A New York Times columnist offering pointers for “Pitchfork Pat” Buchanan-type populists on “the isolationist right who thought Trump shared his views” might seem akin to a mad scientist named Frankenstein offering a road map to a pitchforks-and-torches peasant mob. Yet Michelle Goldberg does just that in “The President Was Never Antiwar” (March 2).
While maintaining that Donald Trump was indeed the embodiment through which “the once marginalized politics of Patrick Buchanan became a dominant force in the Republican Party,” Goldberg insists that “Trump was never Buchanan’s heir when it came to foreign policy.” While “it is true that he broke with key elements of neoconservative ideology,” he hasn’t distanced himself from even “the most fanatical of neoconservatives,” preferring instead to discard the ideology’s “notion that American power should ever be constrained by a veneer of idealism.” The end result is “less a repudiation of neoconservatism than a mutation of it.”
Trump might, as Goldberg suggests, be “attracted to right-wing cranks of all stripes.” But “paleoconservatives who are skeptical of foreign entanglements” can trace their views back to Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams. As Franklin Foer highlighted in The New York Times, during another rash Republican administration garnering “fierce loyalty from conservatives” to the point where rightist “backlash against the war may seem unexpected,” the Buchanan who “vociferously opposed Bush’s campaign against Saddam Hussein, just like he had opposed the one waged by Bush’s father” was drawing on a tendency that included Gerald Ford and John F. Kennedy, “not just angry farmers and protofascists.”
If none of those four forefathers were that peaceful as presidents, neither were they real-life versions of the reactionary rule of Charles Lindbergh as imagined by Philip Roth in The Plot Against America (what was for Foer in 2004 a “new counterfactual novel” dramatizing a dystopia of paleocon precursors). Contemporary conservatives who “bemoan feminism, immigration and multiculturalism” have given up hope of a USA unshaped by such movements to the point where “they see no point in exporting its values abroad.”
By contrast, Goldberg points out that Trump being “anti-immigrant, hostile to free trade and given to John Birch Society-style conspiracy theorizing” is taken to show that he will cut off military maneuvering at the borders as well. That doesn’t just ignore the longstanding observation by laissez-faire radicals that voluntary relations across state lines tend to defuse rather than fuel international tensions. It’s almost as if Perseus didn’t bother with his painstaking tracking and taming of the mythological winged horse Pegasus in Clash of the Titans, but was satisfied with a particularly malodorous pile of manure.
Goldberg is on to something in noting how Trump’s persona evolved in an environment with “no real cost to his belligerence” … not even mentioning his 2000 interview in The Advocate magazine defining his politics in opposition to, not imitation of, “the things [Buchanan] had written about Hitler, Jews, blacks, gays, and Mexicans.” As Herculean as the task may seem, we don’t need a Greek demigod to clean up the political horse race.
New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.