BY NAOMI CRAINE
As his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination picks up steam, Patrick Buchanan has been presenting an increasingly open national socialist, that is counterfeit socialist, program. He purports to speak in the interests of "American workers," against "big business" and the political "establishment."
With this message Buchanan came in first in the New Hampshire primary for the Republican presidential nomination February 20, winning 27 percent of the vote. Senator Robert Dole, the former front-runner, trailed second with 26 percent.
In speeches filled with vivid, popular demagogy, Buchanan - who has pointed in the past with admiration to his father's heroes: fascist leader Francisco Franco of Spain, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and Gen. Douglas McArthur - is appealing to the emotional energies of people who, under crisis conditions, can find no way forward to destroy the liberal democracy that has failed so horribly and replace it with something historically progressive. In the process, Buchanan is building an incipient fascist movement, solidifying a core of supporters committed to his ultrarightist agenda.
Hot on the campaign trail, he pushes his fake
anticapitalism.
"You watch the establishment," Buchanan told a crowd of
supporters two days before winning in New Hampshire primary.
"All the knights and barons will be riding into the castle,
pulling up the drawbridge because they're coming. All the
peasants are coming with pitchforks after them."
In one of his typical stump speeches - increasingly described as "red meat" in the capitalist press - he at tacked the callousness of big business. "When AT&T lops off 40,000 jobs, the executioner that does it, he's a big hero on the cover of one of those magazines, and AT&T stock soars," he declared. To approving cheers, he railed against "this idea of these new businesses, these cold-blooded characters with the green eyeshades."
In a February 15 Washington Post column, Richard Cohen said Buchanan is "hearing the pain of the American worker. It's more than the other candidates have done.... [Clinton's] Labor Secretary Robert Reich has made it his mantra - and now Buchanan of all people is stealing his thunder."
Immigrants and workers in other countries, however, are portrayed as the source of joblessness and falling wages in the United States. Speaking on the TV show "This Week with David Brinkley" on February 18, Buchanan said, "We're going to take it [America] back for the folks who are losing their jobs, and most of those are single women. Go down to the textile mills of South Carolina. Look in the bewildered faces of those women, and you'll know who's losing their jobs when Bob Dole cuts those trade deals and when he sends $50 billion to bail out Mexico."
He tries to appeal not just to workers who are white, but to all "Americans." Talking about immigration, Buchanan continued, "You have a problem of wages being driven down, especially from minority Americans. These folks will work hard for two bucks an hour. Americans can't live on two bucks an hour."
"It must have been made in Mexico," Buchanan said when a microphone went dead at one of his campaign talks in New Hampshire, according to El Diario. The New York Spanish- language daily also quoted him saying, "We've made an analysis of the Great Wall of China. It's an excellent model" for a barrier along the U.S. border.
Would put U.S. fleet in Taiwan Straits
Buchanan's appearance on the Brinkley show, where he
dominated the discussion with several prominent TV news
figures, highlighted several aspects of his program.
Liberal commentator Sam Donaldson asked the candidate, "Should the United States... preserve Taiwan's independence by force of arms" from an attack by Beijing. Buchanan, who has frequently been dubbed an "isolationist" for his opposition to Washington's military interventions in Iraq and Bosnia, said yes.
"I would start with an airlift of modern aircraft, and I would sell the Taiwanese whatever they needed in terms of anti- submarine naval forces. I would move the Seventh Fleet right in that particular area, and then I would tell the Chinese again, `We have told you don't do this.' I think China would wake up and listen...because I would shut off trade with China." He earlier suggested the governments of Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan should be expected to develop nuclear weapons to counter "Pyongyang building nuclear weapons, China having them."
On the same program, Cokie Roberts queried Buchanan about a column he had written on women. "Rail as they will against `discrimination,' women are simply not endowed with the same measure of single-minded ambition and the will to succeed in the fiercely competitive world of western capitalism," she read.
The column "was a defense of wife and motherhood and the idea that many women find complete fulfillment, as my mother did, in raising nine kids and staying home," Buchanan replied. At the same time, he said, "In my world view women ought to have the right to compete on equal terms with men....I am not in favor of affirmative action or quotas or anything like that....Women are competing and doing well in every single field, Cokie. You know that."
In addition to glorifying women as wives and mothers - he introduces his wife, Shelley Buchanan, as his nominee "to replace Hillary Rodham Clinton" - the rightist politician holds up his sister, who is his campaign manager, as a model of a hard-working single mother who also deserves support.
In the week leading up to the New Hampshire vote, Buchanan distanced himself from a couple of his backers, as facts about their racist backgrounds became public. Susan Lamb, a county chairwoman of the Buchanan campaign in Florida, was forced to resign February 16 when it came out that she was also a leader of the National Association for the Advancement of White People.
Tries to distance himself from racists
The day before, Larry Pratt, a co-chairman of Buchanan's
campaign, took what the candidate termed a "leave of absence"
in face of press reports that he had numerous ties with white
supremacist and anti-Semitic forces, such as leaders of the
Aryan Nations. Buchanan disavowed such views, but described
Pratt as a "very loyal supporter" who should be given a chance
to contest the charges. "I have seen too many people abandoned
in Washington, D.C.," he said. "This man is under savage
attack for two reasons. He's a devout Christian who happens to
be strong in favor of gun ownership, and he's standing by with
Pat Buchanan. That's why the dogs are on him."
This combative, "antiestablishment" tone is popular with Buchanan's supporters. He won lots of applause at a rally following the Brinkley show where he described conservative commentator George Will as a yapping "poodle" who deserved being swatted with a newspaper during the show. Will's wife is the communications director for Dole's campaign.
Brinkley himself noted that Buchanan had a reputation as a "brawler."
"The statute of limitations has run out on most of those things," the candidate retorted.
Campaigning in South Carolina in January, Buchanan said, "When the federal judge went after the Citadel [and forced it to accept women], who stood with ya? When they tried to rip the old [Confederate] battle flag out of the South Carolina flag, who stood with you?" Buchanan doesn't back down either from his "cultural war," including opposing all abortion and calling for teaching creationism instead of evolution in public schools.
One article on the New York Times editorial page described his audiences as "more redolent of the trailer park and the bowling alley than the country club. Some of the folks arrive in cars with rusted-out fenders. Sometimes when Mr. Buchanan warns them to `calm down,' it is because he recognizes that a few of the pot-bellied boys in the back would be happy to throw a punch just for the recreation of it." With a typical contempt for working people, the columnist was pointing to the thuggish elements the Buchanan campaign attracts.
Not a conservative
Though he speaks often of "conservatism of the heart,"
Buchanan's program is not conservative. The presidential
contender "has forged an agenda increasingly at variance with
that of most conservatives," noted an article in the February
26 issue of the right-wing National Review, citing his
positions on foreign policy and tariffs. Buchanan's "populism
has moved him steadily leftward on other issues," the magazine
continues.
In this Buchanan differs from all of the other main contenders in the Republican race, who are competing to carry the conservative standard. One of those candidates, Sen. Phil Gramm, dropped out of the race February 14, after losing in the Louisiana and Iowa caucuses. He immediately said he would not endorse Buchanan. "Our party can never follow the path of protectionism," he said. "It is a dagger aimed at the heart of everything we stand for in the world." Gramm soon decided to support Dole's presidential bid.
After the New Hampshire vote, Rudolph Giuliani, the Republican mayor of New York, declared he would not support Buchanan. He left his options open, saying, "President Clinton, Senator Dole, Lamar Alexander - when you talk about people like that, those are all very good, very decent people."
The campaign for Dole, who until recently was considered the front-runner in the Republican primaries, is in bad shape. An attempt to tap into Buchanan's pro-worker theme backfired when the senator told 300 factory workers in New Hampshire, "I didn't realize that jobs and trade and what makes America work would become a big issue in the last few days of this campaign.
Where has he been?" retorted Buchanan.
Lamar Alexander has been rising in the polls. He finished a close third in New Hampshire, behind Buchanan and Dole. Alexander has faced various accusations over the financial dealings he and his wife carried out while he was the Tennessee governor. "I plead guilty to being a capitalist," he said at one point, trying to justify some lucrative investments.