This is either an advertisement for Nixonland or a brief summary for the lazy:
Nixon was coldly mixing and pouring volatile passions. Although he was careful to renounce the extreme fringe of Birchites and racists, his means to power eventually became the end. Buchanan gave me a copy of a seven-page confidential memorandum—“A little raw for today,” he warned—that he had written for Nixon in 1971, under the heading “Dividing the Democrats.” Drawn up with an acute understanding of the fragilities and fault lines in “the Old Roosevelt Coalition,” it recommended that the White House “exacerbate the ideological division” between the Old and New Left by praising Democrats who supported any of Nixon’s policies; highlight “the elitism and quasi-anti-Americanism of the National Democratic Party”; nominate for the Supreme Court a Southern strict constructionist who would divide Democrats regionally; use abortion and parochial-school aid to deepen the split between Catholics and social liberals; elicit white working-class support with tax relief and denunciations of welfare. Finally, the memo recommended exploiting racial tensions among Democrats. “Bumper stickers calling for black Presidential and especially Vice-Presidential candidates should be spread out in the ghettoes of the country,” Buchanan wrote. “We should do what is within our power to have a black nominated for Number Two, at least at the Democratic National Convention.” Such gambits, he added, could “cut the Democratic Party and country in half; my view is that we would have far the larger half.”
If you want a one paragraph summary of the last 40 years of American politics, I think it’s hard to better than the above. This is from a 2008 George Packer piece in the New Yorker. The article is far from brilliant. It is practically co-written with David Brooks, and the political analysis is about as astute as you’d expect from two people who thought the Iraq War would go swimmingly; Packer obsesses about the “Bradley effect” and Bobo claims Republicans will “soften up” after their next big defeat.
It goes without saying that in the Beltway scheme of things, Buchanan’s plan is seen as savvy, rather than scummy. There’s nothing wrong with ripping the country apart, as long as you do it in the name of love for your country.
Southern Beale
“There’s nothing wrong with ripping the country apart, as long as you do it in the name of love for your PARTY.”
Fixed your typo.
glennn
I keep staring at those words:
and try to imagine anyone who could reasonably think of themselves as patriotic uttering them.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Plus ça change, and all that.
What’s amazing is that not only is Pat Buchanan a respected member of the Punditocracy, not only is he on “the liberal MSNBC”, he’s the pundit who says what Mika Brezcinski and apparently everyone she knows is really thinking. And he hasn’t changed a bit in 40 years.
KG
if you’re the natural minority, as the GOP was for a generation, your election strategy has to be based on creating divisions within the majority coalition, otherwise you can not win. Short of the racial tension point, I find nothing entirely abhorrent in quoted portions of the memo.
ETA: think about it some more “quasi-anti-Americanism” is also a stupid/abhorrent point.
Villago Delenda Est
Winning is the only thing. Power is its own end in an of itself.
I believe Orwell covered this all already.
Benjamin Cisco (mobile)
Larger half? So not only is he a racist douchebag, but his math skills suck balls too.
A Writer At Balloon-Juice
@KG:
The racial tension part is pretty bad, though, no?
And the net effect of all of it has been horrible, it really has torn the country in half.
KG
@A Writer At Balloon-Juice: yeah, the racial tension part is bad.
Chad N Freude
Pat Buchanan, with an infinitely long history of antisemitism, was shocked — SHOCKED! — by Rep. Cohen’s Goebbels comparison.
Bill Murray
@Benjamin Cisco (mobile): If only you were stationary Benjamin, I might have beat you to that response. But your accursed mobility beat me to the metaphoric punch
M-Pop
@glennn: Thank you for that. I agree and we should be calling these bozos out for their belief that a divided country is a more effectively controlled country.
I like this new Balloon-Juice writer, A Writer at Balloon-Juice – astute observations and, if nothing else, thinks David Brooks is as much of an idiot as I do. I revel in validation.
Chad N Freude
@Benjamin Cisco (mobile): Colloquialism: Half is often used as a synonym for “one of two parts”. The only thing he has ever uttered that I think doesn’t deserve serious criticism.
Chad N Freude
@M-Pop: Ummm . . . You do know who new BJ writer is, don’t you?
Benjamin Cisco (mobile)
@Bill Murray: muahaha!
mai naem
@Chad N Freude: Who is it?
Stillwater
@A Writer At Balloon-Juice: it really has torn the country in half.
Only if you view things in simplistic black and white terms …
Actually, when you say it’s torn the country in half, I wonder if the country hasn’t always – from its inception – been torn in half, with only brief respites of calm. Nixon and Buchanan just figured out a new way to tap into old animosities.
Chad N Freude
@mai naem: The BJ writer formerly known as DougJ (and numerous variations thereon). There’s a brief history of this on BJ, but I can’t find the relevant posts. I think it originated with an anonomization (is that really a word?) of a comment he posted on an Atlantic blog.
KG
@Stillwater: yeah, there is that. Early in our history, we were 13 countries from two different regions that formed a confederation and then a federation… today we are effectively a continent that in a rational world would be at least three countries.
Benjamin Cisco (mobile)
@Chad N Freude: OK, so call it unserious criticism – it’s Patrick J. F*king Buchanan, and he is an unrepentant, unreconstructed POS
Chad N Freude
@Benjamin Cisco (mobile): Can’t argue with your premise there.
Stillwater
@Chad N Freude: anonomization (is that really a word?)
I think ‘anonymization’ is what you’re looking for.
Stillwater
@KG: Not only two different regions, but two different cultures, norms, economic systems (for the most part), and most importantly, two distinct conceptions of what the constitution enshrined as an inalienable right, in a broader sense than just the right to slavery.
Right outa the blocks, people disagreed. Strenuously.
Chad N Freude
@Stillwater: I believe you’re right. My inner Word Nerd thanks you.
asiangrrlMN
So, this is what Uncle Pat was doing when he was young. Good to know that some things never change. Asshole.
M-Pop
@Chad N Freude: well thanks for pointing that out, but I don’t think it was necessary to be mysterious about it… :)
Anne Laurie
@glennn:
As a reminder,Pat Buchanan will never stop bragging that his father may have been Irish, but his mother was German. He claimed to get his ‘fighting spirit’ from the first, and his… how to put this politely?… ‘belief in the superiority of a natural aristocracy’… from his poor abused mother.
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: Nope. He’s pretty much been a race-baiting anti-Semite all his life. It wouldn’t shock me if he were Opus Dei too.
Chris
@Anne Laurie:
CHRIST.
German nationalism and belief in a master aristocracy… Maybe that explains Buchanan’s argument that Churchill and Roosevelt shouldn’t have antagonized that nice Mr. Hitler who only wanted to kill all the eebil commies.
mclaren
Cerberus
@KG:
Or you know, people could have parties and platforms based on what they believe and if they are in the minority on those viewpoints, they can fight to change public opinion (like every minority group civil rights campaign ever) or they can moderate their opinions to pass legislation in favor to their viewpoints (like Democrats do because the Villagers and money men don’t like their hippieness or something).
I think the worst thing that has happened to us all is the way we’ve accepted this illusion that “politics is a game” and pointless machiavellian division is a necessity of the two-party political system.
Every minority rights movement has had to work from a position of extreme unpopularity, slowly building up public opinion. If the conservative platform has no chance by that strategy and if in fact it becomes less popular as time advances, that just might be their first clue that said platform may be the fucking problem rather than finding ways to cheat victory a few more decades while driving everything into the fucking ground.
Chris
@mclaren:
So true. It’s amazing, but the more they win, the angrier and more fanatic they get. It’s a worrying spiral, to say the least.
djesno
It’s not even love of country, it’s love of party and self.
morzer
Apparently the past is not a foreign country, and they don’t do things differently there. I personally find this depressing.
batgirl
@A Writer At Balloon-Juice: The other day I was talking with some (conservativish) work colleagues about how our diversity as a country has been used to divide us and to whack away at the little social safety net we do have. They aren’t conservative ideologues, just working class folk easily swayed by all the misinformation out there. They seemed to shake their heads in agreement.
(As an aside, One couldn’t believe that anyone would ever vote for higher taxes. I told her some believe we need to pay for the services government provides, you know, things like roads, food safety, education, etc. etc.)
Anyway, that is all a digression to my main point which is that by the end of our long political conversation, my two coworkers had devolved into talking about how bad the local Wal-Mart was because it was filled with Arabs and another one was terrible because all the workers were black, and how when one of them stands at the checkout line at the grocery store all the magazines are in Spanish. I just shook my head and walked away.
These are/were the very Democrats that Nixon/Buchanan went after and won. Both there husbands hold physical labor union jobs, union jobs that have allowed them to buy homes and live a decent lower-middle class life. The GOP has fought everything that made this possible. And it isn’t that they don’t believe in the social safety net. It’s that someone undeserving is benefiting from it at their expense.
JW
Eeeuuuch! And I just showered!