Buchananism an Intellectual Cause

...The elder party has bought into the myth of Economic Man...

...Eliot and Allen Tate and critics John Crowe Ransom and Cleanth Brooks...

...When Buchanan declaims about the culture war, or about the role of women, or about America First, he is working in part from ideas developed in magazines like Chronicles and The Southern Partisan, whose masthead lists Buchanan as "senior advisor...

...Buchanan himself is not as rigorous as some of his friends, retaining personal loyalty to Reagan, but his presidential run is premised on the argument that the Gingrich revolution is a misconceived failure...

...Ultimately, what is most striking in paleoconservatism is its very rejection of the idea of a nation formed in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal...

...In The Politics of Human Nature, Fleming cites Aristotle, who wrote that men are naturally more savage, courageous, and masterful, while women are softer, more modest, and more impulsive...

...But they resent the impersonality of the global marketplace, in which mutual funds owned by God-knows-whom buy into and out of companies employing God-knows-whom, without any human contact between the (temporary) owners and the (temporary) workers and customers...

...Pat Buchanan has reiterated these views in several columns over the past 10 years, which have been used effectively by his political rivals, both in 1992 and this year...

...To Fleming, Abraham Lincoln was a racist and an incompetent president...

...From that point on, the history of true conservatism is a series of martyrdoms, with the pseudo-conservative interlopers oppressing the remnant defending the faith...

...One of the qualities Fleming says he admires in women is that they don't go in for abstractions...

...Herrnstein so painstakingly drew in The Bell Curve are disregarded...

...His campaign manager Terry Jeffrey spent four years writing editorials for the Washington Times...

...They are talking about the social pecking order in old-time towns-the folks who live on the hill, the merchants on Main Street, the village idiot on the green...

...The rural communities of the South, the paleocons argue, were consistent with the transcendental order...

...Paleocons do not believe the future will be better than the past...

...They do not shy away from expressing their true beliefs, and if they supported slavery they would probably say so...

...They liked right-wing culture, but had trouble stomaching the free-market economics that favored the Ruling Class...

...The new Republicans sense the struggle is broader and deeper...

...In his 1993 book Reclaiming the American Right, Raimondo plumbed the depths of Old Right history, reviving forgotten figures such as Garet Garrett and Rose Wilder Lane (Laura Ingalls Wilder's daughter, thought to have played a considerable role in the writing of the Little House books) and proclaiming them essential figures of true conservatism...

...The paleoconservatives don't subscribe to the universalist ideas of the Founding, the notion that anyone could become an American by adopting certain ideas...

...This is not to say that the paleocons long for a return to slavery...

...And given its connection to Buchanan, paleoconservatism now qualifies as the most important new iteration of conservatism since the advent of neoconservatism in the 1970s...

...Paleocons are not shy about drawing racial distinctions, describing the qualities that characterize the different races...

...But it also demonstrates how this movement's views are at war with conservatism as we have properly come to understand it in our day...

...But Buchanan is something new: "The core of his message consists of a rejection of the thinly masked economic determinism espoused by Kemp, Gramm and Gingrich and an affirmation of the primacy of cultural identity, national sovereignty and national interests over economic goals...

...They admired left-wing economics, but they couldn't tolerate left-wing cultural antinomianism...

...And along came National Review...

...Such social science schemes inevitably do harm, the paleocons argue, because they tend to undermine the ancient institutions that have evolved over time and are consistent with human nature...

...Thus, the Buchananites not only object to the leftist view that human nature is infinitely malleable...

...For the paleocons, the culture war is literally being fought to the death, with Wall Street and media elites trying to subjugate ordinary Americans...

...The literature behind Buchananism supports Buchanan's claim that he is leading a social and intellectual movement, not just an evanescent political campaign...

...The conservatism he describes was isolationist, traditionalist, rural, deeply ambivalent about capitalism, hostile to European ideas, and armed in holy war against the urban, modern elite-precursor indeed to the Buchananism of today...

...But it really isn't possible to turn back this particular clock, at least not in the way Buchanan proposes...

...The paleoconservatives draw their inspiration from the small rural communities of the Old South...

...Reagan's] optimistic view of human nature should warm the heart of liberal theologians...

...You reach the position where you're both stalemated, you get a truce line, and you accept the compromise, but then you use the truce line to begin the next advance, and you keep at it...

...Empires try to nationalize problems...

...In short, his radical individualism and egalitarianism represent much that southern conservatives have always loathed...

...Before true conservatives can ever take back the country, they are going to have to take back their movement," Buchanan has written...

...Perhaps one day their statues, like Lenin's in Russia, will be toppled and melted down...

...Instead, it has writers...

...Instead, the Civil War is an occasion for the romanticism crucial to his worldview...

...Today, on the other hand, men are put on trial for sexually assaulting their wives, even if the couple are Christians who must acknowledge and pay what St...

...Fleming argues that the acts of bearing and rearing children are each woman's primary duties: "The dilemma we face today is not how to make women more like men, but how to let women be fully women...

...their insignias and battle flags will be desecrated, and their war songs tossed into the fire...

...He struggles to restore the code of valor and glory that was exemplified on those battlefields, and which has come under assault by the forces of industrialization and the cultural Left...

...republics sharply limit national powers and respect regional independence...

...The newsweeklies treated the trip as a cynical play for southern votes...

...This is true radicalism, and Buchanan and his friends are aware of it...

...It believes economics drives the world, politics is about economics, and money drives politics...

...Joseph Sobran, Samuel Francis, and Buchanan himself have been hounded by a National Review/neocon alliance on charges of racism and anti-Semitism...

...The communities themselves were tight and hierarchical, exhibiting the qualities that strengthen families...

...Buchanan the romantic does not...

...That opened the way for further incursions from the left over the decades: neocons, Opportunity Society types, supply-siders, Jack Kemp and his ilk...

...For Buchanan is at war not only with liberalism but with fundamental social changes of the last 100 years...

...and his devotion to the free market and to finance capitalism could hardly be stronger...

...The late Murray Rothbard once wrote, "We must always remember, we must Never Forget, we must put in the dock and hang higher than Haman, these who in modern times opened the Pandora's Box of genocide and extermination of civilians: Sherman, Grant and Lincoln...

...It captures the centrality of culture in the politics of Buchananism...

...The Buchananites aren't mainly nostalgic for the magnolia-and-moonbeam South of upper class Tara...

...Simpson might have been executed for marrying a woman of another race, but-setting the question of race aside- he probably would have been acquitted (if he had ever been brought to trial in the first place) for killing an adulteress...

...They also deny that it is possible to devise policies and environments that can alter and improve human institutions and patterns of behavior...

...But the paleocons are far from being middle class Know-Nothings with philistine literary and artistic tastes...

...There you have it, the quintessentially Buchananite mixture of high principle and bad-boy bravado...

...He believes in concepts like progress, equality, and science...

...Many paleocons consider themselves secessionists...

...the principle of one man, one vote and the American tradition of self-government...

...But then we head for the gift shop and return to more comfortable but less heroic lives...

...The empire throws its weight around in the world...

...The paleocons cherish the local marketplace, where face-to-face trading encourages sociability and friendship...

...Buchanan's votes may come from people who are simply interested in ending abortion, or who like the idea of tariffs, but Buchananism itself is a quest for total cultural regeneration...

...Novelist and essayist Walker Percy was a contributor to Chronicles...

...Buckley and his crowd displaced the Old Right in a series of ruthless purges," Raimondo writes...

...Bradford's career was derailed by the neoconservatives, who helped spike his 1981 nomination as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities and put William Bennett in his place...

...His staffer Justin Raimondo wrote a definitive history of the Old Right...

...They merely believe in the social hierarchies...

...He writes often about the conflict between anti-white and white forces...

...Their historical honor roll includes William Jennings Bryan, to whom Buchanan was recently likened in USA Today by Thomas Fleming, who founded Southern Partisan and now edits Chronicles...

...He uses his campaign catch-phrase, "conservatives of the heart," to describe the mission-a romantic conservatism, a conservatism of human bonds...

...the Confederacy and the War of Northern Aggression (as Buchanan sometimes calls it) are constant motifs in Buchananite speeches and in the writings of the movement he now represents...

...It is futile to try to separate the good in paleoconservatism-the longing for the old virtues-from the bad-the view of race and sex roles...

...They celebrate modernist poets TS...

...Global capitalism, they argue, also violates nature...

...In the pages of Chronicles, the Heritage Foundation and the New York Times are lumped together as partners in the "Vile Center...

...The Buchanan campaign doesn't have a pollster, nor does it have much in the way of consultants and apparatchiks...

...the republic minds its own business...

...He quotes G.K...

...Their essays, like Buchanan's speeches, are not arranged according to rigorous logic...

...Chesterton: "There are only three things in the world that women do not understand, and they are liberty, equality and fraternity...

...his celebration of limitless material progress reaches poetic heights...

...Or Francis, in 1993: "If the demise of American civilization through racial and cultural revolution is already apparent on our horizon, in South Africa it has nearly arrived...

...Rather they follow rhetorical melodies that occasionally culminate in startling crescendos, as in these excerpts from a Fleming essay in the January 1996 issue of Chronicles: Among the most dangerous of our theoretical illusions are the political fantasies that can be summed up in words like democracy, equality, and natural rights...

...In those southern communities, they say, social roles were crucial to happiness and ordered sociability...

...Looking for paragons of virtue to serve as foils for today's degraded culture, he describes in a 1993 column the southern soldiers at Gettysburg, who charged bravely and futilely under the command of General Pickett...

...Blood and soil are central to their creed...

...We love the old republic, and when we hear phrases like 'New World Order,' we release the safety catches on our revolvers...

...But Pat Buchanan's presidential run is in fact as close to an intellectual's campaign as we have seen in modern politics...

...Buchanan himself speaks fondly of the Confederate cause: "The War Between the States was about independence, about self-determination, about the right of a people to break free of a government to which they could no longer give allegiance...

...In the February 1996 issue of Chronicles, Francis has an essay on the strategy of the Buchanan campaign that is, like so much of this literature, alternately brilliant and bizarre...

...They regard equality with abhorrence and are so hostile to science and technology that Fleming even laments the use of epidurals in the delivery room...

...This world came crashing to its glorious end in the Civil War, the central event of paleocon literature...

...As an ideology capitalism, almost as much as communism, wages war on natural institutions," Fleming writes in his opus, The Politics of Human Nature...

...Buchanan made the phrase "culture war" famous in his 1992 speech at the Republican convention, and that concept is central to paleoconservative writing...

...There is no evidence that he despises Lincoln or that he seeks the break-up of the Union...

...The paleocons would deny to the death that they represent anything new...

...Middle class and traditional culture are impediments to overclass interests," Buchanan confidant Samuel Francis writes...

...and the America First crowd, who opposed intervention in World War II...

...And it captures the martial spirit that grips Buchananites...

...The Rock-ford Institute, which publishes Chronicles, gave its first TS...

...Their criticism is unfailingly high-toned...

...Eliot Award to the Kafka of Argentina, Jorge Luis Borges...

...Broadly speaking it is in the long-term interest of the overclass (not of anyone else) to 'managerialize' society so that all aspects of life are organized, packaged, routinized and subjugated to manipulation by the technical skills the overclass possesses, and that interest requires the undermining of institutions and norms that are independent of, and impediments to, overclass control...

...There's something undeniably moving about Buchanan's romantic sensibility...

...For the paleocons, blood matters...

...During his 1992 campaign for the presidency, Pat Buchanan went to Okolona, Mississippi, to visit the grave site of his great-grandfather, a Confederate soldier who was captured by Sherman's army...

...The problem, as he sees it, is that mothers have been cut off from the full range of their duties: "The mother is often no more than a 'facilitator,' an amateur coordinator of professional services provided by teachers, pediatricians, counselors and recreation specialists...

...Southern conservatives know, even if others do not, that Ronald Reagan is essentially a right-wing liberal, indeed a progressive," Eugene Genovese writes in his 1994 book The Southern Tradition, an intelligent and sympathetic treatment of southern conservatives and of Buchanan's role as their political leader...

...If Newt Gingrich finds the laissez-faire 1890s somewhat attractive, the Buchananites long to return to the southern farms of the 1820s...

...Buchanan was a staunch cold warrior, but he is the exception...

...The word "deracinated" pops up quite a bit in this literature to describe someone who has been stripped of his essential qualities and rendered only barely human...

...The 'culture war' for Buchanan is not Republican swaggering about family values and dirty movies but a battle over whether the nation itself can continue to exist under the onslaught of the militant secularism, acquisitive egoism, economic and political globalism, demographic inundation, and unchecked state centralism supported by the Ruling Class...

...But the visit was more serious than that...

...For one thing, men and women had clearly defined roles that were based on immutable nature...

...Samuel Francis, who was fired from the Washington Times last year for his racial opinions, regards the race war as a Marxist might see the class war...

...The paleocons believe this notion is at war with nature, and that modern conservatives have been infected by this sort of hubris, too...

...His friends and propagandists, such as Thomas Fleming and Samuel Francis, are essayists, as is Buchanan himself...

...Huey Long and other populists may have tossed off their rhetoric from the top of their head...

...Most paleocons have opposed every American intervention of the 20th century...

...I strongly believe in the politics of conflict, that you go into battle with your opposition," Buchanan once told John B. Judis of The New Republic...

...Peter and Brigitte Berger once wrote that one can differentiate conservatives by how far back into history they want to return...

...We are old church and old right, anti-imperialist and anti-interventionist, disbelievers in Pax Americana," Buchanan once wrote by way of summation...

...In the old democracy of America, O.J...

...But Buchanan's rhetoric and ideas have an intellectual pedigree...

...If this characterization of natural differences between the sexes is incendiary, it pales next to paleocon ideas about natural differences between the races...

...But Buchanan has not really backed off, for the concept of an intractable human nature is his foundation...

...In their imaginings, those villages were populated by folk who worked close to the soil and led lives unpolluted by big business, big government, and mass media...

...True conservatism" was on the march, the paleocons maintain, but in 1952 the Republican establishment robbed isolationist senator Robert Taft of the GOP nomination, giving it to the malleable Dwight Eisenhower...

...These qualities, Aristotle said, made men fit to rule and women to nurture...

...Citizens were dedicated to tradition and subscribed to codes of chivalry and valor...

...The advocacy of political populism is accompanied by unapologetic literary elitism and by an unapologetic reactionary spirit...

...Raw prejudice is not uncommon, as in a 1996 Fleming essay: "Whatever trust we are to put in race and IQ correlations, black achievements in both Africa and North America give little indication that black people, taken statistically en masse, possess the kinds of abilities that are required for success in the modern world...

...Many of us tour Civil War battlefields longing for lost worlds, for the chivalric virtues that were played out there...

...These journals are written, edited, and read largely by people who call themselves "paleoconservatives...

...In the pages of Chronicles, all of the fine distinctions that Charles Murray and R.J...

...Most conservative icons come under uncompromising assault from Buchanan's friends...

...Their sympathy is for the yeoman farmers...

...Buchanan jokingly calls his followers "peasants," but in the paleoconservative literature the word peasant is used as a compliment, the way it is for blood-and-soil conservatives in Europe...

...No one who lives in the world with his eyes open can actually believe in any of this...

...In the paleocon creed, women are to be admired for the same reason as peasants-for their interest in the here and now and their unwillingness to indulge in destructive schemes for the sake of a political abstraction...

...Up until now, Francis argues, Middle Americans have been torn...

...The historian M.E...

...And in truth, why should the paleocons like Gingrich...

...On a larger scale, the paleocons contrast the virtues of the republic with the corruptions of empire...

...Paul called the conjugal debt...

...Everyday democracies do not intrude into the household, even in a case of murder, where it is an affair of family honor...

...Modern conservatives build all these think tanks in Washington where wonks try to devise (market-oriented and family-friendly) programs to improve life...

...They believe they are the original conservatives and that National Review, the neoconservatives, and the likes of Newt Gingrich stole conservatism from them, its true champions...

...Aristotle recognized that a well-ordered society protected an ascending order of good through the institutionalization of rank," Fleming and co-author Paul Gottfried wrote in their book The Conservative Movement...

...In his final column before his current presidential run, Buchanan describes his mission as an effort to save the Republican party for people like him: "There are two Republican parties today...