Buchanan Is Back and He Wants You

Suddenly Patrick Buchanan is all over the place selling his new book, "Where the Right Went Wrong," demanding to know how "a Republican-controlled capital city whose leaders daily confess their conservatism could preside over the largest fiscal and trade deficits in our history and have us mired in a Wilsonian imperial war to remake the Arab Middle East into the American Middle West"?

The question is one many limited government conservatives have asked themselves, especially in quietly agreeing with him that "the era of big government Bill Clinton declared over is back." Buchanan concedes George Bush should be supported in November because John Kerry offers nothing for the right and conservatives need Supreme Court judges so badly. Pat is back in the GOP and he clearly wants to lead future conservative efforts there. He invokes their conscience, Barry Goldwater, updating his clarion call for conservatives to "grow up" and support the Republicans to 2004, again because "we want to take this party back and I think, some day, we can."

The book's subtitle: "How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency" summarizes his main charge that the neocons represent "a cabal that betrayed the good cause of conservatism, because, from the very beginning they never believed in it." For proof, he cites neoconservative leader William Kristol telling the New York Times, "If we have to make common cause with the more hawkish liberals and fight the conservatives, that is fine with me... If you read the last few issues of the Weekly Standard, it has much more in common with liberal hawks than traditional conservatives." Kristol even called for firing Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell for not being hawkish enough in their pursuit of American empire.

Buchanan's case against the explosion of government spending resonates in conservative hearts. "The Grand Old Party has become a big-government party. Tax cuts are no longer accompanied by spending cuts. Fiscal conservatism is dead. The Beltway Right has entered a civil union with Big Brother." Government now takes one-third of total national wealth. We are approaching the "perfect storm," he writes pointedly, when Medicare and Social Security surpluses vanish and the true deficit will explode, depressing markets and stagnating wages. Yet, every local crisis is turned into an excuse for more national government intervention by television commentators and politicians can no longer say "no" to the demands. The Bush Administration response has been to add $164 billion, with 55 percent of the increase (together with $132 billion for defense and homeland security) for domestic programs. Non-defense discretionary spending exploded by one-third under George Bush, the most spending by any recent president.

While President Reagan proposed to shut the national Department of Education, President Bush sought an 80 percent increase in spending. He signed the largest farm bill ever for two-thirds fewer farmers, most of the $180 billion going to wealthy mega agro-industries. $200 billion is earmarked for foreign nation building and foreign aid is to increase by 65 percent. The first new, massive bureaucracy in years was created, the Department of Homeland Security and almost nothing has been cut. Now conservative are demanding "Fund us too," with 1.5 billion proposed for a "healthy marriages" initiative that has no basis in the Constitution and would have shocked Goldwater. Most of all, President Bush passed the largest entitlement increase since Lyndon Johnson in the Medicare prescription drug bill, increasing its unfunded liability by more than that of enormous Social Security's. While Ronald Reagan said: "Government isn't the solution, government is the problem," President Bush retorted, "Too often my party has confused the need for limited government with a distain for government itself."

Buchanan's case on the neoconservative pursuit of foreign empire under Bush is also strong and based upon a competent and thorough analysis. President Reagan did call the Soviet Union an evil empire, he says, but "like the tough union leader he once was, after he took his stand and made his case, he was ready to sit down and talk... Because he was confident that history and Divine Providence were on America's side, he never took precipitate or rash action," only invoking force three times and had the "courage to concede and correct a mistake [in one] and get out" -- and he achieved the first major strategic arms reduction in the Cold War. President Bush is quoted saying the past sixty years of "excusing and accommodating" accomplished "nothing to make us safe" so we need a more aggressive strategy, which Buchanan finds amusing since the older policy led to victory in the Cold War.

Citing a major foreign policy address at Whitehall castle in England, he notes that Mr. Bush declared a new doctrine to promote the "global expansion of democracy," starting with Iraq. The president announced "The United States has adopted a new policy, a forward strategy of freedom for the Middle East," one that questioned the prevailing belief that it could not be "converted to democracy." Those who convinced the president of this new approach -- where "twenty two of twenty two Arab states are nondemocratic," Buchanan devilishly interjects -- were the neocons, the Vulcans by their own designation, with longstanding plans for the U.S. to occupy the region and bring peace to it and to the whole world: deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz, his former assistant Lewis Libby now assistant to the vice president, defense advisor Richard Perle, and assistant defense secretary Douglas Fife, among others.

Buchanan agrees with the neoconservatives that this doctrine is an updated Wilsonianism, the Democratic Woodrow Wilson's idealistic program to make the world safe for democracy. Buchanan notes that it failed for the Democrat but has been adopted by a Republican. He asks, "Is Bush aware that when Jimmy Carter pressured the shah to democratize, the shah was overthrown and Iran fell to the ayatollah. Can the president believe that by hectoring and destabilizing autocracies like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, we are more secure?" Who replaces these leaders? Even if they are elected, they could be much worse. He calls trying to micromanage the world's nations both utopianism and democratic imperialism.

While he claims that nothing justifies 9/11, it was America's preaching of democracy while propping up oligarchies in the Middle East, our basing of troops, especially female ones, to defile the holy ground of Saudi Arabia, our own "neopagan" culture offending Muslim values, our "double standard" in the Israel-Palestine conflict, and our unprovoked invasion of Iraq that have inflamed Islam, he insists. He is critical of U.S. policy that has threatened China when its interests do "not threaten ours." We must finish off al-Qaeda but terrorism has been used to advance numerous causes and cannot be defeated if the cause is supported by the local population. He is not clear beyond that of what his alternative might be but, he warns, popularly supported "terror tactics against Westerners have rarely failed" over the long run.

Buchanan finally makes his case against what he calls "economic treason." This has two causes, a free trade that opens American borders to low-priced goods and cheap labor from abroad that takes U.S. jobs, and a discounted monetary policy that increases the trade deficit. America has betrayed its historic alternative policy of protectionism that he claims created its prosperity. Alexander Hamilton is his hero who produced jobs and raised federal revenue through protectionist tariffs to finance a small federal government, knit together a free U.S. market, and cut our ties of dependency to Europe. He even praises the "Tariff of Abominations of 1828," a 62 percent tax on 92 percent of all goods entering the United States, import duties that make the Smoot-Hawley tariff of a century later look like an excise tax."

Buchanan declares the decline of Great Britain the result of its free trade policy and relates the dependency of both it and the U.S. upon foreign manufactured goods for "critical" national interests today, especially for the military, to their open markets. While he admits President Reagan supported free trade with Canada, that was a country of "first-world wages and environmental and labor standards," not trade with low-cost suppliers, and blames the policy of open trade on the presidents Bush. The result in the U.S. is a trade deficit of a half trillion dollars, manufacturing employment down from one-third in 1950 to 11 percent today, and "the end of our economic independence, the deindustrialization of our country and the abandonment of our working men and women to Darwinian competition with foreign labor forced to work for a fifth or a tenth of U.S. wages."

Buchanan's economic case will be difficult to sell to most conservatives. It is not tariffs per se. Conservatives have no inherent objection to them or even high ones on a very few goods for short-term emergencies, as long as they are low enough not to threaten trade generally. Indeed, when Buchanan gives tariffs the credit for early prosperity he is forthright enough to also mention sound money, limited government spending and few regulations on business as contributing factors. In fact, these are sufficient to explain early prosperity together with the fact that the American market was so undeveloped and with limited aspirations that there was plenty of room to grow. With modern communication and transportation, narrowed demands would be impossible for most people to accept. Moreover, his historic case is weak. The Tariff of Abominations was repealed four years later and most tariffs were moderate -- including Hamilton's -- until World War I, whose subsequent Smoot-Hawley protection helped produce the Great Depression. England had relatively free trade for most of its most successful years and was completely free trade for a half a century before World War I ended it, having much to do with war and little to do with trade.

The idea of returning to a manufacturing world is, to use Buchanan's phrase for empire building, utopian. From the dawn of time, most jobs were in agriculture with a very small minority in manufacturing and commerce. By 1870, farming employment was down to about half the population, shared almost equally with manufacturing. Today, successive stages of agricultural, manufacturing and service sector employment have left the U.S. economy with 1.6 percent agricultural, 11 percent manufacturing and 80 percent service jobs. His plan would not only appeal to a narrow constituency but, more important, it would create economic chaos to reorient the American economy toward such a small proportion of the workforce as manufacturing. Contrary to public understanding, manufacturing is not even much better paid, earning $15.74 per hour on average, compared to $14.96 for service jobs.

Buchanan appeals to an oppressed manufacturing worker, union myth, whereas union members are the elite, receiving $30 per hour, compared to $18 for regular, non-union blue collar workers. But that pay premium, mostly from threats to disrupt work in sensitive industries, has come at a high price. Overpricing itself, union employment has declined from over one-fourth of the workforce in 1970 to less than one-eighth today. An example Buchanan presents to justify protectionism actually shows it is government attempts to control "globalism" that is costing manufacturing jobs rather than free trade. He reports that half the cost of a new car is from goverment taxes and regulations.

Moreover, other nations can retaliate to protectionism. Europe has just imposed a 17 percent levy on 1,600 U.S. exports (very much including manufacturing) as a response to a U.S. export subsidy. Guardian Industries Co. claims that this might cause it to move its tinted glass manufacturing from Pennsylvania and Michigan to Thailand. Contrary to his statement that Ronald Reagan only supported trade with Canada because it offered first-world wages (primarily service sector jobs, by the way) his hero Reagan was the first to suggest an entire North American Accord free market for the whole region, including the Caribbean. Reagan even supported some immigration, another Buchanan priority for government control, although he agreed illegal immigration had to be regulated.

Although criticizing neoconservatives for worshiping Franklin D. Roosevelt, Buchanan's economic policy is straight from FDR. It tracks John Kerry's too, whose first plank in his economic plan is to "create good jobs," with the emphasis on "good" as a codeword for manufacturing and union ones, including the environmental and labor protections Buchanan also cited favorably. The problem with this central plank of the Buchanan cause is that it is big government, contrary to his other concerns about it. To manage an economy by tariff requires as much elite government bureaucracy and expertise as any New Deal. Picking employment winners and losers is called industrial policy, no matter how accomplished. As the conservatives' favorite economist, Nobel Laureate F.A. Hayek, taught the world, government cannot have the expertise or even the knowledge to understand something as complex as a national economy making billions of decisions an hour every day. The tariff police simply cannot keep up with the transactions and their conflicting implications. For example, Buchanan criticized the neocons for being too tough on China on foreign policy but, to control its exports, Buchanan's protectionist demands give them an even greater reason to become an enemy of the U.S.

It is most revealing that Buchanan wonders on page 169 why the neoconservatives do not support protectionism since it would make the country a stronger empire. At bottom his reasoning is similar to those he criticizes. He even has the same hero politicians as does top neocon David Brooks -- especially Hamilton and Theodore Roosevelt. Both Buchanan and the neocons desire national greatness, although of different types. Buchanan supports many conservative policies and even decries "big government." But he proposes nothing to reduce government beyond getting entitlements under control (which the neocons want to do also, so they can spend more elsewhere) and his goal of an neo-industrialized American would require as much positive social engineering as any neocon could possibly desire.

It is not only the necons of Buchanan's subtitle who would subvert Reaganism and Goldwaterism. Both leaders valued Hayek's critical insight that government cannot micromanage the economy efficiently, not any more than they could a world empire. The solution is to follow Reagan all the way. Yes, pursue American national interests rather than empire with a limited number of military engagements and an eye open for peace, as President Reagan did by using military force least of any recent American president. Yes, reduce big government and unleash citizens, communities, states and businesses to create prosperity and a decent social life so that freedom will reign and not bureaucracies and judges. But big government included regulation of the economy to Reagan and the years of prosperity that followed his policies proved he was right here too. The few exceptions were trivial.

Trade simply is the "wealth of nations," in Adam Smith's felicitous phrase (lifted from the Bible), and to try to micromanage it is to step back not to the principles of the U.S. founding but to continue the 20th Century retreat from them. Trade and a healthy nationalism are not competing values as long as they are balanced by the Reagan vision that local community and private enterprise and charity must carry most of the load to leaven the costs of both. To the extent Mr. Buchanan can fit his leadership into that Reagan mould, he will receive a positive reception from conservatives. But his book suggests he is, right now, too neo conservative to fully fit the bill.

By Donald Devine, Editor.