Buchanan: The Spoils Go to the Spoiler : Clinton thought his reelection was safe, but along comes a Republican who, like Reagan, is a winner with the working class.

The American political system is designed to annul unpleasant threats, either by absorbing them or by more drastic means of destruction. With his victory in New Hampshire, Pat Buchanan now represents just such a threat, first for the Republican Party and, more seriously, for overall political “stability”--the ultimate concern of the ruling elites.

Until his victory in New Hampshire, it was easy to cast him as an eccentric and unkempt outsider, his views on trade as outrageous to good taste as his ravings about immigrants, homosexuals and abortion. The elites are untroubled by Buchanan’s flailings on the latter two issues and indeed welcome them because, remembering his fatal speech at the Republican convention in 1992, they feel such talk dooms him.

More than most, ruling classes don’t like unexploded bombs, and trade is just such a bomb. The elites have so persuaded themselves that the North American Free Trade Agreement and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade are of demonstrable benefit to all citizens, that they are stunned to discover that animus against these trade treaties is widespread among the people. After Iowa, they said that in an “export-oriented state” like New Hampshire, Buchanan’s protectionism would be greeted with derision. Of course, it turned out that his views were congenial to many. Buchanan won the votes of precisely those people--blue-collar workers--who are supposedly basking in the warm glow of export earnings. He got the bulk of his votes from those earning less than $50,000 a year; 53% of those to whom trade was the most important issue also went for Buchanan. Those who used to be called “Reagan Democrats” voted for Buchanan.

The opinion-forming elites appear to be astounded and outraged at the uncouthness of Buchanan for denouncing corporations and talking about his campaign as a peasant revolt against the castle and its ermined nobles. One pundit, the easily distressed Robert Samuelson, abused Buchanan for “playing politics with job fears” and manipulating people with “feel-your-pain” populism, as if unemployment or fear of it should be above politics.

How will the Republican Party elders deal with Buchanan? Robert Teeter, who ran campaigns for George Bush, says this “cannot go on long.” The heat will be on Lamar Alexander to get out of the race and allow Dole to collect his votes. The hope will be that in the end, money will win the day. As of Jan. 31, Dole had $8.5 million in his campaign chest and Buchanan only $1.7 million.

The Democrats are no doubt exultant that an extremist like Buchanan is the current star of the Republican race. Down in Florida, the chieftains of the AFL-CIO are meeting, pledging to throw millions into the effort to reelect Bill Clinton. But can they count on the loyalty of their unions’ members? How many will listen to Buchanan, as they listened to George Wallace and later Ronald Reagan, and decide that he is a man speaking their language on jobs, wages, security? Buchanan is alert to opportunity. He once considered asking Ohio’s Rep. Marcy Kaptur, a liberal anti-NAFTA Democrat, to join his ticket.

Clinton’s natural reaction, should Buchanan continue to prosper, will be piously to denounce “divisiveness” while echoing some of the populist lingo the way Dole so comically did when he denounced corporate layoffs. But the economy is going to falter for the rest of the year, and so it will be hard for Clinton to trumpet the contributions his administration has made toward the welfare of ordinary folk.

Of course, the basic hope of the elites is that soon the Buchanan surge will be an unwholesome memory.

For his part, Buchanan can listen to his deepest instincts, rant on about homosexuals, throw red meat to the Christian right and scare every middle-of-the-roader away, or he can deepen his message of economic, populist nationalism: us against Money Power, us against the world. Now that the Russians aren’t a problem any more, right-wing populists really have to talk about the banks and Wall Street. It’s where they came in. Left-wing populists, like Jesse Jackson and Jerry Brown, didn’t shackle their economics to exclusionary racism. With Buchanan, you get the full mean-spirited package.

The elites must be feeling irked. Just when they had Clinton safely guiding the Democratic Party into well-patrolled corporate waters with leftists purged or neutered, here comes a populist, attacking big business, rocking their boat.