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Israeli occupied territory." Taki said this in relation to the Marc Rich
pardon by former President Clinton. He also added that Israeli intelli–
gence knew more about U.S. Air Force activities than the Pentagon did,
and that such information was routed through Rich, who bought Israel's
favor. In this way, Taki tendered himself to Buchanan's crusade. Indeed,
money from Taki's father and his shipping profits, hardly a native Amer–
ican enterprise, generates funding for
The American Conservative.
In
exchange for such angelic services, Taki is entitled to his own sound-off
page in the magazine. Most recently this featured a meandering attack on
The National Review's
Victor Davis Hanson, and the "obsession" with
security shared by ancient Greece and modern Washington. The moral
lesson for Taki is clear: Greece was spread thin because of the "greed of
her elite." Now it is the likes of oil companies, the Israeli lobby, and Bill
Kristol who want a war, but who will never be able to win the peace.
Such stream-of-consciousness ramblings may be freewheeling, but they
are a small price to pay for a place in Pat Buchanan's literary world.
It
is a dangerous mistake to scoff at the ravings of the political extremes.
To start with, we are obligated to do what Buchanan as ideologist cannot
do: examine each overseas activity and each domestic policy choice, as
well, to determine where right and wrong exist. The antidemocratic char–
acter of the political extremes does not reside in its errors about any par–
ticular event so much as in its denial of debate and dialogue before
decision. What makes the position of Left fascism, or if one prefers, Right
communism, so compelling is precisely its simple-minded model of the
world. This simplicity is the source of both the appeal of America First and
its preordained disastrous outcome. The world conspires to be more com–
plex than all models, especially simplistic ones like Buchanan's that refer
complex questions of choice to such ultimates as good and evil rather than
to right and wrong, or to better and worse. Demagogic appeals to national
sentiment carry great weight. But when a nation is undergoing travails of
the sort we are experiencing in the economic realm with a market down–
turn, and in the social realm with the emergence of state-religious spon–
sorship of terrorism to weaken American resolve, there is a risk of
irrelevance to his emphasis. The intriguing challenge of our times is not
only the resurrection of the regnant creed of neo-isolationism, but also the
capacity of the American consensus to hold. Buchanan's attack on publi–
cations like
The New Republic, The National Review, The Weekly Stan–
dard, Commentary,
and a host of other publications that in the past held
high their respective flags of conservatism and liberalism is a profound if
inadvertent recognition that the old order is vulnerable.
