The Patrick Buchanan campaign: Pushing capitalist politics further right

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Buchanan: Admires Hitler and wants to imprison the homeless.

"Buchanan has taken the thunder from David Duke, the Nazi and Klaner, who cleaned up his image to attempt to enter the Republican right wing."

SOCIALIST ACTION APRIL 1992 9 The rightist campaign of Patrick Buchanan for the Republican presidential nomination has little chance of winning in 1992, but it has succeeded in pulling the Republican party and capitalist politics generally further to the right.

The well-known journalist speaks directly about the severe economic crisis, warning that there is "a storm coming." He makes promises to middle-class layers and sections of the working class based upon their fears, insecurities, and backward sentiments.

Exit polls after the New Hampshire primary showed he won a majority among Republicans who said their family situation was worse off than 10 years ago.

Buchanan's main theme is "America first." This demagogy, which is present in all the candidates of both parties to one extent or another, is taken by Buchanan to new heights. He blames the crisis on foreigners, and blasts Bush and the Democrats for selling out to them.

Japan-bashing with an openly racist message is a stock in trade. He attacked a Bush aide who is a lobbyist for a Japanese consortium as a "geisha girl of the new world order." He calls Japanese people Bush's "little friends."

He say he would phase out U.S. troops in Europe. "It's time," he said, "to tell the big boys in Europe who steal our markets around the world that they should look after themselves."

He wants to deploy some of these troops as "border guards in the Southwest," to keep out Mexicans and others.

His racism with regard to Blacks is virulent. "Referring to his hometown of Washington, D.C., he tells crowds that it was a nice place until "they" moved in. Now, he says, his wife has to put up with walking by "bongo players" on the street comer.

"If we had to take a million immigrants in, say, Zulus, next year or Englishmen, and put them into Virginia, what group ...U.S. Communist Party (continued from page 8: “The political dilemma faced by ex-Communist Party members”) from speaking in 'his' state.

"Rick Nagan—a Ph.D from a manufacturer's family who poses, like several of his counterparts, as a 'working class' leader, and who heads an overwhelmingly white party in the majority-Black city of Cleveland-thus tried to stop an AfricanAmerican, female Communist Party leader from making an anti-apartheid tour of Ohio, something De Klerk's apartheid regime never attempted."

Aside from Myerson's CP-style racebaiting, his hyperbole about Hall's alleged racism masks another debate in the disintegrating CP that is probably more to the point.

Support to Jesse Jackson The great majority of the small layer of Black CP members have left the party and are today working with the Committees of Correspondence. Within the CP, they generally favored a more aggressive orientation to the election campaign of Democrat Jesse Jackson, while Hall preferred the more mainline liberal Democrats who eventually got the Democratic Party nomination.

Jackson's campaign, however, was by no means independent of the Democratic Party. Largely funded with corporate money, including huge grants from the Ford Foundation, it was designed to channel the rising discontent in America's Black and other oppressed communities, and in the working class as a whole, into the Democratic Party.

Following Jackson's primary election defeats in 1984 and 1988, his immediate switch to the victorious Democratic candidates said all that needed to be said.

His support in 1984 to Walter Mondale, who threatened to "quarantine Nicaragua"

Buchanan has would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia?" he asks his cheering audiences. Of course, he fails to mention that a cross-section of English people today would include a large number of people not of his preferred "type."

His anti-Semitism is so notorious that even the rightist William Buckley of the National Review has criticized him. Buchanan charges that "Jews" have too much power in Congress.

while the United States deepened its aid to the contras, was in the same vein as his support in 1988 to Democrat Michael Dukakis—who paraded around in a tank in front of the media to demonstrate his commitment to continuing U.S. military might.

The Jackson campaign was further designed to integrate a number of local Black reformists into the administration of various city governments to prevent the possible emergence of an independent Black leadership.

The CPUSA, including its Black leaders, long entrenched in a variety of Democratic Party formations at the local level, sought to deepen this process with the Jackson campaign. The aim was to become part of the system, not to oppose it.

"Differences" on South Africa?

Similarly, the support of Angela Davis and Charlene Mitchell to Joe Slovo's South African CP—and Hall's opposition-had nothing to do with racism, as Myerson insinuates. Davis and Mitchell tied their future, as did Slovo, to the Gorbachev wing of the former Soviet CP, despite its orientation to the restoration of capitalism in the USSR.

If race were the issue, they would have supported the more Stalinist wing of the SACP headed by Black leader Harry Gwala.

Both wings of the South African CP, like the CPUSA and the Committees of Correspondence, seek a negotiated solution in South Africa that is based on the continued maintenance of capitalist rule.

The Committees of Correspondence have made it absolutely clear that their "new" politics represent no "break from the past" regarding their rejection of the fundamental principle of the revolutionary socialist movement, that is, the political independence of the working class.

In the first issue of its publication, The Buchanan He ran an anti-Bush advertisement along the lines of Bush's famous Willie Horton ad appealing to racist fears, but managed to get in gays, "pornographers" and "liberal intellectuals" as well as Blacks. The ad was an attack on the National Endowment for the Arts. It depicts a scene from a film underwritten by the NEA that showed— horror of horrors—nude gay Black men. Buchanan wrote in one of his hate-filled columns that AIDS was "nature's retribution" against gays.

Corresponder, Coordinating Committee member Charlene Mitchell's keynote address is reprinted.

Mitchell states: "The movement to defeat George Bush must unfold now ... for 1992, to defeat George Bush necessitates the broadest, most united front against the ultra-right danger Bush represents. Whether we like it or not, the only way to defeat Bush at the ballot box is with a candidate of the Democratic Party"

Knee-jerk hatred

Myerson's "political break with the past" is deficient in other areas. His knee-jerk Stalinist hatred of Trotskyism is still firmly in place.

Attacking Gus Hall's trade-union policies, Myerson utilizes the classical Stalinist method of constructing a political amalgam to discredit his opponents by alleged association. In the past, the Trotskyist movement was likened to Hitler's fascists, and then to the CIA. Today it's likened to Gus Hall himself!

Myerson writes: "Acting more like traditional Trotskyists, the party leadership has taken to attacking the leaders of such progressive unions as Local 1199 in New York and the United Electrical Workers nationally."

Here Myerson somehow lumps Hall's feud with some local labor officials-when he didn't like the outcome of union elections where CP-supported candidates were defeated-with "Trotskyism."

Of course, Myerson doesn't bother to state just how these "Trotskyists" were wrong in the past. Its enough to just mention the word to send the proper hate signal to people Myèrson considers to be still receptive to Trotsky-baiting.

Myerson berates Gus Hall for Hall's opposition to the Fidel Castro leadership of the Cuban Revolution. "Hall is also the man who wrote to Fidel in the early years including in cases of incest and rape. He takes Bush to task for not vetoing the recent civil rights bill, falsely claiming it is a "quota" bill. All the candidates from both parties are against "quotas," that is, affirmative action, but Buchanan takes them one step further. He even wants to arrest and imprison the homeless.

Buchanan has taken the thunder from David Duke, the Nazi and KKKer, who cleaned up his image to attempt to enter the Republican right wing. Buchanan doesn't carry Duke's Klan and Nazi baggage, although he calls Hitler a "great man" and defends Francisco Franco, Spain's fascist dictator who took power in the 1930s.

Buchanan was a speech writer for Nixon and a White House assistant to Ford and Reagan. He has a well-established base in the right wing of the Republican Party. As such, he is part of the mainstream of capitalist politics. His radical rightism in this campaign is designed to move capitalist politics to the right, and in this he has succeeded.

Bush whimpers under his attacks, and defends himself by identifying with some of Buchanan's positions.

"There is no question that we have not only been driving the debate, we have been winning the debate, " Buchanan crows. "The proof is that George Bush has moved crabwise in a conservative direction ever since we announced."

The fact that rightist politicians like Buchanan can strike a chord in some workers and middle class people hurting from the crisis of capitalism is testimony to the default of the so-called leaders of the labor Labor should be vigorously campaigning against anti-foreigner prejudice and Japan bashing, instead of joining in on it. It should be championing affirmative action for Blacks and other oppressed minorities, and women, including the use of quotas. It should be defending gays and mobilizing to further the right to abortion, instead of dodging the issue.

Labor should be putting the blame for the economic crisis squarely where it belongs, on the capitalists and their system, and formulating a fighting class-struggle program in the interests of the workers and their allies.

Labor's failure to do so leaves the door open to demagogues of the right-like Buchanan.

of the revolution," Myerson explains, "demanding that he hold elections so that the CPUSA could build support for the revolution; Hall, for a decade dismissed Fidel as an adventurist and Trotskyist....

This aspect of CPUSA policy was kept hidden for some time. The American Stalinists, however, were only reflecting their Soviet counterparts in denouncing-as "Trotskyite ultraleftism"—the idea that Castro could do anything more in Cuba other than form an alliance with Cuba's "progressive" capitalists. After all, this was the same policy the CPUSA followed in the United States in its lifelong alliance with the Democratic Party.

When Castro broke with this policy in 1960 and mobilized the Cuban masses to abolish capitalism and establish a state based on many of the historic ideas of socialism, the CPUSA was openly critical. They were held in check only by the fact that an entire generation of radicalizing American youth saw in the Cuban revolution the best traditions the revolutionary movement had to offer.

While the CPUSA thought that Castro had gone "too far," the world Trotskyist movement hailed and defended the Cuban Revolution.

When the Trotskyist movement embraced revolutionary Cuba, it was in keeping with its tradition of fighting for the real legacy of the 1917 Russian Revolution.

Trotskyism represents the struggle for the continuity of the revolutionary socialist movement, which was gravely compromised with Stalin's destruction of the Soviet party. Today, Trotskyism is represented in the United States by the revolutionists organized in Socialist Action, and internationally in the Fourth International. • (To be month.) continued next

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