From: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu (Rich Winkel)
Subject: Buchanan & Duke: Playing the Same Hand
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: PACH
Distribution: na
Date: Fri, 17 Apr 1992 09:23:43 GMT

/** nfd.ifeatures: 28.5 **/
** Written  8:22 pm  Apr 12, 1992 by ihandler in cdp:nfd.ifeatures **

News Analysis / 1000 Words

Buchanan and Duke:
Playing the Same Hand

By FAIR
Insight Features

   Patrick Buchanan and David Duke today find themselves in the same place-
-using nearly identical issues and rhetoric to challenge George Bush from the
right.  But they took different paths to get to this point: Duke rose to
prominence through the use of KKK robes; Buchanan rode a more conventional
vehicle--television.

   Although Duke recently received soft treatment on national TV, he's still
considered out of the mainstream by the political press corps.  By contrast,
Buchanan is one of the boys.  Among TV pundits, he's been the leader of the
pack--the only one to appear on national TV seven days a week, as cohost of
CNN's "Crossfire," host of "Capitol Gang," and a regular member of the
"McLaughlin Group."  Besides these recurring gigs, he's been a frequent
guest on ABC's "Nightline" and "Good Morning America."

   Buchanan has served up his far-right positions so incessantly, they've
become almost commonplace.  His fellow TV pundits appear incapable of
noticing the stark similarities in the ideologies of Buchanan and Duke.

   Buchanan, like Duke, has long displayed authoritarian inclinations and
sympathy for fascism.  In his autobiography, Right from the Beginning,
Buchanan waxes nostalgic about his dad's hero, Gen. Francisco Franco. 
Buchanan has referred to the Spanish dictator as a "Catholic savior" and,
along with Chile's Gen. Pinochet, as a "soldier-patriot who saved his country
from Communism."  Buchanan also admires South Africa--which he calls the
"Boer Republic"--and asked in a Sept. 17, 1989 column: "Why are Americans
collaborating in a UN conspiracy to ruin her with sanctions?"

   For years Buchanan has championed accused Nazi war criminals, and
campaigned for the U.S. Justice Department to stop "running down 70-year-old
camp guards."  His columns questioning the historical record about the
gassing of Jews at Treblinka have run in pro-Nazi publications that claim the
death camps are a Jewish hoax.  Buchanan is credited with crafting Reagan's
line that called the Nazi troops buried at Bitburg "victims just as surely as
the victims in the concentration camps."

   In a bizarre 1977 column, Buchanan said that despite Hitler's anti-Semitic
and genocidal tendencies, "he was also an individual of great courage....Hitler's
success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone.  His genius was an
intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness
masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in
his path."

   Buchanan is contemptuous of what he calls "the democratic temptation, the
worship of democracy as a form of governance."  The would-be president
writes: "Like all idolatries, democratism substitutes a false god for the real, a
love of process for a love of country."  He has written disparagingly of "the
one-man, one-vote Earl Warren system."  In a Jan. 9, 1991 column he
suggested that "quasi-dictatorial rule" might be the solution to the problems
of big municipalities and the federal fiscal crisis: "If the people are corrupt,
the more democracy, the worse the government."

   Like Duke, Buchanan has a demonstrated attraction to white-supremacist
views.  In the Nixon White House, he called an Atlantic magazine article about
the genetic basis of intelligence "a seminal piece of major significance for U.S.
society."  The piece, he wrote to Nixon, indicates that "integration of blacks
and whites--but even more so, poor and well-to-do--is less likely to result in
accomodation than it is in perpetual friction--as the incapable are placed
conspicuously by government side by side with the capable."

   Buchanan was one of the first to advocate that the Republican Party exploit
racial issues.  In another memo to Nixon, he wrote: "There is a legitimate
grievance in my view of white working-class people that every time, on every
issue, that the black militants loud-mouth it, we come up with more money....
The time has come to say--we have done enough for the poor blacks; right
now we want to give some relief for working-class ethnics and Catholics--and
make an unabashed appeal to these patient working people, who always get
the short end of the stick.  If we can give 50 Phantoms to the Jews, and a
multibillion dollar welfare program for the blacks, why not help the Catholics
save their collapsing school system."

   Today, Buchanan couches many of his campaign themes, from trade policy
to the "underclass," in racial terms.  In a recent discusssion of immigration,
he asked contemptuously whether "Zulus" or "Englishmen" would be easier to
assimilate.

   It's ironic to see Buchanan now trying to distance himself from Duke.  (He
complains that Republican officials treat him "no different than Duke.")  Three
years ago, when Duke ran for the Louisiana state legislature and shared a
phone with the Klan, Buchanan ridiculed national Republican leaders for
overreacting to Duke and his Nazi "costume:" "Take a hard look at Duke's
portfolio of winning issues, and expropriate those not in conflict with GOP
principles."

   Buchanan said Duke was right on target attacking "reverse discrimination
against white folks" and crime committed by the "urban underclass"--
Buchanan's code phrase for blacks.  He saluted Duke for walking "into the
vacuum left when conservative Republicans in the Reagan years were
intimidated into shucking off winning social issues."

   The column concluded: "The GOP is throwing away a winning hand, and
David duke is only the first fellow to pick up the discards."  But Buchanan's
friends in the media seem unlikely to look too closely at the cards Buchanan
is holding.

   Some have gone out of their way to blur perceptions of Buchan's far-right
views: William Safire, in the Dec. 16, 1991 New York Times, described
Buchanan's supporters as a "network of the nativist right and isolationist
left," while Stephen Rosenfeld wrote in the Dec.13, 1991 Washington Post that
Buchanan's America First platform raises "fair questions," but he worried that
the "come-home movement might be "captured or severely tainted by
extremists, including David Duke."

                            -- 30 --

    This article first appeared in the March 1992 issue of Extra!, the
publication of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), 130 W 25th St, New
York, NY 10001.  Tel: 212/633-6700  Fax: 212/727-7668.

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