CURRENTS
Buchanan's Takeoff
Can Patrick Buchanan get back into the great American political conversation? Maybe, if his magazine keeps up the good work.
When his bimonthly The American Conservative appeared in October, it was clear that the combative conservative, "old right" heir to the Robert Tafts, Russell Kirks, and Charles Beards of the past was embarking on a mission to reclaim the banner of true conservatism from the neoconservatives, the well-subsidized, politically influential pro-Iraq war crowd whom he denigrates as "right-wing impersonators."
With Taki Theodoracopulos, the sardonic London Spectator and New York Press columnist and shipping heir, as the money man — one of his Spectator columns wisecracked about sending the neocon William Kristol on "a one-way Concorde trip to the Israeli Riviera" — and Scott McConnell, former editorial-page editor for Rupert Murdoch's New York Post, as executive editor, The American Conservative is out to persuade the right wing that Buchanan's paleocons, not neocons, are the real thing.
In its first four issues, Bush's foreign policy (especially toward Iraq) takes repeated hits — by historian Paul Schroeder ("It is precisely from this conservative, pro-American stance that I claim that this would be an imperialist war"); Arnaud de Borchgrave, UPI's editor at large (Iraq as a postwar democracy is a "self-delusional mirage"); and Nicholas von Hoffman, who writes about the devastating impact the embargo has had, and a possible war will have, on Iraq's children. And if The American Conservative has any chance of successfully propagating its sort of conservatism, it can do no better than continue publishing articles as forceful as that of the un-Buchanan-like thinker and political historian Kevin Phillips, whose "Why I Am No Longer a Conservative" excoriates "a war-policy recklessness that makes Barry Goldwater look like Mahatma Gandhi."
Still, to be widely read and talked about, editor Buchanan needs to erase the sour taste that his reputation brings to many Jews who are convinced he's anti-Semitic, or to those recalling his "culture war" harangues, or to American newcomers who fear his wish to limit immigration. The magazine's potential lies not in trying to resurrect an older America, which no longer exists, but in offering fresh conservative and libertarian alternatives.
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