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PAR.TISAN REVIEW
cruelly. As a long-time citizen of New York, I voted for Mario Cuomo
every time he ran for office and would like to vote for him again, were
I not now, happily, a citizen of Georgia. (I confess that I have to vote
for him because I always vote for Italians unless I have a strong reason
not to.) But I would not vote for him or anyone else who refuses to
repudiate Jesse Jackson and the left wing of the party unless he and they
repudiate Farrakhan completely.
As for the right, it is by no means out of the woods. Personally, I
am by no means convinced that Pat Buchanan is a racist or an anti–
Semite, notwithstanding his frequent displays of genuine insensitivity to–
ward blacks and Jews. Buchanan's soul may be left to God. Our problem
lies elsewhere. He speaks for a great many workers and lower-middle-class
people in the American heartland who are being ignored and trifled
with by the politicians of both parties. Whatever his personal future,
those people will not go away. We should not be surprised
to
see the
rise of a broad-based political insurgency against both the liberals who
espouse the politics of moral degeneracy and the conservatives who es–
pouse the politics of complacency. Buchanan may turn out to be an
incidental predecessor to a leader who is actually guilty of what he
himself is often accused of. For reasons I suspect need no review here,
many on the right are especially susceptible
to
white racism and anti–
Semitism, or at least have been so historically.
It
will take a clear eye,
moral fortitude, and nerves of steel for a political leader who courts that
potentially huge constituency to repudiate the sinister elements within it.
Let us worry less about the subjective attitudes of Pat Buchanan or
anyone else and keep our eye on the main point: the demand that every
politician unambiguously reject not only the support of blatant racists
and anti-Semites, but also the support of those who associate with them
under any excuse or pretense.
The struggle against anti-Semitism cannot be separated from the
struggle against racism, or the campaign to destroy the very idea of an
American nationality, or the issues in the so-called Cultural War. The
exponents of the totalitarianism now derisively called "political correct–
ness" are aiming their hardest blows against Western civilization itself and
against the very idea of a distinct American nationality. I think it is un–
fortunate that William Bennett, in his brave rebuttals, should be driven
to proclaim the superiority of the Western civilization over all others. I
would remind him of what his fellow conservative, Eric Voegelin, wisely
observed - that the notion of the stagnation of the East disappears once
we reject the dubious notion of the moral progress of the West. As a
Christian philosopher, Bennett should not have to be told that the illu–
sion of moral progress of the West has historically been inseparable from
anti-Christian infidelity and murderous political utopianism. But Bennett
