The Militant - July 17, 2000 -- Rightist Buchanan firms grip on Reform Party
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A socialist newsweekly published in the interests of working people
Vol. 64/No. 28July 17, 2000

 
Rightist Buchanan firms grip on Reform Party
FRONT PAGE 
 
BY MAURICE WILLIAMS  
Patrick Buchanan, an incipient fascist politician, is in the process of taking control of the Reform Party, a nationwide party with ballot rights that has access to millions of dollars in federal funds.

While many bourgeois pundits have dismissed Buchanan as increasingly marginal in U.S. politics, the opposite is true. The ultrarightist has been pursuing his goal, which does not consist of short-term electoral gains but of building a cadre that can ultimately become a mass, popular street-fighting movement that can storm to victory. His likely capture of the Reform Party apparatus at the upcoming party convention will be one more step along this road.

Unlike Green Party candidate Ralph Nader, who acts as a left wing of the Democratic Party, Buchanan is one of the main elements threatening the two-party electoral system that has dominated U.S. politics for the past century, and that over the past decade has shown deepening fracture lines under the strains of political polarization. Resorting to demagogy, the ultrarightist feeds on the growing discontent with the Democrats and Republicans and seeks to channel it in a reactionary direction.

"Our two-party system has become a fraud on the people," Buchanan declared in June. Seven months earlier he had announced his break from the Republican Party and his plans to win the Reform Party nomination. "Neither Beltway party speaks for the forgotten Americans whose jobs were exported to finance the bull market we enjoy."

Buchanan, a former speech writer and aide in the Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan administrations, took advantage of his connections within the Republican Party, initially seeking to bore from within that party to assemble cadres for his ultrarightist movement. When he judged the time was ripe he made his break.

The Reform Party was founded by Ross Perot, who in 1992 won 19 percent of the vote, stunning the bourgeois commentators and pollsters. Perot, posing as a champion of the "little guy" who promised to "clean out the stables" of Washington and bring economic stability with an iron hand, appealed to millions in the middle classes who, in face of an increasingly insecure future, are susceptible to radical "solutions." Unlike Buchanan and his cadre of faithful "Buchanan Brigades," Perot built a primarily electoral movement. But his reactionary demagogy greased the skids for Buchanan.

The election of Jesse Ventura as governor of Minnesota had many similarities with the Bonapartist appeal of Perot, and Ventura rapidly gained prominence in the Reform Party.  
 
Shoves rivals out of his way
But over the past months, Buchanan has gradually moved to gain control over the Reform Party, taking on political figures who are obstacles in his path. Ventura was one whom he defeated in spite of the Bonapartist governor's influence over large sections of the Reform apparatus. Ventura, the most prominent politician to win office on the Reform Party ticket, eventually left the party in February, politically unable to take on Buchanan's challenge.

"I believe he has run away from a fight," Buchanan said derisively of Ventura. "I was looking forward to this great battle of Minnesota, a struggle for the soul of the Reform Party."

The day after Ventura bailed out, the Reform Party's national committee held a convention in Nashville where it dumped the party chairman Jack Gargan, a Ventura ally who was elected chair at the party's convention last July. Gargan was replaced by Pat Choate, Perot's running mate in the 1996 presidential race.

In consolidating his base in the Reform Party, Buchanan initially recruited Lenora Fulani, former presidential candidate of the New Alliance Party, a reactionary middle-class outfit that gained influence in the Reform Party--especially in New York. Buchanan used Fulani's image as a "socialist" to promote his own increasingly anticapitalist rhetoric and national socialist trajectory.

Once Fulani's usefulness to him within the Reform Party was exhausted, Buchanan forced her resignation as cochair of his presidential campaign.

In mid-June, Buchanan's supporters succeeded in unseating delegates backing party founder Ross Perot in his home state of Texas. On June 4 Perot's supporters in California backed away from a maneuver to keep Buchanan off the ballot there.

Buchanan is expected to receive the Reform Party's presidential nomination at its convention, scheduled for August 10–13 in Long Beach, California. Along with the nomination, the ultrarightist candidate would be entitled to $12.6 million in federal funds.

Buchanan's takeover of the Reform Party makes his forces the most prominent organizing center for incipient American fascism. Taking over a third capitalist party enhances his campaign against "the establishment" and makes the party a pole of attraction in the national election arena to advance his reactionary aims. Other ultrarightist forces, such as the supporters of the Spotlight newspaper, have been coalescing around his campaign.  
 
Calls for 'America First'
Buchanan continues to pose as a champion of "American workers," sprinkling his speeches with anticapitalist, national socialist rhetoric. He states that his running mate should be "someone who fundamentally believes in a new, America First foreign policy and a trade policy that looks out for working folks."

Referring to the nationalist stance of the Teamsters bureaucracy on U.S. trade relations with China, Buchanan declared, "I stand with the Teamster folks that we ought to put human rights and national security above the profit margins of the Fortune 500, which I think this trade deal is appalling. It's not a deal for American workers."

In making his America First appeal, Buchanan has carefully tempered any overtly racist overtones that could be attributed to his campaign. In a May 30 interview on National Public Radio (NPR) he stated, "Of the folks we travel around the country--some of the friendliest ones are African-American folks and other minority folks because they do believe I'm fighting to keep in the United States the kind of jobs that their kids are going to need."

Buchanan is waging a fight for the right to appear on nationally televised presidential debates, launching a suit against the Federal Election Commission. "The Presidential Debate Commission is supposed to be nonpartisan. It is not," Buchanan declared during the interview on NPR. "It has been set up with the specific purpose of...keeping third parties out of the presidential debate."

The Democrats and Republicans can be expected to make every effort to keep Buchanan out of the debates. Unlike the mainstream candidates, who are carefully dancing around controversial political issues with the goal of getting elected, Buchanan will take the reactionary thrust of Democratic and Republican politicians' positions to their logical extreme--from his calls for building an anti-immigrant wall along the U.S.-Mexico border to his chauvinist campaign against China.



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