The June 21, 2004 issue of The American Conservative, Pat Buchanan’s new paleoconservative weekly, carries an interview of Ralph Nader by Pat Buchanan. Now, when you put America’s leading left-progressive maverick in the same room with America’s leading right-wing nativist-isolationist-populist, you might expect to see blood on the floor. But in fact the two of them seem to have hit it off – more or less – and the interview was published to float the idea that real conservatives might want to consider voting for Nader instead of Bush this year. That would be a switch! Nader siphoning off votes from the Republican!
We learn that RN and PB feel much the same way about NAFTA, WTO, the Iraq War, American support for Israel, the big bad establishments in Washington and on Wall Street, and several other things.
What do you think? Will this far-left/far-right rapprochement go anywhere?
It’s a sign of how extreme the Bush Administration has gotten, that it’s pushed these two polar opposites together and given us yet another sign of the impending Apocalypse.
The Pat Man really hates Bush for Bush kicking him out of the Party.
If Democrats really want to see what was wrong in 2000, they should look no further look at the 3000 Jewish votes in a Palm Beach community that went–to Buchanan. The butterfly ballot totally wrecked them, and it was their own party who OKayed it.
I’m curious where you’re seeing dreams, wet or otherwise, in my earlier post, astorian.
Far as I’m concerned, neither Buchanan nor Nader will be a big factor in this election, aside from being a pair of amusing sideshows for the news outlets.
Nader’s been quite open from the get-go this year about wanting to appeal to conservatives disaffected with Bush. And he recently received the endorsement of Buchanan’s Reform Party as their candidate for President. Hence, the interview in Pat’s magazine is no real surprise - it’s an outcome to be expected. I’ve read it and Ralph is no less populist than he was four years ago (playing to both sides of the house) but he’s certainly made more of an effort to seek the right-wing vote than he did in 2000.
Yes, I know Nader has been talking a lot of drivel about his great appeal to conservative voters- that only proves he’s more hopelessly out to lunch than I thought.
Pat Buchanan attracted no voters 4 years ago… except the elderly folks who selected him by mistake! What possible benefit can Nader imagine he’d get from a Buchanan endorsement?
I repeat- WHAT paleoconservative vote? We saw clearly, 4 years ago, that Pat Buchanan has no following, except among elderly folks who voted for him accidentally. Buchanan has no followers to deliver to Nader or to anyone else.
At this point, nader and Buchanan are merely engaged in a mutual masturbation session, in the vain hope that someone will pay attention to them.
The main PB-RN similarities I saw in the interview are disdain for corporatism & an Israelo-centric MidEast policy. Alas, RN’s remedy for corporatism is a degree of economic & even cultural statism most conservatives would find unpalatable (as we would his libertarian view of abortion & perhaps gay marriage).
That was four years ago, astorian. In the time since, Buchanan has founded his own political party, The America First Party (http://www.americafirstparty.org/), and his own magazine, The American Conservative (http://www.amconmag.com/) – which you’ll find on the stands in every Borders and every Barnes & Noble – and his own educational organization, The American Cause (The American Cause: About The Cause), and put together a stable of paleoconservative intellectuals, and capitalized on the discontent a lot of American conservatives feel with Bush’s war policies, expansion of the federal government, and deficit spending. Buchanan’s movement is still nowhere near being the phenomenon the Reform Party was in 1992, but it’s no longer just a blip on the radar screen either. Paleoconservatism has always been with us, but now it’s becoming an independent, non-Republican, even anti-Republican political force, and it’s not going away.
