Buchanan vs. Reagan: The Fight for the Soul of the Right: Part One – Bad History

The GOP is at a crossroad.  We look to two figures who define the divide.  We start with Buchanan's revisionist history to gain insights.  

Transcript

Buchanan vs. Reagan: The Fight for the Soul of the Right: Part One – Bad History

September 2024

“Buchanan’s is not the conservatism of Ronald Reagan, or Barry Goldwater, or William F. Buckley Jr. It is not even, as is so often incorrectly said, a revival of Robert Taft Republicanism: Taft didn’t play to the union halls, and Medicare would have horrified him.”

Ramesh Ponnuru – Former Editor of National Review

“Like many polemicists, Buchanan cannot resist over-egging the pudding. Any facts that stand in the way of his thesis are tweaked or ignored.” 

David Freeman – Professor of History

“If history teaches anything, it teaches that self-delusion in the face of unpleasant facts is folly.”

Ronald Reagan

In this and the next podcast, I will address two parts of Pat Buchanan’s legacy. First, I will assail Buchanan, the historian, for so much of his politics emanates from his vague understanding of history. Second, as the progenitor of the policies that now dominate on the right, to the exclusion of those of Reagan, the very ethos of Trump and his VP candidate, JD Vance, I will address Buchannan’s policies. 

And now for the history part.

Why do we write history.  I get the reading part.  But why the writing?  I believe that many write not out of direct interest of history but rather for ambitious purposes

A few podcasts ago, I attacked the inanity of Tucker Carlson and his guest—some historian of whom I do not have the capacity nor inclination to recall his name. But in research for that podcast, I came across a political figure whose presence always made my skin crawl a bit.  And voila, I found the culprit behind Carlson’s rank stupidity, the spider in the web of not just right-wing historical revisionism but of MAGA’s entire agenda: successful political operative turned rhetorician Pat Buchanan. I can dismiss Carlson’s guest, and in a way, Carlson himself as just another stunt to stand out from the junk clutter of the grifting right in order to get more sweet, sweet subscriber and ad money.  Not so fast with this guy.  Not only was Buchanan at the center of two presidential administrations, a commentator on all the largest political news shows, a columnist and a master of rhetoric, but he can, sadly, write.  And instead of providing the usual self-justifying political blather book, he went into history.    

In the next podcast, I will provide a political critique, but his history, my direct patch, is where he provides historical context to the ideas adapted today. Much as Howard Zinn cherry-picked examples of American history for his neo-Communist tome A People’s History of the United States, a bald-faced justification for socialism here in the US, and as Nikole Hannah Jones warped our history into a DEI diatribe, Buchanan does the same.  

I have been very clear on my approach to history.  I have developed criteria based on traditional conservative principles that include prudence in approaching the content, variety in assessing sources, and an institutional approach based on scholarship, detective work, and hard-core research.  I have long argued that the progressive methodology is to select one of their political narratives, then cherry-pick facts or make them up to prove one’s point.  That is what Zinn did to justify his anti-Americanism. The issue is that in Buchanan’s work, he has followed much the same historiography if you can call it that.  

Adam Kirsch’s piece “Pat Buchanan’s Historical Revisionism” about Buchanan’s Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War clarifies that Buchanan’s work is the true inspiration for the sewage spewed on Carlson’s show. 

“Just from the titles of Mr. Buchanan’s books — “Day of Reckoning,” “State of Emergency,” “The Death of the West” — it is clear that he deploys a rhetoric of violence and treason more redolent of the German right in the Weimar period than of anything in the American conservative tradition. Open the books themselves, and things only get worse. Mr. Buchanan is a man who can write, in “Day of Reckoning,” that “we are on a path to national suicide,” not because he is oblivious to the echoes of the old eugenicist term “race suicide,” but because he positively embraces them.  Buchanan starts with the premise that immigration is bad and then constructs his work to prove his thesis historically.  Political positioning is one thing; history, though, is another.  

We will begin with one of Buchanan’s first forays into history, his book, A Republic, Not an Empire. Of this work, Norman Podhoretz, editor-at-large of Commentary Magazine at the time, had this to say on Buchanan’s reluctance to support Israel, “This politically reckless act has taken the form of his new book, A Republic, Not an Empire. There, he offers a revisionist account of World War II, which is as soft on Hitler as, conversely, the revisionist historians of the Cold War were once (rightly) accused of being on Stalin.”

Blithely circling around a mountain of evidence to the contrary, particularly writings from Mein Kampf, Buchanan maintains that wiping out the Jewish people was not one of Hitler’s primary aims. To the extent that he tried to accomplish this objective, he was driven into it by Britain and the U.S.  One of  Buchanan’s descriptions of the Fuhrer was “an individual of great courage, a soldier’s soldier in the Great War, . . . [a] genius,” etc. 

Buchanan does a perfunctory acknowledgment of Hitler’s capacity for evil.  But his statements of this type are undercut by Mr. Buchanan’s habit of championing the cause of almost anyone accused of participating actively in Hitler’s genocidal campaign against the Jews.  In this book and the follow-up, Buchanan contended that Hitler was dragged into a war with, and by, the Allies, France and Britain, a conflict he did not desire. 

So, in Buchanan’s world, who would fill that role if Hitler was not the villain of World War II?  That figure would come in a different book: Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. It portrays Winston Churchill as a warmonger who turned a deaf ear to Adolf Hitler -- a much-misunderstood man, in Mr. Buchanan’s view -- and to all evidence of Hitler’s wish to be friends. Mr. Buchanan’s book was a best-seller, enthusiastically touted by Fox News impresario Sean Hannity (these Fox News guys love their revisionist history).  Buchanan was not only successful; he was completely wrong.  

One of his main contentions was that Winston Churchill stated in 1938 that the policy of appeasing Hitler (another policy Mr. Buchanan now retrospectively defends) left Britain with the “bleak choice between War and Shame. I think we shall choose Shame and then have War thrown in a little later.” Buchanan would conjecture that Churchill went to War not based on Nazi aggression and a string of broken promises but personal pride.  Buchanan displays the sentiments of the left.  Forget the facts; what did Churchill feel at the time?  

David Freeman, a professor of history at California State University, Fullerton, rises to the defense of Churchill in a piece called “A Polemic Not a History.” Freeman states, “Buchanan has done no archival research. Instead, he has read the standard popular histories such as Barbara Tuchman’s and William Manchester’s, and the revisionist histories of A.J.P. Taylor, Correlli Barnett, John Charmley, et al. Conspicuous by omission is David Irving—presumably intentionally. From these purely secondary sources, Buchanan formulates his theses. What are his arguments, and what are we to make of them?

A quotation from A.N. Wilson summarizes Buchanan’s main argument, cited deeply in the text: “The tragedy of the twentieth century is that in order to defeat Hitler, Churchill believed it was not merely necessary but desirable to ally himself with Stalin.” Buchanan believed that Nazism and communism were both bad but that communism was the more significant threat. He accepts Hitler’s repeated insistence that the Third Reich never desired War with the British Empire. From here, he concludes that Britain and France should have consigned central and eastern Europe to Hitler, hoping that Germany and Russia would destroy one another in a clash of titans, while the democracies held a defensible line in the west. 

As if Hitler, smarting from the Treaty of Versailles, something cited in many of his speeches and writings, would have left France alone.  Then, with France gone, Hitler would have left Britain alone.  

Even the title of the book is Buchanan twisting Churchill’s meaning.  Buchanan contends that it is Unnecessary because Britain would not acquiesce (further, it should be noted) to Hitler’s desires.  What Churchill actually meant in his own work, The Gathering Storm, was that had the Allies taken a firm stand in 1938 over Czechoslovakia, they could have strangled Germany then and there before they were able to deploy million-man armies on Poland and France.  The unnecessary part of the deaths of tens of millions was Britain’s failure to act earlier, not to sit on the sidelines.

Buchanan goes on to note that Neville Chamberlain, egged on by Churchill, committed “the greatest blunder in history” by guaranteeing Poland against German attack after Hitler had absorbed the rump Czech state Chamberlain thought he and Hitler had guaranteed at Munich.  Because Buchanan could not be bothered to look, he might have realized that Chamberlain was not exactly at the beck and call of Churchill and made the decision independently after he felt Hitler duped him.  Chamberlain famously and incorrectly declared “Peace in Our Time” and later realized his belief was wrong. He, not Churchill, allied with Poland by his own agency.  “Chamberlain would be surprised to know he was stampeded into the Polish guarantee by Churchill—whom he studiously ignored.” Adds Freeman. 

As I noted in detail in a previous podcast. Once Hitler obtained power in 1934, one of his first acts was to reoccupy the German Rhineland with troops in 1936, in violation of the Versailles Treaty.  Then, he expanded the German army, again in violation.  Then, he occupied Austria in 1938.  Britain and France were nervous, having lost less than 20 years earlier, the aforementioned 3.5 million people to German Aggression.  But they did not do anything.  Then, in 1939, Hitler took the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia with the claim that it was German people (like Austria) and that he was uniting his kind.  Thoroughly alarmed, there was a peace conference at which Hitler said, sorry about the concern, guys. This is it, I am satisfied.  Then Hitler then took the rest of Czechoslovakia.  This was the guy the French and British should have trusted to leave them alone.  To believe his peace entreaties.  I love how the real political cold warrior Buchanan sounds as naïve as Charlie Brown, thinking that Lucy will let him kick the ball this time.  

Buchanan could have been cured of this delusion by reading Hannah Arendt’s analysis in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” in which she lays bare the distinctive quality of Nazism (and Stalinism): that it was not a party but a movement, which could keep itself alive only by constant motion, new conquests, new transformations of society.  Hitler himself made it very plain that Germany was only the beginning of his ambitions, which ran to the complete reorganization of the world as a racial hierarchy. Left to his own devices, Hitler would have completed the genocide of the Jews, made Poland and Ukraine German slave colonies, depopulated Russia, and committed even more horrors against the “Christian peoples” for whom Mr. Buchanan professes such solicitude when contemplating their sufferings under communism.

In any case, everything that was weak in Churchill’s character and objectionable in his politics was well-known during his lifetime. In the mid-1930s, indeed, he was one of the most unpopular politicians in Britain. The reason why he came back from exile to be named prime minister in May 1940, England’s darkest hour, was not because he was a perfect statesman but because he was indomitable: “We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” 

“Pity the nation that reaches a point where it needs a Churchill to save it, but pity even more a nation that, needing a Churchill, fails to find one,” adds Kirsch. 

It is not just WWII that Buchanan gets wrong.  In The Unnecessary War, Buchanan states, “Had Britain not declared War on Germany in 1914, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and India would not have followed the Mother Country in. Nor would Britain’s ally Japan. Nor would Italy, which London lured in with secret bribes of territory from the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. Nor would America have gone to War had Britain stayed out. Germany would have been victorious, perhaps in months. There would have been no Lenin, no Stalin, no Versailles, no Hitler, no Holocaust.”

Buchanan believes that imperial Germany, who won wars against Denmark, Austria, and France in the 19th century and under Kaiser Wilhelm II, was willingly, excitedly going to War against the nations of his first cousins, would have beaten France and then gone back to pre-1914 Status Quo? That the Tsarist Empire, after defeat by Germany (which Buchanan notes above), would not have become something worse after its inevitable fall? Buchanan believes that India would have remained under the British yoke.  A nation of 300 million being ruled by, at best, 300,000 British?  Would Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have stayed indefinitely under British rule?

I am often designated a history buff because I lack the requisite PhD and academic platform.  Given that I have a book and over 220 podcasts averaging 3,000 words, I am fairly comfortable assuming the title of historian, and I will grudgingly afford the title to Buchanan.  But his works often seem like a history buff’s read on history.  “I have read Tuchman and a few other works and thus will speculate on British history.” However, without knowing the narratives of India back to the Mauryans or what the 2nd and 3rd Reich actually denoted in Germanic history, it is not easy to make the sweeping generalizations that Buchanan provides.  Buchanan does not seem to note that Hitler’s murder of the Jews was not a unique Nazi invention but rather the systematization of a millennia-long hatred that, in a lesser form, could have taken place under the Kaisers.  

Adds Kirsch, “Mr. Buchanan’s total reliance on the work of historians — there is no sign in this book that has opened a scholarly journal or delved into an archive — makes it a bit rich for him to claim that he is out to overturn some historians’ consensus or conspiracy. “Historians today,” he writes, “see in Hitler’s actions [during the 1930s] a series of preconceived and brilliant moves on the chessboard of Europe, reflecting the grand strategy of an evil genius unfolding step by step ... This is mythology.” The only mythology here is the existence of such naive “historians,” none of whom Mr. Buchanan actually names. In fact, almost all of Mr. Buchanan’s contentions have long pedigrees. When he writes that the Treaty of “Versailles had created not only an unjust but unsustainable peace,” he echoes what John Maynard Keynes wrote in the very year of the Treaty and what is now as close to a commonplace as history can show.”

Now, Buchanan was not alone. Niall Ferguson is also another WWII revisionist.  But Ferguson is a pure historian who I imagine, even among the subset of American populists, could not be named by 1 in 10 of them.  Buchanan, however, was a crucial figure in the Nixon Administration (the one who told Nixon not to resign).  He was a Reagan speechwriter.  He was once a celebrated figure on the right for his cold-warrior, anti-Soviet positions.  He ran for president in 1992 and 1996.  Ferguson was not the keynote speaker at the 1992 Republican National Convention.  They gave him a prime spot because he was a party power broker.  Buchanan had influence.  Or should I say HAS influence?  We shall see the permissive nature of his views in today’s GOP.  Buchanan’s history is puzzling unless two goals are perceived: to sell books and create political influence.  I am not averse to either of these goals, but I would not say I like writing shoddy or incorrect history to get there.  

In reflection of the left, Buchanan embodies that same ethos that America was at fault.  Contrast this with Reagan’s view. “I’d really like to go down in history as the President who made Americans believe in themselves again.”

If Buchanan had actually extended his history beyond Europe, no doubt the Koreans provoked the Japanese invasion of 1910, and heck, those darn Incas made life so miserable for the Spanish that those nice conquistadors had no choice. If only the Incans had left them alone. Reagan also said, “It isn’t so much that liberals are ignorant. It’s just that they know so many things that aren’t so.”  The same can be said of Buchanan.