I just read George Packer's essay The Fall of Conservatism in the New Yorker. He describes how Richard Nixon, and conservatives since then, practiced the politics of polarization to advance Republican fortunes, and appealed to the basest instincts of Americans toward that end. He quotes from a revealing memo written by Patrick Buchanan to Nixon in 1971, given to him by Buchanan himself. Buchanan warns him that it's "a little raw," and it is and a little racist as well.
Finally, the memo recommended exploiting racial tensions among Democrats. “Bumper stickers calling for black Presidential and especially Vice-Presidential candidates should be spread out in the ghettoes of the country,” Buchanan wrote. “We should do what is within our power to have a black nominated for Number Two, at least at the Democratic National Convention.” Such gambits, he added, could “cut the Democratic Party and country in half; my view is that we would have far the larger half.”I will not go so far as to say that Patrick Buchanan was a racist in 1971, or that he is one now, but at the very least he has a blind spot for racism, and hangs out with racists. I have commented on this before in posts titled "Racism and the Conservative Movement," parts one and two.
The difference between Buchanan 1971 and Buchanan 2008 is that then he was a central part of the conservative movement, and today he is on the fringes. It is not a coincidence that his wing of conservatism is today often called paleoconservatism. It is a conservatism of the past, a conservatism of racism, or at least racialism, and at times anti-semitism as well. It is a conservatism that is primarily defined more by what it is against than what it is, namely the other, those people with different color skins, different religions or no religion, different sexual orientation.
Patrick Buchanan is probably a nice enough man, he is a shrewd political observer, and he often makes a lot of sense on foreign policy. Modern conservativism could learn something from his critique of neoconservatism. But even conservatism cannot go back; it must go forward.
