Word: buchananism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Buchanan doesn't sound like he's faking it. He says he's sorry now for all those years spent flacking for Big Business as a mainstream Republican operative. He claims his conversion came on the 1991 campaign trail when he met some poverty-stricken New Hampshirites and discovered they weren't, as he might have thought, degenerates and dope fiends but "the type of fellows I played ball with." And of course sooner or later some candidate--even one as sheltered as the Beltway insider Buchanan--had to trip over the bodies of the downsized and notice that...
...welfare moms and blasphemous artists, he's not blaming any of these familiar miscreants for falling wages or capital flight. If you want to talk about the decline of working-class America, you have to talk about footloose and irresponsible corporations. And the least you can say about Buchanan is that he, alone of all the candidates, talks the talk. He's against NAFTA and GATT, which locates him outside the great bipartisan, pro-business, free-trade coalition led by Clinton, Gingrich and Dole...
...that's as far as Buchanan's populism goes. Oddly, for a man who claims to be deeply moved by the plight of the working person, he has nothing to say about raising the minimum wage, banning the use of "replacement workers" as strike breakers, or defending occupational safety and health standards against the Republican onslaught. In fact, his economic program is little more than the old millionaire-friendly supply-side economics, garnished with a twist of nationalism. Business, says Buchanan, should be free to do whatever it wants, except perhaps flee across the border in search of even cheaper...
...wealthy. The legendary rationale for this kind of tax cut is that if you pump enough wealth uphill, sooner or later some of this money will trickle down to ordinary people in the form of decent-paying jobs. But this can't work when there are, as Buchanan himself says, "two economies" instead of one. Downsizing delights Wall Street, even when it means the K Mart class has to skip Christmas; and the stockbrokers all cringe when unemployment falls...
...fact that Buchanan now embraces blue-collar Democrats as "my folks" hardly means he's been born again as a "left-winger." The only reason he can pass for a champion of the working class is that the Democrats have abdicated that role. Bill Clinton never seriously tried to raise the minimum wage or otherwise level the ground separating worker and boss; and anyone who thinks Clinton got into office and then "lunged to the left" must have trouble getting their shoes on the right feet in the morning. If we have a two-party system anymore, it consists...