Angry White Men
by Patrick J. Buchanan
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To hear the Obamaites, those raucous crowds pouring into town hall meetings are “mobs” of “thugs” whose rage has been “manufactured” by K Street lobbyists and right-wing Republican operatives.
Press secretary Robert Gibbs compares them to the Young Republicans of the “Brooks Brothers riot” during the Florida recount.
But is it wise for the White House to denigrate and insult scores of thousands with the fire and energy to come to town meetings in August, and who appear to represent millions? Is this depiction fair or accurate?
Most K Street lobbyists could not organize a two-car funeral. They don’t storm meetings. They buy friends with $1,000 checks. And if GOP operatives are turning out these crowds, why could they not turn them out for John McCain, unless Sister Sarah showed up?
The Obamaites had best wake up. Opposition to health-care reform is surging, and Barack Obama’s campaigning has gone hand-in-hand with collapsing support, just as George W. Bush’s barnstorming did for Social Security reform.
There is an anger out there unseen since Ross Perot was leading Bush I and Bill Clinton in the presidential trial heats in 1992.
Who are these folks? Why are they angry?
In his essay “Decline of the American Male” in USA Today, David Zinczenko, editor of Men’s Health, give us a clue. “Of the 5.2 million people who’ve lost their jobs since last summer, four out of five were men. Some experts predict that this year, for the first time, more American women will have jobs than men.”
Ed Rubenstein, who has written for Forbes, National Review and the Wall Street Journal, blogs on VDARE.com that if one uses the household survey of job losses for June-July, Hispanics gained 150,000 positions, while non-Hispanics lost 679,000. Guess who got the stimulus jobs.
Going back to the beginning of the Bush presidency, Rubenstein says that “for every 100 Hispanics employed in January 2001, there are now 122.5. … (But) for every 100 non-Hispanics employed in January 2001, there are now 98.9.”
Since 2001, Hispanic employment has increased by 3,627,000 positions, while non-Hispanic positions have fallen by 1,362,000. For black and white America, the Bush decade did not begin well or end well, and it has gotten worse under Obama.
African-Americans remain loyal, but among white folks, where Obama ran stronger than John Kerry or Al Gore, he is hemorrhaging.
According to the latest Quinnipiac poll, which showed him falling to 50 percent approval, whites, by 54 percent to 27 percent, felt Obama behaved “stupidly” in the Sgt. Crowley-professor Gates dustup.
Fifteen straight months of job losses by non-Hispanics explains the anger, but columnist Lowell Ponte raises an issue that may explain who is protesting health-care reform and why.
Under the civil rights legal doctrine of disparate impact, used in the New Haven firefighters case, if tests for hirings and promotions consistently produce results disadvantageous to minorities, the tests are, de facto, suspect as inherently discriminatory, and the results are tossed out. New Haven canceled the promotions for firefighters when all but one of the firemen who passed the test were white, and not a single African-American made the cut.
The city argued that New Haven was acting true to the letter of the Civil Rights Act, which says that tests that consistently produce a disparate and unfavorable impact on African-Americans must go.
Ponte applies the disparate impact doctrine to the trillion-dollar health-care reform.
Who are the principal beneficiaries? The 47 million uninsured who will be covered. Who are the principal losers? The elderly sick who, in the name of controlling costs, are going to lose benefits, be denied care at the end of their lives and have their lives shortened. For half of all health-care costs are in the last six months of life, and cost control is priority No. 1.
Here is where the disparate impact hits. Among those who benefit most—the uninsured—African-Americans, Hispanics and immigrants are overrepresented. Among the biggest losers—seniors and the elderly sick—well over 80 percent are white. Ponte quotes Fox News’ Dick Morris:
“The principal impact of the Obama health-care program will be to reduce sharply the medical services the elderly can use. No longer will their every medical need be met, their every medication prescribed, their every need to improve their quality of life answered.”
Under Obamacare, adds Morris, “the elderly will go from being the group with the most access to free medical care to the one with the least access.”
America is already divided ideologically and politically on health-care reform. And with seniors having to sacrifice care, while the young are all insured, a generational divide is opening.
Now Nobel prize-winner and New York Times pundit Paul Krugman writes in his “The Town Hall Mobs” column that, as did Richard Nixon’s men, “cynical political operators are … appealing to the racial fears of working-class whites.”
Pulitzer prize-winning black columnist Cynthia Tucker says 45 percent to 65 percent of all vocal opponents of Obamacare are motivated by racial hostility to a black president.
We are headed for interesting times.
COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS.COM
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1 Comment by John Seiler on 11 August 2009:
“For black and white America, the Bush decade did not begin well or end well, and it has gotten worse under Obama.”
A typical Republican, Bush stabbed in the back his own top supporters, white men.
And it’s even worse than Pat says, because Clinton cooked the books in the early 1990s to reduce unemployment numbers. More accurate numbers — showing actual unemployment at 20% — are at John Williams’ ShadowStats(dot)com. Click on “Altenate Data.”
2 Comment by Fred Breisch on 11 August 2009:
It’s about time white men got mad!
3 Comment by McCallum on 11 August 2009:
2010 is starting to look like a slaughter.
Now, and I’m not sure how it can be done beyond a bloody purge, the neo-cons must be driven from the ranks. They are simply waiting, not getting their hands bloody in the fight, for the time to come forward and lay claim to taking back Congressional seats.
Frankly I gave up on the concept of the United States some time ago. I simply want my community left alone, there is little I am required to render beyond an extended finger.
McCallum
4 Comment by MAP on 12 August 2009:
There is no conservative I have more respect for than PB. His historical knowledge and insights are incredible, astounding even. However, I wonder at his unfailing faith that the republican party will come to the rescue of the conservative. A case could be made that each time in the past when conservatives have rallied to the republican banner; they have been abandoned by the party at the slightest provocation. This, in turn, would imply that the republican platform is something other than conservatism and, further, that conservatives are merely a resource to be exploited by the republicans for winning elections. I can only wonder why PB believes that things will now, or in the future, be different. I say all this out of utter confusion. It is difficult to find fault with someone whose knowledge and accomplishments so far exceed my own.
5 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 12 August 2009:
MAP, you scored a bullseye. What is happening is that Republican apparatchicks have taken over the anti-ObamaCare sentiments of the people. The only motive is to build up Republican support to be betrayed at a later date. These people are doing NOTHING to clarify the issues for the public or to contribute to the defeat of the enormity. The first goal of every genuine conservative must be to destroy the Republican Party machine. The real agenda of the Party has always been the same—to serve the rich. The particular positions are altered as needed to demagogue the people. This is not only the nature of the Republican Party now—it has ALWAYS been the nature of the Republican Party. But, I’ll bet you ten to one that the next election will see the “conservatives” trotting after some phony “Republican Conservative” leader like Bush, Kemp,Romney, etc.
6 Comment by Robert II on 12 August 2009:
Posts 4 @ 5 need to be laminated, posted on public bill boards carried around in ones wallet or prayer book and memorized by every young or aspiring conservative under the age of 65. They contain all the necessary principles for any authentic return for a conservative conversation in the United States. The Republican party must be destroyed and the Democratic party ignored, now and for the foreseeable future.
7 Comment by John Seiler on 12 August 2009:
Pat Himself put it well in his 1975 book, “Conservative Votes, Liberal Victories: Why the Right Has Failed”:
“For neither party today voices the concerns or defends the interests of the hardest working and most productive citizens. Both parties are up to their elbows in this sordid business of bidding for votes with the tax dollars of the American people. And things need saying that are not being said.”
34 years later, nothing has changed.
8 Comment by R. McCabe on 12 August 2009:
These comments may be accurate, but they are incomplete. You offer no alternatives to the GOP, thus it will continue to thrive as you have described. Nothing can be truly destroyed until it is replaced.
So we’re damned when we do and damned when we don’t. Not a very enticing offer. What’s a guy to do?
For better or worse, there will be a wave coursing through the GOP as a result of Obama’s policies and tactics. I suggest as many conservatives ride this wave as possible. The ideal will never exist.
9 Comment by Miles Gloriosus on 12 August 2009:
@R. McCabe, you write, “The ideal will never exist,” which has been the excuse conservatives have used to justify throwing away their votes on republicans for at least two decades now, always childishly imagining “This time, things are going to be different!”
After John Sidney McCain secured the GOP nomination in 2008, I decided “Never again!” In future, when I vote for a true conservative candidate and he loses, at least serious members of the GOP establishment will be forced to take note that continuing to peddle the same old pablum has stopped working and is only losing them votes. And, more importantly, as the GOP drifts ever leftward, intimately embracing socialist-lite policies, I’ll at least have the satisfaction knowing I wasn’t an accomplice in conservatism’s, this nation’s and my own self-destruction.
10 Comment by R. McCabe on 12 August 2009:
Mr. Gloriosus, I cannot agree with your extremist position. I have not advised anyone to throw away their votes on the GOP, nor have I said that this time things will be different.
Because every time, things are somehow different. PJB is a different man now than in 1975, and the people in the GOP are different now than even 2 years ago, what’s left of them. Whether those differences are worth anything remains to be seen. I was advising people to get involved with the inevitable resistance, the swing back, to become the conservative alternative, not the conservative drop out. Whoever is the presidential nominee later on is not a concern now.
Clinging to comfortable absolutes (whether or not we recognize them as unreachable ideals) is not a valuable position for anyone other than the clingers and the opposition.
11 Comment by Ed Roberts on 12 August 2009:
Mr. Buchanan wrote:
“The Obamaites had best wake up. Opposition to health-care reform is surging,”
The Obamaites are well aware that the opposition to socialized medicine is widespread and genuine. They intend to push it through anyway, if they can with the aid of the propaganda ministry which masquerades as our news media.
Obama’s legions are wide awake. The ones sleepwalking are the ever-benighted conservative white men who, like Mr. Buchanan labor under the delusion that the GOP is their best hope.
A rule of thumb that should be adopted is that, if the democrats are pushing for something, it is going to turn out to be a scheme originally cooked up by the GOP.
I think that the reason behind the concept of the conservative votes/ liberal victories phenonmenon is that conservatives vote for GOP liberals who pass themselves off as conservatives to gain office.
Mainstream GOP politicians are liberals who would be as much at home in the “opposition party” as they are in the GOP. Look at the way they have been denouncing Mrs. Palin for her prediction of Obama Death Panels if Obamacare is instituted. For once, Mrs. Palin made a courageous statement that was based on a solid probability, given the facts, and the GOP jobholders joined hands with their democrat soulmates in a veritable bloodbath of hand-wringing and finger shaking.
If scenes such as that can’t wake up white conservatives, then they may as well stay asleep.
12 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 12 August 2009:
The only hope is for the creation of a grassroots party that will defend the interests of working Americans and see that the Evil Yankee Empire in D.C. is dismantled. It is not easy nor likely. More likely is a further descent into decadent empire. The question is—do the core American people have the intelligence and will to recover their self-government and make sure the survival of their posaterity?
13 Comment by John Seiler on 12 August 2009:
Dr. Wilson is right, @5. The Republican Party is just a party for the rich and must be dismantled. It should be called the RePlutocrat Party.
Remember GOP’s old slogan, the one associated with Reagan?…
Win one for The Grifter!
14 Comment by John Seiler on 12 August 2009:
In support of Dr. Wilson’s comment, @5, that the Republican Party needs to be dissolved:
The most important issue of our time has been abortion, costing 60 million lives since the Supreme Soviet’s unconstitutional Roe vs. Wade edict of 1973. Since then, Republicans have used the issue to cadge votes for victories, especially the votes of the so-called “Reagan Democrats”: Southern Protestants and Northern “ethnic” Catholics.
But what’s the Republicans’ record? On the Roe court, six “justices” were nominated by Republicans. President Nixon, new Nixon Tape releases reveal, didn’t oppose Roe, so he did nothing to overturn it. Soon, Watergate consumed him. President Ford avoided the issue.
In the 1980 election, Reagan gave his solemn promise to appoint only pro-life justices. We got Scalia — but also Sandra “D. for Dilation and Curettage” O’Connor and Anthony “Just as Bad As Teddy” Kennedy.
Bush I gave us Thomas — but also Souter, a Norman Bates wannabe.
Bush II gave us Roberts and Alito, who are good on abortion (probably). But Bush himself was so bad on everything else, now we have Obama nominating Sotomayor — and whatever other horror-nominees follow.
Also, in 1996, Pat Buchanan came up with the great idea of a president refusing to enforce Roe, declaring it unconstitutional — thus throwing the matter back to the states, at least until a new president reversed the action. Bush didn’t do it.
Finally, from 1995 to 2006, Republicans controlled both houses of Congress almost every year, so they could have withdrawn appellate jurisdiction on abortion from federal courts, including the Supreme Soviet, thus throwing the matter back to the states. They didn’t.
So, that’s 36 years of betrayal of the babies by Republicans.
And remember all those Jan. 22 pro-life protests in frigid Washington, where Republican presidents refused to speak in person, bud did so only by remote broadcast, as if they might catch cooties from the pro-lifers?
Why the continual betrayal? I think the reason is simple: The plutocrats who run the party want pro-lifers’ votes, but also sometimes need abortions for their mistresses, wives, and even daughters.
For example, in the biography “Goldwater,” by Lee Edwards, we read: “When [Goldwater's] daughter Joanne, not yet twenty and still in school, became pregnant with the child of her intended husband and told her father that she did not want to have the child, Goldwater said, ‘I’ll take care of it.’ He arranged for Joanne to fly back to Washington and have a then-illegal abortion (it was 1955) in the converted dining room of a large three-story house in the suburbs. ‘I just want to prevent anyone from going through that,’ says Joanne Goldwater, who admits that all three of her daughters have had abortions.
“Given this family pattern, it is not surprising that Goldwater ultimately assumed a pro-abortion position.”
15 Comment by John Seiler on 12 August 2009:
I just thought of something concerning the Goldwater part of my immediate previous comment:
In 1955, as Bill Buckley started National Review, two years after Russell Kirk’s “The Conservative Mind” was published, Sen. Barry Goldwater, the conservative movement’s future standard bearer, procured an abortion of his grandchild.
No wonder conservatism has gone nowhere for 55 years. It was aborted right after its conception.
16 Comment by Brock H. on 12 August 2009:
My admiration for Barry Goldwater stopped when I learned he supported Ford over Reagan for the GOP nomination in 1976. I then learned from the wisdom of Dr. Wilson that there is no authentic or substantial difference between any Republican, so it didn’t matter who he supported. I’d like to thank the commenters on this article for enlightening me concerning the real Barry Goldwater. Now I know why the old curmudgeon became an outspoken social liberal – because he was one all along.
17 Comment by polemicscat on 12 August 2009:
#8 and #10 McCabe you are right.
It’s unrealistic to think a new party could be put in place between now and 1012 let alone by 2010. It’s far more realistic to try to elect save-the-constitution candidates in 2010. If just a few states were to elect good people to Congress that would go a long way toward fumigating BO.
I get the feeling we will continue to hear a lot of griping in Chronicles comments and nothing else.
The course of action I suggest is to examine the voting records of members of the current Congress and to work to defeat in 2010 those who have voted for socialist measures. That in itself would send a clear message.
18 Comment by Samuel Bass on 12 August 2009:
Where does one draw the line on what constitutes a socialist measure?
19 Comment by polemicscat on 13 August 2009:
#18 How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
20 Comment by CM Collins on 13 August 2009:
“Goldwater… procured an abortion of his grandchild.”
Mr. Seiler, that can’t be true. It’s not on his Wikipedia page.
21 Comment by Miles Gloriosus on 13 August 2009:
R McCabe wrote: “Clinging to comfortable absolutes (whether or not we recognize them as unreachable ideals) is not a valuable position for anyone other than the clingers and the opposition.”
When it’s become obvious that the only real difference between the GOP and the democrat party is that under them, we’ll get to socialism a nano-second later than we will under the democrats (but arrive at socialism we surely will), then not to finally stand on principle, to dismiss it as the absolutist folly of the zealot or true believer is akin to surrendering your mates to the hungry crocidile so he’ll eat you last.
Thinking “pragmatically” has gotten us nowhere. Isn’t it time to stop pretending that supporting the GOP is doing anything more than fighting a rear-guard action? If we go down, at least we’ve sent a message to posterity that there were people who believed these principles were worth fighting for. (No one would remember Thermopylae if Leonidas had acted pragmatically and found a compromise with Xerxes.)
22 Comment by R. McCabe on 13 August 2009:
19, that’s pretty funny.
21, I’m not here to battle with you. If you read what I wrote, you will see that I never suggested anyone should support the GOP broadly. It is an evil machine as far as I can tell. But some brave or stupid souls have gotten involved and are putting themselves in leadership positions. Let us not turn our backs on those individuals for the sake of personal cleanliness.
As for Dr. Wilson’s suggestion of a grassroots party emerging, that would certainly be the best solution. I don’t know if it’s possible or how to get there, but I have been working in my own ways over the past few years under the idea that if you keep setting the table, eventually enough of the right people will show up for dinner.
Obama is helping accelerate the emergence of the grassroots, now where are the political and financial leaders to formalize the shift?
23 Comment by John Seiler on 13 August 2009:
One of the problems with Dr. Wilson’s idea of getting a grassroots party going is that the 1974 Watergate election “reform,” and subsequent reforms, were advertised as making it harder for the wealthy to control the system — but did the opposite.
Now, the limits on contributions, and the mass of paperwork, mean most candidates spend much of their time raising money. The exception is rich folks, who can self-fund their campaigns, and know how to manipulate the system. So the “reforms” just helped the plutocracy, as we have seen in the results the past 3 decades.
24 Comment by Samuel Bass on 13 August 2009:
I will cheerfully admit to being too dull to appreciate your wit, Polemicscat. Is social security a socialist measure? Is the NIH? Does any representative who does not perpetually introduce bills to abolish farm subsidies, water subsidies and medicare qualify as a socialist? Are you perhaps among those libertarians who believe that our street system is socialist? To my plodding and pedestrian mind, the question still stands.
25 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 13 August 2009:
#21. The GOP is not even fighting a rear-guard action, only occasionally faking one.
26 Comment by polemicscat on 13 August 2009:
#24 The short answer to your original question is that a line cannot be drawn to everyone’s satisfaction. Any legislation that takes the rights of the individual citizen and gives government additional power over citizens is a step in the direction of a socialist state. All of the programs you name infringe on the rights of citizens to some degree.
Some people are willing to surrender much of their freedom to a strong central government. They are tempted to do so usually in return for some kind of security — or the promise of that security— usually in the form of material goods. It is the kind of security a child has under the control of parents.
Others resist the tendency of government to take away their liberties, knowing that the power of government can be oppressive and that once government has powers over citizens, it almost never relinquishes them. Moreover, people in government can’t be said to be more capable of running citizens’ affairs than the citizens themselves. They are subject to all the vices of ordinary people. Jefferson said something like, if people can’t manage their business where will they find angels to do it for them.
But worse than that, politicians enjoy exercising power over other people. That’s true of virtually every politician. So a politician should be given as little power as possible. Jefferson again: the government that governs best governs least. We might give a great deal of power to a government led by a highly virtuous person, but what is to be done when a less than virtuous person assumes that enormous power?
Thomas DiLorenzo’s book, Hamilton’s Curse, is a good look at two of the founding fathers: Hamilton who wanted a powerful central government and Jefferson who understood the dangers inherent in that kind of government. Unfortunately, American history is the story of the unrelenting loss of individual liberty to a central government. The Constitution is now only a shadow of the original document. Although the Tenth Amendment forbids it, Congress now passes laws on any subject it wishes. And the Supreme Court, instead of upholding the Constitution, plays a big part in its destruction. Presidents Bush and Obama openly ridicule the idea that the Constitution matters. Yet they like every President and member of Congress in our history took an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.
27 Comment by Samuel Bass on 15 August 2009:
Thank you, Polemicscat. We are in substantial agreement. And I am altogether with those who find the GOP hopeless at best. I believe Dr. Fleming addresses these issues quite satisfactorily in his healthcare article, including a difference (which Mr. Di Lorenzo, whatever his many virtues would not admit of) between welfare measures and socialism.
28 Comment by Samuel Bass on 15 August 2009:
Would it be fair, Dr. Wilson, to posit that the Republicans occasionally (at least) fake a rear-guard action in order to engage in an avant-garde action? To, for instance, leave (ugh) no child behind?
29 Comment by polemicscat on 15 August 2009:
Why all the scalp hunting of Republicans? In case some people on this site don’t follow the news, Republicans don’t have a majority in either House or Senate. The current president is not a Republican.
If it matters, I have been registered Independent my entire adult life and I’m over seventy years old. So I don’t have a dog in the battle of parties. I am interested strictly in issues.
30 Comment by polemicscat on 15 August 2009:
27 Mr. Bass, one shouldn’t be quick to generalize about DiLorenzo without reading his book. I don’t think he uses the word “socialism” once in the entire book.
31 Comment by Samuel Bass on 15 August 2009:
I am not generalizing about Mr. Di Lorenzo. I have not yet read his latest book, but I have read innumerable articles of his on several sites and I have read his books on Lincoln, as well as a book he co-authored for Cato in the 80s on how the government funds the left. I don’t think he would have taken what I wrote as a criticism, in which spirit it was not intended anyway.
32 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 18 August 2009:
The problem is, that as long as the Republican party exists there can be no genuine opposition party to the Democrat majority.
33 Comment by Jeremiah Whitmoore on 18 August 2009:
Dr. Wilson,
Lest we forget, It took only 44 years to go from Goldwater to McCain.
34 Comment by Ed Roberts on 19 August 2009:
“Also, in 1996, Pat Buchanan came up with the great idea of a president refusing to enforce Roe, declaring it unconstitutional — thus throwing the matter back to the states, at least until a new president reversed the action. Bush didn’t do it.”
Examine the premise behind that idea: that a Supreme Court ruling becomes law and may be enforced as though it were an actual statute approved by Congress.
The Supreme Court has no authority to legislate. The doctrine of stare decisis does not nullify the Constitution. That legal doctrine, which is useful to a sitting judge who needs an excuse to make an attorney stop trying to replow legal ground is not law. It is a subterfuge by which judges have managed to legislate from their benches.
The decision of a court on a lawsuit is binding only on parties to the suit. To assume otherwise is to overturn the US Constitution itself, which grants the power to legislate solely to the legislative branch.
Roe v Wade is not statutory law and must not be treated as though it were. Until the Constitution is amended, the states still have the authority to legislate on abortion, independent of the federal courts and of Congress.
If the president is to enforce the ruling in Roe v Wade, he may only enforce it upon parties to the suit itself. Pretending otherwise has been the means by which we have been duped into believing that court rulings become settled law, binding upon all people within the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court.