>Culture Watch:
>The Big Decisions
>A Real Opposition Party Starts to Line Up at Last
>Bill Kauffman
>
>THOSE WHO MANAGE to stay awake through the next several months of the epic
>major-party clash for the presidency, in which two ruling-class scions
>trade focus-group-tested lines scripted by soulless advisers, will notice
>a hubbub just offstage. It may be loud and messy, but births often are: An
>American opposition is being born.
>
>This opposition seeks to stretch the ridiculously constricted boundaries
>of American political debate.
>
>Trade, military intervention, immigration, globalization-the
>life-and-death issues on which Al Gore and George W. Bush nod in fraternal
>agreement-may yet make an appearance in this campaign. Probable Reform
>Party nominee Patrick J. Buchanan is the point man of this anti- globalist
>insurgency, and his supporters are busy making Reform the vehicle of
>"America First" nationalism.
>
>By "America First" they do not mean a rude chauvinism but fidelity to
>one's little corner of the world. They see Main Street besieged by Wall
>Street, Hollywood and Washington, D.C. Their willingness to fight with
>whatever weapons are at hand, whether the national sovereignty arguments
>of the Right or the anti-corporate language of the Left, confounds
>political taxonomists. The Buchananites are aggressive in championing the
>working class and forgotten rural Americans, but pacific in demanding the
>return of our soldiers from their garrisons abroad. The America Firsters
>echo George McGovern's beautiful 1972 campaign slogan, "Come Home,
>America." The duopolyof Republicans and Democrats -what Buchanan calls
>"both wings of the same vulture"-agrees on every significant issue this
>side of Bob Jones University's parietals. The managed-trade deals of the
>last decade -NAFTA, GATT, the WTO -were bipartisan creations. Both parties
>stand for the projection of U.S. military might into every nook and
>crevice of the world.
>
>They do not deign to answer the question -"What in hell are we doing over
>there?" -that is asked in diners and over clotheslines whenever American
>soldiers are sent hither and yon from Somalia to Serbia. As for reducing
>immigration, a popular position in Middle America, neither party will
>touch the matter lest it trip the alarms down at the thought-police
>station.
>
>To the curious charge that America First is "racist"-after all, most
>African Americans have deeper American roots than most whites -opinion
>polls reveal that the demographic group most favorable to isolationist
>positions on foreign policy and trade is American blacks.
>
>By the way, how is it "xenophobic" to believe that U.S. policy ought to
>place American workers and families over foreign interests? And isn't it
>odd that those who oppose bombing and killing foreigners are the ones
>called xenophobes? The aborning populist coalition ranges from Ralph
>Nader, communitarian localists and disaffected trade-unionists on the Left
>to libertarians and nationalist Republicans on the Right. Their
>coalescence into a single party remains problematic, though Buchanan seems
>determined to make Reform a party that bursts the old liberal-conservative
>straitjacket.
>
>The most nettlesome social issues -abortion, gay rights-are amenable to a
>federalist compromise that respects local preferences. Let San Francisco
>be San Francisco, and let Utah be Utah.
>
>Time and again, erstwhile foes have come together - against NAFTA, against
>the WTO, against the Persian Gulf war and Iraqi sanctions, against NATO
>expansion and the war on Serbia -only to be labeled "strange bedfellows"
>by the media. How many times do partners have to fall into the sack before
>their coupling ceases to be "strange"? The America Firsters fear that our
>nation's distinct identity is being submerged by globalism: All the color
>and diversity of American life is being erased by a Nike swoosh.
>
>Both anti-imperialist Buchananites and anti-multinational populists oppose
>globalism because they cherish the features that make our country -and the
>thousands of flavorful little communities within- unique.
>
>If I may be forgiven a modest caricature, the globalists wish us to be
>bland citizens of the world who use the metric system, play soccer and
>speak in an unaccented TV anchorman tongue while the America Firsters
>prefer a variegated country of Delta blues, New England taciturnity, Grant
>Wood paintings and an authentic American culture, not the Disneyfied
>porridge of CNN and Madonna.
>
>The America First platform adds up to a defense of human-scale
>institutions - the parish, the family, the neighborhood school - against
>the massive global forces that would crush them.
>
>Half a century ago, North Dakota Congressman Usher Burdick lamented, "We
>are without a party that will stand for this country. Both old parties
>want war and profits and the plain people like you and me have no means of
>bringing our vote to account." Burdick's plaint rings truer than ever. But
>maybe not for long.
>
>Pat Buchanan, Ralph Nader and other independents are groping toward the
>formation of an anti-globalist alliance that may give Americans a real
>live opposition for the first time since the dawn of the Cold War.
>
>Our corporate-owned two-party system will do what it can to strangle this
>movement in its crib.
>
>Patrick Buchanan and likely Green Party nominee Ralph Nader will be denied
>their rightful places in the Republican-Democrat-sponsored debates.
>Buchanan, the only presidential candidate in memory who doesn't employ a
>ghostwriter, will continue to be slandered by talking heads who don't
>bother to read what they criticize.
>
>But no matter.
>
>The anti-globalist rebellion is coming. Somewhere beyond the white noise
>of Gore-Bush, an American tune is taking shape.
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