Word: buchananism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...trade, as on other points, of course, Buchanan often appeals less to economic logic than to nationalistic nostalgia. Last week he apostrophized the faces on Mount Rushmore as those of fellow protectionists, and he was right. George Washington was a Buy American booster who boasted that he drank only U.S.-brewed ale, and Thomas Jefferson came over to that side as President. Both Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt assailed free trade. T.R.'s view: "Pernicious indulgence in the doctrine of free trade seems inevitably to produce fatty degeneration of the moral fiber...
Reviewing this background, historian Alfred E. Eckes Jr. has lately come up with one of the few intellectual arguments Buchanan has been able to cite. In a 1995 book, Opening America's Market, Eckes argues that the protectionist U.S. grew much faster than free-trade Britain between 1871 and 1913, and that the post-World War II competitive position of the American economy weakened greatly after the 1968-72 period, when a U.S.-led round of sharp tariff cuts went into effect. Some students, though, think Eckes is reading into the statistics a cause-and-effect relationship that...
...first Republican renegade to cry "Wrong!" and charge was Steve Forbes. With his free-lunch, tax-cutting flat tax, he declared the balanced budget, the centerpiece of the Republican revolution, misguided and unnecessary. Then, no sooner had the Forbes mutiny been put down than Pat Buchanan declared a general insurrection. He too declared war on the party's central ideology--in the name not of supply-side theory but (the unkindest cut of all) of class warfare, the Democratic weapon of choice against Republicanism...
...enemy, according to Buchanan, is not the welfare state. It is that conservative icon, capitalism, with its ruthless captains of industry, greedy financiers and political elites (Republicans included, of course). All three groups collaborate to let foreigners--immigrants, traders, parasitic foreign-aid loafers--destroy the good life of the ordinary American worker...
...Buchananism holds that what is killing the little guy is the big guy, not Big Government. It blames not an overreaching government that tries to insulate citizens from life's buffeting to the point where it creates deeply destructive dependency, but an uncaring government that does not protect its victim-people enough from that buffeting. Buchanan would protect and wield a mighty government apparatus to do so, a government that builds trade walls and immigrant-repelling fences, that imposes punitive taxes on imports, that polices the hiring and firing practices of business with the arrogance of the most zealous affirmative...