Only yesterday we were lectured against the “politics of personal
destruction.” Politics, everyone agreed, should be about “the issues”
and not about this or that personal trait of a particular individual. Do
Bill Clinton’s private peccadilloes matter so long as his policies meet
with public approval? Why should anyone care whether George Bush used
drugs 25 years ago when it’s his platform we ought to be debating?
Well, when it comes to Patrick J. Buchanan, yesterday’s civic pieties
have turned to dust. The reason? The establishment, with a vested
interest in the two-party cartel, wants to prevent him from running for
president on a third-party ticket. Recall that Ross Perot was similarly
blasted when he ran in 1992 and 1996, even without any hope of being
elected. Pat is so much more passionate and interesting than the canned
acts of the major parties that he might actually threaten the regime as
we know it. Therefore he must be stopped.
The ostensible reason for the attack is his book, “A Republic, Not an
Empire.” In it, Pat deals directly with the U.S. military’s role in the
post-Cold War world. He compares the present U.S. military presence
around the globe to that of the British in the 19th century, and warns
that the U.S. is wildly overextended — a position embraced by huge
majorities, including most people employed in the armed services.
Consider such pointless adventures as the war against Serbia and the
continuing attack on Iraq. These are not backed by most people and they
have soiled the image of the U.S. around the world. Whatever credibility
bounce the U.S. experienced after the collapse of the Soviet Union has
been squandered. Because of this and many other reasons, Pat believes
U.S. foreign policy should be recast along the lines spelled out by the
Framers.
To make his case, Pat turns to history, in particular to the U.S.
role in the war on Spain, the two world wars, and the Cold War. His
position on William McKinley’s imperialist adventure is clear: it was
costly to American liberties and cruel to the nations which became
captives of American power.
Regarding the First World War, he agrees with the legion of historians
who say the U.S. should have stayed out, and that U.S. entry may even
have helped bring about the Second World War. Regarding that disaster,
he engages in counterfactual analysis to ask whether anything could have
been done to
prevent its ghastly bloodshed and the communization of Eastern Europe.
It would be one thing if his opponents in the press and politics
engaged his historical argument. For example, there are real questions
about the consistency of his political vision. Pat calls himself a
nationalist, but nationalism was the prop of McKinley’s imperialism,
which Pat opposes. He is an avowed protectionist, and yet it was
Britain’s blockade against Germany that led to the U.S. being dragged
into World War I.
And even given the chaos generated by the Versailles treaty, well
analyzed by Pat, an interwar policy of free trade on all sides (which
Pat anathematizes) might have prevented the bloody global massacre that
followed. In a further irony, the labor unions that Pat now courts
received their biggest boost from the wars that Pat believes could and
should have been prevented.
Finally, his admirable penchant for independent thinking does not
carry over to the Cold War and all the hot wars it spawned. The pre-war
America First isolationists Pat praises were uniformly against the Cold
War state as well. John T. Flynn, Frank Chodorov, and Felix Morley
opposed Truman’s and Eisenhower’s warmongering, viewing it as a pretext
to feed the military-industrial complex at the expense of American
liberty. Here Pat parts company with his self-chosen intellectual
lineage.
All of this makes for a very interesting discussion. But instead of
dealing with his arguments, Pat’s opponents call him every name in the
politically correct handbook. When carefully trimmed quotations from his
writings aren’t enough to make the point, commentators say he speaks in
code. Having cracked the code, they tell us what Pat really means and
conclude that American democracy has no room for such a heretic. So much
for free speech. So much for letting the voters decide. So much for
sticking to the issues and barring the politics of personal destruction.
Shocked Pat supporters have wondered if this character assassination
could have been prevented. Perhaps their man should not have come out
with this book at the very time he was considering running for the
nomination of the Reform Party. And why should World War II be
considered a campaign issue at all? After all, he is not running for
national historian.
In his defense, what Pat senses is that U.S. involvement in the world
wars had a profound impact on a conception of government he believes
should be changed. The U.S. is seen as wholly blameless, playing a
sanctified role in not only beating back tyrannies abroad, but in
planning the economy and
society at home. It was during the war years, and the decades which
followed, that the people, the government, and the media marched in
lockstep. Those days are long gone — and thank goodness — but pressure
groups are reluctant to let go.
Consider Tom Brokaw’s silly book, “The Greatest Generation,” which
might also be called “An Empire, Not a Republic.” You might think that
Brokaw is merely praising the folks who lived through the terrible years
of depression and war. Not so. At the root of this book is a political
argument: the Second World War was wonderful because it baptized a
generation of people into accepting federal power. This attitude is
sadly rejected by the current, supposedly cynical and thereby less-great
generation.
From Brokaw’s perspective, loving and serving the government is a
wonderful thing, which is why his book reads like 50-year-old, and very
stale, war propaganda. That generation was great, he says, because it
gave us not only a war victory, but also the expansion of federal power
in every area of
life. It gave us the welfare state, affirmative action, public housing,
Medicare, and the whole Leviathan State we know and are thoroughly fed
up with. Thus Brokaw celebrates the lives of such public menaces as
George Bush, Robert Dole, Lloyd Cutler, George Shultz, and Arthur
Schlesinger (a court historian Brokaw can only feebly imitate).
Like all official histories, and the popular spinoffs which echo
them, this book is devoid of objectivity or an appreciation for the
complexity of political events. It swallows conventional wisdom whole,
which Pat’s treatment, for all its limitations, does not.
So, for questioning established orthodoxies that are important to the
state and its interests, Pat is being skinned and smeared. By whom? By
people who have a self-interest in seeing a certain view of U.S.
imperialism perpetuated: that it was born without sin and is infallible
in all its ways. They also
want to preserve the neat, stable, and wholly predictable two-party
system that supports the warfare state. Pat should take their attempt to
silence him as a compliment.
