READING: Origins of Present-Day Neofascism: Garry Wills on Pat Buchanan, from February 1992
Apropos of John Ganz’s new book When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, & How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s…
I atill, 32 years later, do not know whether this from Garry Wills is unboundedly stupid or amazingly insightful here:
Few of these votes are for Buchanan the man, or for the second rate staff he has assembled, or for the crazies boosting him. In that respect, the comparison with David Duke is a fair one. Duke’s followers also deny voting for the man (whatever his background); they vote against his enemies, against “them,” against Washington or bureaucrats or liberals or blacks or foreigners…
The question is: is there anything in the “man” other than his pledge to wreck things in a way that will hurt his voters but that will hurt them more?
Garry Wills: The Golden ‘Blade’: ‘They made a handsome couple…. I asked why they had come to hear Pat Buchanan speak, and he answered, with an elegant British accent: “I just want to see a man who could say words I thought no human being capable of.” What words, for instance? He pointed to…“If we had to take a million immigrants in, say, Zulus next year, or Englishmen, and put them up in Virginia, what group would be easier to assimilate?” Why did that quote disturb him? “Because we’re Zulus,” said Mdudzi Keswa; and Chuma Mbalu nodded ruefully. I asked if they intended to put any questions to the speaker after his talk. They shook their heads no…. “If it weren’t for real, it would be a great joke,” Mr. Keswa said. If it weren’t for real. The nine hundred people in the auditorium, and those turned away at the door, seem to indicate that Patrick Buchanan is for real. But really what? The only real conservative in the race, he contends—though most well-known conservatives deny that he is one of them.
Coming into this hall, I met Jeffrey Hart, the Dartmouth English teacher who, along with his student son, launched The Dartmouth Review, famous for its mockery of blacks, gays, and indigenous Americans. Hart, a choleric redhead whose face is a conflagration, was backing Buchanan, I had just learned at the office of The Dartmouth Review. Wasn’t he disturbed by William Buckley’s claim, in National Review (of which Hart is a senior editor), that Buchanan is guilty of anti-Semitic statements? Hart focused his red eyes, volcanic coals in the conflagration, and said: “No. Bill is concerned with Pat’s protectionism—as, indeed, am I.” Then the anti-Semitic charge is just a pretense? “Mainly. The main thing he has on him is his use of the four names of kids who would do the fighting. There are no Anglo-Saxon names there, either.” (Buchanan had said the fighting in the Gulf War was cheered on by Israel’s “amen corner,” including A.M. Rosenthal, Richard Perle, Charles Krauthammer, and Henry Kissinger. He later said the fighting would be “done by kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzales, and Leroy Brown.”)
Hart is willing to swallow his fears about Buchanan’s protectionism in order to get rid of George Bush, whose betrayal of conservatism is unforgivable. Hart wrote, in the November 20 issue of The Dartmouth Review: “As a political leader, George Bush is afflicted with heat-seeking stupidity.”
The Buckley article on Buchanan is something of an embarrassment around the offices of The Dartmouth Review. Buckley helped launch the magazine—every issue carries on its masthead a “special thanks to William F. Buckley, Jr.” In the same article that attacks Buchanan, Buckley defends the Review from charges that it is anti-Semitic. Does the journal make that defense obsolete by backing a man Buckley has identified with anti-Semitic statements?… “It would not be in our best interests to take sides between Mr. Buchanan, who is on our board, and Mr. Buckley, who has a historic connection with us.”…
[…]
Those who do not know Buchanan seem sure that only a mother could love him. Testimony against that comes from (e.g.) a smitten Peggy Noonan, who registered this reaction on meeting him: “He is handsomer than on TV, with quick, bright eyes and perfectly trimmed brown hair, a big, slim, Brylcreemed man.” His colleagues in Washington find him distressingly likable. Murray Kempton thinks that geniality prevents Buchanan from living down to his principles. He says things only a fanatic should be saying, but he is not fanatic in his manner….
Buchanan imbibed his certitude that “we’re number one” from his belt-wielding father, all of whose views and values he replicates to this day—love for the Confederacy (and especially for Robert E. Lee), love for the military (and especially for Douglas MacArthur), love for the Republican Party (and especially for Joseph McCarthy), love for Mother Church (and especially for Pope Pius XII). The one true Church was emphatically one during Buchanan’s childhood. It entertained no doubts—none, at least, that he ever heard of from his father. School did not alter these notions….
Buchanan deplores subsequent changes in a Church that was supposed to be proof against change. He does not explain why a body possessed of all truth should itself become—worst of horrors—uncertain. Aliens somehow got inside, Communists perhaps, like the Sandinistas who corrupted Maryknoll nuns (including Tip O’Neill’s sister). The same thing happened to the infallible nation of Buchanan’s youth, perfect under Eisenhower, where everybody seemed to be having as good a time as Buchanan. Even the less fortunate were good sports in those days, like the black maid (one of two who cared for the Buchanan children) hosed down by Pat and his siblings for their amusement:
Laura [no last name, here or anywhere] was a delight. One afternoon, when we asked her to come outside for a second, we turned the hose on her for three minutes[!]; she joined right in, laughing, running around the yard, grabbing the hose and turning it on us…
Black passengers in a bus that carried maids into Buchanan’s neighborhood were similarly delighted when the locals pelted the bus with snowballs:
The white driver was always more outraged than his passengers, who laughed at the diversion from the day’s drudgery provided by the little white boys….
Polls show him winning votes in hard-pressed New Hampshire, for one simple reason. People want to punish Bush. Few of these votes are for Buchanan the man, or for the second rate staff he has assembled, or for the crazies boosting him. In that respect, the comparison with David Duke is a fair one. Duke’s followers also deny voting for the man (whatever his background); they vote against his enemies, against “them,” against Washington or bureaucrats or liberals or blacks or foreigners. That is the company Buchanan is forced to keep in order to press forward toward office. It is a long way from the golden time of a perfect Church in a perfect America that promised the golden “Blade” so much.
References:
Ganz, John. 2024. When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, & How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. <https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374605445/whentheclockbroke>.
Ganz, John. 2024. “What My Book Is About.” Unpopular Front. June 26. <https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/what-my-book-is-about>.
Wills, Garry. 1992. “The Golden Blade.” The New York Review of Books, February 13. <https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1992/02/13/the-golden-blade/>.