UPDATE:  Chris Check is quite knowledgeable about the Cristeros and he has written an excellent overview of their struggle.  Chris' article may be found here.

The Notre Dame lawsuit will likely draw more attention than the other lawsuits, because in 2009 Notre Dame honored President Obama by inviting him to be its commencement speaker and awarding him an honorary degree, despite Obama's long and vocal support for abortion.  In his speech, Obama promised to look for common ground with those who disagreed with him over abortion.  Three years later, Notre Dame's lawsuit is proof of how valuable Obama's commitment to seeking common ground turned out to be.  Now all that remains is for Notre Dame to rescind the honorary degree Obama should never have been given, preferably in a major ceremony at halftime during the home football game on the Saturday closest to the election.

UPDATE:  Since writing this, I've read two pieces on the issue I'd like to recommend, one by Scott Richert on the substantive issue and one by Ross Douthat on the politics.  Scott's piece may be found here and Douthat's piece may be found here.

Georgetown's decision to invite Sebelius to speak can only be seen as a challenge to America's Catholic bishops, who have unanimously denounced the mandate authored by Sebelius that requires Catholic universities, hospitals, and charities to provide health insurance covering contraceptives, including contraceptives that act as abortifacients.  Indeed, as Governor of Kansas, Sebelius was instructed by her bishop that she could not receive Communion, because of her staunch and public support for abortion.  While governor, Sebelius vetoed several anti-abortion bills, including one directed at late term abortions, and received financial and political support from both Planned Parenthood and late-term abortionist George Tiller, whom Sebelius even invited to the Governor's mansion.  The invitation for Sebelius to speak was so egregious that it caused blogger Jeff Miller to quip that the reason Sebelius was invited was because "Judas was unavailable."

Blatty's attitude toward his alma mater is the correct one.  The unfortunate reality is that far too many American universites and colleges are now dedicated to subverting the values they were founded to uphold.  Far too many of them see their current mission as inculcating leftism.  Conservative alumni should no longer be filling the already overflowing coffers of places like Georgetown.  They should instead follow Blatty's example and try to get their alma mater back on course.

The funeral of the Marquess of Marchmain was marred by the refusal of the parish priest, Father Mackay, to give Communion to two of the mourners, Lady Julia Mottram, the Marquess' daughter, and her partner, the artist Charles Ryder. According to Ms. Mottram, the priest refused to give her Communion after he learned that she was living with Charles Ryder even though Ms. Mottram is still married to the Conservative politician, Rex Mottram. Ms. Mottram told Reuters that she was "outraged at this priest's callousness. I am in a loving, committed relationship with Charles. I even introduced Charles to him as my lover. Who are these priests to pass judgment on love? What do they know about love, anyway? This priest was just like my brother, who told me I was living in sin with Charles. How can being intimate with someone you love ever be a sin?"

Charles Ryder, who is not a Catholic, was also denied Communion. Ryder told Reuters that "I thought Jesus welcomed everybody. What difference should it make that I'm not a Catholic? Shouldn't the priest welcome me when I come up for Communion? Isn't that what Jesus would do?"

Both Mottram and Ryder have launched a campaign to have Fr. Mackay removed from his parish. "We don't want anyone else hurt by this priest's arrogance," said Ms. Mottram. "I foolishly let him give my father the Last Rites, which is probably what killed him. But passing judgment on Charles and me was too much."

The Crusader: The Life and
Tumultuous Times of Pat Buchanan

British scholar Timothy Stanley  has produced the first significant biography of Patrick J. Buchanan, describing his life from his boyhood in Washington, D.C., up to the present.  Stanley’s book is written in a breezy, informal manner—Buchanan is referred to as “Pat” throughout—and it makes for quick and generally enjoyable reading.  Stanley gets much right in his general narrative of Buchanan’s life, particularly his description of Buchanan’s 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns.

Despite his recognition that Buchanan has been a major figure in American politics, Stanley refuses to commit himself on the nature of Buchanan’s legacy:

He is a controversial figure, so I have avoided passing judgment.  It is better simply to tell his story from beginning to end and let the reader make up his or her mind as to whether [Buchanan] is a visionary or a brute.

No one who reads Stanley’s biography, however, can reasonably conclude that Buchanan is a “brute,” since the book details nothing that can reasonably be described as brutish.  A former aide, Greg Mueller, recounts that, during the 1996 campaign, Buchanan “was incredibly patient and never got angry.”  Indeed, all those who know Buchanan realize that he is a gentleman, a conclusion buttressed in the book by such disparate figures as liberal columnist E.J. Dionne, Andrew Sullivan (to whom Buchanan wrote a supportive private note after Sullivan was diagnosed with AIDS), and Joe Scarborough, who told Stanley that the young interns at MSNBC would balk at working with Buchanan, until they actually met him: “They’d really squirm and say, ‘Isn’t he an awful person?  He’s so right wing.’  But after a couple of days with him, they’d all want to adopt him as their father.”  Scarborough’s interns were repeating the reaction of Peggy Noonan, who was worried about having to work for the hard-right Buchanan in the Reagan White House, yet ended up making him one of the heroes of What I Saw at the Revolution.

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Stanley also provides facts that refute some of the attacks made on his subject.  Those who charge Buchanan with antisemitism need to come to grips with the fact that, “Throughout his career, Buchanan had been a cheerleader for Israel.”  Buchanan’s view of America’s relationship with Israel did not change definitively until the end of the Cold War, which caused him to reevaluate his foreign-policy views across the board.  Buchanan opposed George H.W. Bush’s first foreign intervention, the invasion of Panama, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Indeed, as Stanley relates, on Crossfire Buchanan called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops the day after the fall of the Berlin Wall, provided the Russians withdrew their troops from Eastern Europe.  Stanley notes that Buchanan’s concern for Americans charged with complicity in the holocaust, such as John Demjanjuk, grew out of Buchanan’s anticommunism and the fact that the evidence being used against such Americans came from the Soviets.  In a similar vein, Stanley writes that Ronald Reagan’s visit to “Bitburg had nothing to do with Buchanan; the decision to go was made before he was appointed.”

The author also deals with the Myth of Houston: the notion that Buchanan’s speech to the 1992 Republican convention blindsided the White House and destroyed George H.W. Bush’s chance for reelection.  Indeed, the Bush White House coveted Buchanan’s endorsement and vetted the speech.  As Greg Mueller told Stanley, “The White House saw that speech.  And they loved it.”  They were not alone.  David Brinkley pronounced it “an astoundingly good speech,” and Sander Vanocur agreed:

Viewed in terms of classic raw rhetoric, that was the most skillful attempt to remind the party faithful of the role that ideas have played in American politics since Eugene McCarthy nominated Adlai Stevenson at the 1960 Democratic convention.

The polls validated the judgment of those veteran political journalists: Following Buchanan’s speech, Bush went from trailing Clinton by 52 to 35 percent to lagging behind him by only three percentage points (45 to 42 percent) with a lead among male voters of 47 to 41 percent.  Indeed, given the state of the economy, the social and cultural issues highlighted by Buchanan were Bush’s only possible road map to victory.  But after the left savaged Buchanan’s speech, Bush grew timid and went down to defeat instead.  The soundness of Buchanan’s strategy was shown by Bush’s son, who used the division of America into Red States and Blue States that accompanied his 2000 election to win reelection and elect more Republicans to Congress in both 2002 and 2004, until the disastrous tendencies of his administration became impossible to ignore.

Stanley’s narrative also provides plenty of facts to support the view that Buchanan has been a “visionary.”  In the Nixon White House, he played a significant role in crafting Spiro Agnew’s attack on the media, an attack that has been imitated by conservatives ever since.  Buchanan wrote to Nixon that “Our future is in the Democratic working man, Southern Protestant and Northern Catholics,” and also “argued that if [Nixon] wanted to get reelected, he had to reach out to the people who voted for George Wallace.”  Republican success in winning over such former Democrats has been instrumental to the GOP’s political success, and likely would have made the Republicans as dominant as the Democrats were under FDR, had the GOP not stood by and allowed the left’s Gramscian march through the institutions and the Immigration Act of 1965 to transform America.

Buchanan’s foresight has been clearest in the areas where he broke from the Republican mainstream.  As Stanley notes, Buchanan was one of the first Republicans to argue that America should resume her traditional policy of nonintervention following our victory in the Cold War.  After the United States lost thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars in a vain attempt to transform the Middle East into something resembling the Middle West, more and more Americans have come to agree with what Buchanan has been saying forcefully and consistently since the collapse of communism.

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Buchanan was one of the first Republicans to question the GOP’s policy on trade and economics, decrying “vulture capitalism” long before Rick Perry applied that term to Mitt Romney’s career at Bain Capital and opposing the free-trade policies that decimated American manufacturing long before Rick Santorum began lamenting the deindustrialization of America.  Stanley quotes these remarks by Buchanan from his 1996 campaign:

There’s no doubt there is an inherent contradiction between conservatism and unfettered capitalism.  Conservatives ought to be worshipping at a higher altar than the bottom line on a balance sheet.  What in heaven’s name is it that we conservatives want to conserve if not social stability and family unity?

Stanley is correct in seeing Buchanan as a conservative transformed into a revolutionary by the leftist ascendancy in American society:

Traditionalism created a paradox among orthodox Catholics like Pat.  On the one hand, Buchanan longed to obey.  On the other hand, to preserve anything worth obeying he had to fight the authority of reforming priests and bishops.  Traditionalism turned conservatives into unlikely revolutionaries.

This insight is also applicable outside the Catholic context.  Stanley quotes the penetrating analysis of contemporary America offered by Buchanan’s friend Sam Francis in this magazine:

We must understand that the dominant authorities in . . . the major foundations, the media, the schools, the universities, and most of the system of organized culture, including the arts and entertainment—not only do nothing to conserve what most of us regard as our traditional way of life, but actually seek its destruction or are indifferent to its survival.  If our culture is going to be conserved, then we need to dethrone the dominant authorities that threaten it.

Buchanan’s campaigns were an attempt to dethrone those dominant authorities.  He was shaped by, and remains loyal to, the America that existed before the cultural revolutions of the 1960’s, just as the revolutionaries have no use for the America that predated them.  This is why Buchanan was viciously attacked at the time and is still viciously attacked today, most recently by leftist groups petitioning MSNBC to terminate his employment, using Buchanan’s most recent book, Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive Until 2025?, as a pretext.

Unfortunately, Buchanan’s presidential campaigns, to which Stanley devotes the bulk of his biography, did not succeed.  There were many reasons for this failure.  The task was always a daunting one.  As I argued in 2008 in an article on VDare.com,

What Buchanan did in his campaigns, by defending traditional morality and beliefs and arguing against mass immigration and globalism, was to take on both wings of America’s elite at the same time—the left-wing elite that gives lip service to displaced manufacturing workers but is really animated by its hatred for traditional morality and its desire to advance social radicalism; the right-wing elite that gives lip service to defending traditional morality but is really animated by its desire to advance the interests of transnational corporations and enrich its members.

When Buchanan showed signs of succeeding, both wings attacked him.  As Stanley notes of Buchanan’s victory in the New Hampshire primary in 1996, “No humiliation the Tea Party endured in 2010 could match the things that were said about Pat Buchanan in New Hampshire, 1996.”  And the resources of the campaign were simply insufficient to meet such a challenge.  What Stanley wrote of the 1992 campaign was true of them all: “his campaign was a genuine crusade of the little man; paid for and staffed by ordinary people united in anger at the way things were.”

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But another reason the campaigns failed is that too many of those who knew enough to support Buchanan refused to do so.  Buchanan has long been a stalwart social conservative, and he certainly is the most socially conservative candidate to have won a Republican primary or caucus in the post-Reagan era.  But Buchanan ran his campaigns without any significant support from the leaders of the Religious Right.  As Stanley observes (again regarding the 1992 campaign), “the organized religious right was committed to supporting [President Bush].”  In 1996 and 2000, its leaders preferred Bob Dole and George W. Bush, even though neither man could match the consistency and intensity of Buchanan’s social conservatism.  Indeed, in 1996, Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition did all he could to help Bob Dole beat back the challenge from Buchanan, especially in the South Carolina primary.  The same is true of the more conservative members of the Beltway Right, none of whom bestirred themselves to help Buchanan, even when they agreed with Buchanan on most of the issues.

Then there was Buchanan’s run as the Reform Party candidate in 2000.  Although Stanley is critical of that campaign, he does note that at one point national polls showed George W. Bush at 39 percent, Al Gore at 35 percent, and Buchanan at 16 percent—far more than the 5 percent the Reform Party would have needed to continue to receive federal matching funds.  Buchanan’s goal, as he told supporters, was to create “a new fighting conservative traditionalist party in America.”  Unfortunately for Buchanan, mainstream conservatism had become obsessed with the obvious moral failings of Bill Clinton, and, as a result, most conservatives were too consumed by the need to deny Al Gore the White House to consider whether the cause of conservatism might benefit from “a new fighting conservative traditionalist party in America.”  Another significant problem was Ross Perot, whose chief political aide, Russ Verney, had encouraged Buchanan to run for the Reform Party nomination.  But after Buchanan had served Perot’s interests by thwarting former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura’s attempt to take over the Reform Party, Perot turned on Buchanan: “Perot could use Pat to break [Ventura], and then use the convention to break Pat.  The Buchanans were being set up.”  Indeed, Perot later signed an affidavit stating that he regarded Buchanan’s opponent for the Reform Party nomination, John Hagelin (a devotee of transcendental meditation and “yogic flying”), as the nominee of the Reform Party, and ultimately endorsed George W. Bush—even though Bush championed NAFTA, which both Perot and Buchanan had opposed.

There are problems with Stanley’s biography.  He sometimes adopts conventional criticisms of Buchanan without much additional thought or analysis.  He has a tendency to employ colorful generalizations to keep his narrative flowing, even when those generalizations are supported by scanty evidence at best.  And he gets a number of details wrong, including attributing to me a belief that the Republican establishment “cheated” during the 1996 campaign and citing me to establish that John Hagelin won the support of the Reform Party in Ohio.  Neither statement is accurate.  Stanley devotes little attention to the substance of the many books Buchanan has written since the 1996 campaign, not to mention the many White House memos and hundreds of columns Buchanan has authored, and the transcripts of Buchanan’s numerous television appearances.

Despite these flaws, anyone who followed Buchanan’s presidential campaigns and remains interested in this American statesman will want to read Stanley’s biography.

This review first appeared in the March 2012 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. To subscribe, click here.

Why are there bilingual ballots?  Why isn't a knowledge of English a requirement for voting?  And how can we ever possibly hope to assimilate millions of Spanish-speakers if we don't require them to learn English in order to participate in civic life?

Now Buchanan has written a new book, Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?  This book continues to raise many of the issues Buchanan has long stressed and shows where we are likely to end up, if we do not change course.  It is well-written, well researched, and highly persuasive.  It will likely be of interest to most Chronicles readers.  (Indeed, Chronicles is quoted more often than any other journal of opinion).  The book also challenges, head on, the regnant ideology of “diversity” and “multiculturalism.”

Although the book is likely to end up on the New York Times bestseller list, its reception is also illustrating one of Buchanan’s themes.  “Diversity” has become a religion, the new religion of our elites, and it is “an ideology not terribly tolerant of dissent.”  On October 24, 2011, the political website TPM ran a piece entitled “Twelve Pretty Racist or Just Crazy Quotes from Pat Buchanan’s New Book.”  Most of these statements are either purely factual or conclusions drawn from and supported by facts.  Among the “pretty racist and just crazy” things Buchanan says is that “The white population will begin to shrink and, should present birth rates persist, slowly disappear. Hispanics already comprise 42 percent of New Mexico’s population, 37 percent of California’s, 38 percent of Texas’s, and over half the population of Arizona under the age of twenty….Mexico is moving north” and that  “If [conservative political commentator Heather] Mac Donald’s statistics are accurate, 49 of every 50 muggings and murders in New York are the work of minorities.”  Which raises the question:  is it “pretty racist” to notice reality, or “just crazy?”

Not to be outdone, the Color of Change, a group founded by Marxist ideologue and former official in the Obama Administration Van Jones, has demanded that MSNBC fire Buchannan.  The first charge against Buchanan is that he has has “just published a book which says that increasing racial diversity is a threat to this country and will mean the ‘End of White America,’” quoting the TPM article I just discussed.  Apparently, anyone expressing trepidation about the fact that the Census Bureau projects that by 2042 whites will, for the first time in history, no longer be a majority in the United States should be excluded from public life.

The second charge is that one of the hundred or so radio shows Buchanan has been on to discuss the book is hosted by James Edwards, whom The Huffington Post quotes as describing himself as being “pro-white.”  The Color of Change, on its website, states that it “exists to strengthen Black America's political voice. Our goal is to empower our members—Black Americans and our allies—to make government more responsive to the concerns of Black Americans and to bring about positive political and social change for everyone.”  In the political world Color of Change wants to create, allowing yourself to be interviewed by someone who describes himself as “pro-white” should be enough to get you fired, but wanting to “strengthen Black America’s political voice” is okay.

Other groups are also trying to get MSNBC to fire Buchanan.  In an interview about the book on the Diane Rehm show on NPR, Buchanan described homosexual conduct as “unnatural and immoral.”  In response, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, a homosexual activist group, has stated that “MSNBC should sanction Mr. Buchanan, as his extremist ideas are incredibly harmful to millions of LGBT people around the world.”  No word yet from the Human Rights Campaign on how long people should be allowed to read the “extremist ideas” of St. Paul and Thomas Aquinas, both of whom expressed the same view of homosexuality that Buchanan did.

For all the hue and cry over Buchanan’s supposed “hate,” the emotion that runs through Suicide of a Superpower is not hate, but love.  Buchanan sees the country he grew up in and loved passing away, and he wants to raise his voice in its defense.  As Buchanan writes, in one of the twelve “pretty racist or just crazy” statements highlighted by TPM, “Americans who seek stricter immigration control have been charged with many social sins: racism, xenophobia, nativism. Yet none has sought to expel any fellow American based on color or creed. We have only sought to preserve the country we grew up in. Do not people everywhere do that, without being reviled? What motivates people who insist that America’s doors be held open wide until the European majority has disappeared?  What is their grudge against the old America that eats at their heart?”

These are all fair questions.  Buchanan does not advocate legal privilege for whites or discrimination against non-whites, even though those calling for him to lose his job do advocate discrimination against whites by means of affirmative action, a form of discrimination that is apparently meant to continue even after whites become a minority in America   Buchanan merely opposes an immigration policy that, by favoring non-European immigrants, is bringing about a radical transformation of America. It is hard to see why white Americans should welcome their own displacement as America’s majority, even though the message being sent by those calling for Buchanan to lose his job is that white Americans must welcome their own displacement.

It should also be noted that, if those voting on the Immigration Act of 1965 had realized what the act would achieve, it would never have become law.  Indeed, Teddy Kennedy, one of the act’s principal supporters, felt the need to declare that, under the act, “the present level of immigration remains substantially the same” and “the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset.”   Today, those who want the level of immigration to be what it was in 1965, or who want the majority of America’s population to be what it was in 1965, risk organized campaigns to strip them of their jobs.

What the hysterical reaction to Buchanan’s book suggests is not just the intolerance of the advocates of “diversity” but also the brittleness of the intellectual foundation of their creed.  After all, anyone who believes that “diversity is our greatest strength” must face the facts of American history.  Most of America’s greatest achievements occurred before anyone thought diversity was our greatest strength, or indeed before America became “diverse” by today’s standards.   As a friend of mine quipped, the Apollo program was diverse only if you define diverse as meaning “white guys with crew cuts and white guys without crew cuts.”  The same could be said, with allowances made for hairstyles of the period, about almost every significant event in American history before the 1960s.  The advocates of “diversity” must also face the fact that ethnic diversity is most often a source of national division and even national disintegration and that, as The Financial Times summarized the research of sociologist Robert Putnam, “the more diverse a community is, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust anyone—from their next-door neighbour to the mayor.”  Buchanan’s book is a formidable dissent from the cult of “diversity,” which is why its adherents are so eager to prevent us from hearing what he has to say.

Obama's comments would be bad enough at a time of economic prosperity. They are little short of astonishing now, at a time when millions of American cannot find work. As VDARE.com's Ed Rubenstein has long documented, immigrants are displacing Americans in the workplace and driving down wages. And it turns out that just as the jobs our trade policy creates are largely overseas, the jobs our immigration policy creates are largely among immigrants. The Center for Immigration Studies recently reported that, despite all of Rick Perry's bravado over job creation in Texas, 81% of all jobs created in Texas since 2007 were filled by immigrants, both legal and illegal. A government serious about reducing unemployment would be introducing legislation to curtail immigration, not expand it.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for all his faults, never suggested in the depths of the Depression that America needed to bring more foreigners into the country, to compete with Americans for the remaining jobs and to drive down the wages for those jobs. If he had, Roosevelt would have faced a firestorm of controversy, because Americans then thought of their country as a real country, where the economic interests of Americans came first. Today, most of our elites have come to think of America as little more than a shopping mall with a flag, and decades of globalist propaganda has convinced millions of Americans that they are right. So, at a time of deep and painful unemployment, both parties continue to pursue immigration and trade policies that destroy American jobs and drive down American wages, with relatively little controversy.

The article also notes one of the causes: "Corporations have cut costs by moving manufacturing jobs, routine computer programming, and even simple legal work out of the country." But the article, like all the presidential candidates, treats this massive outsourcing as a force of nature, akin to the tides, about which nothing can be done. Actually, something can be done about outsourcing, and was done for most of American history. That something was the tariff. And we are not going to see sustained improvement in jobs and wages until we begin to remember what earlier generations of Americans knew about protecting American industry and American jobs.