Standing Pat.

• Author: Postrel, Virginia I.

Buchananism's establishment allies

Pat Buchanan won't be the Republican nominee. He has, however, shaken up "the establishment." Or so he'd have his followers believe.

Buchanan's heated rhetoric certainly runs counter to establishment Republicanism. Nor would a President Buchanan make Bill Kristol chief of staff or appoint Arianna Huffington to his cabinet. On substance, his vision of a static American social and economic system - opposed to enterprise and regulated from Washington - contradicts the dynamic optimism that has energized the Republican core since Reagan.

But Buchananism is, in fact, a very establishment ideology. It is the ideology of The Atlantic Monthly and of publishing house W.W. Norton, the attitude that marks such indulgently received social critics as Kirkpatrick Sale, Alan Ehrenhalt, Jeremy Rifkin, and Michael Lind. Write a book promoting Buchananism in a properly abstract style, present yourself as a man of the left (perhaps criticizing the right as not truly "conservative"), and you will be respectfully reviewed, deluged with talk-show offers, and featured on the covers of magazines far larger and more prestigious than anything Buchanan's dreaded "neocons" command.

For a half-dozen years, Buchananism has been the hottest of intellectual fads. Its red-hot center is not militia country, but the Washington-to-Boston corridor, where cosmopolitan intellectuals have relentlessly championed an anti-cosmopolitan ideology in the name of attacking markets. They have made economic and social dynamism the enemy, denounced consumer choice, blasted liberal immigration policies, romanticized peasant virtues and traditionalist ethnic neighborhoods, scorned technological achievement, sneered at knowledge work, and opposed international trade. It was the left's golden boy, Michael Lind, not Pat Buchanan, who coined the term "overclass" to build populist resentment against the global economy, large-scale immigration, and upwardly mobile professionals. (See "Overcoming Merit," October 1995.)

Buchananism's most coherent statement is not some obscure "paleoconservative" tome but a book by the widely acclaimed, very establishment social critic Christopher Lasch: The True and Only Heaven (1991). It is devoted to denouncing progress - not just the discredited idea that history is inexorably moving toward some utopia, but the more modest concept of an open-ended, incrementally improving future. Lasch detested the very concept that the future...