By Barry Sheppard
Robert Dole will be the Republican presidential nominee, and the other Republicans have faded from the public spotlight — all except one. Patrick Buchanan will use the delegates he won in the primaries to make his voice heard and push his agenda at the Republican convention in August.
Buchanan is not just another right-wing conservative. He is an incipient fascist, complete with "anti-capitalist" demagogy.
A brief review of his positions is illuminating.
In defending the Confederate flag of the slavocracy, he openly comes out for the South in the Civil War: "The War Between the States was about independence, about self-determination, about the right of a people to break free of a government to which they could no longer give allegiance".
He fought the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s, reprinting FBI smears of Martin Luther King. On the system of legal segregation that the civil rights movement overthrew: "There were no politics to polarize us then, to magnify every slight.
"The 'negroes' of Washington [Buchanan's home town] had their public schools, restaurants, bars, movie houses, playgrounds and churches; and we had ours."
As adviser to Nixon's White House in 1969, he urged Nixon not to visit "the Widow King" on the first anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination, warning that such a visit would "outrage many, many people who believe Dr King was a fraud and a demagogue and perhaps worse ..."
In a memo to Nixon he said the "integration of blacks and whites — but even more so, poor and well-to-do — is less likely to result in accommodation than it is in perpetual friction, as the incapable are placed consciously by government side by side with the capable".
Concerning apartheid South Africa, he denounced the view that "white rule of a black majority is inherently wrong".
Buchanan believes that Hitler was "an individual of great courage ... Hitler's success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. 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."
His other heroes include Spain's fascist strongman Franco, Chile's Pinochet and Buchanan's fascist-minded forerunner here, Senator Joseph McCarthy. He says Jews are guilty of "group fantasies of martyrdom" regarding the Holocaust, and doubts that many died at Treblinka.
"Rail as they will about 'discrimination,' women are simply not endowed by nature with the same measures of single-minded ambition and will to succeed in the fiercely competitive world of Western capitalism." He is against abortion under all circumstances.
"Gay rights activists seek to substitute, for laws rooted in Judeo-Christian morality, laws rooted in the secular humanist belief that all consensual sexual acts are morally equal. That belief is antibiblical and amoral; to codify it into law is to codify a lie."
No wonder he attacks "the worship of democracy as a form of governance". He says, "Like all idolatries, democratism substitutes a false god for the real, a love of process for a love of country", and suggests that "quasi-dictatorial rule" might solve our problems.
Breaking with the traditional Republican defence of big business, Buchanan appealed to white working people suffering under capitalist "downsizing" and declining wages, while the wages of corporate CEOs are spiralling, as are profits and the stock market.
Some in the press even called him a "socialist" for this demagogy. But if he is a socialist, it is of the national socialist variety. Hitler, the most infamous National Socialist ("Nazi" is a contraction of the term) railed against the capitalists and presented himself as a champion of the working people, too.
Like Hitler, Buchanan attacks the other capitalist politicians who stand in his path for their mushiness, character flaws and weakness. His pro-working class stance is a sham. He is anti-union, against the minimum wage, unemployment insurance, workers' compensation and job safety laws.
He is against NAFTA, not because Mexican workers and farmers are being more intensely exploited by the New York banks, or because the treaty weakens laws to protect workers in the US, but in order to blame the conditions working people face on immigrants, foreigners, imports and affirmative action for people of colour and women.
Behind the scenes manipulating all this are "internationalist financiers" — read "Jewish bankers". Whenever he wants to personalise his demagogy against the rich, he picks the firm of "Goldman, Sachs", and draws out the name so his audiences get the point. Likewise when he attacks the Supreme Court, he zeroes in on the one Jew on the court, drawing out "Ruth Ba-der Gins-berg."
Underneath this filth is the move to the right by both capitalist parties. Part of the reason for this fascist-minded demagogue's success has been the failure of the labour movement to provide any political alternative to the rightward shift in politics. The union leaders have backed the Democrats for decades, and have been pulled to the right with them. The same is true for most of the Left.
I do not wish to imply that Buchanan has succeeded in organising a mass fascist movement at this time. There are no Brown Shirts organised to break up union meetings and other workers' organisations. The capitalist class has no need yet, given the weakness of the labour movement, to turn toward fascism.
But small fascist outfits used Buchanan's campaign to grow and extend their influence. Individuals associated with such outfits even surfaced high up in his campaign committees.
The Buchanan campaign achieved a certain jelling of an incipient fascist movement, which Buchanan intends to keep working on after the Republican convention and the November elections.