilized...
...I think the long-term benefit of the Buchanan campaign is thai he has gotten people talking about economics...
...And we're only now realizing that was a mistake...
...civil-rights issues...
...It's not difficult to make the case that Pat Buchanan is a fascist—his vision of an overarching state controlling everything from the economy to the womb owes more to Benito Mussolini than Thomas Jefferson, and Buchanan's bigotries appeal to fascists everywhere...
...So Buchanan has co-opted some of the left's message...
...Where is his program for helping workers buy their factories...
...The problem is that when working people look to the party that's supposed to represent them, they see this bullshit of Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council endorsing the North American Free Trade Agreement...
...A man who was excited by Jesse Jackson's talk of economic democracy in 1988, and by Tom Harkin's promise to fight for full employment in 1992...
...and his open hostility toward gay and lesbian Americans, and you've got the political equivalent of anthrax...
...director of Labor Notes, a Detroit-based publication that pulls together rank-and-file union activists nationally, sees evidence of just how far the Buchanan message has spread...
...It's a sentiment that runs far deeper than Washington pundits and political analysts care to consider...
...Where is he on OSHA'A Where is he on labor-law reform...
...Either our side gets m there with a message or the other side will...
...That's why Buchanan's rising...
...group seeking to forge a progressive populist movement in America...
...After a while, vou just get tired of waiting for a Democrat to come along and say something that matters about the economy...
...In the 19S0s...
...But at least he seems to be singing the right tune on the number one issue in the country...
...Everybody knows the Democrats are in bed with the corporations...
...You can hear it expressed by men and women wearing Pat in 'oh stickers on their union jackets, by long-haul drivers displaying Truckers tor Buchanan stickers, and by farmers hammering red-white-and-blue Buchanan for President signs to their fence posts...
...Hightovver says the prospects for a serious third-party drive appear slim...
...His name is Pat Buchanan and, I don't care what they say about him, at least he understands that people are hurting...
...But with the votes of anti-abortion fanatics, gun-toting social renegades, and anti-United Nations ranters alone, Buchanan would have gotten no further than did the lame 1988 candidacy of fundamentalist broadcaster Pat Robertson...
...Bob Kasen...
...And right now there's only one candidate for President who says we've got to put American workers first...
...Il took a Republican to prove to us what we instinctively knew—that working people in this country were just waiting for a candidate to raise these issues of economic justice...
...Iowa, high school, preparing to participate for the first time in a Republican Presidential caucus...
...The Nazis were originally populists...
...Senator Joseph McCarthy is one of his heroes...
...It hasn't...
...Where is he on...
...Buchanan seemed to be the only option available...
...When the hapless Bob Dole used a New Hampshire debate to offer the traditional Republican defense of the free market—a refrain now frequently echoed bv Bill Clinton—Buchanan responded-with glee...
...Said it would improve our trade balance...
...Kim Moody...
...But when white working-class voters in the first primary and caucus states went hunting for a hero this year...
...They haven't...
...and claimed that, "millions of black people have paid a terrible price for having let themselves be led to the Pleasure Island of the Welfare Stale-thai wholly owned and operated subsidiary of liberalism—that has destroyed the moral liber of America's black poor...
...national organizer for Labor Party Advocates, says Buchanan—for all his faults—may have made the task easier...
...But he also is complimentary of the New Party, and its strategy of starting locally...
...Buchanan objected to those who would "interfere with a man's right to he a practicing bigot...
...The lesson for progressives is that our work is cut out for us...
...The Democrats have given Buchanan a wide-open highway on this issue," he says...
...Moody says, they are hearing more economic populism from a conservative Republican than from the Democrats who are supposed to be the tribunes of the working class...
...Wages have fallen...
...These are the issues that reach everyone...
...So, for that matter, are thousands of other blue-collar workers in Iowa on this night when Buchanan will nearly upset GOP frontrunner Bob Dole...
...We've lost jobs...
...Thc\ are indentured to the corporate power structure...
...And he's raising the flag of economic populism in the Republican Party...
...It's scary, but the (ruth is that he's touched a nerve with precisely the people Democrats and progressives should be reaching on these issues...
...savs Kasen...
...The meatpacking plant is cutting back...
...We just had a toy factory west of town announce that they were shutting down and moving 300 jobs to Mexico...
...He's showing just how much rage there is at the corporate oligarchy...
...Sure Pat Buchanan sounds good on NAFTA, .sure he sounds good on the trade stuff, but he isn't the candidate of organized labor...
...he fought to prevent the Reagan Administration from deporting former Nazi collaborators who had been accused of committing atrocities during World War II...
...who attended the 19SX Democratic caucus in Dubuque as a backer of Mike Dukakis but this year registered as a Republican so she could support Buchanan...
...These are people who would respond to the left's analysis of the economy if there was a candidate offering that analysis...
...Why didn't you let those fellows test the magic of the marketplace like you want American-workers to do...
...Clinton...
...Tonight Welsh is fighting back...
...Buchanan has made something of a career delending anti-Semites, and he's only recently disavowed his past remarks questioning the extent of the Holocaust...
...Bui how can solid union people—even Jesse Jackson backers—vote for Pal Buchanan, the man who defended Franco's fascism, the man whose entire career has been characterized by charges of racism and anti-Semitism, the man who plotted dirty tricks with Richard Nixon, the man who held Ronald Reagan's hand at Bitburg...
...Bob, when Citibank, Chase Manhattan, and Goldman Sachs got into trouble you turned into a protectionist with" Bill...
...It didn't...
...says the consumer advocate, who remains cov about his own prospects as a possible Green Parly candidate...
...You get a response...
...In his 1990 autobiography Right From the Start...
...So they keep looking, and no other Democrat is running...
...He's even taken material straight from Nader...
...the man who proclaimed Ollie North a hero...
...On his central rhetorical message about NAFTA...
...One of Buchanan's television commercials promises to repeal NAFTA...
...American jobs need to be saved.' Now, the establishment may say that guy is a nut...
...What people who get excited about Buchanan fail to take into consideration is Buchanan's position on other issues argues Neil...
...We have to start at the school-board level, at the cilv-council level...
...The Democrats will not learn shit from this, frankly...
...Neil is the president of the po-litical arm of the Iowa United Auto Work ers, and he spent a good deal of time before the Iowa caucuses talking union members out of backing the...
...Millions of factory workers are scared out of their wits right now about layoffs...
...They said...
...No one should be shocked that working people are turning in desperation to Buchanan, says Jim Hightower...
...He isn't the candidate of working people...
...On today's political landscape...
...We're in a fight for our lives out here...
...a progressive challenge to Clinton could have resonated with American voters this vear...
...says Dugger, currently a fellow of the Shorenstein Center at Harvard s Kennedy School of Government...
...Another commercial promises that Buchanan will "make the United States again the mightiest manufacturing power on Earth...
...Buchanan's speeches are laced with condemnations of "corporate greed" and of "transnational corporations that don't care about America anymore...
...Along comes this rightwing guv with a heavy populist message, and people look up...
...Buchanan is, after all, the man Nixon once referred to as "the only extremist I've ever known who has a sense of humor...
...We re going to really lake care of our own people.' And they did...
...At night, he worries whether he'll wake up and have a job in the morning...
...GATT...
...Unless the left moves to retake the banner of economic populism, Buchanan and other conservative extremists will be allowed to shape America's political dialogue without challenge, many progressives fear...
...Buchanan's response: "I plead guilty to trying to protect the American worker...
...But that's not the Clinton Administration's program...
...What Buchanan's success means is that the process of the Democratic Party ceding this issue has reached a critical stage...
...And if that happen-., we don't jnsi lose the debate, we lose .America...
...It would be great if we could start at the top...
...And the candidate himself admitted during his 1992 campaign against George Bush that he has been described as "an anti-Semite, a homophone, a racist, a- sexist, a nativist, a protectionist, an isolationist, and a beer-hall conservative...
...We have educated Buchanan on NAFTA and these economic issues," Nader says...
...Buchanan responds that he will never "sacrifice on the altar of foreign policy the interests of American business and workers...
...The level of the rot is beyond imagination...
...jabbed at Buchanan and his backers for sounding like a bunch of socialists...
...They cross lines of race, class, sex...
...Labor Secretary ] Robert Reich runs around and talks about saving jobs...
...but that's not how it works...
...But there isn't...
...But how can progressives enter that court, grab hold of the economic message, cleanse it of Buchanan's bigotries, and use it to advance positive social change...
...is even blunter...
...And it won't come via the Democratic Party...
...he's recognized it, he's tapping it...
...There's a deep rage...
...Highlower thinks thai Buchanan's political surge is evidence not only of Democratic fossilizalion but also of the left's failure to assert itself...
...David Neil has heard those words from, Buchanan...
...Hightovver still thinks that progressives may be able to wrest control of the Democratic Party from the Clinloniles...
...It's people like Welsh who will go on to supply Buchanan with the margin of victory in New Hampshire and strong showings further down the primary road...
...or whatever...
...These are the universally significant issues...
...and protecting jobs, Buchanan is sounding the clarion call of economic populism," says Ronnie Dug-ger, the founder of the Texas Observer who now heads The Alliance, a national John Nichols, an editorial writer for The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin, covers electoral politics for The Progressive...
...savs Hightower...
...The issues of disciplining excessive corporate power over consumers and workers resonate," says Nader...
...says Evelyn Stieber...
...says Dugger...
...That sentiment is widespread...
...of Labor Notes...
...It won't be easy, says Nader...
...says Moody...
...Just like fascists have always done...
...When Republican critics condemn what sounds to them suspiciously like an industrial policy...
...Nader is not surprised that Buchanan's economic populism has caught on with voters...
...We gave Buchanan huge amounts of information that he began to absorb...
...Welsh is about to cast a ballot for Pat Buchanan...
...And we have to get cracking...
...Pat Buchanan's base still lies in the shadowy realm of the religious right and the militia fringe...
...NAFTA is wrong, GATT is wrong, multinational corporations are irresponsible...
...The tractor factory is laying people off...
...he argues...
...We need to advance a populism that is not rooted in haters and xenophobes and jingoists...
...The candidate stares intently into the camera and declares, "They promised it would create jobs...
...Add in Buchanan's uncompromising opposition to abortion, his anti-immigrant views...
...We have to get ourselves organized, and we have to get ourselves in a position so that we are prepared for Presidential races in the future...
...The problem is this: We're not offering that candidate...
...says Welsh...
...The rise of Buchanan leaves us little choice but to move faster—not merely for electoral reasons but to enter the court of public opinion...
...Beyond that, adds Dugger, Buchanan's fierce opposition to abortion, to gay rights, and to women's rights, as well as the anti-Semitic and racist flavor of his past comments make him the worst sort of populist...
...Moody has received e-mail messages from labor activists—including backers of forming an independent labor party—who now send him Pat Buchanan quotes...
Vol. 60 • April 1996 • No. 4
