Buchanan Measured by Life of Sharply Honed Rhetoric

Since boyhood, Patrick J. Buchanan has seen the world in the simplest of terms: us against them.

Whether “they” were the kids from the neighboring parish or “Zulus” from across the sea, Buchanan stood unmoved at the bridge to protect “us,” with fierce words if possible, with fists if necessary.

He has long understood the power of incendiary and divisive rhetoric in American politics and has expressed his unvarnished and at times insulting opinions with apologies to no one.

With unyielding adherence to a conservative view of his Catholic faith, Buchanan excoriates all who do not share his values and the values of what he repeatedly refers to as “a once-Christian nation that has been force-fed the poisons of paganism.”

He has used the print and electronic pulpit he has occupied for more than 30 years to hector, mock and belittle the “others” in American society--which at various times have been feminists, Jews, blacks, homosexuals, foreigners, free-traders, atheists, abortionists, the United Nations, intellectuals, Supreme Court justices and corporate executives, not to mention “establishment” politicians ranging from Nelson A. Rockefeller to Bob Dole.

An examination of his written and spoken opinions over the last three decades, a record that runs to more than a million words, reveals a remarkable consistency in Buchanan’s core political beliefs and in his attitudes toward those he considers the “enemy.”

It is this vast lode of controversy that Buchanan’s opponents are mining as they accuse him of “extreme views” and seek to blunt his political rise.

It is a search that, in some ways, resembles the proverbial shooting of fish in a barrel. For Buchanan is the rhetorical agent provocateur of the current political scene, couching his views in language deliberately designed to shock and to set his followers apart from all the hostile “thems” that surround them.

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The list of foes changes and grows through the years, but they share a common thread in Buchanan’s mind: They are out-of-touch elites trying to impose their corrupt and godless values on the common men and women of America.

He, of course, is the leader of the self-described peasant rebellion that is storming the gates of the terrified establishment. “Ride to the sound of the guns,” his rallying cry out of New Hampshire, could well have stood as his motto since he threw in his lot with Barry Goldwater and the radical right 32 years ago.

Buchanan’s first job after college in 1962 was as an editorial writer for the conservative St. Louis Globe-Democrat, where he honed the skills in argumentation that four years later caught the eye of Richard Nixon, the former vice president then planning a run for president in 1968.

It was in the Nixon White House that Buchanan perfected the use of words as offensive weapons. One of the nation’s most effective propagandists, Buchanan knows exactly what he is doing with his language. Its effect is to polarize and define in his terms whatever political clash he has chosen to provoke.

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At almost all times, he has chosen the most visceral terms to dramatize his points. Out-of-the-closet lesbians “defecate” on community values, foreign diplomats “vomit” on the United States at the U.N., supporters of welfare are “guilt-soaked wimps,” family-planning clinics are “abortuaries” akin to the Nazi ovens of Auschwitz.

These are the techniques of the conservative populists in American politics, from William Jennings Bryan through George C. Wallace, says historian Dan Carter, author of “The Politics of Rage,” a new biography of Wallace.

“There are some deep strains in the family we call populism, but they do have a few things in common,” Carter said. “They clearly are outside the establishment. When they talk about Washington, Wall Street, transnational corporations, these people are not part of it. They are all insurgents, rebelling against the people running the operation.”

All incorporated in their language a sense of “grievance, betrayal, paranoia about elites . . . an angry evangelical moralism that divides the world into the saved and unsaved,” he said.

Buchanan is a man who clearly means what he says; he has been steady in his militancy throughout his life. He also understands that the best way to win is by galvanizing an audience through attack and outrage.

The very first object of Buchanan’s wrath was the Republican establishment, which in his view torpedoed the candidacy of his first political hero, Goldwater.

“What attracted me about Goldwater was his principled militancy,” Buchanan wrote. “When people called us ‘the radical right,’ they had a point.”

For Buchanan, the Goldwater campaign took on an aspect of religious and cultural war--a sentiment and a phrase that stayed with him for three decades. He never forgave Rockefeller for remaining an agnostic in that war, nor has Buchanan ever shown the least respect for Rockefeller’s Republican political heirs: President Bush and Dole chief among them.

The foundation, of course, of the Eastern establishment is Wall Street and its scions of old money.

In his early writings, Buchanan used “Wall Street” as shorthand for inherited privilege and disdain for the working man.

But Buchanan’s thinking has evolved. Wall Street now represents for him the corporate interests that support trade pacts like the North American Free Trade Agreement and the revision of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which Buchanan believes encourage U.S. business to shutter American factories in favor of cheap overseas labor.

Wall Street is also responsible for the $50-billion international bailout of the Mexican treasury last year, another deal that Buchanan condemned as inimical to American interests.

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Interestingly, he cites the investment house Goldman, Sachs as the chief beneficiary of the Mexican bailout, although dozens of other banks were involved in the deal. He also notes that the transaction was engineered by Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin, former chairman of Goldman, Sachs.

Likewise, when Buchanan speaks of the Supreme Court, he seldom names any member other than Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who, like Rubin, is Jewish.

Buchanan has denied accusations of anti-Semitism repeatedly. In New Hampshire earlier this month, for example, he responded to the question by saying that his personal physician and one of the co-chairmen of his presidential campaign, a rabbi who heads an antiabortion group, are both Jews.

But many Jewish leaders consider Buchanan’s use of Jews to represent institutions he opposes to be a classic instance of coded anti-Semitism.

“This is a pattern you see in him very often, singling out Jews to exemplify positions he’s in opposition to,” said Matthew Brooks, executive director of the National Jewish Coalition, a group of Jewish Republicans.

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“One time you can ignore it, but there’s clearly a pattern here that’s very troubling. Someone as bright as he is, and as careful with language as he is, is not doing it out of ignorance. He knows what he’s doing,” Brooks said.

Jewish leaders also cite as evidence of Buchanan’s anti-Semitism his remark after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait that only two groups were “beating the drums for war in the Middle East: the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States.”

He named four prominent Jews as the leading U.S. voices supporting military action against Iraq: former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, former Pentagon official Richard N. Perle and journalists A.M. Rosenthal and Charles Krauthammer. He wrote that the war’s casualties would be “American kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzales and Leroy Brown.”

Just before the start of the 1992 campaign, in which Buchanan challenged Bush for the GOP nomination, columnist William F. Buckley wrote: “I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charges that what he said and did during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism.”

As an angry young man in the 1960s and 1970s, Buchanan fumed at court-ordered school busing and integration; he also assailed the women’s movement and Congress. Buchanan took on anybody and anything that he found responsible for America going to hell in a handbasket.

And he always did so with utter confidence that the people were behind him.

“Let me say candidly that for the foreseeable future, it is all over for compulsory social integration in the U.S.A., because that body of public approval which must be present for a social change of this magnitude is not there; indeed, a hard opposite opinion is building,” Buchanan wrote in 1970 while at the White House.

Homosexuals occupy a special place in Buchanan’s oratory, particularly those who are open about their sexual orientation. The most colorful language in Buchanan’s canon is found in his descriptions of gay men and lesbians and their sexual practices.

In a September 1994 newspaper column, Buchanan called gays the “aggressors in our cultural war.”

“Neither Jesse Helms nor John Cardinal O’Connor goes gay-bashing, but homosexuals annually parade naked in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, perform lewd acts on the parade route, disrupt Sunday masses and vandalize churches,” Buchanan wrote.

He writes in his autobiography that the “truth” demands that he say that gays, through their practice of “promiscuous sodomy,” are solely responsible for the plague of AIDS in their community.

To Buchanan, a sacred cow is simply someone or something that provides a bigger target. He seems unswayed, for example, by charges that he is a closet racist. He has attacked Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., charging him with “voracious womanizing,” claiming in addition that King was guilty of plagiarism.

Indeed, race often seems to be part of Buchanan’s message. He has repeatedly warned that an “anti-white” bias exists throughout the American government and culture. And although he has opposed ex-Ku Klux Klansman David Duke, he has admonished Republicans to take up the ideas that propelled Duke to political prominence in Louisiana in the early 1990s.

“The national press calls [Duke’s] positions code words for racism, but in the hard times in Louisiana, Duke’s message comes across as middle class, meritocratic, populist and nationalist,” Buchanan wrote in 1991.

Buchanan also makes it clear, again and again, that it doesn’t matter to him if his ideas are popular today. He is pushing the debate to set the agenda for the future.

“What of the ridiculed concept of ‘America first’? Well, just as the nation was not ready for Goldwater in ‘64--but was more than ready for Reagan in 1980--its time is coming,” Buchanan said in 1991. “Mark it down.”

Scholar Michael Novak, who studies the interplay between religion and politics at the American Enterprise Institute, says he admires Buchanan’s “fighting Irish” spirit even as he disagrees with many of his views, particularly on race and on the influence of Jews and Israel on U.S. foreign policy.

“There’s a combative spirit that comes out of oppressed peoples,” Novak said, referring to Buchanan’s upbringing as a Catholic in a 1950s society ruled by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. “He calls himself a Republican, but he’s filled with class envy and resentment. He’s a conservative on social issues, but he sounds like a leftist when he writes about money.

“I can’t help admiring his guts, persistence, verve and sparkle,” Novak said. “He’s not afraid, he fires fast and he takes on all comers.”

Buchanan, as always, gets the last word. He was asked on a recent television interview show whether he would apologize for writing that women lack “the ambition and the will” to succeed in the modern world.

Buchanan looked at the questioner as if she were from Venus.

“We don’t make apologies,” he said.

Times researcher Robin Cochran contributed to this story.

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Buchanan Quote File

“Look, I would be rather ashamed of myself if, after 10 years of writing a syndicated column on politics and issues, and if, after seven years of radio and three years of nationwide television, I were not controversial. What kind of commentator or critic would you be if you weren’t controversial after all that?”

--1985 interview in the Washington Times

ON ISRAEL

“Capitol Hill is ‘Israeli-occupied territory.’ ”

--”The McLaughlin Group” syndicated TV show, June 1990

“What I meant by that is the most powerful lobby in Washington which Congress can’t stand up to, one of the most powerful, is certainly the pro-Israeli lobby. It has gotten its way in this town year in and year out. . . .”

--PBS’ “MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour,” December 1991

“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. . . .”

--”The McLaughlin Group,” August 1990

ON NAZISM

“You’ve got a great atrocity that occurred 35, 45 years ago, OK? Why continue to invest . . . put millions of dollars into investigating that? I mean, why keep a special office to investigate Nazi war crimes?”

--Television interview, 1982

ON IMMIGRATION

“Does this First World nation wish to become a Third World country? Because that is our destiny if we do not build a sea wall against the waves of immigration rolling over our shores. . . .”

--Newspaper column, 1990

“I think God made all people good. But if we had to take a million immigrants in, say, Zulus, next year, or Englishmen, and put them in Virginia, which group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia?”

--Newspaper column, 1991

ON WOMEN

“Rail as they will against ‘discrimination,’ women are simply not endowed by nature with the same measures of single-minded ambition and the will to succeed in the fiercely competitive world of Western capitalism. . . . The momma bird builds the nest. So it was, so it ever shall be.”

--Newspaper column, 1983

CULTURE WAR

“There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.”

--Republican National Convention speech, August 1992

“Whose moral code says we may interfere with a man’s right to be a practicing bigot, but must respect and protect his right to be a practicing sodomite?”

--1988 autobiography, “Right From the Beginning”

ON HOMOSEXUALITY

“Compassion for the victims of this dread disease does not relieve us of the obligation to speak the truth: Promiscuous sodomy--unnatural, unsanitary sexual relations between males, which every great religion teaches is immoral--is the cause of AIDS.”

--1988 autobiography

“The cause of this cultural war is the relentless drive by homosexuals and their allies to use schools and media to validate and propagate their moral beliefs, to convert all of America to those beliefs and to codify them.”

--Newspaper column, September 1994

ON RELIGION

“Anti-Catholicism, as has often been observed, is the anti-Semitism of the intelligentsia.”

--1994 column defending the Catholic Church

“I believe that God created Heaven and Earth. I believe the New Testament is literally the word of God. And I believe the Old Testament is the inspired word of God. . . . [Parents] have a right to insist that godless evolution not be taught to their children. . . .”

--ABC-TV’s “This Week With David Brinkley,” February 1996

ON RACE

“In the South, the trend of integration of the schools will result in socioeconomic segregation, which is worse for education than racial segregation; it is unfair to the poor who integrate, while the middle class retain the freedom of choice to go to the schools they want; it encourages poor whites to simply abandon the schools, and lifelong teachers to quit their jobs.”

--Nixon White House memo on a 1970 speech

Vice President Spiro T. Agnew was

planning on the school busing controversy

“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, wrote the poet Shelley. Does it make a difference that school kids in L.A., who never heard of Robert Frost, can recite the lyrics of Ice-T and 2 Live Crew? Ask the people of Koreatown.”

--1992 column on the Los Angeles riots

FOREIGN POLICY

“If British and French nuclear arsenals helped deter Moscow in the Cold War, why should not small nuclear arsenals in South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Australia help deter the neighborhood bullies of East Asia who reside in Pyongyang and Beijing?”

--Newspaper column, April 1994