Pat Buchanan thinks …

Pat Buchanan thinks conservatism–true conservatism, in his mind–is dead.

Pat Buchanan speaks of American conservatism in the past tense.

“The conservative movement has passed into history,” says the one-time White House aide, three-time presidential candidate, commentator and magazine publisher.

“It doesn’t exist anymore as a unifying force,” he says in an interview with The Washington Times. “There are still a lot of people who are conservative, but the movement is now broken up, crumbled, dismantled.”

Now, I don’t know that I adhere to what Buchanan considers “conservatism”, but I do find myself pretty firmly on the right side of the political spectrum, but perhaps somewhat to the left of Pat. But even from my vantage point, I have to agree that some of his points have merit.

Mr. Buchanan, a former adviser to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, says conservatism “is at war with itself over foreign policy, over deficit hawks versus supply-siders.”

Unnamed phonies, he suggests, have infiltrated the movement.

There are “a lot of people who call themselves conservative but who, on many issues, I just don’t consider as conservative. They are big-government people.”

I, too, find Republicans more and more going the “big government” route in order to win elections. For those who’d then insist that there isn’t all that much difference between Republicans and Democrats, I’d have to point out that the bigness of the government some Republicans want is far, far smaller than the nanny state Democrats have given us. (Witness the Social Security debate; Dems want full government control, and wail and gnash their teeth when anyone suggests you be given control of your own money.) But at the same, the Republican party does seem to be losing the social issues in general.

But it is culture and values that matter for Mr. Buchanan, who for more than 40 years has helped shape American conservatism.

In his 1992 speech to the Republican National Convention in Houston, he declared: “There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.”

He is still fighting that war.

“American culture has become toxic and poisonous,” he says. “Take a look at what Hollywood produces today and what it produced in the 1950s. The alteration is dramatic.”

He suggests that in some respects, traditionalists might be fighting for a lost cause. “We say we won a great victory by defeating gay marriage in 11 state-ballot referenda in November,” he says. “But I think in the long run, that will be seen as a victory in defense of a citadel that eventually fell.”

As he later says, “I can’t say we won the cultural war, and it’s more likely we lost it.”

The evidence? He says it was all over the tube, in prime time, at last year’s Republican National Convention, which featured California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, New York Gov. George E. Pataki and former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, all social liberals.

I think the big reason the same-sex marriage amendments passed so overwhelmingly is that the left turned up the heat to fast on the boiling frog. Had the move to same-sex marriage been more gradual, these votes may have never been held, let alone passed.

Unlike Buchanan, however, I do hold out optimism for the future, and partially because of the same-sex marriage issue, and partially because the blogosphere is allowing conservatives to route around the MSM, who won’t report well enough on conservative issues or present them in a fair light. Oh yes, the left certainly has it’s bloggers, but many of them are just echo chambers and apologists for the MSM (e.g. Kos’ backing of CBS’s and Newsweek’s irresponsibility). The election of more and more Republicans and all levels of government is a testament to this. However, to many of the Republican politicians themselves are trying to play the same game as the Democrats are with their constituents; vote for me, and I’ll send home the gravy train. That’s not how to run a government, but I think the blogosphere, and citizen action via the Internet in general, is going to hold these guys accountable.

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