We can only welcome Buchanan’s contribution to the debate about the 20th century, and his useful corrections to the fantasy picture most of us carry around of Winston Churchill.
June 17, 2008
Neocons think in news cycles, the Vatican in centuries—and Patrick J. Buchanan? In the body of worthy, provocative books he has produced, his thought ranges over decades. Having nobly failed to affect American elections and nudge our policies closer to prudence, it’s clear that Buchanan has withdrawn from the dismal business of trying to sober up the Republican party—and decided instead to work at dismantling the historical myths and moral fetishes of the center-left publicists who now dominate the “conservative” movement. His books are clearly written and remarkably persuasive—which explains the hysteria they have occasioned. His genial public persona, the ease with which he can engage the likes of Stephen Colbert and Ali G (remember “I don’t think Saddam was a threat even if he had BLTs”), guarantee him a broad readership. Indeed, his works are bestsellers and hence impossible to dismiss. They make an impact, and threaten to shatter the groupthink so carefully cultivated over the course of the 1990s, when dissenting voices of the Right were systematically purged and persecuted. They are a species of samizdat.
Which is why the totalitarians among us want to silence him—not merely to beat back his arguments but to destroy him as a man, render him an un-person, whose very name evokes hysterical disgust … or better yet, terror. For up-and-coming conservatives, there is no worse fate than to be viewed as just a little too far to the right. You can err to the left all you want—Christopher Hitchens still venerates Leon Trotsky, not that it stops “conservative” journalists from licking his Bolshie jackboots. There are no enemies on the left. But lean a little too far to the right end of the narrowly circumscribed spectrum so recently established—remember when John O’ Sullivan used to publish Peter Brimelow in National Review? It seems like centuries ago!—and you might as well be a confessed pedophile.
Now, I’m all for drawing bright lines distinguishing honest opinion and daring dissent from the moral squalor of racial hate—whether aimed at non-whites, or Jews, or other groups who sometimes frustrate conservatives. But precisely because of the grave evil entailed in contempt for other races, or hostility aimed at the cousins of Christ, we must weigh such charges seriously. They aren’t parking tickets. To adopt an ideology predicated on racial or religious hate rightly earns a thinker an intellectual death sentence. It should never be administered lightly.
It’s clear that in writing Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, Buchanan was courting controversy—and not of the surface sort, like the meaningless chatter aimed by the likes of Limbaugh and Coulter at John McCain, over whom they will be fawning come November. No, Buchanan was striking deep, and his aim was mostly true. In critiquing the figure of Winston Churchill, he was acting like St. Boniface among the Teutonic pagans, when he stood before their sacred oak and hacked it down.