Sometime in 1990, Patrick Buchanan—a former speech writer and aide in the Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan White Houses, and a newspaper columnist and talk-show host—had issued a second edition of his autobiographical political tract, Right from the Beginning. I had picked up a copy of the book and started reading it, and I brought a copy with me to the [SWP] convention that year. That was very much on my mind as I took some time in the report to begin raising the connection between the deepening social crisis we had been living through, the opening guns of renewed interimperialist conflicts, and the inevitable emergence of incipient fascist currents and demagogues in the United States and other imperialist countries.

I had been struck in particular by a chapter in Buchanan's book entitled, "As We Remember Joe," a nostalgic account of why his father had held Senator Joseph McCarthy in such high esteem. Among the other family heroes, Buchanan explains, were General Francisco Franco, leader of the fascist forces during the Spanish civil war in the late 1930s, and right-wing U.S. general Douglas MacArthur. MacArthur was the commander of U.S. forces in Korea who pressed for an invasion of China even after the U.S. rulers, despite their initial plans, concluded in their majority that this would be a fiasco. To understand why people such as his father admired these ultrarightist figures, Buchanan wrote, "is to begin to understand not only his generation but ours."

In the early 1950s, Buchanan said, America was "ready for Joe McCarthy's boisterous, bellowing call for the overthrow of its reigning establishment." The "war of legitimacy that Joe launched had undertones... of class warfare," Buchanan said. Behind the controversy around McCarthy "were warring concepts of morality, of legitimacy, of patriotism," he said. "Who is the legitimate moral authority in America? Who, by conviction, background, character, and belief, should rightly determine the destiny of the Republic, and which is the illegitimate usurper, incompetent to identify and protect America's true interests from her real enemies?"¹ (Notice how "communists" are absent here as direct targets!)  
 

Buchanan campaign not a sideshow

In November 1991 Buchanan announced his intention to wrest the Republican nomination for president from George Bush. We immediately began campaigning to explain the true political significance of Buchanan's announcement. What most of the big-business media was initially treating as a sideshow inside the Republican Party, we said, was not at all funny. It was not idiosyncratic. Instead, it marked a revival for the first time since McCarthy of a demagogic ultrarightist strand in bourgeois politics in the United States—a strand that would eventually spill over into the streets, and that would not go away until the fate of humanity was decided in struggle in those same streets.

By early 1992 a few bourgeois commentators were beginning to take seriously what Buchanan was setting out to do. One example was an article by conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer that had been run in the March 1 issue of the Washington Post and syndicated in daily papers throughout the United States. He had written that the central problem with Buchanan is not his anti-Semitism—which several other commentators had accurately pointed to—nor various other of his particular reactionary views. (Krauthammer cataloged some of these: Buchanan's exhortations against "a morally cancerous welfare state"; his racist alarm bells about the "Flood tide of immigration"; his warning that "white Americans will be a minority by 2050"; his question, "Who speaks for the Euro-Americans?"; his hero-worship of Franco and the butcher of Chile, Gen. Augusto Pinochet; and his euphemistic reference to the apartheid regime in South Africa as "the Boer republic.")

"The real problem with Buchanan," Krauthammer wrote, is that his views are "in various and distinct ways, fascistic."

That bald characterization of the Buchanan campaign marked a new departure in the respectable daily press in the United States. Until then, the big-business media had been doing their best to slide over the fact that a fascist program was being advanced as a "legitimate" perspective within the two-party system by one of the leading contenders in the 1992 presidential primaries. But Krauthammer's characterization was correct, as far as it went. Buchanan's "America First" demagogy is indeed not only a variety of an incipient American fascism, but the most prominent organizing center for it today.²  
 

Emotional, demagogic appeal

But fascism is a special kind of extreme nationalist movement, something that Kraut-hammer, as an apologist for capitalism, did not and could not explain. A fascist movement above all seeks to mobilize the emotional energies of masses of people who hate the liberal capitalist democracy that is failing so horribly but can find no way forward to replace it with something historically progressive.

We called this new development in U.S. politics "Buchananism." And we printed a special issue of the International Socialist Review supplement to the Militant, headlined, "Buchananism: What It Is and How to Fight It," that supporters of the Socialist Workers Party presidential ticket of James Warren and Estelle DeBates sold thousands of copies of last year as a central piece of campaign literature. We joined with others around the country in picketing events where Buchanan was proselytizing for his reactionary cause.

Incipient fascist movements, demagogic "popular" ultrarightist movements, are often identified with an individual: McCarthyism ("Nixonism" would have served as well at the time), Huey Longism, Father Coughlinism, and there are many more examples from the United States and other countries.³ It is useful to note this fact, to show the variety of forms rightist movements can take and where they come from. The individuals or "movements" such currents are named after are accidental. They have no scientific ideas, or materialist analysis of the crisis of capitalism. But they do have a real "solution" to offer desperate and resentful people.

While Buchanan keeps one foot firmly planted in "normal" bourgeois politics, he at the same time appeals to those who will increasingly seek to function outside that framework and to fight in the streets to impose radical solutions to stop the descent into a "new Sodom." In the Buchanan phenomenon, we could see a pincers movement: one flank came out of the "respectable" Republican Party, including the middle-class areas of Washington, D.C., where Buchanan himself was born and reared. It converged with the cowards trying to block the abortion clinics, with the thugs who simply put the white sheets aside for a while, with all those attracted to taking out their insecurity and hatred against sections of the working class.

Buchanan's hero, Joseph McCarthy, also set out to galvanize a fascist movement in the United States in the aftermath of World War II. And right-wing presidential campaigns were organized in 1964 by Republican candidate Barry Goldwater and in 1968 by Gov. George Wallace of Alabama. But none of these figures arose in conditions of an economic and social crisis that was bound to get worse. None arose in depression-like conditions under which the radical social demagogy and aggressive nationalism necessary to inspire a cadre would have enabled a mass fascist movement to get organized and grow.⁴

1. Patrick Buchanan, Right from the Beginning (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1990), pp. 91–95.

2. In an interview in the July 17, 1995, issue of the New Yorker magazine, the conservative Republican politician and former Bush administration official William Bennett warned that Buchanan is "flirting with" fascism. "This Fortress America stuff, this You the People stuff— I think it's tricky." Bennett is, like Buchanan, a Republican, a Roman Catholic, and a prominent bourgeois campaigner for "family values" and around many of the themes at the center of Buchanan's "culture war." Also like Buchanan, Bennett's family roots are not in the ruling class or its exclusive private prep schools.

3. As a young U.S. congressman from California, Richard Nixon was the most prominent other U.S. political figure in the leadership of the incipient fascist current associated with McCarthy. Father Charles Coughlin, the so-called radio priest, led the fascist "Social Justice" movement, which began to gain momentum in the United States during the renewed sharpening of the Great Depression in 1937-38. Huey Long, governor and later U.S. senator from Louisiana, built a base for his Bonapartist control of state politics in the late 1920s and early 1930s under the demagogic slogan, "Share the Wealth."

4. For a discussion of the 1964 Republican presidential campaign of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, see "What Goldwater Represents" by Joseph Hansen in the July 31, 1964, issue of World Outlook magazine. Given the capitalist boom at the time, and the impact on U.S. politics of the Black rights struggle and colonial revolution, Hansen wrote, "America is not ripe for a fascist takeover. On the contrary, the ground is being prepared for an enormous push in the opposite direction." George Wallace gained national prominence as governor of Alabama in the early 1960s as a demagogic defender of Jim Crow segregation and "states' rights." In 1968 he ran for president on the American Independent Party (AIP) ticket on a platform aimed at rolling back the conquests of the mass civil rights movement. Wallace received 13 percent of the popular vote. The AIP disappeared shortly following the election.  
 
 
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