Buchananism revisited - The Pitchfork Brigade Revisited
Sean Scallon
April 18, 2007
I see Bay Buchanan is joining the campaign of Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Col.) for president. No doubt Tancredo feels that having someone as prominent as Buchanan signing on to his campaign gives it credibility and one would think the seal of approval by Brother Pat himself.
However, I doubt the once strong ranks of Buchanan Brigadiers will all be marching for Tancredo. Some will, no doubt. Others will be with Duncan Hunter, some with Ron Paul, others are probably with the Constitution Party now, some probably are not involved in politics anymore and some are no longer here with us.
I was with the Brigade at the Iowa Straw Poll in Ames back in August of 1999 which was the anti-climax of the Buchanan movement. All our hard work we put in that day, the help from a Teamster’s local, Pat’s wonderfully received speech, even plenty of Maurice’s BBQ in the Buchanan tent wasn’t enough to keep Pat from finishing fifth behind Gary Bauer of all people.
Losing in politics is like getting slugged in the gut, because it means no matter how much time and effort you put into a campaign, it’s not enough to keep from being rejected by the voters. And yes, rejected is what it comes down to. Somebody else was the better candidate, the one they liked better. Instead of having your heart being broken by one person, it’s broken by thousands. Ultimately in that campaign cycle Pat himself and Buchananism was rejected twice, first for the GOP nomination and then for President even as the Reform Party nominee. It meant the end of what was once a significant part of the GOP coalition and the once conservative movement. With the passing of time and with the help of friends and former Brigadiers at the new Conservative Times (www.conservatimes.org) website were I blog now, we can look back and make an honest assessment of Buchananism.
There’s no question the essence of Buchananism and his “nationalist” faction of conservatism (as it was such labeled back in the 1990s) was about the preservation of national identity, culture, customs and industry in what was becoming a globalized world from an intellectual standpoint while calling for a traditional U.S neutrality in a post-Cold War world. Politically, its biggest appeal was to those “Reagan Democrats,” culturally conservative but economically liberal white ethnics and blue collar workers that the GOP, including Buchanan himself, tried to lure into the party. That’s because they were what he was too, a Catholic ethnic from an eastern seaboard city. As George Will once remarked about Buchanan, which I truly believe, “I don’t think Buchanan likes Republicans very much.” No doubt Buchanan’s loyalties growing up were to the Catholic party, which were the Democrats, but also to such anti-stalwart Catholic anti-communists like Joseph McCarthy and authoritarian figures like Francisco Franco and Douglas MacArthur.
Unfortunately, the bulk of the GOP would not tolerate a takeover of the party by Buchanan’s wing. As Norman Mailer once said to him “You can’t be the GOP nominee. They’re the corporatist party. They’ll never let you be their nominee.” That’s exactly what happened, although he came closer than people wish to realize or admit. Had he beaten Dole in Iowa or had Dole finished third in New Hampshire in 1996, there was nothing that could stop Buchanan from winning the party’s nomination short an all-out fratricide within the GOP.
There were several things that did in Buchanan. The first the very Reagan Democrats began to disappear as their union jobs and manufacturing jobs began to disappear in the 1990s. The decline of the industrial unions hurt Buchanan because the dominant public section unions where never going to support Buchanan and were tied to the hip to the Democrats. And those industrial unions that did remain like the UAW or the United Steelworkers of United Miners Workers Association or the Teamsters, never officially supported Buchanan even if certain members did because they were too afraid to be kicked out of the establishment if they did so and because they never got over Pat’s ties to the anti-union GOP. Even though he was the only candidate to show as much as a shred of concern over the plight of manufacturing jobs in the U.S., they never trusted him. In the end only one union, an independent steelworkers union in Weirton, West Virginia, supported Buchanan in 2000 because, well, they were independent.
And while Pat certainly was paleo in much of his ideology, other parts of his thinking were not and he dangerously slid towards right-wing social democracy. If you asked Pat if he approved slashing government bureaucracies he would say yes of course, but that was not a topic that animated him very much or even entered into his speeches. Even his friend Sam Francis had, by the early 1990s, had given up any hope of slashing the Federal leviathan and said that conservatives needed to forget about reducing government and focus on making government do its bidding. All of these contradictions were sadly and correctly pointed about by David Frum in his book Dead Right, like it or not, which inevitably sunk Buchanan. Burkeian/Kirk conservatism was not something he thought a lot about and it’s the reason why he supported someone like Richard Nixon, who shared similar class backgrounds, tastes and views of the world, rather than Barry Goldwater because Goldwater’s libertarian/conservative “fusionism” did not interest him. Like anyone in the Democratic/Catholic mindset, Buchanan was not going to sour on big government the way someone like Goldwater, a westerner, a small businessman and someone’s who’s Jewish family was the victim of government-sponsored pogroms in Russia, would.
This was too bad because it could have cemented a paleo coalition around him. Having paleolibertarians like Murray Rothbard and Justin Raimondo in his corner broadened Pat’s electoral appeal, which is essence of politics. You can’t get elected from an enclave; you have to stack up different voting blocs that have some common interests. Goldwater would have never been nominated in 1964 if it wasn’t for fusionism because different conservative factions would have had their own candidates much like they do now. Rothbard kept the scholars from the Ludwig von Mieses Institute based in Auburn, Alabama in line but when he died in 1996, the gloves came off and soon von Miesians like Lew Rockwell and Hans Herman von Hoppe were attacking Buchanan over his protectionism. The whole essence of the John Randolph Club was to having a paleo debating forum between conservatives and libertarians, but that was lost over some pretty nasty JRC debates in 1996 and in 1997 that saw the von Miesians go their own separate way. As Buchanan’s coalition was unraveling, the economy boomed in the late 1990s and Pat blissfully went back to work for CNN. He failed to build a political movement away from the larger conservative establishment and away from the GOP, so all the momentum he had from his 1996 campaign evaporated. Just winning the Reform Party nomination in 2000 was an accomplishment because he easily could have lost it. But, by that point, the Reform Party became a joke to most voters and basically turned into a political version of Somalia with all its warring factions and its nomination availed him nothing but the end of his political career.
In its own way, Buchananism was its own mini-version of “fusionism”, which was the attempt by National Review editor Frank Meyer to unite libertarians and traditional conservatives in the late 1950s and 1960s. I can understand why conservatives are down on “fusionism” for obvious reasons. It was an intellectually silly attempt to meld together two very unlike ideologies (Does the existence of the IRS make one into a bad person?). Not only that but no one could explain to whom we should pay credit for fusionism’s successes, Adam Smith or Edmund Burke? But from a political point of view, fusionism did the trick of keeping the conservative movement together for least 30 years. As I said before without it, Goldwater would not have had a united conservative front behind him that won him the GOP nomination in 1964. To me, it’s not a question of trying to meld unlike ideologies to be united against a hated foe, which is what the original fusionism was all about, it’s about building a broader political coalition and building a new kind of movement. That’s my great hope for the Ron Paul campaign regardless what happens. The question for paleocons is what kind of libertarians can paleoconservatives work with? Certainly not the market uber alles types. Certainly not the Virginia Postrel “Gee, ain’t progress wunnerful?” types. Certainly not the Brink Lindsay, Eric Dondero warmonger types that apparently have infested the Cato Institute and certainly not the Reason magazine “Let’s legalize crystal meth!” types either. Yes, it comes back to working with the von Miesians and Antiwar.com crowd because while there are differences between us all, they are not so great that we can’t work together to fight against neoconservatism, the federal leviathan and globalism.
Ron Paul hates NAFTA just as much as Buchanan does and Lew Rockwell.com is not filled with articles celebrating CAFTA or GATT, for these trade agreements are what Paul describes as “managed trade” designed to benefit big, multi-national corporations, not the average America. Von Miesians believe that they are upholding the free-trade tradition of the South before it became industrialized. If we believe that the War Between the States was as much about tariffs as it was about slavery or even more, then we must remember it was the South that was a believer in free trade. Remember the Tariff of Abominations in 1831? John C Calhoun certainly does. If we claim to be Calhoun’s heirs, we can’t just whitewash this legacy because we happen to hate cheap Chinese imports filling the shelves of the local Wal-Mart. What Calhoun believed, and certainly we should support, was that state’s and regions and local communities should have the right to opt out of trade agreements, or form their own trading blocs to look out for their own economic interests or be able to opt out of national agreements or tariff system that don’t reflect the economics of their own respective locality. I’m certain Ron Paul would support that.
Decentralization isn’t just about reducing the size government, but the national market structure and soon to be global government and business structures that threaten distinct localities around the country. I think Paul realizes, as Rothbard did, that the twin swords of Damocles that hang over the U.S are big government and big business. The union between them that began with the New Deal and opposed by old Democrats like Bryan and Cleveland and Progressives like LaFollette, destroyed the old Republic and is the cause of our misery today, whether its the military- industrial complex or government privatization schemes which just draws the business community more and more into government’s web and creates lobbies for bigger government to satisfy their profit margins. It wasn’t corporate executives at GM and U.S. Steel that helped get the conservative movement off the ground in 1950s and 60s, it was small industrialists from the Midwest and Texas wildcat oilmen who hated government regulations that they couldn’t pay for and made them uncompetitive.
Buchananism had its day in the sun but now a new movement is needed to challenge the establishment.
Sean Scallon is a freelance writer and journalist living in Arkansaw, Wisconsin.
However, I doubt the once strong ranks of Buchanan Brigadiers will all be marching for Tancredo. Some will, no doubt. Others will be with Duncan Hunter, some with Ron Paul, others are probably with the Constitution Party now, some probably are not involved in politics anymore and some are no longer here with us.
I was with the Brigade at the Iowa Straw Poll in Ames back in August of 1999 which was the anti-climax of the Buchanan movement. All our hard work we put in that day, the help from a Teamster’s local, Pat’s wonderfully received speech, even plenty of Maurice’s BBQ in the Buchanan tent wasn’t enough to keep Pat from finishing fifth behind Gary Bauer of all people.
Losing in politics is like getting slugged in the gut, because it means no matter how much time and effort you put into a campaign, it’s not enough to keep from being rejected by the voters. And yes, rejected is what it comes down to. Somebody else was the better candidate, the one they liked better. Instead of having your heart being broken by one person, it’s broken by thousands. Ultimately in that campaign cycle Pat himself and Buchananism was rejected twice, first for the GOP nomination and then for President even as the Reform Party nominee. It meant the end of what was once a significant part of the GOP coalition and the once conservative movement. With the passing of time and with the help of friends and former Brigadiers at the new Conservative Times (www.conservatimes.org) website were I blog now, we can look back and make an honest assessment of Buchananism.
There’s no question the essence of Buchananism and his “nationalist” faction of conservatism (as it was such labeled back in the 1990s) was about the preservation of national identity, culture, customs and industry in what was becoming a globalized world from an intellectual standpoint while calling for a traditional U.S neutrality in a post-Cold War world. Politically, its biggest appeal was to those “Reagan Democrats,” culturally conservative but economically liberal white ethnics and blue collar workers that the GOP, including Buchanan himself, tried to lure into the party. That’s because they were what he was too, a Catholic ethnic from an eastern seaboard city. As George Will once remarked about Buchanan, which I truly believe, “I don’t think Buchanan likes Republicans very much.” No doubt Buchanan’s loyalties growing up were to the Catholic party, which were the Democrats, but also to such anti-stalwart Catholic anti-communists like Joseph McCarthy and authoritarian figures like Francisco Franco and Douglas MacArthur.
Unfortunately, the bulk of the GOP would not tolerate a takeover of the party by Buchanan’s wing. As Norman Mailer once said to him “You can’t be the GOP nominee. They’re the corporatist party. They’ll never let you be their nominee.” That’s exactly what happened, although he came closer than people wish to realize or admit. Had he beaten Dole in Iowa or had Dole finished third in New Hampshire in 1996, there was nothing that could stop Buchanan from winning the party’s nomination short an all-out fratricide within the GOP.
There were several things that did in Buchanan. The first the very Reagan Democrats began to disappear as their union jobs and manufacturing jobs began to disappear in the 1990s. The decline of the industrial unions hurt Buchanan because the dominant public section unions where never going to support Buchanan and were tied to the hip to the Democrats. And those industrial unions that did remain like the UAW or the United Steelworkers of United Miners Workers Association or the Teamsters, never officially supported Buchanan even if certain members did because they were too afraid to be kicked out of the establishment if they did so and because they never got over Pat’s ties to the anti-union GOP. Even though he was the only candidate to show as much as a shred of concern over the plight of manufacturing jobs in the U.S., they never trusted him. In the end only one union, an independent steelworkers union in Weirton, West Virginia, supported Buchanan in 2000 because, well, they were independent.
And while Pat certainly was paleo in much of his ideology, other parts of his thinking were not and he dangerously slid towards right-wing social democracy. If you asked Pat if he approved slashing government bureaucracies he would say yes of course, but that was not a topic that animated him very much or even entered into his speeches. Even his friend Sam Francis had, by the early 1990s, had given up any hope of slashing the Federal leviathan and said that conservatives needed to forget about reducing government and focus on making government do its bidding. All of these contradictions were sadly and correctly pointed about by David Frum in his book Dead Right, like it or not, which inevitably sunk Buchanan. Burkeian/Kirk conservatism was not something he thought a lot about and it’s the reason why he supported someone like Richard Nixon, who shared similar class backgrounds, tastes and views of the world, rather than Barry Goldwater because Goldwater’s libertarian/conservative “fusionism” did not interest him. Like anyone in the Democratic/Catholic mindset, Buchanan was not going to sour on big government the way someone like Goldwater, a westerner, a small businessman and someone’s who’s Jewish family was the victim of government-sponsored pogroms in Russia, would.
This was too bad because it could have cemented a paleo coalition around him. Having paleolibertarians like Murray Rothbard and Justin Raimondo in his corner broadened Pat’s electoral appeal, which is essence of politics. You can’t get elected from an enclave; you have to stack up different voting blocs that have some common interests. Goldwater would have never been nominated in 1964 if it wasn’t for fusionism because different conservative factions would have had their own candidates much like they do now. Rothbard kept the scholars from the Ludwig von Mieses Institute based in Auburn, Alabama in line but when he died in 1996, the gloves came off and soon von Miesians like Lew Rockwell and Hans Herman von Hoppe were attacking Buchanan over his protectionism. The whole essence of the John Randolph Club was to having a paleo debating forum between conservatives and libertarians, but that was lost over some pretty nasty JRC debates in 1996 and in 1997 that saw the von Miesians go their own separate way. As Buchanan’s coalition was unraveling, the economy boomed in the late 1990s and Pat blissfully went back to work for CNN. He failed to build a political movement away from the larger conservative establishment and away from the GOP, so all the momentum he had from his 1996 campaign evaporated. Just winning the Reform Party nomination in 2000 was an accomplishment because he easily could have lost it. But, by that point, the Reform Party became a joke to most voters and basically turned into a political version of Somalia with all its warring factions and its nomination availed him nothing but the end of his political career.
In its own way, Buchananism was its own mini-version of “fusionism”, which was the attempt by National Review editor Frank Meyer to unite libertarians and traditional conservatives in the late 1950s and 1960s. I can understand why conservatives are down on “fusionism” for obvious reasons. It was an intellectually silly attempt to meld together two very unlike ideologies (Does the existence of the IRS make one into a bad person?). Not only that but no one could explain to whom we should pay credit for fusionism’s successes, Adam Smith or Edmund Burke? But from a political point of view, fusionism did the trick of keeping the conservative movement together for least 30 years. As I said before without it, Goldwater would not have had a united conservative front behind him that won him the GOP nomination in 1964. To me, it’s not a question of trying to meld unlike ideologies to be united against a hated foe, which is what the original fusionism was all about, it’s about building a broader political coalition and building a new kind of movement. That’s my great hope for the Ron Paul campaign regardless what happens. The question for paleocons is what kind of libertarians can paleoconservatives work with? Certainly not the market uber alles types. Certainly not the Virginia Postrel “Gee, ain’t progress wunnerful?” types. Certainly not the Brink Lindsay, Eric Dondero warmonger types that apparently have infested the Cato Institute and certainly not the Reason magazine “Let’s legalize crystal meth!” types either. Yes, it comes back to working with the von Miesians and Antiwar.com crowd because while there are differences between us all, they are not so great that we can’t work together to fight against neoconservatism, the federal leviathan and globalism.
Ron Paul hates NAFTA just as much as Buchanan does and Lew Rockwell.com is not filled with articles celebrating CAFTA or GATT, for these trade agreements are what Paul describes as “managed trade” designed to benefit big, multi-national corporations, not the average America. Von Miesians believe that they are upholding the free-trade tradition of the South before it became industrialized. If we believe that the War Between the States was as much about tariffs as it was about slavery or even more, then we must remember it was the South that was a believer in free trade. Remember the Tariff of Abominations in 1831? John C Calhoun certainly does. If we claim to be Calhoun’s heirs, we can’t just whitewash this legacy because we happen to hate cheap Chinese imports filling the shelves of the local Wal-Mart. What Calhoun believed, and certainly we should support, was that state’s and regions and local communities should have the right to opt out of trade agreements, or form their own trading blocs to look out for their own economic interests or be able to opt out of national agreements or tariff system that don’t reflect the economics of their own respective locality. I’m certain Ron Paul would support that.
Decentralization isn’t just about reducing the size government, but the national market structure and soon to be global government and business structures that threaten distinct localities around the country. I think Paul realizes, as Rothbard did, that the twin swords of Damocles that hang over the U.S are big government and big business. The union between them that began with the New Deal and opposed by old Democrats like Bryan and Cleveland and Progressives like LaFollette, destroyed the old Republic and is the cause of our misery today, whether its the military- industrial complex or government privatization schemes which just draws the business community more and more into government’s web and creates lobbies for bigger government to satisfy their profit margins. It wasn’t corporate executives at GM and U.S. Steel that helped get the conservative movement off the ground in 1950s and 60s, it was small industrialists from the Midwest and Texas wildcat oilmen who hated government regulations that they couldn’t pay for and made them uncompetitive.
Buchananism had its day in the sun but now a new movement is needed to challenge the establishment.
Sean Scallon is a freelance writer and journalist living in Arkansaw, Wisconsin.
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