Word: buchanan
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...early 19th century's Know-Nothings, with their hatred and fear of Catholics and immigrants, anchored a lineage that ran through the Ku Klux Klan to Michigan's Father Charles Coughlin in the 1930s, with his anti-Semitic radio broadcasts and sympathetic sermonettes about Hitler and Mussolini. Pat Buchanan wants Americans to recover their sense of shame about things like sex and pornography. But he is worse than oblivious to the political sewage. It is the medium he has chosen to swim...
...Buchanan's appeal on economic issues is rational, if simplistic. It is his language in other parts of the field that is scurrilous. In waging the culture wars, he introduces a hateful ethnic dimension. Almost all the 20th century's horrors (the slaughter of the Armenians, Stalin's starvation of the Ukrainian kulaks, the Hitler Holocaust) have begun with a demonization of others. Buchanan has a genius for techniques that bundle his enemies together and subtly satanize them. His litany of Jewish villain names (ticking off "Goldman, Sachs...Greenspan" as if they were the Elders of Zion) is slyly anti...
...here is the problem: Buchanan's candidacy occurs in the context of what might be called the Great Nineties Conflation, wherein too many elements of American life (politics, moralism, journalism, sports, crime and the justice system, to name some) have merged with one another to form a sort of metaphysical entertainment conglomerate. The O.J. Simpson trial will be remembered as a classic of the conflation. Rush Limbaugh, whom some credit with the Republicans' 1994 electoral deluge, is a prototype; his material is relentlessly political-cultural, and he describes himself as an entertainer. For years after Buchanan left government, he made...
Where are the borders between those roles? In the great conflation, by what standards is a controversialist-politician to be judged? Hence the further problem: Does Pat Buchanan mean what he says, or is he merely putting on a great show of fire breathing and machete work to stir up the audience, as he was paid to do on Crossfire? Does it matter whether he means what he says? The question may be as silly as trying to judge the intentions of an adolescent who strikes matches one after another and tosses them toward piles of dry leaves...
...fire, once lighted, has a life of its own. So does rhetoric that inflames people and encourages hate. It is curious that candidate Buchanan, protector of the family, acts like a man who is trying to burn down the house...