The Trump Before Trump: Krauthammer's Warning
“Pat Buchanan's Fascist Underpinnings” I really miss Charles Krauthammer.
And I was reminded again how much I missed him, when a Bulwark reader sent along this remarkable piece that Krauthammer wrote about the GOP’s earlier flirtation with fascism. It’s a stark reminder that none of this is new.
In March 1992 — more than 30 years ago — Krauthammer warned against the dark political underbelly of then-candidate Pat Buchanan. The political establishment of the time had been rattled by Buchanan’s better-than-expected showing in the New Hampshire primary, which had fired up the debate over whether or not the tv pundit/speech/writer/populist demagogue was an anti-Semite.
Of course he was, Krauthammer wrote, but it was actually worse than that.
“The real problem with Buchanan,” Krauthammer wrote, “is not that his instincts are anti-Semitic… but that they are, in various and distinct ways, fascistic.”
It’s worth your time to read the whole thing:
First, there is Buchanan's nativism. "What happened to make America so vulgar and coarse, so uncivil and angry?" he asks. After serving up the usual suspects ("a morally cancerous welfare state" etc.), he finds "another reason": "Since 1965, a flood tide of immigration has rolled in from the Third World, legal and illegal, as our institutions of assimilation ... disintegrated." The next paragraph advises us that since 1950 America has gone from 90 percent to less than 77 percent European. "If present trends hold," he warns, "white Americans will be a minority by 2050."
"Who speaks for the Euro-Americans?" (read: white Americans) asks Buchanan. Guess. "Is it not time to take America back?" Guess for whom and from whom. This naked appeal to racial and ethnic exclusivity puts Buchanan firmly in the tradition of Jean-Marie Le Pen and Europe's other neo-fascists whose platform is anti-immigrant resentment, fear and loathing of the unassimilated Other.
Then there is Buchanan's open admiration for authoritarian politics. Press profiles of Buchanan recall colorfully his father's worship of Franco and (Joe) McCarthy. But this is more than mere family lore. Buchanan fils has quite cheerfully expressed his own esteem for Franco and Pinochet (both "soldier-patriots") and for the "Boer Republic," Buchanan's quaint and sympathetic euphemism for white racist South Africa.
As for the man who gave fascism a bad name, Buchanan offers this: "Though Hitler was indeed racist and anti-Semitic to the core, a man who without compunction could commit murder and genocide, he was also an individual of great courage, a soldier's soldier in the Great War, a political organizer of the first rank, a leader steeped in the history of Europe ... " etc. Another soldier-patriot?
As for democracy, Buchanan disdains the principle of "one man, one vote" as "democratist ideology," a locution as contemptuous as it is peculiar. In particular, he scorns the idea of spreading democracy abroad, the cornerstone of Reagan's foreign policy, as "democracy worship" and "liberal idolatry."
Long before Trump descended the golden escalator, Buchanan had connected the dots: “Nativism, authoritarianism, ethnic and class resentment.”
That was, Krauthammer wrote, “a good start.”
But, he wrote, Buchanan was still “missing an essential feature of the fascist world view: its economics.”
He had contempt for "democracy worship," but he was still a parishioner at the church of capitalism, free trade and limited government.
No longer. Buchanan has converted to protectionism, i.e., government shutting markets in the name of the nation. And now the pretender to the throne of Ronald Reagan has gone beyond mere autarky to public denunciations of "vulture capitalism."
In other words, he was MAGA before MAGA and Trump before Trump, except with a bigger vocabulary.
**
Earlier this month, historian Nicolle Hemmer also highlighted the Trump-Buchanan echoes, including his open disdain for “democracy.”
At the very moment democratic triumphalism was in full force and commentators were musing about the end of history, he began questioning whether democracy really was the best form of government. “The American press is infatuated to the point of intoxication with ‘democracy,’” he wrote in 1991. To make his point, he compared the Marine Corps and corporations like IBM to the federal government. “Only the last is run on democratic, not autocratic, principles. Yet who would choose the last as the superior institution?”
Despite Buchanan’s defeats in 1992 and again in 1996 and 2000, she wrote, “his ideas took root immediately.” Republicans were quick to embrace some of his nativist, anti-immigrant stances.
“And while Republican politicians like George W. Bush and John McCain attempted to tamp down that nativist streak in the party,” she wrote, “it was the nativists who ultimately won.”
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