Auf Wiedersehen, Pat Buchanan

Ten years ago Jacob Weisberg wrote an illuminating article about Pat Buchanan - Auf Wiedersehen, Pat - which presents much evidence about Buchanan's anti-semitic, Nazi-defending worldview then.

He writes:

Buchanan is a kind of fascist fellow traveler, who dabbles in an anachronistic style of populist demagoguery that points to cosmopolitan Jews, and to a lesser extent nonwhite immigrants, as the source of the country's problems....

The fuss about Buchanan first started in 1990 when he blamed Jewish neoconservatives of dragging the country toward the Gulf War. In a similar vein in his 1996 campaign, Buchanan would hint that Jews were to blame for much else, sarcastically enunciating the name of Ruth Bader Ginsburg when complaining about the Supreme Court. Or he would attack "New York bankers," often singling out the firm of "Goldman Sachs" (but never Bear Stearns or Salomon Smith Barney). Or he might complain about the globalist economic policies of Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan--not those of Lloyd Bentsen and Bill Clinton. In Buchanan's neo-1930s protectionism and isolationism, it isn't hard to hear the echoes of the radio priest Father Coughlin, who associated Jewish bankers with rapacious capitalism....

His new book, A Republic Not an Empire, makes his complaints against the Jews more explicit than ever. A brief for isolationism, the book includes a pocket history of "Jewish Influence" in U.S. foreign policy from 1917 to the present. Buchanan, who blamed Jews for dragging America into the Gulf War, thinks they also pushed us into World War II--mistakenly! His words echo those of Charles Lindburgh, a leader of the America First Committee, who Buchanan thinks was unfairly labeled an anti-Semite for warning the country about Jewish influence in Hollywood and the media. Buchanan, whose campaign Web site sports an "America First" logo, echoes Lindbergh when he decries "the growing domination of U.S. foreign policy by ethnic groups and media elites able to focus public attention and incite public hysteria." Instead of agitating for entry into a specific war, he thinks these "ethnic groups" and the "media elites" (read Jews) are pushing us toward general policies of interventionism and internationalism.

I hadn't realized how accurate it was to accuse him of being an America-Firster. I wonder if Philip Roth was thinking of Pat Buchanan when he was writing his book, The Plot Against America.