'Axiomatic' Andy

"Notice that for Buchanan in this column, it is axiomatic that America was once defined by its whiteness."
-- Andrew Sullivan

Really? Rather than trusting entirely to Mr. Sullivan's judgment, let us consult the Buchanan column whereof he speaks, and see how the subject of race is introduced. The column begins:

In the brief age of Obama, we have had "truthers," "birthers," tea party activists and town-hall dissenters.
Comes now, the "Oath Keepers." And who might they be? . . .

(I hesitate to answer "kooks," because I don't actually know any of these people, and Mr. Buchanan quotes as his source a columnist for a Las Vegas newspaper, so this is all third-hand anyway. Never mind, then. But it is not until Mr. Buchanan's ninth paragraph that the subject of race is introduced by reference to that notorious Southern bigot, Jimmy Carter.)

As with Jimmy Carter's long-range psychoanalysis of Joe Wilson, the reflexive reaction of the mainstream media will likely be that [the Oath Keepers] are militia types, driven to irrationality because America has a black president. . . .

(OK, the connection between phenomenon A -- the Oath Keepers -- and phenomenon B -- the remarks of former President Carter -- seems kind of tenuous here, but a few paragraphs later, Mr. Buchanan introduces other sources.)

[Progressives] cannot comprehend what would motivate Middle America to distrust its government, for it surely does, as Ron Brownstein reports in the National Journal: "Whites are not only more anxious, but also more alienated. Big majorities of whites say the past year's turmoil has diminished their confidence in government, corporations and the financial industry. ... Asked which institution they trust most to make economic decisions in their interest, a plurality of whites older than 30 pick 'none' – a grim statement."
Is all this due to Obama's race?
Even Obama laughs at that. . . .

Well, you can read the rest. What is declared "axiomatic" by Sullivan -- who goes on to accuse Mr. Buchanan of engaging in revisionist racial demagoguery -- is by no means evident from a straightforward reading of this column.

It is the liberal Mr. Brownstein (who has never been accused of hatemongering, except perhaps by Republicans) whose quote is the orange cone around which Mr. Buchanan's column pivots to discuss in depth the context wherein white voters are "anxious" and "alienated." And Mr. Buchanan then cites no less an authority than President Obama for dismissing this specific idea.

Obviously, given Mr. Buchanan's history, there are penumbras and emanations that might cause him to be suspected of "speaking in code." But is it not possible that Mr. Brownstein's reference to "anxious" and "alienated" whites was also a way of speaking in code, namely the Frankfurt School language that gave us Theodor Adorno's The Authoritarian Personality and Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics?

More to the point, however, whose basic analysis of the phenomenon -- the poll numbers cited by Mr. Brownstein -- is more factual and reasonable? Which of them addresses the topic with more accuracy, insight and authority?

While there are many Tea Party activists who would not welcome Mr. Buchanan as a speaker at their next event, I dare say if Andrew Sullivan attempted to speak at a Tea Party rally, no one would hear a word he said because of the cacaphony of boos and jeers from the crowd. They might even call him ugly epithets like "Limey."

But what do I know? All I've done is cover the largest rally of the Tea Party movement. I'm not a British expat with a Harvard degree and a beach house in Provincetown, so please ignore my opinion.

Mr. Sullivan is an expert, and surely I know even less about the motives of American populists than Patrick J. Buchanan, whom Mr. Sullivan so airily accuses of "hateful hackery."

(Via Ann Althouse.)

UPDATE: Speaking of posh Brits, it seems some people have decided they're generally a nuisance.

Media Matters attacks . . . MSNBC?

Why would one crooked left-wing smear operation attack another crooked left-wing smear operation?

Two words: Pat Buchanan. (That's a post at the personal blog of Media Matters employee Oliver Willis, who spent hours Twittering his attacks on Buchanan.)

Notice that the Left was OK with Pat being on MSNBC as an anti-war Republican during the Bush years. But now that Buchanan is criticizing Obama . . . eh, not so much.

Buchanan's views about the subjects for which Media Matters now denounces him haven't changed at all. All that has changed is the tactical objectives of the Left, whose No. 1 goal now is to silence all critics of Obama.

The Left has always been more dangerous to its "friends" than to its enemies. Trotsky was a comrade-in-good-standing until he began to became a threat to Stalin's leadership. Try to make friends with the Left, and next thing you know, somebody puts an ice-ax through your skull.

Of course, I'll defend Buchanan against these leftist vermin, but there is a lesson to be learned here, and that lesson is this:

When you're a Jet,
You're a Jet all the way,
From your first cigarette
'Til your last dyin' day.

No conservative should ever believe that there is anything to be gained by making friends with the Left.

Oh, for crying out loud, David Frum!

On the occasion of Bob Novak's death, must you still stubbornly defend your errors?

Robert Novak was respected and liked by many, and their memories of him are the memories that deserve hearing today.
But there is one thing about Robert Novak that I have had in mind for some time, and today seems the appropriate moment to say it.
Novak was one of the people I discussed in a still-controversial 2003 article for National Review, “Unpatriotic Conservatives.”
That piece analyzed a group of conservatives so radically alienated from their country that not even the events of 9/11 could rally them to her cause. . . .

OK, I'll stop there and if anyone wants to read the rest, they can. But David, do you not see what was wrong with your 2003 article, and what is even more wrong with your untimely defense of it?

First, you did not "discuss" or "analyze" Novak, Buchanan, et al., you attacked them, and in exactly the same manner that liberals have attacked conservatives as far back as Barry Goldwater or even Joe McCarthy.

You did what a friend of mine calls the "Ransom Note Method," cutting and pasting like a kidnapper gluing together words clipped from magazines. You then presented this assemblage as if it constituted a complete file of the essential facts that told us who these men really were.

Nudge, nudge: "They're all Jew-haters!"

Unfair and unfortunate, especially considering that on the issue which was even then being weighed in the balance -- the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq -- their doubts were ultimately vindicated.

'Cakewalks' Have Consequences
More than 3,000 U.S. troops died to implement that policy, thousands more were wounded, billions of taxpayer dollars were expended and, while the eradication of Saddam's Ba'athist regime was inarguably a good thing, patriotic Americans may reasonably ask, "Was it really worth the cost?"

The domestic political consequences have included the mobilization of a powerful left-wing grassroots movement, the loss of a congressional majority it had taken Republicans 40 years to gain, and the election of the most left-wing Democrat president in our nation's history. As to the foreign-policy results, we can only speculate what mischief may ensue in however many years it takes for American voters to get their bellyful of liberal misrule and regain their traditional good sense. (Assuming, of course, that the Bush-damaged GOP can yet be salvaged as a workable majority coalition, which is at this point a hypothetical proposition.)

For these multiple woes, then, leading advocates of the Iraq invasion must bear responsibility just as, had the invasion turned out to be the "cakewalk" that Ken Adelman notoriously predicted, its advocates would now be fighting over who should get credit for its success.

While future developments might conceivably lead historians to conclude that the Bush administration's policy was altogether wise and beneficial, as matters stand now, the Iraq invasion bids fair to rank as the most tragic folly of imperial overreach since the Athenian expedition to Sicily in 415 B.C.

How, then, can you possibly consider it "appropriate" on the occasion of Novak's death, to attempt to defend your foolish attack on him and others when even many of the most staunch Republican loyalists -- men and women who defended the Bush administration through thick and thin -- now freely admit that Novak, et al., were right all along?

Say what you will, David, but facts are stubborn things, and the facts are not on your side.

Ex-Democrats and GOP Cliques
Let us now leave to future historians to argue the merits of the Iraq invasion, just as Civil War buffs still endlessly argue whether Longstreet or Lee was correct about the tactical situation on July 2, 1863. (Most folks down home derogate Longstreet as a faithless scalawag, but I believe Lee was both sincere and correct when he said he was entirely responsible for that defeat.)

Military considerations aside, then, what of your attempt to smear Novak, along with Buchanan and others both living and dead, with the odious taint of anti-Semitism?

This involves an old intra-Republican feud to which I'd paid little attention before arriving in Washington. Having been a Democrat all my life until 1994 (a story I've told in bits and pieces over the past 18 months, including a thumbnail version at The American Spectator), I little suspected that what I had once dreaded as a mighty Republican monolith was in actuality a middle-school playground of antagonistic cliques.

David Horowitz and Peter Collier have described their own shock, upon leaving their New Left allegiances to support Reagan in the mid-1980s, at discovering the vicious factionalism inside the GOP. To its enemies, the Republican Party inevitably appears to be a carefully managed, well-funded, brutally efficient political machine, staffed entirely by ruthless automatons acting in synchronized lockstep.

This powerful illusion of Republican unity vanishes as soon as, dillusioned by the latest Democratic Party betrayal, the ex-Democrat ventures inside the GOP camp and tries to join up. Immediately, the arriviste finds himself pulled this way and that, urged to pledge his loyalty to one clique, one cause, one ideological posse within the intramural league of Republican rivalries.

Paleo, Neo, Me-o, My-o
Little did I suspect, while yet a Democrat, how bitterly Republicans were torn by Operation Desert Storm. While I thrilled at this brilliant military victory that vanquished the Vietnam Syndrome, from my purely political standpoint as a moderate Democrat, that war had the tragic consequence of destroying the presidential hopes of Sam Nunn.

Meanwhile, unknown to me, the GOP faction led by Buchanan had opposed Desert Storm from the beginning. By the nature of the arguments the Buchanan faction made against that war, they left themselves exposed to the charge of anti-Semitism. We might say, as Antony said of the accusation that Caesar was ambitious, "If it were so, it was a grievous fault, and grievously hath Buchanan answer'd it."

As in every previous and subsequent engagement between the paleocons and neocons, the paleos emerged the embittered losers, while the neos went on to new heights of prestige and influence.

However, allow me now to suggest, David, that in the Babylonian debacle that destroyed Karl Rove's "permanent Republican majority," the neocons have now suffered their Philippi.

You cannot recover from this self-inficted disaster, my friend. Whatever the future holds for the GOP, if the Republicans should recapture their Reaganesque mojo, displace the vaunting Pelosi Democrats and roll onward to new glories, I pray that they will never again commit the errors of Bushism, failing to discern wise counsel from folly merely because the fools were clever enough to accuse the wise of crude bigotry.

Plagiarize Yourself Much?
Your 2003 "Unpatriotic Conservatives" article that defamed Novak and other critics of the Iraq war -- some of them arguable less innocent than Novak -- was not your first exercise in that sort of attack. I am grateful to my friend Daniel McCarthy for having filled the gap in my knowledge on this score:

While at the [Wall Street] Journal, Frum accepted the freelance assignment that would make his name: a 1991 cover story for The American Spectator attacking Pat Buchanan.
The article, "Conservative Bully Boy," described Buchanan as "everything couth conservatives want to escape" and took aim not just at Buchanan himself -- then contemplating a run against George H.W. Bush for the 1992 Republican presidential nomination -- but also at his paleoconservative and libertarian supporters, including Paul Gottfried, Murray Rothbard, and Thomas Fleming, among others. Frum accused Buchanan of "sly Jew-baiting" -- so sly, evidently, that it slipped past Jewish intellectuals Rothbard and Gottfried, but not the ever vigilant Frum. . . .
The hit on Buchanan earned Frum a book deal with The New Republic's imprint at Basic Books; indeed, Frum reused much of his material on Buchanan and the paleos for Dead Right's chapter on "Nationalists."

So, a dozen years before your 2003 National Review cover, you had deployed the same theme in the same situation. When America was at war under a Republican president, you denounced conservative critics of the war in a way calculated to inflict maximum damage on their influence. What could be more damaging than the suspicion of anti-Semitism?

It is worth mentioning here that I have various disagreements with Buchanan and some of his supporters. For starters, I am a philo-Semite so staunchly pro-Israel as to make Netanyahu look like a squish. Also, as was true of Novak, I am a resolute free-marketeer who has no use for tariffs, labor unionism, and other such economic deviations to which the Buchananites are sadly prone. (I admit an uncouth nostalgia for the gold standard, but some Austrian School friends assure me that this is actually quite orthodox.)

Despite these various disagreements, however, I cannot bring myself to say that Buchanan and his followers are evil. Nor, in the grand scheme of things, would I consider their support for the Republican Party a net liability to the GOP. If you take a look at the Tea Party crowds and townhall "angry mobs" now striking terror in Democratic hearts, they look a lot more like Buchananites than Frumians.

All of which is to say, as I look at the conservative movement going forward, I think we have seen an end to the era when populists and traditionalists -- Bradford, Sobran, Brimelow, etc. -- would periodically be scapegoated and purged to maintain the standard of "respectability" necessary to sustain the support of a tiny clique of highbrow elitists.

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Elitists!
No more of that. From here on out -- and I think I speak now for a very broad consensus of conservative opinion -- we're rolling like the Hell's Angels on a Labor Day weekend run to Monterrey. If this flagrant contempt for elite opinion causes panic among the effete snobs at the Wall Street Journal, if it offends the tender sensibilities of gentle souls like Peggy Noonan, David Brooks and Rich Lowry -- well, screw them.

And in an ironic way, David, you have helped make possible the new bad-boy conservatism of the future. Let's list a few names of those you have denounced in recent months:

• Rush Limbaugh.
• Sarah Palin.
• Glenn Beck.
• Mark Levin.
• Matt Lewis.

Having done your best to alienate the widest possible swath of conservatives -- thinking that Obama's popularity would justify a purge of those clamorous talk-radio types -- you now deem the occasion of Novak's demise "appropriate" to revisit your old grudge against conservative critics of the Iraq war.

Alas, no one important to the GOP's future is listening to you now. If your conservative credibility were a bank, David, the FDIC would shut it down. So far as any ability to influence rank-and-file conservative Republicans is concerned, you're as bankrupt as Kathleen Parker.

What really makes your renewed ax-grinding against Novak's ghost so risible, David, is your accusation that Novak and friends were "so radically alienated from their country that not even the events of 9/11 could rally them to her cause."

David: You're Canadian.

Case closed. Court adjourned. You are remanded to the custody of Judge Ann Coulter for sentencing.

UPDATE: My previous discussion of the Frum/Novak/Levin feud has now been front-paged at Hot Air.

UPDATE II: More Novak obituary tributes piling up, including this one from American Spectator editor R. Emmett Tyrrell:

He is one of the most loyal contributors that The American Spectator has ever had. Some who have written for us never let it be known in their bios lest they give offense to polite company. Bob never hid his relationship with us and mentions it often in his stupendously informative memoir, The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington. . . . He served on our Board of Directors, never flinching when the government haled us before a grand jury or when and the Clintonistas infiltrated into the media tales of our treasonous behavior. During all this hullabaloo I innocently asked Bob what the mainstream journalists thought of us. The mortar fire was pretty heavy. "They think you're obnoxious," he responded. Gee, Bob have a heart!
He actually did have a heart and a strong conscience. On the one matter that temporarily ended our friendship he was proved wrong or at least sort of wrong. When that became apparent to him he suggested we dine and smoke the peace pipe. He admitted he had been wrong. I insisted that he had only been a bit wrong. Our friendship was renewed. In all my years as an editor I have only known one other acquaintance to come forward and admit to being wrong. And again, Bob was only sort of wrong, but he had the self-confidence to admit error. He also had the intellect and general competence to fall into error rarely.

Read the whole thing. Meanwhile, Mr. Tyrrell's indefatiguable right-hand man, Wlady Pleszczynski, posts this video tribute:

Special note to David Frum: I noticed your most recent e-mail in my inbox but, due to my chronic e-mail overflow (which my intern has promised to fix as soon as he returns from his holiday jaunt to Florida), it was auto-deleted before I had a chance to read it.

Please don't take a non-reply, or the reiteration of my criticisms, as unfriendly gestures. I still want to be your friend, but your relentless ax-grinding against the paleos and populists is passed its sell-by date. I have done what I can to try to persuade my paleo friends to relinquish their own ax-grinding, and intend to do more in that direction.

However, if there is to be a "New Majority" -- a conservatism that can win again, as you say -- it cannot be built on the basis of an elitist disdain for those unruly grassroots activists. Majority coalitions are not built by a process of subtraction, which is what your anti-populist agenda represents. The fact that Bill Kristol continues to say nice things about Sarah Palin should be a warning signal of how badly you're isolating yourself.

I'll be in town Thursday, if you'd like to upbraid me in person for this criticism.

Pat Buchanan's Very Excellent Idea

Via Hot Air:

The problem with Pat's approach is that it's far more humane than this punk deserves. As I've said before, the big mystery to me is why Levi Johnston's horribly mutilated corpse hasn't been fed to a pack of wolves.

'At least Henry Ford knew how to make a car'

Thus did John Podhoretz respond last week to what he saw as anti-Semitic neocon-baiting from Andrew Sullivan. The real weirdness, as Donald Douglas points out, is that Sullivan appears to have made alliance with some of the Culture11 refugees.

One can be pro-Israel and anti-neocon. Not every neocon is Jewish, nor is every opponent of America's pro-Israel policy an anti-Semite. One of the worst fruits of the poisoned tree of "compassionate conservatism" is that it has popularized a superficial conception of "neocon" as an anti-Semitic slur meaning "Jewish Republican hawk." The implied "dual loyalty" smear and the notion that the only reason the U.S. invaded Iraq was to serve the interests of Israel -- well, these ideas didn't just materialize out of thin air, but are socially constructed, as the postmodernists would say.

In its original sense, "neo-conservative" meant liberals or leftists who had been "mugged by reality" and reoriented themselves to a conservative position. Irving Kristol wrote a book about it.

The fact that many of Kristol's ideological soulmates were likewise Jewish, and that among the "realities" by which they were "mugged" was leftist support for the Arab powers in the 1967 and '73 wars -- no one denies this. But the cause, character and conduct of neoconservatism as a school of political thought is varied and complex, and it was not until Bush's engagement with radical Islamic terrorism after 9/11 that the term "neocon" was dumbed-down to its current status as the equivalent in political discourse of "kike." (One wonders if Jewish boys today engage in schoolyard brawls after being called "neocon.")

Elitism and neoconservatism
My pet peeve with neoconservatives has nothing to do with foreign policy, as such, and everything to do with the characteristic style and content of their arguments. The contant factor of neoconservatism -- the thread connecting Irving Kristol with, inter alia, Bill Bennett and Peggy Noonan -- has been their preference for a conservatism that speaks to sensibilities considered "respectable" by a certain academically-oriented urban audience.

This is not quite the same as saying that neoconservatism is the conservatism of the elite, for most of the elite are not conservative and, in the person of Sean Hannity, we can see what populist neoconservatism looks like. And one might note, for example, that Bill Kristol -- who can claim the "neoconservative" label as a birthright -- did not jump into the elitist anti-Palin camp with the likes of David Brooks.

In general, however, neoconservatives insist on a Right that they are not ashamed to defend in Manhattan and Hollywood (or at Harvard), and this results in a certain habit of argument: Concede the desirability of liberal goals, but object to the specific policies by which liberals seek to obtain those goals.

Hard-core liberals aren't deceived by this half-a-loaf argument, but it does gain neoconservatism a hearing with bien-pensants who can't understand why such phrases as "social justice" and "world peace" are an invitation to folly. Because neoconservatism so often succeeds at this game, entire organizations (e.g., the Claremont Institute) are devoted to supporting those whose job is to craft arguments convincing the bien-pensant simpletons that they can have their "social justice" and low taxes, too.

Exoteric and esoteric
This is why the term "Straussian" has been applied to neoconservatism. Leo Strauss famously identified the difference between the exoteric meaning of an argument -- that is to say, its direct and superficial meaning, apparent to any reader -- and its esoteric meaning, which is perceived only by the enlightened, the insiders, the elite. Neoconservatives apparently think of political leadership in terms of the Platonic archons, who understand the need for the "noble lie" of popular mythology. This Straussian tendency leads directly to a species of Republican mythmaking that is ultimately self-defeating, especially when the Straussians lose sight of the distance between myth and reality.

American government was founded with the idea, expressed by James Madison in Federalist No. 10, that there is no shame in the political pursuit of self-interest -- i.e., "faction" -- and that the object of government is to reconcile such factions so as to prevent harm to "the permanent and aggregate interests of the community." Modern liberalism undermines this Madisonian conception by asserting that certain interests -- e.g., "children's health" -- are so unquestionably urgent and valuable that no decent person can oppose them.

The error of neoconservatism is that it refuses to engage directly the underlying anti-Madisonian impulse of modern liberalism, opting instead to counter with a "conservative" proposal to achieve whatever it is that liberals aim to achieve. Neoconservatives grant the premise of the liberal argument, but deny the conclusion. This produces arguments that are sometimes successful, without being fully persuasive, because they lack the kind of sturdy, honest truth perceived by "men of untaught feelings," to borrow a phrase.

You see, that in this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess, that [the English] are generally men of untaught feelings; that instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. . . . Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, skeptical, puzzled and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit; and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature.
-- Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France

Now, you may say that I am prejudiced in Israel's favor, much as I am prejudiced against France. So be it. But I am far more prejudiced against liberalism and the Democratic Party, and it is these cherished prejudices -- widespread as they are -- that broadly unite the American Right. Our immediate challenge is to seek out and persuade those I have called "Future Ex-Democrats." Exactly how they will be persuaded, and what sort of agenda they will support in the future, is yet to be discovered. But we know that the Democratic agenda is doomed to failure ("It Won't Work") and we know that many who voted for Obama will be disillusioned by that failure.

Populism and the Palinites
My preference is for a conservatism that is more forthright and "mean-spirited" than John Podhoretz might accept as respectable, and this "libertarian populist" conservatism might appeal to many who don't share my favorable prejudice toward Israel. But foreign-policy arguments among conservatives are moot when conservatives have no influence over foreign policy, which is very nearly the case now.

Podhoretz recently published an article by Yuval Levin about Sarah Palin that expressed truth both exoteric and esoteric:

Many of those (including especially those on the Right) who reacted badly to Palin on intellectual grounds understand themselves to be advancing the interests of lower-middle-class families similar to Palin’s own family and to many of those in attendance at her rallies who greeted her arrival on the scene as a kind of deliverance. But it is hard to escape the conclusion that while these members of the intellectual elite want the government to serve the interests of such people first and foremost, they do not want those people to hold the levers of power. They see lower-middle-class populists like Palin and their supporters as profoundly ill-suited for governance, because they lack the accoutrements required for its employment -- especially in foreign policy, which, even more than domestic affairs, is thought to be an intellectual exercise.

The esoteric significance of this class prejudice -- for it is nothing else -- can be observed in the way David Brooks inveighs against the anti-government rhetoric of populists. The meaning of Brooksian wrath can be summed up in two words: Pat Buchanan.

Because Buchanan is perceived as an anti-Semite, and because Buchanan has among his supporters some few who don't even flinch at the accusation of anti-Semitism, there is the suspicion that everyone who grumbles about big government is a Jew-hating troglodyte. This is "conservatism" as viewed through the paranoid lenses of Theodor Adorno and Richard Hofstadter, the crypto-Freudian belief that we're never more than one election away from that moment when the Republican Party unfurls the swaztika and the GOP brownshirts come goosestepping down Main Street.

Clever fellows that they are, the Brooksians conceal their silly fear with a superficially plausible argument that a more populist conservative rhetoric can't win, an argument that is made to appear all the more plausible because it serves to undermine support -- especially financial support -- for populist candidates in Republican primaries. (Giuliani spent $59 million to get 597,518 primary votes. We are left to wonder where that $59 million might have gone, and what it might have accomplished, had not the Brooksians promoted the absurd notion that a short, bald, pro-choice New Yorker was a serious candidate for the GOP presidential nomination.)

Is Sarah Palin a rabble rouser? Oh, hell, yes. I've seen the rabble, and I've seen her rouse them. Feel free to argue that she wasn't ready for presidential primetime on Aug. 29, 2008, but don't tell me that she can't possibly be ready by Jan. 20, 2013. And don't tell me she can't win. Whatever her deficiencies, she's got more natural political talent in her little finger than Rudy Giuliani's got in his entire body (and she's got a much better body, too).

It may be that a Palin candidacy attracts some Buchananites and Paulistas whose foreign-policy views are not shared by me or John Podhoretz or David Brooks. As it is now, however, the really dangerous Jew-haters (including some self-hating Jews) are in the Obama camp, and they are all the more dangerous because Democrats control both houses of Congress. To take back Congress and the White House from Democrats will require Republicans to assemble a coalition inclusive enough not to demand foreign-policy litmus tests as a condition of admission. We can be grateful that economic issues will be front and center for the foreseeable future, since this unites the Paulistas in common cause with the broad limited-government conservative coalition.

Slagging Sarah Palin and her supporters -- the Ordinary Americans, or "ordinary barbarians," as some of them have dubbed themselves -- because they appear to represent a Buchanan-style populism that inspires fear and loathing among the elite, is to push away the Reagan Democrats without whom Republicans can't win.

It is worth noting that Buchanan was an adviser to both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, which is to say, "At least Pat Buchanan knew how to win an election."

Cracker-Americans for Steyn

Whatever idiot sent that stupid e-mail to Mark Steyn, he doesn't speak for the entirety of "cracker Appalachia," and he certainly doesn't speak for me.

When a man suffers what Steyn suffered for political incorrectness, he is my ally. And when you consider that what Steyn is saying about demographics, immigration and culture is, to a great degree, the same thing that Pat Buchanan has been saying about demographics, immigration and culture -- well, you see the basis for a new fusionism, an opportunity to heal the bitter breach between paleoconservatives and neoconservatives that goes back to Mel Bradford.

Why do I feel like I'm the only one who sees these things? Peter Brimelow includes Michelle Malkin on his VDare blogroll. Phyllis Chesler favorably cites The Camp of the Saints. In Godless, Ann Coulter paid tribute to Joe Sobran (!) as a mentor. Could the basis of a tactical ceasefire be any more apparent? If we view the embarrassing defeat of Crazy Cousin John as the final debacle of the GOP's open-borders wing, is it not possible that, at a very minimum, conservatives in the circular firing squad could agree to form a semi-circle for the next four years?

As I said this morning in reference to Ron Paul, with Obama in the White House and Democrats in control of Congress, "Republican foreign policy" is now a moot debate. Can we call an intermission in the Sharks-vs.-Jets quarrel over imperialism? Conservatism is at coffin corner, and one good thing about having your back against the wall is, it makes it much harder for your "friends" to backstab you.

If we cannot unite on a few basic issues, Team Obama will run the table so completely, there will be nothing left worth fighting over. I attended a roundtable last week during which one conservative suggested that, with 41 Republican senators, a filibuster is possible. I couldn't restrain myself: "Susan Collins? Are you kidding me?"

Conservatives who imagine that the current crisis allows leisure for internal feuding over ancient grievances and philosophical disputes are woefully underestimating the severity of the crisis. Folks, if Obama gets nationalized health care, that's it: Game over. Hello, Permanent Welfare State, a la Scandinavia.

As my remark about Susan Collins was meant to suggest, our only hope of stopping such a measure is to bring unbearable heat on enough red-state Democratic senators to force them to join in a filibuster with the 30-something Republicans who can be counted on for the cloture vote. If a national health-care plan passes cloture, even some of those 30-odd GOP stalwarts will peel off, the plan will pass with 70-plus votes and -- if history is any guide -- it can never be repealed.

Seems to me some of my fellow Cracker-Americans are living in a dreamland, spoiled by a quarter-century of Republican ascendance, imagining they can be finicky in their choice of allies in the battles to come. The Hell No Coalition -- "Hell, no" to the stimulus, "Hell, no" to open borders, "Hell, no" to national health-care -- can ill afford such self-destructive infighting. In this hour of great peril, start fighting the common foe, or forfeit any right to call yourself a friend of conservatism.

UPDATE: Banner linked at Steyn Online.

Buchanan: Bitter?

Finally, a real populist weighs in:

It was said behind closed doors to the chablis-and-brie set of San Francisco, in response to a question as to why he was not doing better in that benighted and barbarous land they call Pennsylvania.
Like Dr. Schweitzer, home from Africa to address the Royal Society on the customs of the upper Zambezi, Barack described Pennsylvanians in their native habitats of Atloona, Alquippa, Johnstown and McKeesport.
"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and ... the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. . . ."

Pat Buchanan not only hits Obama where it hurts, he also hits the nail on the head, targeting exactly what is so obnoxious about "Bittergate": The extent to which Obama and the liberal zillionaires who comprised his San Francisco audience view blue-collar Americans as the exotic Other.

Buchanan, it must be remembered, was one of the first conservatives to see and understand the latent political power of "the Silent Majority."

Back in the '60s and '70s, there were lots of Americans who were sick of turning on their TVs and seeing mobs of overprivileged college students burning their draft cards, buring their bras or burning the flag. The media lavished attention on the hippies and the Yippies, the feminists and the Panthers -- noisy people who, it seemed, had nothing better to do than to stage protests and demonstrations and shout angry rhetoric about their rights.

What Buchanan presciently saw was that this Loud Minority did not speak for most Americans and were, in fact, profoundly resented by those hard-working, law-abiding people -- the Ordinary Americans --- who paid their taxes, saluted Old Glory, and were just as proud to send their sons to Parris Island as the elite were to send their sons to Yale.

Over the years, Buchanan's efforts to channel the unheard voices of the Silent Majority have led him to say and do things that have exposed him to criticism. He embraced economic protectionism, he was famously dismissed as an anti-Semite by William F. Buckley Jr., and he left the GOP in 2000 to run for president on the Reform ticket -- and ironically, because of his hitherto unsuspected level of support in Palm Beach County, played a key role in electing George W. Bush to the White House. Buchanan has since been denounced as a ringleader of the "Unpatriotic Conservatives," those on the Right who opposed the Iraq war before the first shot was fired.

Through it all, however, Buchanan has never stopped listening for the quiet voice of the Silent Majority. Here, in his column on Obama's now-notorious phrase about the "bitter" people of Pennsylvania, Buchanan hears that voice clearly. And what he hears is the Ordinary American's resentment of the snobbish condescension of so-called sophisticates.

Obama gave his wealthy San Francisco supporters a "pitch-perfect Hollywood-Harvard stereotype of the white working class," Buchanan says:

Though he sees himself as a progressive who has risen above prejudice, Barack was reflecting and pandering to the prejudice of the class to which he himself belongs, and which he was then addressing.
A few months back, Michelle Obama revealed her mindset about America with the remark that, "for the first time in my adult lifetime, I'm really proud of my country." Barack has now revealed how he, too, sees the country. The Great Unifier divides the nation into us and them.
The "us" are the privileged cosmopolitan elite of San Francisco and his Ivy League upbringing. The "them" are the folks in the small towns and rural areas of that other America. Toward these folks, Obama's attitude is not one of hostility, but of paternalism. Because time has passed them by, Barack believes, they cannot, in their frustration and bitterness, be held fully accountable for their atavistic beliefs and behavior.

"Us and them" -- as often as conservatives like Buchanan have been accused of dangerous "divisiveness," here he exposes the inherent divisiveness of liberal elitism. While an Ivy League liberal like Obama can feel pity toward the working-class people of small-town Pennsylvania, he can never feel empathy toward them. From Obama's stratospheric perspective, those grubby steel workers are so far beneath him as to be unworthy of his notice . . . except for the unfortunate fact that he needs their votes to satisfy his upwardly-mobile ambitions.

Obama's ambitions, however, also require something else: Campaign cash. And to get that, he jets off to San Francisco for a Sunday wine-and-cheese event where he delivers an academic analysis of the "bitter" troglodytes whose votes he was so earnestly soliciting just a day or two earlier.

Obama is supposedly the new face of progressivism, the future of the Democratic Party. But he's actually a familar face from the party's past, the phony rich liberal. As Buchanan says:

Obama's remarks about small-town America told us little about small-town America, but a lot about Barack. He is yet another cookie-cutter liberal who has absorbed and internalized the prejudices of that blinkered breed. He is an African-American John Lindsay, the great liberal hope of the Nixon-Agnew era, of whom Frank Mankiewicz once said: He was the only populist he knew who played squash every day at the Yale Club.

Frank Mankiewicz! The mention of the name of George McGovern's campaign manager reminds me to ask Buchanan to tell the story about how Hunter S. Thompson nearly changed the course of history at the Manchester, N.H., airport in 1968.

"I'm a sane, responsible journalist; otherwise I might have hurled my
flaming Zippo into the fuel tank."

--Hunter S. Thompson

Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72, p. 45

UPDATE: Linked by James Antle of The American Spectator. Thanks!