Pat Buchanan: Once Right, Now Wrong

The Hill

October 2, 2002

You have to hand it to Pat Buchanan. He never, ever gives up. He's back on television and starting his own magazine as part of his continuing campaign to wrest control of the conservative movement from latecomers and sellouts. It's going to be interesting.

Much of what Pat is upset about is, frankly, upsetting. He may go overboard from time to time, but he is right to be worried about the tendency of the Bill Kristols of the world to equate greatness with military adventurism, and he's dead on when he says politicians of both parties seem incapable of rationally discussing the societal consequences of our current immigration policies.

I think he's wrong about Iraq again and that he's generally wrong whenever he discusses the Middle East, but it is useful to have him out there reminding us that great nations ought to resort to the sword only when their just interests are threatened.

The question, though, is: Does he have to suggest that everyone who disagrees with him has sold out or does he just not get it?

In the old days Pat focused most of his energy and vitriol on left-wingers and communists. I worked with him back in the days when Richard Nixon roamed the Oval Office and the Soviet Union was real. He worked for Nixon, but almost bailed out in disgust when his man flew over to Peking (We still called it that in those days.) to kowtow before Mao and his buddies.

Pat was a polemicist, an anti-communist, a patriot, a Nixon man and a Catholic. His typewriter spewed fire when he had an enemy in his sights and his anger was a wonder to behold, but he was not one you would look to for anything approaching philosophical consistency.

Today's Buchanan remains a patriot and a polemicist of the first rank, but as his politics have jelled they have made him less, rather than more, conservative. He pines for a return to a traditional conservatism, but he represents something less than the traditional modern conservatism articulated by Bill Buckley's National Review in the 1950s or Arizona's Barry Goldwater in the 1960s and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Most of all, he wants to go back to a period before National Review's Frank Meyer managed to bring together cultural and social "conservatives" with believers in free markets and freemen to form what grew to be the modern conservative movement.

Few outside the movement today remember Frank. He was a former Communist who broke with the party, retreated to a mountaintop near Woodstock, New York, and figured it all out. He was in many ways the true father of modern conservatism and would agree with many of Pat's concerns about the disintegration of our culture, but he would reject as foolish the idea that free market capitalism and individual freedom are as unimportant as Pat seems to believe. Pat would be well-advised to dip into Kevin Smant's new biography of Meyer, for in it he will find echoes of the debate he wishes to rekindle.

Frank realized, as Pat does not, that a good and moral society can only be good and moral if it results from the efforts of freemen and -women choosing freely. This sounds simple enough today, but in the old, old days it was a view rejected by many in this country and abroad. They, like Pat today, believed that conservatism should be all about preserving the old in the face of the new, and almost to a man believed that individual freedom and the disruptive nature of capitalism were definitionally enemies of all that was good.

But thanks to Meyer, Buckley and dozens of others, all that changed. The new conservatism was radical in that it refused to accept the old as unchangeable. Its philosophers and practitioners believed that one could reconcile freedom and tradition and that a good society must also be free. Eventually, the result was Ronald Reagan at home, Margaret Thatcher in London, the collapse of the Soviet Empire and an unprecedented growth in freedom.

The "old" conservatives lost the argument then and the world is better for their having done so. Pat wants to reopen it today and he is welcome to do so. Times change and the threats we all face change with them, but human nature doesn't change all that much. Individual freedom and the market combined with the wisdom to choose have made the world a far freer and more prosperous place today than anyone might have imagined back in the good old days.

David Keene is the chairman of the American Conservative Union and a managing associate with the Carmen Group, a Washington, D.C.-based governmental-affairs firm.