This marks another step in Buchanan's longer-term goal, which is not to win opinion polls and the next election — as all the sophisticated pundits smugly assume — but to recruit cadres to a popular, ultrarightist street movement that can eventually storm to victory.

The day before, real estate billionaire Donald Trump proclaimed his membership in the Reform Party's New York affiliate and threatened to challenge Buchanan for the party's nomination. Taking a cue from Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura, his main backer in the Reform Party, Trump is demagogically striving to repackage himself as an anti-Establishment "nonpolitician" who can "get things done."

In a speech titled "The New Patriotism," Buchanan made his announcement before a crowd of 300 partisans in Falls Church, Virginia, which included the majority of the Reform Party's state chairmen.

He accused the Democrats and Republicans of "betrayal," attacking them as "Beltway parties" who don't speak "for the forgotten Americans."

"Our vaunted two-party-system is a snare and a delusion," the ultrarightist stated. "Our two parties have become nothing but two wings of the same bird of prey."

Evoking the class warfare image of peasants with pitchforks storming the castle, as he had during his 1996 campaign, Buchanan aimed a warning at the "Beltway elites," saying, "You don't know this peasant army. We have not yet begun to fight."

Buchanan sounded the reactionary themes of "family, faith, and country" that he has campaigned around since his first presidential bid as a Republican in 1992. He called for a war "to rescue God's country from the cultural and moral pit into which she has fallen." He targeted the president as "our own Elmer Gantry, Mr. Clinton, whose desecration of that temple of our civilization, and squalid behavior, render him unfit to serve as Commander-in-Chief."

Beating the drums of economic nationalism, the ultrarightist denounced the Republican and Democratic leaderships for supporting the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and what he called "the surrender of our national sovereignty to the WTO," referring to the World Trade Organization. A Seattle meeting of the WTO in early December will be the site of protests by assorted liberals, radicals, and trade union officials, whose protectionist "America First" campaign leads working people toward Buchanan's fascist trap.

The rightist politician struck a pose as a champion of "American" workers who are "forced to compete with sweatshop labor abroad," which he associated with NAFTA and the WTO. This demagogic argument and his railing against "a transnational elite that has no loyalty to any country" have marked his increasingly national socialist rhetoric.

Buchanan pushed many elements of his "culture war" — an ideological campaign, directed particularly at disaffected middle-class layers, that scapegoats sections of the U.S. population for the social problems inherent in the capitalist system itself. He denounced a woman's right to choose abortion, affirmative action with quotas, and — in the name of "learning our English language" — the right to bilingual education. He called for a moratorium on immigration, falsely blaming immigrants for "the downward pressure on workers' wages."

The new Reform Party leader avoided some of the shrill anti-immigrant language that sparked protests against him in Arizona and elsewhere during the 1996 Republican primaries. Instead, he appealed to Americanism under the banner of "racial reconciliation," declaring, "Let us abandon a sterile and futile politics of victims-and-villains, and rediscover what brings us all together as one nation and one people."

Invoking patriotism and a supposed lost era of social peace, he concluded, "America needs a Government of National Unity and Reconciliation." The past he alludes to, of course, is the era of Jim Crow segregation, back-alley abortions, and the McCarthyite witchhunt.

Buchanan promoted his America First foreign policy, which most bourgeois commentators have falsely labeled isolationist. In fact, he pledged to send U.S. troops abroad when "our vital interests are imperiled."

In his new book, A Republic, Not an Empire, his assessment of the Vietnam war spells out his general stance: "Vietnam was a legitimate war of containment that could have been won in half the time if the United States had used its full conventional power at the outset, and refused to set geographic limits on the use of that power.… It is the mark of a Great Power that when it commits itself to war, it commits itself to victory, and all the force necessary to prevail."

In the chapter on "Reaffirming and Refining the Monroe Doctrine," Buchanan states that the U.S. government should "not tolerate any regime bordering the Caribbean, in Central America, or in Mexico, controlled by, or allied to, a hostile foreign power," and justifies Washington's military intervention against the Nicaraguan revolution in the 1980s and its aggression against revolutionary Cuba. He also warns of "China's agents" controlling the Panama Canal — one of many calls for taking an aggressive stance against the Chinese government. Hardly an isolationist position.  
 

Trump jumps into campaign

Trump's entry in the presidential campaign as a potential Reform Party candidate, far from unexplainable, is part of the developing pattern in U.S. politics, where the fault lines in the strained two-party system are more and more visible.

Ross Perot's candidacy in 1992, from which the Reform Party emerged, tapped radical attitudes among millions in the middle class and layers of the working class who fear the insecure future capitalism has in store for them and who distrust the traditional political parties and institutions. Perot posed as a tough figure who stood above classes and the dirty politics of Washington and who could cut through the "gridlock" to bring social peace, even at the expense of democratic rights.

Ventura's election as Minnesota governor follows a similar pattern of political figures, known as Bonapartist, arising in times of crisis. Trump is working hard to refashion his image along these lines too. In a September 30 article in the Wall Street Journal, the billionaire offered his credentials as a "nonpolitician" who unlike the Democrats and Republicans — borrowing a page from Perot — would be incorruptible because of his immense wealth and could even claim to speak "for the working men and women."

As an example of a tough foreign policy, Trump vowed that if elected he would threaten to bomb north Korea if it didn't "get out of the nuclear arms race." And he would attempt to seize Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro and put him on trial "like Augusto Pinochet" of Chile. Like Perot and many in the Reform Party, he takes a protectionist stance against NAFTA. Like Ventura, he also espouses a pro-choice position.

The pro-Ventura faction of the Reform Party is using Trump's candidacy to try to block Buchanan. In such a party, there's room for only one man on a white horse.

Trump has attacked Buchanan as a "Hitler lover" who could only get support from "wacky people on the far right."Opponents of Buchanan in the Reform Party, however, may be underestimating him. The incipient fascist doesn't play by the traditional rules of the game. In fact, he has thrived on the storm of controversy generated by his new book.

Buchanan brushes aside accusations of anti-Semitism, and instead goes after his opponents. He has aggressively defended his view that Washington should have let the German imperial government under Hitler attack and weaken or overthrow the workers state in the Soviet Union before going to war against Germany.

In the face of Buchanan's intransigence, many conservative commentators have conceded arguments to the ultrarightist. A range of columnists, from William Buckley to Robert Novak, while expressing their disagreements with him, have asserted that his viewpoint is legitimate and denied the charge that he is an anti-Semite.

When conservative columnist William Safire criticized some of his Jew-baiting statements, Buchanan shot back, on CNN, that Safire was "a lifelong shill of the Israeli lobby." The day after his formal break with the Republicans, he declared that U.S. interests must come "ahead of any other country, and that means Israel," accusing Safire of putting "Israel a little bit ahead of his own country."  
 

Ventura's demagogy

Meanwhile, Ventura has stirred controversy over an interview in the November issue of Playboy. His comments reveal the reactionary thrust of his political course, despite his admirers among the "left" who point to his supposedly progressive positions on a range of social issues such as capital punishment, the military draft, and the right to abortion.

In the interview, Ventura opposes capital punishment but pointedly adds that he is for eliminating parole. "Life should be life. And there should be no three strikes. Should be one strike," he declares.

Similarly, Ventura criticizes the draft because "only the poor were getting drafted" in the Vietnam war, but adds that "if you're going to have a draft then there should be no deferments."

On abortion, far from defending women's rights, he lumps it with prostitution and drug use as unavoidable evils that should be decriminalized. He also dismisses the 1991 Tailhook scandal of sexual abuse of women in the Navy as "much ado about nothing."

Possibly worried that Trump may be no match for Buchanan and his cadre of supporters, who rumble that the billionaire is trying to "buy" the nomination, Ventura has hinted he might consider joining the presidential race himself rather than serve out his term as he had previously said.

Buchanan responded to the possible Ventura challenge with a taunt: "I'd say, 'Jesse, come on in. The water's fine.' "  
 
 
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