Buchanan sees ‘war’ within conservatism

Pat Buchanan speaks of American conservatism in the past tense.

“The conservative movement has passed into history,” says the one-time White House aide, three-time presidential candidate, commentator and magazine publisher.

“It doesn’t exist anymore as a unifying force,” he says in an interview with The Washington Times. “There are still a lot of people who are conservative, but the movement is now broken up, crumbled, dismantled.”

He is seated in his living room on a sunny afternoon. His wife, Shelley — a member of the Nixon White House staff when he met and married her — is upstairs in their Virginia home.

Mr. Buchanan, a former adviser to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, says conservatism “is at war with itself over foreign policy, over deficit hawks versus supply-siders.”

Unnamed phonies, he suggests, have infiltrated the movement.

There are “a lot of people who call themselves conservative but who, on many issues, I just don’t consider as conservative. They are big-government people.”

Culture under attack

Conservatism, by most accounts, has dominated the Republican Party since 1964, when it nominated Barry Goldwater.

Mr. Buchanan questions that view. For one thing, he says, Mr. Nixon, who imposed wage and price controls on the nation and outraged conservatives with his historic opening to communist China in 1972, was not a conservative. Nor in his view is President Bush or today’s Republican Party.

“I was a conservative in the Nixon White House, but there was no question that it was not a conservative White House,” he says. “Nixon referred to conservatives as ‘they.’ He used to ask me, ‘What do they want?’ One time he said, ‘Buchanan, you have to give the nuts 20 percent of what they want.’”

Was the president referring to conservatives?

“No, he meant me,” Mr. Buchanan said with a laugh.

He was a Goldwater supporter in 1964, but Mr. Buchanan says the Arizona Republican was probably more of a libertarian than a traditional conservative. “But in 1964, he was a hard-core anti-communist, he was for downsizing big government, and on law and order, he was quite tough.”

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