Give John McCain credit for shrewd deployment of principle: he calmly derided Buchanan’s views on World War II and said he had no place in the Republican Party. George W. Bush, choosing his political hide over bedrock historical principle, urged Buchanan to stay loyal to the GOP. Pat blew a gasket and demanded an apology from McCain. Like all bullies, Buchanan goes to pieces when confronted with a fraction of the abuse he heaps on other people every day. If he leaves the Republicans and gets under the hood with Ross Perot, which is now likely, he won’t be as big a spoiler as he seemed to be just a couple of weeks ago.
I actually thought McCain was too easy on Buchanan. Pat is a charming man off camera, kind to his wife and co-workers; Adolf was a vegetarian, kind to pets. Comparing Buchanan to Hitler? Awfully low blow.
Well, not really, at least not according to Buchanan. In his view, communism was much worse than fascism, which means that Nazi comparisons should be less insulting to him than his long history of Red-baiting was to his targets. Besides, Buchanan believes Hitler had his good side: “Though Hitler was indeed racist and anti-Semitic to the core,” he once wrote in his newspaper column, “he was also an individual of great courage… His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality, that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path.” Note that Buchanan didn’t call him an “evil genius,” just a genius. Nowhere in his writings could I find Buchanan condemning Hitler with anywhere near the venom he reserves for, say, Franklin Roosevelt.
Buchanan’s critique of Western leaders wouldn’t be so crazy if the “mushiness” he decried was appeasement. But we learn in “A Republic, Not an Empire,” his new isolationist tour of American history, that he thinks the Allies should have done less to stop Hitler. He argues that Great Britain and France should not have declared war when Germany attacked independent Poland in 1939, that Hitler after 1940 posed “no physical threat” to “vital American interests” and sought only “mastery of Europe,” which was apparently none of our business. All of this is conveyed in the guise of careful revisionist history, but the thrust is unmistakable–that the Allies should have let Hitler sweep eastward and smash Bolshevism. The author somehow neglects to mention that this would have almost certainly allowed Germany to win the war.
Buchanan is not a Nazi, but he is unquestionably soft on Nazism–softer than many he’s accused of being soft on communism. In his fury last week, he even said that failed Western policies “produced World War II and virtual annihilation of the Jewish population of Europe”–as if that was our fault, not the Nazis’. A few years ago he wrote that the Treblinka gas chambers, where 800,000 Jews were killed, “did not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anyone.” He later admitted he was snookered by a Holocaust denier, though he didn’t express regret over it. He heaped more contempt on “hairy-chested Nazi hunters” than on those they hunt.
What’s puzzling is why Pat wrote the World War II sections of the book the way he did. It’s not as if he won’t pander and trim to stay politically viable. When he worked for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, he was a free trader; by 1992 he’d become a protectionist. He’s huddling now with Lenora Fulani, a New York fringe candidate and self-described “black nationalist Marxist” who was once fodder for his attacks. Buchanan could easily have echoed most “America Firsters,” who later admitted that their prewar isolationism had been wrong. After all, he carves out an exception to his isolationist creed for the war against communism. But now he ends up suggesting that while the cold war merited American intervention, World War II did not. This can only be chalked up to pure political pugnaciousness and perhaps loyalty to his late father, who worshiped Spain’s dictator Franco.
All of which leaves Buchanan looking disloyal to everyone else’s fathers and grandfathers, and on the wrong side of best sellers by Tom Brokaw and John McCain that extol wartime service. Buchanan easily survived the charges of anti-Semitism leveled by William F. Buckley and others in the early ’90s, but now he’s anti-dad. That’s a bigger political problem.
Even so, the Bush forces continue to appease him. They are still terrified he will cost them the election. The media will remain prisoners of Buchanan’s entertainment value. In a low-energy election season, Crackpot Pat versus The Donald for the Reform Party nomination looks like a lively bout, especially with Perot and Jesse Ventura playing Angelo Dundee in the corners. But Pat Buchanan’s ability to tap populist resentments and grab large numbers of votes now seems less likely. No one serious will debate him. The onetime superpatriot has become somehow un-American. Of course he can always go back to pounding the table on cable–or start CrackpotPat.com.
