Pat Buchanan and the intellectuals.

It's normally easy to tell where Buchanan stands. Some of his supporters are making it harder.

NOT LEAST among Patrick J. Buchanan's attractive attributes is a clarity of purpose all too rare in politics. Even his critics concede him that. "He does not fudge. He does not trim," wrote Mark Shields in a recent Washington Post column otherwise chiding Buchanan for endorsing immigration policies that would have kept great-grandmother Anna Kerrigan back in County Cork. And the above sample of Buchanan's opinions on trade would seem to leave little ambiguity about his protectionist sympathies.

Or so I thought. But when I phoned some of the economists around him, men with impeccable free-trade credentials, I discovered a marked reluctance to invoke the P word. Of the four economists Buchanan listed in a December 30 Wall Street Journal profile as his favorites - Richard Rahn, Alan Greenspan, Ron Paul, and Paul Craig Roberts - both Roberts and Paul objected to my characterization. Greenspan could not be reached. Only Rahn, former chief economist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, accepted it, adding he was worried that this would reduce Buchanan's credibility against President Bush.

Further illumination was provided during a weekend at the Dulles Airport Ramada Renaissance Hotel, where the John Randolph Club was holding its second annual meeting. While Buchanan did not attend, he is the best-known member of the club, a sort of Patriot-missile marriage of oldline libertarians and paleoconservatives who embraced in shared opposition to the Gulf War. Over the course of the weekend what one member dubbed "the Buchanan Brains Trust" explored everything from crime and culture to property and small-r republicanism. But the real thesis, nailed to the conservative door in the Saturday dinner speech by the club's new president, Murray Rothbard, was that somewhere after the 1940s American conservatism had gone wrong, horribly wrong, and that the John Randolph Club was here to take it back. He was pretty about who was to blame, too.

"What happened to the original Right, and the cause of the present mess, was the advent and domination of the right wing by Bill Buckey and the NATIONAL REVIEW," said Rothbard, a libertarian and professor at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. Henceforth, the continued, the Right would be defined only by Buchanan. "The original Right, and all its heresies, is back," he gleefully reported.

An Earlier Split

IF ROTHBARD'S assessment of the intellectual support of Pat Buchanan is accurate - and I think it mostly is - this is something much larger than a difference over free trade. The wrong turn meant here is not traceable to the 1991 intervention in the Gulf but to Bill Buckley's purge in the mid Sixties of sundry "non-respectables" (Birchers, Randians, anti-Zionists, etc.) and the subsequent Draft Goldwater campaign. The inescapable implication is that Ronald Reagan too was not really a legitimate representative of the Right. Again, Rothbard is admirably direct. "I never call myself a Reaganite," he says. "In the Seventies we had a whole anti-government movement from people fed up with regulation to the anti-war movement. The worst thing Reagan did was to et everyone to like government again."

Whatever the reason, Reagan was scarcely mentioned. Named for the Virginia congressman who championed state's rights, opposed the War of 1812, and fought tariffs, the John Randolph Club might, in a different context, have had an energizing effect on the Republican Party - getting both the Randolphites and the Reaganites to recognize their complementary interests in reducing government. Many things the club espouses receive hearty endorsement from all conservatives, hyphenated or not: school choice, lower taxes, no to quotas, opposition to Bushism. Instead, the club has emphasized issues that are divisive, e.g., isolationism (okay, call it America Firstism), immigration, and a French-style commitment to Americanist culture. Many members - and not just the libertarians - reject the word "conservative."

Although Rothbard's address received a standing ovation - the seventy or so attendees especially liked his dismissal of Buckley as "the Mikhail Gorbachev of the conservative movement" - amusement does not necessarily imply total endorsement. Participants took paints to stress that the club adhered to neither party nor ideology. Tom Fleming, editor of Chronicles, summed it up best in his December issue, writing about the original America First. "It was opposition to the war and affection for their country that bound members together."

Members joked nostalgically about the Articles of Confederation, and, not surprisingly, reacted to the New World Order like a vampire to garlic. Certainly the phrasing is unfortunate: conservatives are properly suspicious of anything "new," wary of "world" as an adjective, and distrustful any time the word "order" is unjoined to the word "law." Eyes rolled heavenward during the luncheon address, when Thomas Molnar took protectionism further than anyone else by proposing the establishment of the Roman Catholic Church as the official religion of the United States. Otherwise, libertarians listened politely when paleoconservatives plumed for state measures to protect and enforce a distinctive American culture; and paleocons didn't bring up abortion or drugs when libertarians had the pulpit.

The most lively debate had to with whether one could call Pat Buchanan protectionist, which Jim Bovard, author of The Fair Trade Fraud, did in a session on property. Buchanan prefers the term "trade hawk", and while he says his retaliation is aimed at opening Japanese markets rather than closing American ones, the difference between a Buchanan "trade hawk" and a Gephardt "protectionist" is one of degree, not kind. "I'm mortified by Pat Buchanan's statements on protectionism," Bovard told the audience. "He's saying good things on taxes and the budget, but then he poisons the mix with some of the things he says on trade. Based on that, I'd have to say Buchanan is worse than Bush on trade."

This in turn provoked statements of the view I had encountered before: that not only is Buchanan not a protectionist, he is better than Bush on free trade, once you add Buchanan's opposition to foreign aid and multilateral institutions like the World Bank. This went back and forth a few times between Bovard and both Rothbard and Llewelly Rockwell, until the Ludwig von Mises Institute's Jeff Tucker summed up what was undoubtedly the real reasoning: "I'd sooner have a few high tariffs under Buchanan than any of the agreements of George Bush." Afterward, Rockwell was more specific. "You can't compare Buchanan to von Mises and Hayek," he told me. "You have to compare him to George Bush."

Now, there's case to be made that Buchanan amounts to a better package, even a better economic package, than George Bush. But I don't buy it, not with the way he is publicly distancing himself from his "free-trade friends"; tariffs, after all, paved the way for the New Deal, and socialism is impossible without them. And it does a disservice to Pat Buchanan to say, as some of these folks do, that he really doesn't mean what he says but is only pandering to popular sentiment. Pat Buchanan's economic nationalism comes straight from the heart.

Without the fact of the Buchanan campaign, the weekend might have been nothing more than a tidy academic dispute; adding to the rabbinical flavor of the debate was the stress on university credentials, the upshot of which was that everyone save me seemed to be addressed as "Doctor." But for the backsliding of George Bush and the disagreement over the Gulf War, the club would never have come together. But for Pat Buchanan it wouldn't much matter. Sidney Blumenthal was doubtness teasing in The New Republic when he noted that "Chronicles, which was on the periphery of conservatism under Reagan, has become suddenly engaged at the center as the Bush-Buchanan race looms." But the generally ebullient tone showed that the Randolphites took him at his word.

For all their emphasis on the culture, those present recognized that movements require a candidate. And what is true of Pat Buchanan - that he has had the guts to take on an unconvincing President on the basis of principles - is not true of the rest of the Right. The absence of a candidate with a continued Reaganite commitment to free trade and American leadership leaves Buchanan as the only horse in the race. Lord knows Bill Bennett, Jack Kemp, and Dick Cheney are torn between their principles and personal loyalty to a decent man who gave them important portfolios. But Pat Buchanan cannot be blamed for their failure to take up the torch.

Wild Card

THERE IS, however, one wild card left: Pat Buchanan himself. John Randolph Club members may pine for the anti - New Deal Old Rights of the Thirties and Forties, but Buchanan will probably stop short of following the club's principles to their logical conclusions. After all, he is campaigning as Reagan's heir against a President who diluted that legacy, and there is about him a same Reaganesque willingness to let groups believe he is more with them than he really is. For all his position to the Gulf War, for example, he never did join the Committee to Avert a Mideast Holocaust. For all the John Randolph Club's railing about civil rights, Bulachanan says he supported the original (1964) act. For all his America Firstism he favors intervention on behalf of Croatia. Asked about the club meeting and Rothbard's address, sister Bay Buchanan, chairman of her brother's campaign, says that Pat hasn't read the speech, but she emphasizes that while Murray Rothbard and others are dear friends, "they speak for themselves."

In Washington for a speech to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Buchanan started off by saying his pedigree is "Goldwater, Nixon Reagan" and likening his campaign to a "theological debate in a church to which not many of you belong." But some of us do belong. And we worry that many a voice that starts off promising reformation finds itself swept along into schism.

Mr. McGurn is NR's Washington Bureau Chief.