Buchanan vs. Reagan: The Fight for the Soul of the Right: Part Two – Bad Politics

The GOP is at a crossroads.  We look to two figures who define the choices.  We look at Buchanan's politics, their influence on the current GOP, and Reagan's views for perspective.  

Transcript

Buchanan vs. Reagan: The Fight for the Soul of the Right: Part Two – Bad Politics

September 2024

“It is peculiar for Buchanan, ostensibly a “populist” favoring Main Street rather than Wall Street, to adopt protectionism, which aims to correct consumer preferences that the government deems incorrect.”

George Will

“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

“Let me speak plainly: The United States of America is and must remain a nation of openness to people of all beliefs. Our very unity has been strengthened by this pluralism. That’s how we began; this is how we must always be. The ideals of our country leave no room whatsoever for intolerance, anti-Semitism, or bigotry of any kind -- none. The unique thing about America is a wall in our Constitution separating church and state. It guarantees there will never be a state religion in this land, but at the same time, it makes sure that every single American is free to choose and practice his or her religious beliefs or to choose no religion at all. Their rights shall not be questioned or violated by the state.”

Ronald Reagan

I love Yogi Berraisms, and among those are “When you come to the fork in the road, take it!” I sometimes describe myself as Captain Pedantic when correcting some minor historical incorrection. But today, it is Captain Cliché! After the election of 2024, which I fear and lament will go to an epically unworthy for the highest office in our nation, Kamala Harris.  With two clear paths, the GOP will be at a fork in the road (cliché alert).  One of them is to continue down the road that has been trod since 2015, and the other is to reclaim the belief system that existed from the late 1960s to about ten years ago. 

I had to choose the title of this podcast with care.  I originally wanted to put in Barry Goldwater, the Arizona Senator who was the intellectual progenitor of the three-stool conservative movement. The pillars of the tri-part policy mix were small, limited government, American exceptionalism abroad, and social conservatism.  Many have said that Reagan was the heir to Goldwater, but we first had to go through Richard Nixon, he of price controls and the EPA, and Gerald Ford and his ineffectual Whip Inflation Now program.  

Reagan also brought two key attributes to his presidency and his programs.  He believed strongly in the nation’s greatness, not as rhetoric or a performative nod, but really believed.  The second was a sunny disposition, the happy warrior archetype.  In many regards, this quality emanated from the second. It was also a consequence of his belief in himself and his ideas.  He did not need a crowd to affirm his self-worth.  He also believed the Democrats were poor stewards of government but did not indulge in the “elect me, or the country is over” alarmism we have seen since Obama’s first term, again something seeping from a lack of true confidence in the belief systems at hand. This alarmism was Patrick Buchanan’s stock in trade, as exhibited by the dire titles of all his books.  You get words like Death, Wrong, Suicide, Reckoning, Threats and Betrayal.  Did this guy put Doom into this thesaurus and then just pick the next synonym?

It was in 1992 that Buchanan emerged from his role as a political operative to Nixon and Cold War speechwriter to Reagan as a candidate for president.  He had always enjoyed national prominence but became the center of attention for the right.  Given his strong beliefs, he seemed more ardent and certain that George HW Bush, the moderate and the guy who, in 1992, was laboring under his breaking of a pledge to not create new taxes.  In addition to the policy prescriptions driven by Buchanan, he initiated a new style for GOP candidates.  The optimism of America was gone, replaced by apocalyptic scenarios.  

Since 2008, we have had three out of the past four Democratic presidents, but our nation, battered and all, is still here. It is not that I think Democratic policies, all anathema to the three pillars I have already outlined, will not eventually lead to our decline or worse. Since 2000, we have seen an explosion in Americans, particularly seniors, and specifically related to entitlements, becoming far more dependent on the government. Unlike so many democratic policies, this is an intended, not unintended, consequence.  

It is just that I do not buy into the doomsday scenarios trafficked by the MAGA movement every four years. Part of my skepticism is their answer to governmental intrusion, which is governmental intrusions. Their prognostications of impending destruction are, in so many ways, a mirror image of the falsities perpetrated by, one example, Climate Change zealots.  So it’s a little tough to take their disaster scenarios seriously when their true pitch is, “Vote Republican; we are not quite as bad as those other guys.” 

Yet after Reagan, even if lip service, GOP presidential candidates, with the exception of Buchanan, hewed their policies and personas as closely to him as possible.  Until 2016.  There is a plethora of ways that Trump’s GOP, with its love of command economies, big government, protectionism, isolationism, rejection of social conservatism, and admiration for autocracy abroad, is not the party of Reagan.  Yet before JD Vance, before Donald Trump, it was Pat Buchanan who first emerged to challenge the Reagan style of conservativism.  And today, with Congressional influencers like Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Green, Tucker Carlson, Charlie Kirk, and a host of AM radio hosts hectoring on the sidelines, and corruption of once conservative institutions such as the Heritage Foundation and the Conservative Political Action Committee, the party far more resembles Buchananism with its tribalism, Democratic policies, and outlook than of Reaganism.  Scratch the surface of any of today’s populist leaders or influencers and find Pat Buchanan’s thoughts.   

And it was Buchanan who helped bring the party from one that won five out of six elections from 1968 to 1988 to one that is now perched to win one out of the past five from 2008 to 2024.  And Buchanan, like your present speaker, used history to help guide him. Well, sort of. He created the same havoc in politics that he made in my genre.  The left has produced the likes of Howard Zinn, James Loewen, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Nikole Hannah Jones to distort and warp history for political expediency.  The issue is that this same phenomenon is now prevalent on the right. Buchanan was not the initial father of right-wing warped history, but he was a key populizer of it. And it is intertwined with his political views.  After his aborted presidential runs in the 1990s, many conservatives hoped to see an end to Buchanan’s influence. Still, like a dormant insect, it has emerged from the larvae and pupae stage to full adulthood in MAGA form.  

I never knew the man, but those who did describe someone opposite of what I saw on TV: smug, combative, and arrogant.  Figures such as George Will say he was engaging, fun, and approachable off-camera.  I do not care what his personality was like. Barack Obama seems like a pretty cool guy, but that does not belie the damage he has wrought to the social fabric of our nation.  

The following is a look at policies perpetuated by Buchanan, which are now key pillars of the populism movement that has taken hold of the Republican Party.  

Buchanan on isolationism:

In his Day of Reckoning (remember that all of Buchanan’s books have a ring of Armageddon in their titles), Buchanan’s foreign policy prescriptions include withdrawing from NATO, abandoning our commitments to Taiwan and South Korea, and pretty much everywhere else in the world. 

Buchanan says, “The ‘cataclysmic terrorism’ of 9/11 was an unpardonable atrocity. But it was not unpredictable. For terrorism is the price of empire. Islamic killers are over here because we are over there.”  Yup, like a good far left-wing ideologues believe, 9/11 is really our fault.  Noam Chomsky could not have said it better himself.

Giving into terrorism is craven and just plain wrong.  This is akin to Churchill saying, sorry, Adolph; we will let bygones be bygones, but curious old chap, why is your Luftwaffe over our sky?  The ceding of Middle East energy reserves to Islamic extremists like Osama Bin Laden or to Arab strongmen such as Saddam Hussein would grossly affect the US.  I will not make the entire neo-conservative argument here, but suffice it to say Buchanan has it backward.  We fight them there, or we will fight them here.  For all his supposed brilliant insights into WWII, Buchanan seems to have missed that other part of the war where Japan pulled us into that conflict by attacking our sovereign lands in Hawaii.  Nor has this historian studied the War of 1812, the Mexican War of the last 1840s, the Lusitania, and the indiscriminate U-boat activity of World War I.  He has heard of 9/11 but missed the meaning.  

Buchanan writes, “We borrow from Europe to defend Europe. We borrow from the Gulf states to defend the Gulf states. We borrow from Japan to defend Japan. Is it not a symptom of senility to borrow from the world so we can defend it?” We are not defending the world. I always hated when Obama invoked his strawman arguments, and we have Buchanan doing it here. We did not intervene in 1990s Rwanda despite the bloodshed there.  We did not enter the Peru-Ecuador war, though that was in our hemisphere, and despite abject chaos in Haiti, we are not there either.  We are defending American interests, which is a foreign goal worth having.  Note the Trump/Vance approach so easily mirrors Buchanan’s.  

Another work, Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency, states, “Listening to the neoconservatives, Bush invaded Iraq, united the Arab world against us, isolated us from Europe, and fulfilled to the letter bin Laden’s prophecy as to what we were about.” 

Actually, Trump’s Abraham Accords united most of the Arab World with us (and Israel), Putin has reunited Europe in opposition to him, and bin Laden and all his minions are very dead.  Buchanan’s prophecies are as dumb as his policies.  

As noted above, Buchanan also likes to indulge in the apocalyptic beliefs that are fashionable on the right and the left.  The right says that if Harris wins, the country is over.  The left claims if Trump wins, it’s the end of Democracy. These predictions are more about sucking the dollars out of the pockets of donors, particularly older, more credulous ones, than about any doomsday.   In his Suicide of a Superpower (seriously, these titles), the subhead is Will America Survive to… 2025? This is like Al Gore predicting in 2006 that the glaciers will be gone by 2016 (hint, they are still there and writing this in September of 2024, so are we – though according to Buchanan, I should be stocking guns, propane, and canned goods, now! Because I have only three months to Judgement Day).  

Per Buchanan, “The difference between an optimist and a pessimist,” said journalist Clare Boothe Luce, “is that the pessimist is usually better informed.” Maybe, but not in this case. 

“Live simply, love generously, care deeply, speak kindly, leave the rest to God.”

and

“Because we’re a great nation, our challenges seem complex. It will always be this way. But as long as we remember our first principles and believe in ourselves, the future will always be ours.” 

Ronald Reagan

The Party of the Working Class

Buchanan, from his 1992 Convention Speech, 

“There were those workers at the James River Paper Mill in Northern New Hampshire in a town called Groveton -- tough, hearty men. None of them would say a word to me as I came down the line, shaking their hands one by one. They were under a threat of losing their jobs at Christmas. And as I moved down the line, one tough fellow about my age just looked up and said to me, “Save our jobs.” My friends, these people are our people. They don’t read Adam Smith or Edmund Burke, but they come from the same schoolyards and the same playgrounds and towns as we came from (really? Buchanan came from DC). They share our beliefs and our convictions, our hopes and our dreams. These are the conservatives of the heart. They are our people. And we need to reconnect with them. We need to let them know we know how bad they’re hurting. They don’t expect miracles of us, but they need to know we care.” 

I will play a continual game here.  Guess the politician.  You would not have known the difference if I had told you it was Bernie Sanders.  It is not the role of the federal government, or any government, to “save jobs,” especially in an outdated industry such as paper.  Among the eight organizations I worked with in my business career, one was a company that printed books, magazines, and catalogs.  That company is gone.  The Internet killed it.  It is called capitalism, and that system has created untold prosperity worldwide. Part of it is not to use government interference to save industries that make a product no one wishes to buy.  The true role of government is to create the dynamics or get the heck out of the way as new jobs are created. The purpose of government is to build an environment where those James Rivers workers can find better work.   What else does Buchanan wish to protect, the old typesetters I knew from my printing days? Silversmiths?  

In his epic Working Class Dog album (yes, the one with Jesse’s Girl), Rick Springfield writes, 

I’m workin’ hard, I don’t know why

I’m like a working-class dog, and I just get by

At the time, Springfield was a soap opera actor and successful pop musician.  Undoubtedly, he worked hard, but that is not the image that he, Buchanan, and Trump now project onto the GOP. That is someone down in the mines, laboring to bring in a harvest or endlessly toiling along an assembly line in 92-degree, non-air-conditioned factories.  In 1900s America, these images were prevalent, but today?  Farmers do not bring in harvests; their giant combines do that.  Less than 11% of employed Americans work in what are termed manufacturing jobs.  And the total United Mine Workers membership is 80,000, or roughly half the employees at Apple Computer.  All of Ford’s American factories have air conditioning, and according to the United Auto Workers, the average number of hours, with breaks, is 40.2 per week.  Allowing for eight hours of sleep each day and 1 hour of daily commuting yields weekly leisure hours of 49 or seven per day, not including time off and holidays—just gettin by-indeed.  

Protectionism 

The current talk of elites (!) on the right and Systemic Power inequities on the left also reflect Buchanan 

In his State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, “The Bush plan is economic treason against the American worker.” Which worker?  The MRI machine operator?  The finance guy at that non-profit.  I was in marketing for over 30 years and have never lost my job to an immigrant. I did not even lose one to AI or Indian-style outsourcing.  Of course, Bucahan means those workers I noted above.  

He goes on to say, “That “civil rights leaders” are silent about the dispossession of the black working class, that unions are not marching to denounce this sellout of blue-collar and white-collar America, only tells us that the amorality of the transnational corporation has infected both. Solidarity be damned, it is all about money now.”

Remember my contest? If I had told you that was written by Elizabeth Warren or Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, would you know the difference? We are to assume that the Astors, Rockefellers, Carnegies, Fricks, and Fords who built this nation into an economic superpower, the economics that powered everything else, were in it for the benefit of society?  Buchanan is that guy who claims to be a capitalist but hates the nature of capitalism.  At least Sanders and AOC are honest socialists.

The importation of inexpensive goods lowers prices for American consumers, in other words, all of us. The America First concept is always about selecting certain constituencies to reward, but higher wages mean higher prices for all consumers. But when one is trying to win Michigan, Trump/Vance begins to seem a whole lot like Sanders/Warren, which leads us to Protectionism.

In The Great Betrayal, (at some point, Buchanan practically runs out of hyperbolic words to put in his book titles, but I digress). Buchanan advocates that America 1) destroy the institutions that have promoted free trade since World War II; 2) impose across-the-board 15 percent tariffs on products from every country on earth, with the possible exception of Canada (Trump, however, wants more Canadian tariffs as well; and 3) impose heavy additional tariffs on poor countries.

Now, I am not a blanket all things libertarian on trade.  Though not a fan of the CHIPS Act, I get its point.  Nor do I want fighter jets or smart missiles to be made anywhere other than the good old-fashioned US of A.  That 1st right in the Declaration of Life is one of the few governmental functions I approve of, so defense stuff should be made here, or maybe in Canada, England, or Australia; it is a short list.  But for everything else, like socks, iPhones, or cars?  

I agree that IPs, such as computer designs, should be protected, and I have little doubt that Xi Jinping could give two darns about stealing trade secrets.  But tariffs will not solve this.  Isolationism will not solve this either.  

I will save my attack on protectionism for another podcast, but here is Kevin Williamson on the subject. “Want to give Americans a modest tax cut, raise the standard of living for middle-class and lower-income families, reduce federal bureaucracy, and make US companies more competitive in the global marketplace? Easy—all you have to do is enact the single most unpopular idea in American politics: unilateral free trade.  Unilateral free trade is a policy under which non-U.S. companies can sell their goods and services in the United States under the same terms US firms do.” Well, the usually brilliant Williamson does get one thing wrong.  Entitlement reform, which I shall address later, is the single most unpopular idea in the US, but I digress.

Again, I will address the history of tariffs more fully in a future podcast, but you get the gist.  

Buchanan disagrees; “America’s conservatives -- Washington, Hamilton, Clay, Webster, Coolidge -- all believed in a tariff wall to protect the standard of living of workers and ensure our independence from foreign countries for national needs. . . . Every nation to rise to industrial power in modern times . . . did so by first protecting the home market. . . . Perhaps {cities are in crisis} because the good jobs that were once there have been exported to Mexico, Taiwan, Korea, and China.”  

The reality is that America’s huge continental market drove our success, not tariffs. We are no longer protecting infant industries as we did in the early Republic days; we have not for 170 years.  And the most protected industries, such as sugar and textiles, have become uncompetitive and dependent on purchasing political influence. As noted, Buchanan would have protected that vital paper mill, some governmental Michael Scott of Dunder Mifflin fame.  As Will noted above, “protectionism aims to correct consumer preferences that the government deems incorrect.” Ponnuru adds that Buchanan “invites Big Government, Big Labor, and Big Business to form a coalition to socialize the economy; free trade protects ordinary citizens from all of them.”

“We should beware of the demagogues who are ready to declare a trade war against our friends—weakening our economy, our national security, and the entire free world—all while cynically waving the American flag.”

—Ronald Reagan, 1988

“I am a Tariff Man.”

—Donald J. Trump, 2018

It is not that Reagan entirely eschewed tariffs, but rather, in the realm of semiconductors, he used them strategically, not as a blanket policy.  Reagan also described “open trade policy” as “one of the key factors behind our nation’s prosperity.” He said that free international trade has “proven itself in the real world where we have seen free trading nations prosper while protectionist countries fall behind.”

Immigration

Here is Buchanan’s position on immigration, again reflected in today’s GOP. In his The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization. “The hearts of many on the Right are in cutting marginal tax rates and eliminating the capital gains tax. Good causes, to be sure. But what doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his country? Is whether the GDP rises at 2, 3, or 4 percent as important as whether or not Western civilization endures and we remain one nation under God and one people? With the collapsing birthrate, open borders, and the triumph of anti-Western multiculturalism, that is what is at issue today — the survival of America as a nation, separate and unique, and of Western civilization itself — and too many conservatives have gone AWOL in the last great fight of our lives.”

Well, for one, it is not the last fight.  There will always be another fight, but Buchanan is wedded to hyperbole the way Kamala Harris is to word salads.  Yet, this is the rare position where I do agree with Buchanan and will outline that in a moment.  But immigrant labor is a critical component of our economy.  The National Association of Manufacturing notes that our precious manufacturing sector often goes with nearly 2 million open positions.  If manufacturers pay more to get those workers in the door, they will have to charge more to, once again, the American consumer.  However, I do agree with the multicultural aspect.  We have had immigration since the original native Americans crossed the land bridge from Asia some 11,000 years ago.  And we have had European immigration to the US beginning in the 1600s.  What has changed is that since the 1960s, we now have a governmental social infrastructure that includes healthcare, education, housing, and food.  Our systems are already stretched.  Throwing in unskilled, non-English speaking people onto that system in the millions could break it.  And there are values here.  In the past, immigrants were integrated into our society by adapting to our values.  Today, they form societies within societies, many of which are illiberal and noncapitalistic.  Both economically and societally, immigration cannot be managed with open borders.  The answer is a wall with a decent-sized gate.  

One issue with the rhetoric is that Buchanan, much that I’m afraid I have to disagree with him, was a thinking man.  Many of his successors are not.  It is one thing to make the case that Buchanan makes, but it is all too easy to say that the current ills of our nation are immigrants’ fault.  Our biggest fiscal challenge today, much to Trump’s lying about it, is entitlement spend and will not be solved by closed borders.  As much as immigration may wreck our house of cards entitlement systems, they may also be a piece of a more significant package to save them.  

And, of course, like the more despicable elements of MAGA, there is an underlying racism to Buchanan’s position.  He opposes “the mixing of all tribes, races and peoples” and suggests he would support an immigration policy that would “keep the United States predominantly Christian and European.”) It is one thing to assert that America has the right to police its borders and to regulate immigration however it sees fit. It is quite another to blame “diversity” for the Virginia Tech massacre.  

The founders were steeped in the classics and Enlightenment thought.  However, many immigrants coming to the nation, certainly those from Buchanan’s forebears from Catholic Ireland, Italy, or even parts of Germany, would have initially rejected those precepts.  Today, so many of these people embrace American cultural norms of individual liberty, capitalism, and American exceptionalism not due to some ethnic blood ties but to integration and education.  To survive, they had to adapt, and we need to make the new people adapt as well, which is why I oppose separate language programs in our schools. 

In his book Churchill, Hitler, and Unnecessary War, when one remembers that the first pages of this book lament that “as a share of world population, peoples of European ancestry have been shrinking for three generations” and that “we are slowly disappearing from the earth,” Buchanan’s selective and wrong criticism of Churchill stands as a piece of genuinely shameless hypocrisy.  

It is not about blood.  Joe Biden is Irish and has not really gotten America. Elizabeth Warren does not either, and despite her protestations, she is pretty much Northern European in ethnicity. Thomas Sowell is, I assume, not descended from Northern Europe, and no one gets America better. Nor the aforementioned Indian-descended former editor of National Review. America is unique not because of its ethnicity but rather because of its development as an ideal.  I can go to Japan and learn all the languages and customs but never be Japanese.  But someone from Japan can come here and be an American.  Reagan understood this.  

I believe strongly in controlled borders, but more so in what we expect from immigrants and what they expect to get here.  We need a wall but with a decent-sized gate because, sorry folks, we need them.  

Buchanan’s Anti-Semitism

We have come to Buchanan’s position on Israel and his own use of America First, which is also adopted by current GOPers.  This position could be copied and pasted into the handbooks carried by Democratic squad members like Ayanna Pressley, Rashid Tlaib, and Omar Ilhan. 

Norman Podhoretz, writing for Commentary back in 1992, stated, “The purpose of the original America First movement, founded in 1940, was in the short run to oppose American aid to the nations of Europe threatened by Nazi Germany and in the longer run to keep the United States from going to war against Hitler. Although the movement attracted a number of prominent left-wing isolationists (among them the socialist leader Norman Thomas and the historian Charles A. Beard), its main support came from the Right and included the notorious anti-Semitic demagogue Father Charles Coughlin. But America First’s most famous spokesman by far was the great aviation hero and Jew-hater, Charles Lindbergh.”

As a historian, amateur or otherwise, Buchanan would have known of the implication of this name in a way that the famously unstudious Trump would not.  Instead, then, of trying to distance himself from the anti-Semitic associations of the old America First movement, Buchanan moved with all due deliberation in the opposite direction.

Buchanan and his many apologists seemed to have no trouble in evading these implications. They defended him by indignantly insisting that one could be critical of Israel, or even generally anti-Zionist, without being anti-Semitic.” Rashid Tlaib and Ilhan Omar would be vigorously nodding along to these sentiments.  They are not anti-Israel but anti-Zionist or anti-Netanyehu or whatever needs to be said to mask their true beliefs.  They do not like Jews, and they all want to see Israel go down.  

The concept of America as a dystopian hell hole unless protectionism is enacted, its border is entirely closed, America’s forces abroad are brought home, the abrogation of international alliances, advanced industrial policies favoring this business or that, the increase the welfare state, and the power of the executive to the detriment of the other two branches, is the alignment of Buchanan and today’s populist GOP.  

This is in contravention of the Republican Party’s principles and the Reaganite legacy Buchanan falsely claimed to be upholding.  In the 1990s, there was ample reason for the Republican leadership to disown Buchanan, even apart from his well-documented anti-Semitism (which should have been enough by itself). Nevertheless, fearful of alienating his followers (sound familiar)--whose numbers were wildly exaggerated by a misreading of the primary results--the Republican managers, with George HW Bush’s acquiescence, allowed Mr. Buchanan to make the kickoff speech at their national convention in 1992. HW Bush lost anyway, and many Republicans were convinced that Buchanan’s prominence at the convention was one of the causes.

Ponnuru added back in 1999, “an old Nixon hand who decided at some point that exploiting cultural resentments and seeing various elites get their comeuppance mattered more than expanding freedom.” Sounds suspiciously like Trump.  

In Death of the West, Buchanan makes some sense: “In science, technology, economics, industry, agriculture, armaments, and democratic rule, America, Europe, and Japan are generations ahead. But the Islamic world retains something the West has lost: a desire to have children and the will to carry on their civilization, cultures, families, and faith.” But to use terminology such as suicide, death, unnecessary, and where the right wrong does not exactly inspire confidence. Buchanan’s apocalyptic rhetoric would give a young person wanting to start a business or a family pause.    

Reagan’s tax cuts and the Fed’s prescription of maintaining high interest rates to curb 1970s inflation also drove a 26-year period from 1982 through 2008 of unparalleled growth.  But part of it was Reagan’s infectious belief in our success.  No one will be inspired to take the risks inherent in business or family without some optimism.  I love to castigate FDR’s New Deal, but he was correct in saying that the only thing we need to fear is fear itself, and we must understand that if Americans believed the country was doomed, then it was doomed.  This is not psycho-babble.  Ask yourself what Trump’s plans, beliefs, and programs are for the betterment of the nation over the next four years, aside from Harris’s vagaries of half-truths and fears.  Like Reagan, Buchanan had a plan, but it was based on the limits of America, not its potential.  

Entitlements NON Reform

“I’ve been asked if I have any regrets. Well, I do. The deficit is one.”

Ronald Reagan

And this is not to say that Reagan achieved everything.  The conservative journalist David Frum surveyed the landscape and published a book called “Dead Right.” Reagan, he wrote, had offered his “Morning in America” vision, and the public had rewarded him enormously, but in failing to reduce government, he had allowed the welfare state to continue infantilizing the public, weakening its moral fiber. But this does not mean that philosophically, Reagan was okay with a massive government.  Buchanan and Donald Trump are just fine with it.  For all of Trump’s talk of ending the Department of Education, which is a worthy goal, one wonders if he means it; second, can he get it done? Third, with the size of entitlements will it make any difference?  

This week, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece entitled “Americans Are More Reliant Than Ever on Government Aid,” noting, “This spending accounts for a big and growing share of the national debt. But this year’s presidential candidates, Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump, have said little about reining it in. In fact, both have offered plans that would add to the costs. Trump would end taxes on Social Security benefits. Harris would expand the Earned Income Tax Credit for lower-income workers and extend Affordable Care Act subsidies that are due to expire, among other proposals.”  

It is not that Buchanan was not concerned about debt and deficits; it is just that, unlike Reagan, they were never part of his priorities. This, again, is reflected in Trump’s sanguinity about more spending.

This is not conservatism; it is Dems lite. Buchananism is a form of identity politics for white people—and becomes more worrisome as it is married to collectivism. Buchanan’s mentor, if you will, was none other than Richard Nixon. Wage and price controls, the EPA, quotas, and arms control just begin the list of Nixon’s statist-liberal policies. The only reason Nixon was seen as a conservative was because he succeeded LBJ and his great society. 

All of this gets us to the elephant, in or not, in the room.  Buchanan’s ideas cannot win. They are either more modest versions of Democratic orthodoxy and thus unlikely to win over moderate voters, or worse, bad policies in and of themselves.  

The only success the GOP has had in the past ten years has been the deficient quality of its opponents.  Hillary Clinton was elevated entirely because of her husband. Had it not been for Bill, she would have been a mid-level functionary in the Health and Human Services or the Interior Departments.  After two colossally unsuccessful runs for president, Biden was plucked from coming irrelevance by Barack Obama, the last Democrat who could win in his own right.  Kamala Harris is a true Democratic creation, an attractive, leftist, absolutely empty vessel chosen for affirmative action reasons who could only have succeeded in progressive hot house California.  In the future, the Democrats will feature the likes of Josh Stein, Doug Brashear, Roy Cooper, Gretchen Whitmer, and Josh Shapiro.  The layups are over.  In the cases of elections in 2018, 2020, 2021, and 2022, the GOP mishandled the ball on the way to the hoop.  The party should have a 40-seat majority in the House, a 5-seat majority in the Senate, and the White House.  I mostly blame Donald Trump, but Trump did not arise in a vacuum.  

As noted, Reagan wanted to reduce the size of the government.  By 2028, the interest paid on debt and the viability of sustaining entitlement plans will be paramount.  A Republican who claims not to end them but to reform to save them will have an advantage.  

Smart government will be a thing, especially after four years of known incompetence from the Harris administration.  The world, which is already deteriorating in places ranging from Korea to the South China Sea, India to the Middle East to Eastern Europe to South America, will be even more dangerous and affect trade.  A president who can address these by making the case for the exceptionalism of America abroad can win.  Protectionism, like sugar or steel or autos, will see a steady decline in American industries and services while driving higher prices for American consumption.  Finally, the DEI insanity and the moral laxity in our culture could never be addressed by Trump, who was never really interested in the former and embodied the latter.  The future of the right’s ability to win and its GOP standard bearer could be bright, but not if it continues down the Buchanan way.  

With the inception of the Great Depression, the GOP could not win in the next five presidential elections and lost the house for nearly 80 years.  Eisenhower won two terms in the 1950s, but just a few years before his successful 1952 election, people were not sure which party he belonged to.  It was not until after Goldwater, and truly with Nixon and Reagan that the GOP gained ascendency.  However, misguided policies and unserious candidates have undone that work.  It is time for a new beginning, and we must return to what has worked.  It is time to reintroduce America to the three pillars again.  

And in my own patch of history, where decades, if not centuries, of understanding of history should hold sway, revisionists such as Buchanan should be put back the dusty back-room bookshelf containing the fringe stuff right where Buchanan himself always belonged.