The red and the brown
With his new magazine, Pat Buchanan links the old right to the new left
By Ronald Radosh, 10/13/2002
When the first issue of The American Conservative, the new weekly edited by Patrick J. Buchanan, recently hit the newsstand, readers might have been excused for wondering if they had accidentally picked up The Nation. Buchanan's magazine, which he co-edits with the journalist Taki Theodoracopulos, resembles its left-liberal counterpart in appearance and is printed on the same cheap newsprint. Even more remarkably, much of The American Conservative's contents could just as easily have appeared in the flagship publication of America's left.
In their Oct. 7 debut, the editors bitterly lament the victory of the “neoconservatives” in our country's cultural and political wars; the neoconservatives, in their view, stand for unfettered interventionism, free trade, and unlimited immigration. By contrast, The American Conservative promises to champion a number of causes that also find support on the political left: protectionism to keep workers' wages high in America; opposition to globalism (“we will point to the pitfalls of the global free trade economy”); and the struggle against “global hegemony.” Noam Chomsky probably would not put it differently.
Above all, The American Conservative is antiwar. In his own signed contribution, Buchanan complains about “a new triumphalist America” that is leading us into “an imperial war on Iraq.” As one might expect, he believes that the “war party” is being manipulated by the Israeli government, which hopes that war with Iraq will provide an excuse to return to Lebanon “and settle scores with Hezbollah.” Buchanan goes on to claim that the Israelis are “tugging at our sleeve, reminding us not to forget Libya.” Meanwhile, Eric S. Margolis writes that the United States “has been buttressing autocracy and despotism” in the Middle East for years. As for Iraq, it “has not committed any act of war against America,” and to invade would be “an act of brazen aggression.” Writing from Britain, Stuart Reid cites the acerbically conservative writer Auberon Waugh to ask how a country of 15 million impoverished “desert dwellers” can conceivably be viewed as a “threat to world peace.” America, Reid writes, should not “make a burnt offering of innocent Arabs.” These are, to be certain, blame-America-first conservatives.
On domestic affairs, the magazine is aggressively populist and critical of corporate elites. The maverick journalist Kevin Phillips, whose 1969 classic “The Emerging Republican Majority” championed a “Southern strategy” that would give Republicans control over the electoral map, condemns “extreme levels of wealth concentration and polarization” as well as the “ideological corruption” of conservative ideology that stems from the “worship of markets,” “triumphalist Pentagon saber-rattling,” and “Axis of Evil foreign policy theology.” His proposal: a campaign for Democratic retention of the Senate or an independent presidential bid by Arizona Senator John McCain.
The magazine's second issue is more substantive, though it continues to sound the same notes. In it, Buchanan goes so far as to praise Al Gore for the antiwar speech he recently gave in San Francisco. Gore, he enthuses, offers “Democrats a choice, not an echo.” Indeed, Gore shows the same “savvy” that Richard M. Nixon, Buchanan's former employer, did in engineering his comeback from defeat in 1960. Gore, says Buchanan, is “Albert M. Nixon.” The issue also includes a heartfelt tribute by executive editor Scott McConnell to the late Jim Chapin, a brilliant historian and lifelong social democrat. And its centerpiece is a 10,000-word essay opposing the newly-minted Bush doctrine of “preemptive war,” written with considerable intellectual sophistication by the European historian Paul W. Schroeder. The article, which echoes recent arguments by liberal historians, would be a typical realist critique of US policy, were it not for the author's claim that if the United States invades Iraq, the result “would be an imperialist war.”
<http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/286/focus/The_red_and_the_brown+.shtml>
Carl
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