Bully in the pulpit.

Patrick Buchanan's triumph over Republican front-runner-Senator Robert Dole in last month's New Hampshire presidential primary threatens to turn the nominating process into a long and bitter struggle between the GOP's populist and mainstream factions. As of this writing, Dole has yet to articulate the case for his own candidacy. Meanwhile Buchanan, the once-and-future media pundit, has reminded the political world that an ability to communicate a sense of yourself and your convictions may still be worth more than money or clout when it comes to presidential politics.

To say that Buchanan is a throwback is to belabor the obvious. His fiery populism, with its attack on Wall Street, foreign trade, the UN, and other real or imagined international elites hearkens back to what has rightly been called the "paranoid" style in American politics. In the 1890s William Jennings Bryan preached against big business and for the unlimited coinage of silver in the name of populism. In a markedly more demagogic fashion, Father Charles Coughlin denounced "international bankers" and Jewish power in the late 1930s. Conspiracy theories as explanations for misfortune and injustice can usually win a following in hard times. But the true sources of American prosperity and hope for the expansion of economic and social justice lie elsewhere.

Much has been made of the conservative Republican Buchanan embracing protectionism and working-class complaints about inequality. Interestingly, Buchanan's willingness to erect trade barriers to protect American workers from low-wage foreign competition is a view shared, in part, by some respected economists on the left. Free trade has become an almost unchallengeable dogma among academic economists and for most Republican and Democratic policy makers. For that reason alone it deserves a broader critique, especially when it places free trade above reciprocal labor, environmental, and fair-trade standards.

Still, the real problem of stagnant wages and mass layoffs has more to do with the short-term profit-maximizing strategies of American corporations than with foreign competition. As the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s President John J. Sweeney said after the New Hampshire primary, Buchanan's bid for the working-class vote is a charade. The former speechwriter for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan has a long record of hostility to the aspirations of workers. He has opposed the minimum wage, worked to weaken occupational safety regulations as well as unions generally, and endorsed Republican policies that for the last fifteen years have transferred income from the middle class to the rich.

Nevertheless, it has been Buchanan's shrewd rhetorical attention to the economic insecurity of the middle and working classes that has catapulted him to the center of the Republican race. Dole's admission that he had not understood the depths of that insecurity was astonishing. How American society might better adjust to the new global, information-based economy was the central theme of Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign, as well as House Speaker Newt Gingrich's futurist vision. Yet the Republican establishment has once again revealed itself to be--remember George Bush at the supermarket check-out line--out of touch with the economic hardships experienced by ordinary Americans As a consequence, the social and class antagonisms Republicans have cynically exploited since Nixon's presidency now promise to tear the party apart.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Buchanan's protectionist instincts are hard to tease out from an uglier nativism that is harder still to separate from the columnist's history of glib and offensive racial and ethnic remarks. His railing against illegal immigration is cynical and manipulative. Controlling illegal immigration and regulating legal immigration are legitimate concerns. But Buchanan's threats to build a wall across the Mexican-American border isn't a solution. It's a provocation designed to exacerbate social and ethnic divisions. Coming from a self-advertised Irish-Catholic whose ancestors met bitter resistance here themselves, such fulminations are shameful.

Finally, there is another way in which Buchanan is a throwback, one which many Catholics will recognize. Buchanan is unapologetic, if not belligerent, about his faith. His opposition to abortion, a significant factor in his popularity with Republican primary voters, is steadfast and brooks no compromise. He is right about abortion as a moral issue and should be complimented on his steadfastness. But his righteous intolerance of all other views and disdain for political compromise are wrong and self-defeating. Voters say they are drawn to Buchanan because "you know where he stands." Yes, indeed, you do. Buchanan, who boasts of his strict as well as rough-and-tumble Catholic upbringing, speaks in the cadences of "the church militant." When it comes to moral certitude, the only note he seems able to hit is triumphalistic. These intellectual habits can lead to tragic mistakes. Given the right (or is it the wrong?) circumstances, what seems like moral clarity turns into mere rigidity; what looks like honesty and an admirable loyalty easily lends itself to an authoritarian use of power. In short, too many of Buchanan's instincts are an obstacle to persuasive moral reasoning and a danger to democratic governance. We trust that his prominence in the Republican party will be short-lived.