The Great Betrayal: How American Sovereignty and Social Justice are Being Sacrificed to the Gods of the Global Economy.

• Author: McDougall, Walter A.

Patrick J. Buchanan (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1998), 384 pp, $22.95.

Pat Buchanan will not go away. Even if his planned third run for the presidency should reduce him to Harold Stassen status, he is confident that the economic nationalism he espouses will capture one or both major parties. In fact, he believes that the tide has already turned, as demonstrated by the refusal of Congress to grant President Clinton "fast track" authority to reduce trade barriers. After sixty years of hegemony, the free-trade establishment finally lost an intellectual and political battle, and for him that means "the counter-revolution" has begun.

The Great Betrayal is a manifesto that conservatives will ignore at their peril. For whatever they think of Buchanan's economics, his political and moral broadsides against current U.S. trade policy thunder. Consider that since 1970 real wages of American workers have fallen 19 percent, while the price of an average new house has risen from two to four times the income of an average young couple, and the portion of young mothers in the workplace has soared from 18 to 63 percent. Consider that the federal tax bite, a mere 3 percent of the average family income in 1950, is now 25 percent, that the dollar has lost two-thirds of its value against the deutschemark and yen since 1970, that manufacturing now accounts for only 17 percent of the U.S. national income, and that government employees now outnumber factory workers in twenty-eight states. Consider that imports as a share of America's GNP, just 7 percent in 1965, are now five times that number, and that two trillion dollars in American capital has flowed overseas in the past twenty years to finance the trade deficits that exploded, according to Buchanan's charts and graphs, the moment the United States flung open its market to foreigners without receiving or even asking for reciprocation.

In short, Buchanan's message is that "Free trade is not free." And while statistics may not play well on the stump, he expects that stories of closed plants, gutted industries, dying towns, and ruined families in a deindustrialized, dependent America will resonate not only with blue-collar ethnics in Manchester, but with all voters who do not earn a living at a computer terminal. They will ask why there is no work for them at a time when the economy and stock market are booming, and if free traders make no reply, the field will be left to Buchanan, for whom the answers are not economic but political and profoundly historical.

Buchanan's technique is to return to the roots of American history and inquire how the United States became the greatest productive powerhouse and wealthiest society in the history of the world. He reminds us that...