Standing Pat

Buchananism's establishment allies

Virginia Postrel from the May 1996 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

This static ideology requires regular denunciations of consumer choice, individual ambition, and anyone who turns his (or, worse, her) back on the old neighborhood. It relies on sweeping generalizations about the attitudes of broad classes of people. It inevitably divides the world into good and evil, our folks and theirs. It cannot achieve the control it craves any other way.

"The battle for the future," writes Buchanan, "will be as much a battle within the parties as it will be between the parties, a battle between the hired men of the Money Power who long ago abandoned as quaint but useless old ideas of nationhood--and populists, patriots and nationalists who want no part of Robert Rubin's world." Lasch said the same thing, to wide acclaim from the intellectual establishment. He just tactfully left names like "Rubin" out of it.

You cannot build a tolerant nation by denouncing people for working with their minds, traveling abroad, buying and selling financial capital, or simply expressing optimism about America's future. You cannot preach a politics of anti-cosmopolitan hate and expect it to stay safely contained within anti-business boundaries. Michael Lind will not get the America of his dreams, a dynamic culture complete with gay marriage and transracial mixing, by suggesting that everyone who supports international trade and large-scale immigration is an unpatriotic elitist looking for cheap household help.

Such sentiments are popular on the intellectual left, a way of sneering at trade and traders, of pretending to be one with "the people" while denouncing their taste for shopping malls and Japanese cars. But, as conservatives are fond of saying, ideas have consequences. And the most recent consequence of cheap antiliberalism is Pat Buchanan. It's time his intellectual allies owned up to their responsibility.