Buchanan’s is the only important candidacy this year, because only it can have big consequences, including a ruinous redefinition of conservatism. Most presidents’ second terms are even less successful than their first terms, so if Bill Clinton is re-elected, and (as is likely) Republicans control Congress, he will be even less consequential than he has been while being the least consequential president since Coolidge. Neither Bob Dole nor Lamar Alexander would significantly alter, retard or accelerate the conservative agenda that is well defined and advancing. Clinton’s latest budget is much more conservative than the one 12 months ago. For the first time since the 1960s spending on government programs (everything but debt service) is less than the government is receiving in revenues. Conservatism has carried the day against liberalism. Now comes Buchananism, wrecker of what Reaganism has wrought.
Buchanan, whose candidacy gives a patina of validity to media caricatures of conservatism, says, “We are taking our party back.” From whom? From virtually everyone with conservative credentials. From the spirit of Reagan, champion of free trade. From William F. Buckley, who has judged some Buchanan statements anti-Semitic. From William Bennett who, long before endorsing Alexander, said Buchanan “flirts” with fascism. From Phil Gramm, who doesn’t need his Ph.D. in economics to know that protectionism “is a dagger aimed at the heart of everything we stand for . . . [There] has always been a recessive gene in the American character that has found protectionism appealing.” From Newt Gingrich, a student of history who surely recognizes in Buchanan’s brew of nativism and protectionism a recipe concocted by the European right–statism in the service of xenophobic nationalism. Says Gingrich, Buchanan is an “isolationist” and a “reactionary”: “He’s not a conservative. He does not represent Ronald Reagan or Barry Goldwater or anything that we understand as conservative.”
Buchanan has some interesting supporters. Asked recently, with reference to a neo-Nazi newspaper’s raptures, “What have you done to generate such enthusiasm among the Nazis?” Buchanan replied: “I have done nothing.” Oh?
He repeatedly has expressed impatience with prosecutions of accused Nazi war criminals. When the United States apologized to France for having sheltered Klaus Barbie, the “butcher of Lyons,” Buchanan was contemptuous of “all this wallowing in the atrocities of a dead regime.” In 1989 he denounced as “moral bullying” the ostracism of Austria’s President Kurt Waldheim, whose offense was, Buchanan implied, trivial: “Like others in Hitler’s army, Lt. Waldheim looked the other way.” Hitler’s army did much worse than look away; it was deeply complicit in genocide. And in 1988 an Austrian commission concluded unanimously that Waldheim was close to persons committing atrocities, “repeatedly went along” with his unit’s atrocities, and that his passivity when knowing of criminal plans facilitated atrocities.
In 1990 Buchanan, blithely misrepresenting “1,600 medical papers,” ridiculed the “so-called “Holocaust Survivor Syndrome’,” which he said involves “fantasies” of martyrdom and heroics. He said that “reportedly” half the survivor testimonies on file at Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem are considered “unreliable.” He did not say who reported that.
Regarding the use of diesel engine exhaust to asphyxiate Jews at the Treblinka concentration camp where 850,000 died, in 1990 Buchanan wrote: “Diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody.” How did he know? “In 1988, 97 kids trapped 400 feet underground in a Washington, D.C., tunnel while two locomotives spewed diesel exhaust into the car, emerged unharmed after 45 minutes.” The source of that anecdote? “Somebody sent it to me.” It had already appeared in a publication specializing in Holocaust denial.
Buchanan’s eagerness to use such stuff that comes in, as it were, through his transom is telling. And as Jacob Weisberg wrote in The New Republic: “Carbon monoxide emitted by diesel engines is sufficient to asphyxiate people when they are crammed by the hundreds into thirteen-foot chambers. According to the “Encyclopedia of the Holocaust,’ suffocation at Treblinka took as much as half an hour; Buchanan’s comparison only proves that the children he described had sufficient oxygen to survive whatever length of time they were trapped in the tunnel.” Even though the tunnel was open at both ends, some children were made sick.
Diesel exhaust was used for killing at several other Nazi death camps and by the Einsatzgruppen, roving death squads. By saying it cannot kill, and by saying survivors’ testimonies are unreliable, Buchanan abets the principal neo-Nazi obsession–Holocaust denial. The deniers, says Weisberg, focus on Treblinka: “Because the camp was destroyed and most witnesses murdered before the Allies arrived, a smaller quantity of conclusive evidence survives than from Auschwitz. The revisionist case is therefore harder to discredit.” The Holocaust deniers’ lot is not easy. They reciprocate assistance, such as Buchanan’s.
Just 15 months after conservatism captured the constitutional high ground, Capitol Hill, a reckless presidential campaign is taking the name of conservatism slumming. It could get terribly soiled.
