It is hard to think of a precedent for the odd alliance Pat Buchanan has made with Lenora Fulani, although the Hitler-Stalin pact to carve up Poland comes to mind.
Hitler and Stalin were political opposites. But they agreed for a time, at least, to work together out of their mutual interests, mainly to conquer and oppress their mutual neighbors.
So it is with Buchanan and Fulani. “In traditional political terms, Pat Buchanan stands for all the things that black progressives such as myself revile,” Fulani told a news conference in Washington.
And the feeling is mutual, I am sure. In the annals of politics making strange bedfellows, the Buchanan-Fulani alliance almost breaks the bed.
Fulani, a psychologist, is boldly pro-choice, pro-feminist and a self-described “militant black nationalist, . . . Marxist and social therapist.”
Buchanan is, well, Buchanan, a self-described “paleo-conservative” who fled the Republican Party because, in his view, it was getting too liberal for him.
Yet, despite their differences, there they were, Pat and Lenora, standing side by side in front of the news cameras out of their mutual desire to stand in front of news cameras.
Buchanan hopes Fulani’s endorsement will make him look less like a racist or anti-Semite, charges he frequently has heard, sometimes from prominent conservatives, because of some of his more controversial remarks. Now he can say that at least one of his best friends is black and a liberal too!
Before he decided to run for president for the third time, Buchanan was a nationally famous conservative columnist and commentator. He often has been called a racist–a charge he vigorously denies–because some of his less temperate remarks sound like code words for bigots.
For example, he has called for a moratorium on immigration, although he sees nothing wrong with the immigration that brought his own ancestors here from Europe.
He has called for an end to affirmative action, although he suggested in two columns over the past year that “it might be time for Euro-Americans to demand affirmative action” in Ivy League colleges, where he proposed “reserving 75 percent of their slots for non-Jewish whites.”
Most recently he made news with a pro-isolationist book that suggests World War II could have been avoided had we only left Hitler alone to slug it out.
Now Buchanan needs some new buddies. When he joined the Reform Party, he called the Republicans and Democrats “two wings of the same bird of prey.” Suddenly his former friends and colleagues on the Republican right were denouncing him in ways that questioned his very sanity. That’s what he gets for biting the hands that have fed him since his days in the Nixon administration.
In the Reform Party, which has become a national homeless shelter for the politically odd, Buchanan has found a seemingly unnatural alliance with Fulani, a leader in the party’s left wing.
Like the proverbial gal next door, she was available. Those of us who have been following left-progressive movements over the years have seen her move from one left-progressive party and movement to another, latching her little faction to other people’s organizations the way a pilot fish latches on to sharks to feed and take a free ride.
Since she emerged in New York City’s political scene in the early 1970s, she has tried with varying success to latch onto leaders and candidates as varied as Lyndon LaRouche, Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan.
Now it is Buchanan’s turn. Together this odd coupling embodies the old saw about how politics at their extreme left and right begin to come together and sound alike.
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Buchanan and Fulani take that political paradox to a new height or, if you prefer, depth. They represent the last gasp of retro-politics, the politics of moving backward.
It is a politics that feeds off fear and anxiety, whether it is about immigrants taking jobs here or big corporations shipping jobs overseas.
It is a politics that views the economy as a limited pie to be fought over and carved up among interest groups, instead of an expanding organism of market forces that can grow large enough to feed everyone.
It is a politics that finds common cause between Buchanan’s isolationism and Fulani’s protectionism.
It is a politics whose time is not now. The most popular candidates of the Republican and Democratic Parties at present are men of moderation like George W. Bush, John McCain, Al Gore and Bill Bradley.
Each is gathering strength by trying to carve out new ideas in the moderate center of American politics. Each is thinking about how America can best prepare for a new century and a new world that will be smaller and more tolerant of diversity than any that have come before.
Buchanan and Fulani don’t have time for that kind of future. They are too busy refighting old class and ethnic battles of the past. They belong together, happily moving backward, away from the rest of us.