Ebony and ivory fascists.

• Author: Reed, Adolph, Jr.
• Position: Patrick Buchanan; Louis Farrakhan - Class Notes - Column

The American left is a funny place. I recently attended a Labor Party Advocates chapter meeting where a gaggle of left sectarians interminably vented their disagreement with the executive committee's position that the party should be a non-electoral entity. They seemed not to realize that whether or not we engage in the 1996 elections is meaningless. The left is so weak that we can't hope to have any impact on national politics in the electoral arena. In fact, the only thing we could accomplish would be to set ourselves up as scapegoats for a possible Clinton defeat.

Nothing underscores the left's irrelevance in the big picture of American politics more boldly than Pat Buchanan's strong showing in the Republican primaries, just as Louis Farrakhan's bounce from the Million Man March indicated the left's irrelevance in black politics. The success these salt-and-pepper twins of religious-tinged fascism have enjoyed stems partly from a spate of media coverage. But it is also testament to the left's failure to connect with the lives of people outside our ranks.

Buchanan and Farrakhan thrive--as demagogues always do--by tapping people's anxieties and offering a cathartic identification with themselves as the cure. They cultivate a nostalgic wish for an organic order, and they offer simplistic solutions that focus on demonizing stereotyped enemies. Their world views similarly rest on the staples of fascist ideology: racism (including anti-Semitism), misogyny, homophobia, and populist authoritarianism. Each presents himself as the crystallized essence of Popular Will. Each spouts belligerent, borderline violent rhetoric while complaining that he is the beleaguered, overmatched victim of vastly powerful conspiracies. The complaints grow louder with each success.

Buchanan may or may not survive in the race until the Republican convention. He's not likely to win the nomination. If he does win, he could be an easy opponent for President Piggly Wiggly. On that basis, some liberals and progressives are secretly cheering him on, seeing him as partly source, partly reflection of the GOP's disarray. And some progressives may want him to stick around in the race because his success seems to validate the power of an anti-corporate, anti-NAFTA appeal. But I'd be cautious about either of these views.

While Buchanan looks like an extremist and a loser who will rally both the GOP elite and the establishment media around some other candidate, the possibility remains that the popular groundswell he got going could take on a life of its own. That's certainly what Buchanan himself is hoping. And he could secure the nomination. Reagan looked like an extremist loser in 1980, and the right is a lot stronger now than then, both ideologically and organizationally.

Except for his vocal opposition to NAFTA, Buchanan's views aren't that out of step with the Republican mainstream; he's just more pugnacious than the other national figures when he expresses them.

Sure, "fiscal conservatives" like Governor William Weld of Massachusetts and former HUD Secretary Jack Kemp tend not to be especially concerned with restricting abortion or civil rights for well-off women, gays, and nonwhites. And "social conservatives" aren't particularly concerned with getting rid of government on principle. They unite naturally, however, around expanding government's punitive functions when directed at people who are poor or different.

Republican "libertarians" like Weld are among the quickest to go in for prison-building. And they should be--they understand that their program of gutting government's...