Get Ready for Buchanan’s Politics of Resentment : He plays to common fears, but is short on resolution

Along with his fellow survivors, Republican presidential aspirant Patrick Buchanan will soon be stumping California in quest of the 165 GOP convention delegates at stake in the March 26 winner-take-all presidential primary. Buchanan is now well established as this year’s poster boy for the politics of resentment, that not-unfamiliar mood of anger and anxiety that grows out of economic insecurity and simmering social grievances. This is the kind of political climate that traditionally brings out candidates adept at fiery rhetoric, blame-laying and simplistic answers. This year is no exception.

Buchanan likes to describe his supporters as peasants with pitchforks, a wonderful image that calls to mind medieval uprisings against the callous gentry, or the classic movie scene where outraged rustics finally decide that Dr. Frankenstein is up to no good. Imagery aside, it’s clear that a significant minority of primary voters share, if not all of Buchanan’s ideas, then at least his scorn for those who take a more contemplative and conciliatory approach to the hard issues of governance. In little more than three weeks we’ll know how well California’s Republicans respond to Buchanan’s message.

We particularly have in mind his economic credo, with its seldom-specific references to the alleged malefactions of big business, its ominous allusions to international bankers and multinational corporations, its century-old suggestion of a no-quarter contest between virtuous Main Street and infamous Wall Street for the nation’s economic soul, its strident call for import restrictions in the name of safeguarding jobs. The appeal of this litany--and its power shouldn’t be underestimated--is that it claims to identify the villains in a time of rapid and economic change and of the deep insecurity that accompanies it.

The accuracy of Buchanan’s populist finger-pointing of course can be questioned. This is not the America of the 1890s or the 1930s. An economy that has expanded almost unimaginably has made more families than ever shareholders in the nation’s businesses, a part of what Wall Street represents. Retirement plans have become major investors in the stock market, and such giant players as the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, with its $97 billion in assets, have emerged as powerful voices demanding better performance and greater returns from companies they invest in. Downsizing, painful and sometimes even brutal, is often a prelude to corporate growth and improved performance. Among the eventual beneficiaries is the great middle class that, directly or through retirement plans, now owns a large portion of corporate America.

Buchanan’s refrain on trade is simplicity itself. Imports, he says, cost jobs, and he would slash imports by imposing sweeping tariffs--10% on products from Japan, 40% on those from China, a “quality of life” tax on goods from Mexico and other developing countries. What he doesn’t talk about are the inevitable consequences of such protectionism: Retaliation against American products sold overseas and higher prices for much of what Americans buy from abroad, since a tariff is really nothing more than a tax on consumers. It will be interesting to see how hard Buchanan pushes these outdated notions in California--whose exports, worth $41.4 billion, account for more than 828,000 jobs--and in the state of Washington, whose primary is also on March 26 and whose $15.6 billion in annual exports support 311,000 jobs.

No one looking at the record is likely to accuse Buchanan of having a coherent economic program. He has instead a refrain of prejudices against banks and big business and those seemingly distant and foreign-sounding “transnational corporations,” and he has a clear sense of the economic worries that grip a lot of Americans. He’s very good at playing to those fears. But that’s a long way from having real ideas about how to resolve them.