Buchanan fodder.

Dan Welsh's collar really is blue. A shipping dispatcher at an aging furniture factory in a decaying industrial town, Welsh still wears an old-fashioned blue work shirt. At night, he worries whether he'll wake up and have a job in the morning. He's seen too many fellow members of his United Steelworkers union local "downsized" and "outplaced" from the middle class into a grim existence on the margins of American society.

Tonight Welsh is fighting back. He's standing in a classroom at a Dubuque, Iowa, high school, preparing to participate for the first time in a Republican Presidential caucus. A man who was excited by Jesse Jackson's talk of economic democracy in 1988, and by Tom Harkin's promise to fight for full employment in 1992, Welsh is about to cast a ballot for Pat Buchanan.

So, for that matter, are thousands of other blue-collar workers in Iowa on this night when Buchanan will nearly upset GOP frontrunner Bob Dole. It's people like Welsh who will go on to supply Buchanan with the margin of victory in New Hampshire and strong showings further down the primary road.

Pat Buchanan's base still lies in the shadowy realm of the religious right and the militia fringe. But with the votes of anti-abortion fanatics, gun-toting social renegades, and anti-United Nations ranters alone, Buchanan would have gotten no further than did the lame 1988 candidacy of fundamentalist broadcaster Pat Robertson.

What propels Buchanan forward is an unexpectedly strong level of support from white workers--many of them union members--who have simply given up on waiting for redemption in the form of a Democratic President.

"On his central rhetorical message about NAFTA, GATT, and protecting jobs, Buchanan is sounding the clarion call of economic populism," says Ronnie Dugger, the founder of the Texas Observer who now heads The Alliance, a national group seeking to forge a progressive populist movement in America. "That's why Buchanan's rising. I don't think it's anything else. He's showing just how much rage there is at the corporate oligarchy."

But how can solid union people--even Jesse Jackson backers--vote for Pat Buchanan, the man who defended Franco's fascism, the man whose entire career has been characterized by charges of racism and anti-Semitism, the man who plotted dirty tricks with Richard Nixon, the man who held Ronald Reagan's hand at Bitburg, the man who proclaimed Ollie North a hero?

"We're in a fight for our lives out here," says Welsh. "We just had a toy factory west of town announce that they were shutting down and moving 300 jobs to Mexico. The tractor factory is laying people off. The meatpacking plant is cutting back. The Fortune 500 companies are trashing us. And right now there's only one candidate for President who says we've got to put American workers first. His name is Pat Buchanan and, I don't care what they say about him, at least he understands that people are hurting."

That sentiment is widespread. You can hear it expressed by men and women wearing PAT IN '96 stickers on their union jackets, by long-haul drivers displaying TRUCKERS FOR BUCHANAN stickers, and by farmers hammering red-white-and-blue BUCHANAN FOR PRESIDENT signs to their fence posts. It's a sentiment that runs far deeper than Washington pundits and political analysts care to consider.

Kim Moody, director of Labor Notes, a Detroit-based publication that pulls together rank-and-file union activists nationally, sees evidence of just how far the Buchanan message has spread. Moody has received e-mail messages from labor activists--including backers of forming an independent labor party--who now send him Pat Buchanan quotes. On today's political landscape, Moody says, they are hearing more economic populism from a conservative Republican than from the Democrats who are supposed to be the tribunes of the working class.

"It's scary, but the truth is that he's touched a nerve with precisely the people Democrats and progressives should be reaching on these issues," says Moody. "Along comes this rightwing guy with a heavy populist message, and people look up. There's a base for it. You get a response. Millions of factory workers are scared out of their wits right now about layoffs. These are people who would respond to the left's analysis of the economy if there was a candidate offering that analysis. But there isn't. So Buchanan has coopted some of the left's message. Just like fascists have always done."

It's not difficult to make the case that Pat Buchanan is a fascist--his vision of an overarching state controlling everything from the economy to the womb owes more to Benito Mussolini than Thomas Jefferson, and Buchanan's bigotries appeal to fascists everywhere. But when white working-class voters in the first primary and caucus states went hunting for a hero this year, Buchanan seemed to be the only option available.

"It's the jobs issue," says Evelyn Stieber, who attended the 1988 Democratic caucus in Dubuque as a backer of Mike Dukakis but this year registered as a Republican so she could support Buchanan. "After a while, you just get tired of waiting for a Democrat to come along and say something that matters about the economy."

No one should be shocked that working people are turning in desperation to Buchanan, says Jim Hightower, the former Texas agriculture commissioner who has battled for years to reinvigorate the Democratic Party with a message of economic populism.

"Working people in this country aren't stupid. They know they're under attack from multinational corporations," says Hightower. "The problem is that when working people look to the party that's supposed to represent them, they see this bullshit of Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council endorsing the North American Free Trade Agreement. So they keep looking, and no other Democrat is running. Finally they look over on the Republican side and they see a guy who's saying, `NAFTA is wrong, GATT is wrong, multinational corporations are irresponsible, American jobs need to be saved.' Now, the establishment may say that guy is a nut, or a xenophobe, or whatever. But at least he seems to be singing the right tune on the number one issue in the country."

Unless the left moves to retake the banner of economic populism, Buchanan and other conservative extremists will be allowed to shape America's political dialogue without challenge, many progressives fear.

"This sense of economic insecurity represents a very deep and vibrating nerve in the body politic now," says Dugger. "There's a deep rage. Buchanan's a smart man, he's recognized it, he's tapping it. And he's raising the flag of economic populism in the Republican Party. It's a shocking indictment of the Democratic Party."

Ralph Nader agrees. "The Democrats have given Buchanan a wide-open highway on this issue," he says. "What Buchanan's success means is that the process of the Democratic Party ceding this issue has reached a critical stage."

Buchanan's speeches are laced with condemnations of "corporate greed" and of "transnational corporations that don't care about America anymore."

He's even taken material straight from Nader. "We have educated Buchanan on NAFTA and these economic issues," Nader says. "We gave Buchanan huge amounts of information that he began to absorb."

Nader is not surprised that Buchanan's economic populism has caught on with voters. "The issues of disciplining excessive corporate power over consumers and workers resonate," says Nader. "These are the issues that reach everyone. They cross lines of race, class, sex. These are the universally significant issues."

One of Buchanan's television commercials promises to repeal NAFTA. The candidate stares intently into the camera and declares, "They promised it would create jobs. It didn't. Said it would improve our trade balance. It hasn't. Claimed American wages would grow. They haven't. We've lost jobs. ... Wages have fallen." Another commercial promises that Buchanan will "make the United States again the mightiest manufacturing power on Earth."

When Republican critics condemn what sounds to them suspiciously like an industrial policy, Buchanan responds that he will never "sacrifice on the altar of foreign policy the interests of American business and workers."

When the hapless Bob Dole used a New Hampshire debate to offer the traditional Republican defense of the market--a refrain now frequently echoed by Bill Clinton--Buchanan responded with glee.

"Bob, when Citibank, Chase Manhattan, and Goldman Sachs got into trouble, you turned into a protectionist with Bill Clinton," Buchanan charged. "Why didn't you let those fellows test the magic of the marketplace like you want American workers to do?"

Another Republican contender, talk show host Alan Keyes, jabbed at Buchanan and his backers for "sounding like a bunch of socialists."

Buchanan's response: "I plead guilty to trying to protect the American worker."

David Neil has heard those words from Buchanan. Neil is the president of the political arm of the Iowa United Auto Workers, and he spent a good deal of time before the Iowa caucuses talking union members out of backing the conservative hopeful.

"What people who get excited about Buchanan fail to take into consideration is Buchanan's position on other issues," argues Neil. "Where is he on OSHA? Where is he on labor-law reform? Where is he on civil-rights issues? Sure Pat Buchanan sounds good on NAFTA, sure he sounds good on the trade stuff, but he isn't the candidate of organized labor. He isn't the candidate of working people."

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Ronnie Dugger argues that Buchanan's economic populism is only skin deep "Where is his program for a steeply graduated progressive income tax? Where is his program for a public-works initiative that provides family-supporting jobs? Where is his program for co-ops? Where is his program for helping workers buy their factories?"

Beyond that, adds Dugger, Buchanan's fierce opposition to abortion, to gay rights, and to women's rights, as well as the anti-Semitic and racist flavor of his past comments make him the worst sort of populist.

Buchanan is, after all, the man Nixon once referred to as "the only extremist I've ever known who has a sense of humor." And the candidate himself admitted during his 1992 campaign against George Bush that he has been described as "an anti-Semite, a homophobe, a racist, a sexist, a nativist, a protectionist, an isolationist, and a beer-hall conservative."

In his 1990 autobiography, Right From the Start, Buchanan objected to those who would "interfere with a man's right to be a practicing bigot," and claimed that, "millions of black people have paid a terrible price for having let themselves be led to the Pleasure Island of the Welfare State--that wholly owned and operated subsidiary of liberalism--that has destroyed the moral fiber of America's black poor."

Buchanan is so obsessed with the threat of communism that he is still defending the witch hunts of the 1950s. Senator Joseph McCarthy is one of his heroes. Another hero is Francisco Franco, the Spanish fascist who came to power with a boost from Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy.

Buchanan has made something of a career defending anti-Semites, and he's only recently disavowed his past remarks questioning the extent of the Holocaust. In the 1980s, he fought to prevent the Reagan Administration from deporting former Nazi collaborators who had been accused of committing atrocities during World War II.

Add in Buchanan's uncompromising opposition to abortion, his anti-immigrant views, and his open hostility toward gay and lesbian Americans, and you've got the political equivalent of anthrax.

But populism has frequently mixed appeals for economic justice with xenophobia, racism, and other evils.

"There are good populisms and bad populisms," says Dugger, currently a fellow of the Shorenstein Center at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "The Nazis were originally populists. They said, `We're going to really take care of our own people.' And they did, as long as those people weren't Jews or Gypsies or radicals."

Buchanan's campaign should serve as a wake-up call to American progressives, Dugger says. "We need to advance a populism that is not rooted in haters and xenophobes and jingoists," he argues. "And we have to get cracking. We have to offer a populism rooted in the best parts of nineteenth-century American populism--particularly in its fundamental opposition to the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a narrow elite. The rise of Buchanan leaves us little choice but to move faster--not merely for electoral reasons but to enter the court of public opinion."

But how can progressives enter that court, grab hold of the economic message, cleanse it of Buchanan's bigotries, and use it to advance positive social change?

It won't be easy, says Nader. And it won't come via the Democratic Party. "Nothing's going to wake the Democrats. They are authentically fossilized," says the consumer advocate, who remains coy about his own prospects as a possible Green Party candidate. "The level of the rot is beyond imagination. They are indentured to the corporate power structure."

Kim Moody, of Labor Notes, is even blunter.

"The Democrats will not learn shit from this, frankly," he says. "[Labor Secretary] Robert Reich runs around and talks about saving jobs. But that's not the Clinton Administration's program. Everybody knows the Democrats are in bed with the corporations."

Hightower thinks that Buchanan's political surge is evidence not only of Democratic fossilization but also of the left's failure to assert itself. Perhaps, he says, a progressive challenge to Clinton could have resonated with American voters this year. But the primary filing deadlines have passed, and despite a loose-knit effort by Greens and left activists around the country to promote a Nader-for-President campaign, Hightower says the prospects for a serious third-party drive appear slim.

"There isn't going to be a challenge from the left to Clinton this year, either in the Democratic primaries or in November," he says. "And we're only now realizing that was a mistake. It took a Republican to prove to us what we instinctively knew--that working people in this country were just waiting for a candidate to raise these issues of economic justice. The problem is this: We're not offering that candidate."

Hightower still thinks that progressives may be able to wrest control of the Democratic Party from the Clintonites. But he also is complimentary of the New Party, and its strategy of starting locally. "The lesson for progressives is that our work is cut out for us. We have to start building from the bottom. We have to get ourselves organized, and we have to get ourselves in a position so that we are prepared for Presidential races in the future. It would be great if we could start at the top, but that's not how it works. We have to start at the school-board level, at the city-council level."

Bob Kasen, national organizer for Labor Party Advocates, says Buchanan--for all his faults--may have made the task easier. "I think the long-term benefit of the Buchanan campaign is that he has gotten people talking about economics," says Kasen. "But there's still an awful lot of work we've got to do if we're going to take it somewhere. Either our side gets in there with a message or the other side will. And if that happens, we don't just lose the debate, we lose America."