Pat Buchanan And My Journey To The Left

I don't always agree with him, but Pat Buchanan’s latest article on the decline of the American labor movement is worth reading, and so are the comments below. I was surprised to see so many pro-union comments on the American Conservative website, given that the Old Right often tends toward economic libertarianism, lionizing Ron Paul and the Austrian School. Pat Buchanan, however, has always had a strong populist side to him, and he is one of the few prominent American conservatives to raise concerns about social justice and the plight of the American worker. Indeed, on economic issues I think Mr. Buchanan is arguably to the left of most modern Democrats.

Reading Pat Buchanan’s writings on globalization, with his powerful descriptions of collapsed industrial towns in the Midwest and elsewhere, caused me to completely reevaluate my political philosophy. I used to be a typical GOP conservative. I believed in the power of the market to self-regulate and produce a kind of Leibnizian “best of all possible worlds.”  I was also a social conservative, as I still am today.  Eventually, this combination could not hold. The reality of global capitalism, with its rootlessness, its utilitarianism, its disregard for families and communities torn asunder by capital’s endless search for great and greater profits, started to become clear.

My own experience as a member of the College Republicans reinforced my misgivings. The leadership of my school’s GOP group was comprised mainly of the sons and daughters of upper-middle class professionals from the Chicago suburbs. They cared little about the social or cultural issues that were important to me, but they were very keen on anti-unionism. Having grown up around police officers, firefighters, municipal employees, tradesmen, and other unionized workers I knew that many of the stereotypes of greedy, lazy, and incompetent union workers were untrue.

Soon, the scales fell from my eyes, and I was able to comprehend the true nature of capitalism as an essentially anti-conservative force.  Reading the works of the great French counter-enlightenment authors, such as Joseph de Maistre and the Vicomte de Bonald, revealed a different kind of conservatism, one that did not submit to capitalism but instead critiqued it on the very grounds of preserving Christian civilization. Eventually, I discovered figures such as Giorgio La Pira and Jakob Kaiser who were able to formulate a more modern form of Social Christian thought. But it all started with Pat Buchanan.