Monday, June 16, 2008
Victor Davis Hanson has an excellent fisking of Pat Buchanan in his latest blog entry: Patrick J. Buchanan -- Pseudo-Historian, Very Real Dissimulator. I've been waiting for a real historian to step into the fray with Buchanan, and this is it. A tiny snip:
[Buchanan’s citation of the quip of the aristocratic hostess Nancy Witcher Langhorne as an authority on Versailles is revealing and gives his game away—a woman known for her virulent anti-Semitism, pro-Hitler appeasement, and close correspondence with another kindred soul in Ambassador Joseph Kennedy. Her slurs about Czechoslovakian refugees, prejudice toward Catholics, lunatic pronouncements on slavery and blacks, and reprehensible slanders of British soldiers proved her to be unhinged—but apparently earns a citation of wisdom from Buchanan.]
On like that. Pat Buchanan is an unfortunate character and an embarrassment to conservatism. He's intelligent, articulate, engaging, good on TV, a lot of fun at parties...but he has a disturbing blind-spot when it comes to anything German (and things Germans might have been interested in long ago -- like Nazi war criminals and Jewish States). It's hard not to read Buchanan, especially in light of Carlson, and not have it come to mind that he's nothing but a Bundist in the style of some Japanese soldier holed-up on a small Pacific island who never got word that the war had been over for decades. Buchanan is an atavistic throw-back to an uglier time.
> Buchanan is an atavistic throw-back to an
> uglier time.
He is, and I think the shock I felt when I first realized that his true nature, revealed, was no obstacle to success in our media and culture actually aged me just a bit.
I don't know if this is true, but I read somewhere that Buchanan had one Irish grandfather, but was otherwise of German descent. I think he got his antisemitic views, as well as his paleo-conservative views, from his upbringing.
One other thing: I think that Buchanan's conservatism harks back to the days when conservatives were isolationists, before the interventionism of the Cold War. It also harks back to a time when conservatives were no friends of the Jews, before William F. Buckley turned the conservatives away from antisemitism. That's what's meant by "paleo-conservatism."