Inside Pat Buchanan Burns the Fire of Furious Belief : Politics: One can agree with his criticism of social deterioration and still be chilled by his remedies.

Patrick J. Buchanan is a driven man. One can see this not only in the fervor of his views but in the ferocity of his gaze in certain fleeting moments. Having lunch with him and others at the White House during the Reagan years, as the President spoke against a backdrop of falling snow outside, I drew that laser gaze momentarily. So you are from San Francisco, it seemed to say. What kind of a freak are you and how did you get in here?

But this was fleeting; the infectious grin came out. He may have remembered that there was at least one pro-Reagan editor in Northern California, and this might be the one. But one is reminded, when a singular ferocity of eye comes upon him, that this is a man in whom burns a special inner fire. We shall see how combustible it is in the bucolic expanses of New Hampshire. We may come to think that if there is anything worse than the superficial chameleon opportunist of TV politics, it is the true, fierce believer, set loose in a revival of old-time demagoguery.

And Buchanan is an old-timer--no doubt about that. We saw him first, or a good likeness of him, in 1940. America First really got moving then, when the isolationists--including many Republicans in Congress--organized against Franklin D. Roosevelt’s commitment to help Britain survive the Hitler onslaught. Keep America at home and let the rest of the world wallow in its own ills, was the cry of a movement, headed by Gen. Robert Wood, the well-meaning chairman of Sears Roebuck. The America First organization included even Joseph P. Kennedy; Henry Ford gave it financial help and Charles A. Lindbergh drew crowds to hear the isolationist appeal.

At least he did until an infamous speech in Des Moines revealed that an anti-Semitic streak was one of the varied elements at work in America First. American Jews should keep their mouths shut, he said, about the issue of intervention in the European conflict. Owing to Jewish “ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government,” he said, if this nation gets into war “they will be blamed for it.” The aviator’s poisonous speech defamed his movement, but still its spokesmen yelled that “England will fight to the last American,” and many people half agreed. At least they did until Dec. 7, 1941, when they received a crash course in the costs of running from international responsibility.

In any event, here is Buchanan, right out of 1940, who also should know better from the lessons of the past and the perilous international realities of the present. This stolid America Firster opposed U.S. military action to stop Saddam Hussein’s aggression. He gave an insight into his apparent main reason with a comment on television’s the “McLaughlin Group”: “There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East--the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States.” One would think, unless he is blind to events of the more thunderous kind, that he would discern that the “beating of drums” for Mideast war was done by Saddam Hussein and came in the form of tanks blazing into Kuwait, an event having no relationship at all to Israel.

But of course he is not blind. Plainly, Buchanan’s opposition to U.S. action against Hussein sprang viscerally from his antipathy toward Israel and his tilt toward the Arab states. His “amen corner” is reminiscent of Lindbergh’s chastisement of American Jews. It should occur to Buchanan now that without the action he opposed on behalf of Arab relations, Saddam Hussein would be, at this moment, the victorious lion of the Mideast, solidifying his control of the oil nations and thereby his grip on much of the West, while preparing confidently to become a nuclear-warhead dictator this very year.

By contrast, one can agree with Buchanan’s criticism of social deterioration. But his remedies are chilling. His call for a stringent new nationalism based on exclusivist ideas has a faint boot-stomping sound about it. “We are nationalist. We believe in the old Republic.” The old Republic before the Civil War? A thread of racism runs through his discourse, whether he admits it or not. Would we rather have a million English folk immigrating to Virginia, or a million Zulus? Nobody has suggested that Zulus aspire to any mass move to Virginia; this is racial scare talk, a code to stir emotion behind a facade of humor.

His old Republic is anti-immigrant and racially focused in other respects: He is running against Mexico and Japan and Taiwan, trying to play on job-loss resentments. And there is in his appeal to xenophobia and nativism a hint of a racial purity theme. “Must we absorb all the people of the world into our society, and submerge our historic character as a predominantly Caucasian Western society?” he asks. Of course, all the people of the world are not applying for absorption (not even the Zulus) and any implication that the greatness of America hinges even remotely upon the integrity of blood-lines should be shouted into political oblivion. Buchanan merited shouts of correction when he asked, “Who speaks for the Euro-Americans who founded the U.S.A.? . . . Is it not time to take America back?”

In his call for withdrawal of foreign assistance and of the U.S. military presence abroad, and his proposal of a ditch and fence separating us from Mexico, Buchanan appeals to base instincts. He uses sick stimuli. He propounds a selfish fantasy with glandular appeal not only to people harboring bigotries but to those who do not comprehend the reality of an interdependent world, the necessity to save civilization through sacrificial interaction.

There are, out there, dangerous disintegrations in the world and new nuclear powers emergent among the barbarous dictatorships that crave expansion and the satisfaction of old vengeances. There may be more perils and pain ahead, around the globe, than anyone imagines. Withdrawal of the only superpower, the main humane and pacific force on the planet, could be the mistake of the century, punctuated by nuclear flashes.

No, Buchanan will not win the nomination. But he will cause division. He may sow the seeds not of the old Republic but of old hates whose sprouting is a latent peril through all of time. There is about him a glowering intensity that could turn the New Hampshire primary into something that few seem able to imagine as yet--a nasty and bruising pugilistic exchange, sobering for George Bush, as the steams within Buchanan are vented in the final days. He is a man of peculiar intensity, driven by furious belief rather than the zeal for power we see in other candidates. The chance that he will go ballistic against Bush, causing quite a mess in some final rhetorical explosion, seems excellent.