Pat Buchanan vs. The Neocons

This is another excerpt from the article on paleocons that never quite came together.

Paleoconservatism is largely a reaction to this usurpation of the right by neoconservatives, although this would not fully become a recognised term until the early 1990s and the Presidential candidacy of Pat Buchanan, who stood against another bland liberal establishment figure, George H.W. Bush, in 1992. Ronald Reagan, under whom Buchanan served as White House Communications Director, was the last Republican to occupy what Laura Ingraham has called “the biggest tent”.[i] The eight years of the Reagan presidency can be seen as a transitional period in which paleoconservatives and populists, who inarguably delivered the landslide elections of 1980 and 1984, vied for control of the party with the elite liberal establishment Rockefeller Republicans, who would largely become synonymous with the neoconservatives. A significant moment in this contest for control came in 1981 when M.E. Bradford, a leading paleoconservative thinker and contributor to Chronicles magazine, was nominated to become Chair for the National Endowment for the Humanities. Neoconservatives led by Irving Kristol launched a series of hit-pieces on Bradford, foregrounding his pro-confederate and anti-Lincoln stances, and successfully connived to deny him the post, which instead went to their favoured candidate, William Bennett. Neoconservatives would repeat this process of cancelling paleoconservatives using leftwing methods many times, most famously when Dinesh D'Souza similarly connived to get Samuel T. Francis, who was an adviser to Pat Buchanan and a contributor to Chronicles, fired from The Washington Times in 1995.[ii]

Neoconservatism can be broadly defined as having three main features: first, an unshakable commitment to Zionism and the security interests of Israel which are often repackaged as somehow being in the American interest; second, an interventionist foreign policy committed to spreading “liberal democracy” around the world as an almost evangelical mission; third, a loose commitment to free markets following Milton Friedman and the Chicago School, which in practice means the protection of the interests of multinational corporations and international finance. A similar list of three features of paleoconservatism would read as follows: an anti-interventionist foreign policy that puts America first, not Israel (or any other nation);

a belief that America is experiencing a deep moral and ultimately spiritual decline which has destroyed social cohesion in the nation and which is greatly exacerbated by mass immigration, which should be halted at once; and, finally, a nationalist economic platform that favours protectionism over free trade and the mom-and-pop store to multinational corporations. This was the platform on which Buchanan ran in 1992 and 2000 and formed the backbone of what propelled Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016, although it should be noted that Trump is much more Zionist than Buchanan, much less socially conservative, much less well-read, and – for reasons known only to himself – largely kept paleoconservatives on the outside and filled his administration with establishment figures who hated him, especially after the departure of Steve Bannon in 2017.

While Trump was frequently compared to Hitler and labelled variously as a white supremacist and racist by the media throughout his time in office, they could seldom get the label of “antisemite” to stick largely owing to his firm commitment to Zionist interests and the fact that his daughter, Ivanka, is married to Jared Kushner, who is Jewish. The same cannot be said for Buchanan, who was many times viciously accused of antisemitism and “crypto-fascism” in the media, despite his personal friendship with Jews, because of his vocal opposition to Zionist interests being put above the interests of the American people. As Edward S. Shaprio put it, “few contemporary American political figures have been viewed so negatively by Jews as the conservative columnist Patrick J. Buchanan.”[iii] He still has a page dedicated to him at the ADL and an article in which he is labelled as an “unrepentant bigot”.[iv] Most notoriously, in the run-up to the 2000 primary run-off with George W. Bush, The Jewish Press in New York ran an article called “Another Sewer Rat Appears” in which the author, Howard L. Adelson wrote, “Out of the slime of the sewers and into the filth of the gutter a desperate Patrick J. Buchanan, the neo-Nazi, has crawled into the political arena using anti-Semitism as his principal device to secure a future for himself.”[v] On the same day, in a different publication, The Forward, which carries the tagline “News that Matters to Jewish Americans”, the famous lawyer, Alan Dershowitz – who has seemingly held a personal animus against Buchanan for decades[vi] – wrote:

Let there be no mistake about it. Pat Buchanan is a classic anti-Semite with fascist leanings who hates Israel and loves Nazi war criminals. … Let us begin to think about Pat Buchanan realistically. He is a bigot who appeals to the worst of America. That's why he will always be a loser.[vii]

Notably, in contrast, Dershowitz defended Trump throughout his presidency and defended him legally against impeachment in 2020 despite supporting his rival, Joe Biden, in the election; Dershowitz’s other clients include such luminaries as Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein and, of course, O.J. Simpson.

Details such as these and many others, too numerous to list, ensure that on the right-wing in politics, at least in America, the so-called Jewish Question is never far away and, before continuing, it is worth dwelling on it a little. Buchanan’s chief complaint was never against Jews per se but rather that America should be run first and foremost in the name of its own interests and not those of a foreign special interest group. The renowned geopolitical realists John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt wrote a paper in 2006 called “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy”.[viii] Alan Dershowitz was again on hand to accuse them of antisemitism in a swiftly written rebuttal. It is interesting to note Dershowitz’s rhetorical strategy throughout as it is instructive of the general strategy that the system has used to attack Buchanan and other paleoconservatives. Dershowitz begins by outlining what he sees as Mearsheimer and Walt’s central thesis:

It asserts that the Israel “Lobby” – a cabal whose “core” is “American Jews” – has a “stranglehold” on mainstream American media, think tanks, academia, and the government. The Lobby is led by the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (“AIPAC”), which the authors characterize as a “de facto agent of a foreign government” that places the interests of that government ahead of the interests of the United States. Jewish political contributors use Jewish “money” to blackmail government officials, while “Jewish philanthropists” influence and “police” academic programs and shape public opinion. Jewish “congressional staffers” exploit their roles and betray the trust of their bosses by “look[ing] at certain issues in terms of their Jewishness,” rather than in terms of their Americanism.[ix]

Dershowitz makes no attempt to deny the existence of AIPAC, the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the ADL, the Jewish Institute for the National Security of America (JINSA) or any other Jewish lobby group, or indeed their influence. His rebuttal simply points out, first, there are other lobby groups that exercise influence in the USA, such as the Saudi lobby group (we might call this whataboutism), and, second, that characters such as the former KKK member, David Duke, have made similar arguments, as has, of course, Buchanan. Since these figures are “discredited”, therefore, the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis is little more than old wine in shiny new bottles. “The working paper”, Dershowitz concludes, “is little more than a compilation of old, false, and authoritatively discredited charges dressed up in academic garb. The only thing new about it is the imprimatur these recycled assertions have now been given by the prominence of its authors and their institutional affiliations.” For Dershowitz it appears that the substance of the argument is much less important than its social acceptability and the backing it is given by power and institutions. If power is our focus, it should be interesting to note that Mearsheimer and Walt were attacked not only by one of the most high-profile lawyers in America, but also by, among others, CIA Director, James Woolsey; former Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger; AJC Director, David A. Harris; ADL National Director, Abraham H. Foxman; Former Secretary of State, George Shultz; Dore Gold of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs; Caroline Glick of The Jerusalem Post; Richard Cohen; and Christopher Hitchens. Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government also responded by removing its logo from the paper and putting a disclaimer on it to the effect that the paper only represents the views of its author and not the institution.[x] It is difficult to tell if all this activity was designed to convince the reader that these people have none of the power or all of it.

The main difference between the positions of Buchanan and those who are typically called “Neo-Nazis” whether or not they accept the label, such as David Duke and William Luther Pierce, a direct contemporary (and critic) of Buchanan, is that for the latter, Jewish control of the media and other institutions is of primary concern and is the centre of most of their focus. According to their line of thought, most social ills can be attributed to the subversive machinations of organised Jewry, which is afforded by a deep moral and spiritual malaise in white people that allows them to be exploited because they are weak and confused. If only whites could recapture their true spirit – akin to Nietzschean master morality – the Jews would once more be expelled to the margins and order and normality could once more be restored. Buchanan certainly agrees that there is a moral malaise, but for him the central concern is the loss of Christian faith and a shared national culture. How can immigrants ever integrate into a culture that is falling apart at the seams and has few, if any, moral norms? Or indeed, how can anyone integrate into it? Buchanan’s chief concerns remain the central concerns of paleoconservatism: loss of faith; declining birth rates; leftist capture of institutions; mass immigration; the leftist assault on Western history and culture; the demonisation of the white majority; and the complete lack of social cohesion all these things ultimately cause.[xi] To all this, Jews only become of concern to Buchanan when they appear to organise in opposition to his goals, which happened frequently in his career not least because his key rivals, the political left in the USA and the neoconservatives, were both disproportionately Jewish by a factor of between 14 and 20, or if you prefer, 1400 and 2000 percent.[xii]

Shapiro readily admits this in his account: “The central role of liberalism in American Jewish identity has made Jews acutely sensitive to political movements and individuals who have challenged the underlying assumptions of modern liberalism. This is particularly true regarding movements and individuals insensitive to Jewish concerns.” One struggles to understand what Shapiro means by “Jewish concerns” – as opposed to, say, American concerns more generally, since in the same article, he writes that the idea Jewish people might have “dual loyalty” is “an old anti-Semitic canard”. If that is the case, why are Buchanan’s criticisms of American policy towards Israel a “Jewish concern”? If it is a “canard” to accuse Jewish people of dual loyalties, then they cannot lay claim to any special “concerns” when Buchanan declares, “America First – and Second, and Third”.[xiii]  In the account that follows, Shapiro goes on to concede virtually every criticism that paleoconservatives have of neoconservatives: they “embodied the spirit of modernism” and “were essentially utilitarians with little sense of a transcendent religious and moral order or of the philosophical and theological underpinnings of traditional conservatism”. After which he concludes: “Jews, as well as other Americans, are wise to oppose [Buchanan]. He has assumed leadership of a conservative faction permeated with xenophobia, isolationism, and a rancor directed at ethnic and cultural minorities. His is a politics of fear that appeals to estranged Americans nursing economic and cultural grievances but does not provide any sensible answers to alleviate their problems.”[xiv] What is not clear from Shapiro’s account is how the neoconservative answer – forever wars in the name of liberal democracy, largesse towards Israel, mass third-world immigration, accelerating globalism, and a constant and embarrassing pandering to liberal and left-wing cultural concerns – addresses or alleviates these grievances at all; indeed, these policies are their cause. Shapiro ultimately supports these things, and therefore, despite fraudulently calling himself a “conservative”, he must oppose Buchanan.

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[i] Laura Ingraham, Busting at the Barricades: What I Saw at the Populist Revolt (New York: All Point Books, 2017), p. 16.

[ii] For an account of both the Bradford and Francis affairs, along with a catalogue of other such neoconservative “purges”, see Paul E. Gottfried, “The Logic of the Conservative Purges: Rethinking William F. Buckley’s Quest for ‘Respectibility’”, in The Great Purge: The Deformation of the Conservative Movement, ed. Paul E. Gottfried and Richard B. Spencer (Arlington, VA: Washington Summit Publishers, 2015), pp. 3-32.

[iii] Edward S. Shapiro, “Pat Buchanan and the Jews”, in We Are Many: Reflections on American Jewish History and Identity (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2005), p. 208.

[iv] See: https://www.adl.org/resources/profiles/pat-buchanan-his-own-words and https://www.adl.org/resources/profile/patrick-buchanan-unrepentant-bigot.

[v] Howard L. Adelson, “Another Sewer Rat Appears”, The Jewish Press (Oct 1, 1999).

[vi] He can be found accusing Buchanan of being a Neo-Nazi as early as 1990 (Alan Derschowitz, “Columnists Heart Bleeds for a Nazi War Criminal”, Tampa Bay Times (Mar 24, 1990) and as late as 2017 (Alan Derschowitz, “Dershowitz: A New Tolerance for Anti-Semitism”, Fox News (June 9, 2017).

[vii] Alan Derschowitz in The Forward (Oct 1, 1999).

[viii] John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign

Policy,” John F. Kennedy School of Government Faculty Research Working Paper Series (March 2006): http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP06-011/$File/rwp_06_011_walt.pdf.

[ix] “Debunking the Newest – and Oldest – Jewish Conspiracy:A Reply to the Mearsheimer-Walt ‘Working Paper’”, Harvard Law School Working Paper (April 2006): https://www.comw.org/warreport/fulltext/0604dershowitz.pdf.

[x] For a summary of all these criticisms see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Israel_Lobby_and_U.S._Foreign_Policy#Criticism.

[xi] Patrick J. Buchanan, The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002).

[xii] Sean Last, “Jewish Influence on American Politics”, Ideas and Data (May 17, 2020): https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2020/05/17/jewish-influence-on-american-politics/.

[xiii] Patrick J. Buchanan, “America First – and Second, and Third”, The National Interest, 9 (Spring 1990), pp. 77-82.

[xiv] Shapiro, “Pat Buchanan and the Jews”, pp. 208, 213, 209, 210, 217.