The New Republic

It can't be a good omen for Pat Buchanan. The man who will now carry
the pitchfork for his "America First" peasant populism is a European
aristocrat. Taki Theodoracopulos (or Taki, as he signs his byline),
scion to a Greek shipping fortune, will fund and contribute essays
to Buchananism's new house organ, The American Conservative (TAC),
a Washington-based biweekly set to launch this September. It is, to
say the least, an odd match. While Buchanan venerates the working
class, Taki is an unabashed yacht-owning, nightclub-going social
snob with homes in the Swiss Alps, London, and Manhattan's Upper
East Side. While Buchanan rails against the fraying of God-fearing,
law-abiding, traditional American culture, Taki was convicted in
1984 for smuggling cocaine. His most penetrating meditation on
American cultural decay was a 1982 essay in The American Spectator
titled, "Why American Women are Lousy Lovers."Still, this unlikely pair is bound by a common goal: to rescue
American conservatism from the false gods of internationalism,
immigration, free trade, and Zionism. And Buchanan's disastrous
2000 presidential run notwithstanding, as recently as one year ago
there was reason to believe such a mission might elicit popular
support. After all, in his quest to woo Hispanics, George W. Bush
floated a blanket amnesty for Mexican immigrants--an idea that
sparked a sharply negative reaction from the conservative
grassroots. He called fast- track trade authority a top priority
and declared himself "committed to pursuing open trade at every
opportunity," despite evidence that the American right was souring
on free trade. He reneged on campaign promises to pull U.S. troops
from Bosnia and Kosovo. And against conservative orthodoxy, he
embraced the spirit of multiculturalism, hardly lifting a finger to
undo affirmative action and apparently practicing it himself,
packing his Cabinet with minority appointments. In short, the most
corporate president in recent history seemed the perfect foil for
the anti-corporate conservatism Buchanan had been preaching for
years.

And at first glance, September 11 seemed to add fuel to Buchanan's
critique. What better evidence for Fortress America than the
spectacle of visa-finagling foreigners blowing up lower Manhattan?
Buchanan wrote a quickie book, The Death of the West, about the
swarthy menace; and across Europe his brand of nativism began
harvesting votes in record number. But over time it has become clear
that on this side of the Atlantic, 9/11 hasn't boosted the
isolationist right; it has extinguished it. Instead of America
Firstism, September 11 has produced a war on terrorism that has
virtually ended conservative qualms about expending blood and
treasure abroad. And as a corollary, it has produced an
unprecedented eruption of conservative and evangelical support for
Israel. The conservative establishment has co-opted post-9/11 fears
of Muslim immigration, and Bush has covered his protectionist flank
on trade. In short, Buchanan and his rich friends couldn't have
chosen 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 to
Scott McConnell--a former editorial-page editor of the New York
Post, an heir to the Avon cosmetics fortune, and TAC's third
proprietor--"Garden-variety conservatives pretend that the movement
speaks with one voice on foreign policy. But foreign policy
represents a significant fissure among conservatives. [TAC] will
challenge the orthodoxy." It would be more accurate to say it used
to represent a significant fissure among conservatives. In
late-'90s debates over the Balkans, for instance, a growing number
of congressional Republicans broke from the internationalism of GOP
elders like Bob Dole and George H.W. Bush and echoed Buchanan's
1999 critique of America's "utopian crusades for global democracy."
One year later Tom DeLay delivered a speech at a Washington think
tank decrying Clintonite foreign policy as "social work." And Trent
Lott took to CNN to accuse the president of neglecting diplomacy,
urging him to "give peace a chance" in Kosovo. Even some normally
hawkish neoconservatives like Charles Krauthammer condemned the
Balkan interventions as "a colossal waste-- and drain." A poll in
late 1999 taken by Mark Penn showed that 57 percent of Republicans
considered the United States "too engaged in the world's problems."

Buchanan has continued that line of argument. Then, he argued the
United States had no right to interfere in Balkan tribal feuds. Now
he writes, "Where does Bush get the right to identify and punish
every [terrorist] aggressor? Who believes any president can lift
the `dark threat' of aggression and terror from all mankind?" But
no one on the right is listening anymore. A "CBS News" poll from
last month shows that 94 percent of Republicans approve of the
president's handling of the war. If anything, the conservative
critics of Bill Clinton's foreign policy--Krauthammer and DeLay
among them--are demanding that Bush intervene more aggressively to
root out global terrorism, starting with Yasir Arafat.

The Buchananite critique has fallen flat for three reasons. First,
the Clinton administration justified its interventions as
humanitarian necessities. In the war on terror, by contrast, Bush
hasn't needed to appeal to altruism. He has employed the rhetoric
of national interest--fulfilling the Buchananite criteria for
intervention. And, in the process, he reestablished the connection
between national security and the hawkish internationalism that
defined conservatism during the cold war. Second, Bush has
preempted charges of Wilsonian internationalism by obsessively
guarding against encroachments on national sovereignty--yanking the
United States out of the Kyoto agreement on global warming, raising
objections to the International Criminal Court, and ditching the
anti-ballistic missiles treaty. Thirdly, the Buchananites have shot
themselves in the foot by blaming September 11 on America's
"indiscriminate support for Israel" (McConnell's words in the New
York Press last fall) and pining for the days "when America was
loved by Arabs" (Taki's words, also in the Press). TAC's supporters
have the misfortune to be espousing anti-Zionism at the very moment
the conservative rank and file, driven by evangelicals, views
Israel as America's kindred spirit in the battle against terrorism
and radical Islam. According to the most recent batch of polling,
64 percent of Republicans say they actively sympathize with
Israel--as opposed to 38 percent of Democrats. And 83 percent of
Republicans applaud Bush's aggressively pro-Ariel Sharon policy on
the Middle East.

The rest of the political landscape is equally inhospitable to
Buchananism. Trade--an issue on which Beltway conservatives and
grassroots conservatives genuinely were out of step--has lost much
of its salience now that national security, not economics,
dominates foreign policy debates. With Senate Democrats adding the
Dayton-Craig labor protections to trade promotion authority, Bush
has threatened to veto the legislation altogether, leaving the
Buchananites nothing to shout about in the short term. And when the
administration has tinkered with trade policy, it has done so in
Buchananite ways--raising tariffs on domestic steel, supporting a
farm bill loaded with subsidies for U.S. agriculture, and generally
proving that Karl Rove is far too in touch with electoral reality
to leave Bush vulnerable to protectionist attack.

Bush and the conservative mainstream have also masterfully preempted
the anti-immigration backlash Buchanan would like to foment.
Although Bush still talks about tolerance for Muslims and even
tried to restore food-stamp benefits to legal aliens, he has
endorsed a major overhaul of the border patrol, tougher enforcement
of student visas, and a fingerprinting system that amounts to
racial profiling. Similarly, pro-immigration magazines like The
Weekly Standard and National Review have turned racial profiling
and a tougher visa system into crusades, leaving Buchanan and his
allies little room to accuse the conservative establishment of
sacrificing American security for political correctness and cheap
labor. When McConnell told me that the American right considers
immigration a "verboten issue," he sounded as if he hadn't touched
the stack of magazines by his bed for months.

The way the Buchananites see it, they're still battling the
neocons--the largely Jewish group of former leftists who migrated
right after the Vietnam War. But the neocons are no longer a wing
of the conservative movement; they are the conservative movement.
Supply-side economics, Israel, welfare reform, vouchers--all the
old neocon pet causes have become enshrined in conservative
conventional wisdom. As Norman Podhoretz triumphantly declared in
The New York Times in 2000, "The time has come to drop the prefix
and simply call ourselves conservatives." This presents a huge
problem for the Buchananites: There's no constituency on the
right--not evangelicals, not gun nuts, not libertarians-- who wants
to send the neocons back to City College or who even remembers they
came from there. It's a fact McConnell seems to acknowledge when he
lumps together National Review, FOX NEWS, and George W. Bush as the
"neoconservative orthodoxy." There's barely anyone left on the
right to embrace TAC.

There is, however, one group that shares the Buchananite docket of
suspicions--of Wall Street, capitalism, Zionism, American power: the
anti- globalization left. Indeed, Buchanan has fitfully wooed them.
He marched in the streets at the 1999 Seattle protests of the World
Trade Organization, and he has spoken at labor rallies against free
trade. During his 2000 presidential bid, he said he hoped to turn
the Reform Party into the "Peace Party." Some of his aidesde-camp
have gone further, taking Buchananism to its logical left-wing
conclusions. Justin Raimondo, an adviser to Buchanan's 1996 campaign
and a historian of the old right, runs Antiwar.com. The site posts
screeds against American interventionism that complain about
"empire" and "increased military spending." And by lifting the
language of the left, he has acquired an audience on the left: The
Nation's Alexander Cockburn has published a column on the site, and
Salon and alternative newsweeklies plug his work. For his part,
Raimondo is unabashed about his ideological transformation. Last
month he wrote on his site, "The only voices of dissent are heard,
today, on the Left. ... This is where all the vitality, the
rebelliousness, the willingness to challenge the rules and
strictures of an increasingly narrow and controlled national
discourse has resided."

And Raimondo is not the only one trying his hand at
far-left/far-right synergy. On the University of California, San
Diego, campus, David Duke's supporters have distributed flyers on
"Israeli genocide." Lefty Pacifica Radio broadcasts right-wingers
who rail against elites, including recordings of the late
conspiracy theorist Anthony Sutton. Thomas Fleming, the editor of
the paleocon Chronicles, told me, "I agree with environmentalists
on chain stores, fast food, and the Americanization of Europe. I
don't even bother calling myself a conservative anymore." Over the
course of the '90s the anti- globalization critique that started on
the right with Buchanan's 1992 and 1996 presidential runs migrated
left. And 9/11, which has forever linked opposition to
globalization to opposition to the war on terrorism, was the final
straw. The Buchananites may not want to admit it, but in the
post-9/11 era, as during the cold war, the prominent critiques of
American internationalism will come from the left. TAC contributor
Sam Francis says he has already privately advised the new magazine
"to forget about the social issues" that divide them from their
anti-globalization comrades on the left. Announcing the magazine in
a New York Press column, Taki wrote: "Our motto for the magazine is
that we are traditional conservatives mugged by the neocons." He'd
be better off trying something different: closer to, say, "Workers
of the world, unite!"

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