THE BUCHANAN FRENZY
Joseph Sobran
In case you haven't noticed, many segments of the major news media have abandoned any pretense of impartial journalism in their coverage of the Buchanan campaign. The hostility of their reporting makes a joke of all their recent high-minded moaning about "negative ads" that "lower the tone of the campaign" and "breed voter cynicism about the political process." The things the Republican candidates have said about each other are tame indeed compared with what Newsweek, Time, the New York Times and Ted Koppel have been saying about Buchanan.
Koppel, for instance, did a Nightline program on Buchanan's refusal to fire his regional campaign manager Larry Pratt for having appeared with some crudely anti-Jewish speakers at assorted gatherings around the country. (Where Koppel got his videotapes is an interesting question, but he cut Pratt short when he asked.) In the course of the program, Koppel showed a clip of a rabbi calling Buchanan a Hitler. Not only did Koppel implicitly approve of the smear; he affected not to know how lethal it could be - though similar smears had notoriously helped encourage the murder of Yitzhak Rabin only last November. Those who tried to destroy Buchanan when he was a mere pundit aren't going to let up now; heaven only knows how far they will go to prevent his becoming president.
With the brave exception of Thomas Oliphant of the Boston Globe, who attacked his fellow liberals for tolerating the libels against Buchanan, most of the commentators have joined the orgy of name-calling. William Satire and George Will have made poisonous insinuations of Nazism. Other alleged conservatives such as Bill Bennett and Bill Buckley have been quoted incessantly; by now their imputations of fascism and anti-Semitism against Buchanan have become Familiar Quotations. Charles Krauthammer has been relatively honest in saying that he far prefers Bill Clinton to Buchanan; the same is obviously true of most of Buchanan's "conservative" detractors.
What's going on here?
One of the nicer names Buchanan has been called is "bully."
He stands alone against a huge slander apparatus, and he's the bully. The truth is that nothing is safer than traducing Pat Buchanan, and he has shown rare courage in taking on the entire political establishment. He never showed that courage more admirably than in his refusal, under withering fire, to repudiate Pratt.
At that point, most Republicans would have folded, as Newt Gingrich did last year in a similar case. Not Buchanan. He displayed not only guts but moving loyalty - and nerveless poise. His un-Republican behavior turned the affair to his own advantage by showing the public what he was made of. It drove the media wild. The "bully" had picked a fight with a giant, and he was winning.
Courage and loyalty are, need one say, rare qualities in politics. So is sincerity. Buchanan is saying pretty much what he has always said, and the whole world knows he means it. That's why it doesn't work to accuse him of ulterior motives. In fact the anti -Semite smear backfires: it merely reveals that his chief antagonistis the Jewish establishment, which will never forgive his criticism of Israel and its American "amen corner." He has provoked his hidden enemy to expose itself. From now on, it will be hard for the Zionist apparat to pass for conservatives.
It's a phenomenal display of fierce ethnocentrism, a sort of furtive racial superpatriotism. In a practical sense, everyone in the political battle knows what's what.Survival in public life requires that you know all about it, but never refer to it. A hypocritical etiquette forces us to pretend that the Jews are powerless victims; and if you don't respect their victimhood, they'll destroy you.
Lamar Alexander has been angling for Jewish money, always a huge factor in presidential races, by posing as the only Republican candidate who can stop "Buchananism" (turning his rival's name into an epithet like "McCarthyism"); he has the support of Bennett and William Kristol, in spite of his liberal record. Righteous gentiles like Bennett, Will, and Buckley have gone to embarrassing lengths in their fawning on the Jewish establishment. That tells you where the real power lies, and who does the bullying in this country.
I've always suspected that if the Jews were really weak and in danger, most of the opportunists who court their favor now would be courting the favor of their enemies; whereas Buchanan would have the guts to defend them.
Buchanan's enemies give him credit for nothing, least of all those moral qualities in which he is so manifestly their superior. This is where their dishonesty shows. An honest critic would give him his due; his enemies won't admit that he has a single virtue - even though the professed conservatives among them presumably agree with him on many issues.
Bernard Shaw observed that a man's real beliefs are to be found not in the creed he espouses, but in the assumptions he acts on. We learn something vital when nominal conservatives who say they abhor abortion rush to a mush like Alexander, who has always favored legal abortion, in their hysterical opposition to the candidate who has flatly and consistently conderrmed it. If they argued with Buchanan in measured terms, their disagreement would be plausible. But when they join in the effort to demonize and crush him, we learn that their public creed bears little relation to their real motives. If for nothing else, we owe Buchanan credit for smoking out a lot of phonies.
Once upon a time, I myself assumed that my conservative and even neoconservative friends would pardon me for applying our shared principles to Israel, especially after the Pollard spy case came to light. Of course I knew I was dealing with a somewhat touchy subject; but, after all, it was like Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs, right?
I soon learned a good deal about what was really driving these "friends," and it wasn't concern for the Tenth Amendment. I'd reasoned that though we might differ on Israel, we agreed on enough other matters; I didn't yet see that if we differed on Israel, they didn't care about other matters. I was accused of being "obsessed" with the Jews because I talked about them; in reality, the people who didn't talk about them had been secretly obsessed with them all along. Their fear of talking about them turned out not to be entirely superstitious.
Pat Buchanan learned the same lesson. He knows what it is to be stabbed by your supposed friends; he's never let it stop him. It's notable that the people who call him the worst names - the Krauthammers, Wills, and Safires - were apologists for two of the bloodiest Israeli leaders, the veteran terrorists -- Menachem Begin and Itzhak Shamir. Buchanan's "offenses," such as they are, are purely verbal. Begin and Shamir were murderers, but he's treated like the killer.
The apologists are terrified by the spectacle of a single courageous Christian. The nominal Christians who abet them are not only frightened but shamed by Buchanan's willingness to put himself on the line. Worst of all, from their point of view, courage breeds courage. When Buchanan calls on us to "take back our country," their power, their positions, their careers, and even their self-esteem are threatened. To them, he is dangerous - as Bill Buckley (another accused Nazi in his day) once seemed to be.
Buchanan reaches ordinary Americans like no other candidate. To them, "taking back our country" has many meanings, thrilling, inspiring, or in some cases worrisome. Pro-lifers, devout Christians, laborers, taxpayers, small businessmen, distressed patriots - all feel deeply that their country has been taken from them. Many of them never think of the Jews as posing any particular problem, though many Jews won't believe that. Whatever these gentiles (and even some powerless Jews) have been taught about politics, they know that the government doesn't work for them; they work for it, and they are both afraid and contemptuous of it. All they have needed is a leader.
In one recent week I talked to two young men who don't follow politics, both of whom not only knew who Buchanan was but brought up his name without my prompting. One, an Italian from New Jersey, runs a bagel shop; he loved Buchanan and couldn't stop raving about him long enough for me to say I knew him. The other was an illegal immigrant from Central America, who was worried about him. The names of Dole and Alexander would mean little to either of these men, but Buchanan's name is on the street.
It's remarkable how thoroughly the Jews identify themselves with the hated "elites" and assume that any criticism of the elites must be a veiled threat of anti-Semitic persecution. Buchanan has actually said next to nothing about the Jews in this campaign; but because of their own taboos, they can never be sure that a gentile who doesn't mention them by name doesn't mean them. Besides, it's hard for Jews to believe that gentiles don't think about them as much as they think about themselves; they are too self-absorbed to understand that the rest of us are pretty self-absorbed too,
So, though Buchanan's war on the elites isn't directed against Jews as such, the war on Buchanan is pretty much a Jewish war. The Jewish media disguise this fact by resorting to generalized accusations of "nativism," "peddling fear," "isolationism," "divisiveness," ''protectionism,'' etc., instead of just "anti-Semitism." It's especially funny to hear such people as Krauthammer accuse Buchanan of "protectionism," as if they were fretting about the fate of free trade under a Buchanan administration.
If there were no Jews in the media, Buchanan would still cause an uproar. He says plenty of things that upset plenty of gentiles. But the argument would have a very different tone, and I doubt that Hitler would come into the conversation quite so often.