Key Thinkers of the Radical Right
Page 24
on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights,
discrimination against religious schools, women in combat— that’s
change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America wants. It
is not the kind of change America needs. And it is not the kind of
change we can tolerate in a nation that we still call God’s country.28
In contrast, others within paleoconservative ranks, including Samuel
Francis, distanced themselves from what saw as the limited political scope
of cultural conservatism and the Christian Right: “If they ever ended
13
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131
abortion, restored school prayer, outlawed sodomy and banned pornog-
raphy, I suspect, most of its followers would simply declare victory and
retire.”29
Impact and effects
While, along with his other books, The Death of the West won plaudits
within paleoconservative and white nationalist circles, there was a much
less plauditory tone among mainstream conservatives. Writing in National
Review, Jonah Goldberg pointed to the coded language that offered “let-
outs” but masked what was in sum a call for white supremacy, Buchanan’s
eclectic use of statistics, the loose and undefined references to the “Third
World,” and his confusion of correlation and causation.30 For many
conservatives, Buchanan had, since his embrace of paleoconservatism, not
offered a “dark” vision of conservatism but instead undermined the efforts
of the Right to win adherents in those minority communities, which had
(at least at that point) seemed essential to the Republican Party’s electoral
future.31
Buchanan’s overall influence cannot, however, be measured by the
character of book reviews. Instead, his significance is twofold. First, his
polemics and campaigns blurred the dividing lines and distinctions that had
largely defined the American Right since the 1950s. As mentioned earlier,
Wiliam F. Buckley and his National Review served a gatekeeping function
by “excommunicating” white nationalism, conspiracy theories, and oppo-
sition to American “empire building” from the ranks of the conservative
movement. Samuel Francis was to allege that the “permissible boundaries
of discourse” were tightened as neoconservatism gained ground and
dissidents were still being “purged” in the 1990s.32 Nonetheless, there was
an important shift. Buchanan’s primary campaigns gave him credibility
and meant that he could not be dismissed in the same way as the “kooks”
had been sidelined in the 1950s. His paleoconservatism contributed,
along with Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s 1994 book, The Bell
Curve, which drew attention to recorded differences in IQ between racial
groupings, and anti- immigration polemics such as Peter Brimelow’s Alien
Nation (1995), to the structural weakening of the boundaries between dif-
ferent sections of the Right. Indeed, paleoconservatism at times merged
with white nationalism as biological representations of race, such as those
put forward by Samuel Francis and in American Renaissance, were not nec-
essarily legitimized but gained a place at the table: “The civilization that
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we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed
apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there
any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted
to a different people.”33
Similarly, Buchanan’s references to Israel seemed to open the way for
shifts in the character of the Right’s discourses and its treatment of anti-
Semitism. He often seemed to single out Jews and assert that they unduly
influenced US policy. His critique of the Gulf War included not only the
assertion that it was being promoted by Israel and its backers in the US but
also those who would likely die would be “kids with names like McAllister,
Murphy, Gonzales and Leroy Brown.”34 Alongside this, Buchanan also
seemed ready to adopt an unduly realist approach to twentieth- century
history in asserting that an accommodation should have been reached
with Nazi Germany, as he did in Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary
War: How Britain Lost its Empire and the West Lost the World.35 While never
subscribing to Holocaust denial, he questioned the numbers killed at
Treblinka and appeared unduly zealous in his defense of alleged Nazi war
criminals.36
By bringing in these strands back in from the cold, Buchanan’s
campaigns and commentaries undermined the gatekeeping role of
National Review. It was further weakened during the years that followed by
shifts and changes in the character of the media that allowed white nation-
alism, paleoconservatism, paleolibertarianism, and forms of conspiracism
that were at times informed by anti- Semitism to merge with new strands
such as the “manosphere” (together forming the Alt Right) and engage
with the mainstream right on far more equal terms.
Second, Buchanan’s electoral showing in the 1992 (when former Ku
Klux Klan leader David Duke also stood) and the 1996 primary campaigns
suggested that there was a significant constituency among grassroots
Republicans or at least those who could be drawn into the Republican
primary electorate for a message structured around a reassertion of the
nation state and hostility to both globalist elites and immigration. His
speeches and commentaries highlighted the extent to which the party was
winning across a substantial share of the white working class from the
Democrats, although these realignment processes were taking place at a
faster rate in the South than the North.37 Nonetheless, after 1996, and
while the white working class was in numerical terms an increasingly im-
portant part of the Republican electoral bloc, nationalism and right- wing
populism were politically marginal. For the most part, at both presidential
13
Patrick J. Buchanan and the Death of the West
133
and congressional level, candidates were associated with either economic
conservatism, thereby stressing the capacity of an untrammeled market
to generate growth and prosperity, or social conservatism that rested on
issues such as abortion and same- sex marriage.
A few candidates such as former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum
and Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee sought to fuse the social conserv-
atism of the Christian Right with populist themes. They attacked political
elites and sought to invoke blue- collar interests. For example, in late 2007
Huckabee spoke in explicitly paleoconservative terms: “The Wall Street- to-
Washington axis, this corridor of power, is absolutely, frantically against
me. . . . The president ought to be a servant of the people and ought not to
be elected to the ruling class.”38 In 2008, the Republicans’ vice presidential
candidate, Governor Sarah Palin, sometimes also wandered well beyond
the bounds of cultural conservatism and hinted at an economically popu-
list message although it remained a long way removed from the defining
axioms of paleoconservatism. However, while Palin’s quasi- independent
campaign served as a temporary rallying point, there was no electoral
breakout.
For his part, Buchanan maintained a more than steady literary output,
although his electoral credibility was damaged beyond repair by his third-
party bid in 2000. While he continued, despite advancing age, to appear
as a news channel commentator until 2012, he never regained the promi-
nence of his Crossfire days.
Nonetheless, once the 2016 presidential campaign was underway,
comparisons were became quickly drawn between Buchanan and Donald
Trump as well as the Alt Right. There were, of course, differences, and
Trump’s campaign also owed a debt to Ross Perot’s presidential bids.39
Although there was, as noted earlier, a profound pessimism underpinning
Buchanan’s claims, which was echoed in the vision of “American carnage”
around which Trump’s 2017 inaugural address was structured, Trump
would emphasize the ways in which, with sufficient leadership skill and
acumen, the challenges facing the country could be swiftly overcome. There
is also a wide political gulf between Buchanan’s conservative Catholicism
and Trump’s and the Alt Right’s treatment of cultural questions. For the
most part, Trump steered away from cultural issues and in particular the
use of bathrooms by the transgendered, which had been a defining issue
for many Christian Right organizations in 2016 although, having said that,
Trump was able to capture the backing of grassroots white evangelicals
at an early stage in the primaries. He also accommodated them once he
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took office. Furthermore, while some detected an anti- Semitic edge to the
Trump campaign’s advertisement indicting Wall Street and the financial
sector, a much stronger odor of anti- Semitism attached itself to Buchanan
during the 1990s, and he forcefully opposed many of the policies pursued
by Israel. In contrast, Trump has stood resolutely by Israel, and his elec-
tion was warmly welcomed in Jerusalem.
Nonetheless, although he questioned Trump’s focus and self- discipline
and also wondered aloud if American decline had become irrevers-
ible, Buchanan still threw his support behind Trump. In a portrait of
Buchanan that assessed the parallels, Politico Magazine recalled the power
of Buchanan’s oratory, reminded its readers about his place in the history
of the American Right, and at the same time acknowledged the debt that
Donald Trump owed him:
This rhetoric . . . not only provided a template for Trump’s cam-
paign, but laid the foundation for its eventual success. Dismissed as
a fringe character for rejecting Republican orthodoxy on trade and
immigration and interventionism, Buchanan effectively weakened
the party’s defenses, allowing a more forceful messenger with
better timing to finish the insurrection he started back in 1991. All
the ideas that seemed original to Trump’s campaign could, in fact,
be attributed to Buchanan.40
Notes
1. Patrick J. Buchanan, Right from the Beginning (Washington, DC: Regnery
Gateway, 1990), 30.
2. Ibid., 63– 64.
3. Ibid., 93– 95.
4. Ibid., 95.
5. Martin Durham, The Christian Right, the Far Right, and the Boundaries of American
Conservatism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 152.
6. Timothy Stanley, The Crusader: The Life and Tumultuous Times of Pat Buchanan
(New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2012), 106– 110.
7. Durham, Christian Right, 155.
8. Samuel T Francis, Revolution from the Middle (Raleigh, NC: Middle American
Press, 1997), 60.
9. George Hawley, Right- Wing Critics of American Conservatism (Lawrence: University
Press of Kansas, 2016), 190.
135
Patrick J. Buchanan and the Death of the West
135
10. Justin Raimondo, Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative
Movement (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2008), 263.
11. Martin Durham, “On American Conservatism and Kim Phillips- Fein’s Survey of
the Field,” Journal of American History (December (2011): 758.
12. Edward Ashbee, “Politics of Paleoconservatism,” Society 37, no. 3 (March 2000): 75– 84.
13. Raimondo, Reclaiming the American Right, 266.
14. Patrick J. Buchanan, “Is Democracy in a Death Spiral?” Patrick J Buchanan–
Official Website, April 21, 2017, accessed November 6, 2017, http:// buchanan.
org/ blog/ democracy- death- spiral- 126837.
15. Patrick J. Buchanan, The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant
Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization (New York: Thomas Dunne Books,
2001), 11.
16. Ibid., 32.
17. Ibid., 40.
18. Ibid., 87.
19. Ibid., 109.
20. Ibid., 129.
21. Ibid., 140.
22. Ibid., 144.
23. Francis spoke at American Renaissance’s founding conference in 1994 (AR Staff,
“Sam Francis in His Own Words,” American Renaissance, April 2005, accessed
November 5, 2017, https:// www.amren.com/ news/ 2011/ 02/ sam_ francis_ in/ .) Nonetheless, American Renaissance, of which Jared Taylor is founder and editor,
regarded Buchanan as part of “non- racial Right” and it provided little coverage
of his campaigns until 1999. Jared Taylor “What the Non- Racial Right Thinks,”
American Renaissance, April 2004, accessed November 5, 2017, https:// www.
amren.com/ archives/ back- issues/ april- 2004/ .
24. Leonard Zeskind, Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist
Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2009), 290.
25. Francis, Revolution from the Middle, 61.
26. Ibid., 146.
27. Having said that, although Buchanan may have won significant swathes of
grassroots white evangelicals during his electoral bids, he was less successful
in winning the backing of leading figures within the Christian Right or its or-
ganizations. By the 1990s, such organizations eschewed insurgency and were
increasingly pursuing a strategy based upon strategic lobbying and political
bartering with Republican elites.
28. Patrick J. Buchanan– Official Website, 1992 Republican National Convention
Speech (Patrick J. Buchanan– Official Website, 2017) http:// buchanan.org/ blog/
1992- republican- national- convention- speech- 148.
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M O D E R N T H I N K E R S
29. Ashbee, “Politics of Paleoconservatism,” 80.
30. Jonah Goldberg, “Killing Whitey,” National Review, February 25, 2002,
accessed August 29, 2017, http:// www.nationalreview.com/ article/ 205150/
killing- whitey- jonah- goldberg.
31. Durham, Christian Right, 154.
32. Hawley, Right- Wing Critics, 39– 40.
33. Ashbee, “Politics of Paleoconservatism,” 76. Those who seek to defend Buchanan
from charges of close associations with white supremacists point to his selection
&
nbsp; of Ezola Foster, an African American conservative, as his running mate in the
2000 presidential election campaign.
34. Nathan Glazer, “The Enmity Within,” New York Times, September 27, 1992,
accessed August 21, 2017, http:// www.nytimes.com/ books/ 00/ 07/ 16/ specials/
buckley- anti.html.
35. Patrick J. Buchanan, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost
its Empire and the West Lost the World (New York: Random House, 2008).
36. Newsweek, “Is Pat Buchanan Anti-
Semitic?” Newsweek, December
22, 1991, accessed August 25, 2017, http:// www.newsweek.com/
pat- buchanan- anti- semitic- 201176.
37. Thomas B. Edsall, “White Working Chaos,” New York Times, June 25, 2012,
accessed August 19, 2017, https:// campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/ 2012/ 06/
25/ white- working- chaos/ ?_ r=0.
38. Rick Macgillis, “Rick Santorum, Closet Populist?” New Republic, December
29, 2011, accessed August 30, 2017, https:// newrepublic.com/ article/ 99017/
the- other- huckabee- santorum- connection.
39. Joshua Green, Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump and the Storming of
the Presidency (New York: Penguin Press, 2017), 37.
40. Tim Alberta, “The Ideas Made It, but I Didn’t,” Politico Magazine, May– June,
2017, accessed August 22, 2017, http:// www.politico.com/ magazine/ story/
2017/ 04/ 22/ pat- buchanan- trump- president- history- profile- 215042.
137
9
Jared Taylor and White Identity
Russell Nieli
S A M U E L J A R E D TAY L O R — W H O prefers to go by his middle name, Jared—
was born in 1951 in Kobe, Japan, to Christian missionary parents from
Virginia, and who instilled in their son the Christian ideal that all human
beings are equally children of God. He attended all- Japanese schools
throughout most of his childhood and early adolescence, where he
learned to speak Japanese like a native. He would subsequently earn much
of his living as a Japan expert, translator, and consultant to international
corporations wanting to do business in the land of his birth.
After attending Yale University, where he obtained a BA in 1973 with
a major in philosophy, Taylor spent three years in France, getting an MA
degree in international economics from the Paris Institute of Political