Buchanan sees 'war' within conservatism

Ralph Z. Hallow of The Washington Times interviews true conservative Pat Buchanan:


"The conservative movement has passed into history," says the one-time White House aide, three-time presidential candidate, commentator and magazine publisher.
"It doesn't exist anymore as a unifying force," he says in an interview with The Washington Times. "There are still a lot of people who are conservative, but the movement is now broken up, crumbled, dismantled."

It was always a coalition. The "movement" consists of faithful Catholics, politically friendly evangelicals, and an ever decreasing number of people who see government as a necessary evil.

Unnamed phonies, he suggests, have infiltrated the movement. There are "a lot of people who call themselves conservative but who, on many issues, I just don't consider as conservative. They are big-government people."

The current president, for one, and his father.

He suggests that in some respects, traditionalists might be fighting for a lost cause. "We say we won a great victory by defeating gay marriage in 11 state-ballot referenda in November," he says. "But I think in the long run, that will be seen as a victory in defense of a citadel that eventually fell." As he later says, "I can't say we won the cultural war, and it's more likely we lost it."
The evidence? He says it was all over the tube, in prime time, at last year's Republican National Convention, which featured California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, New York Gov. George E. Pataki and former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, all social liberals.
"They are indifferent to those moral issues because they see them — and correctly — as no longer popular, no longer the majority positions that they used to be," he says. "They say, 'Let's put those off the table and focus on the issues where we still have a majority — strong national defense and cutting taxes.' "
So, Mr. Buchanan concludes, Republicans have "abdicated from the cultural war. They've stacked arms."

This is the newsworthy part of the interview. The Republican Party is not a conservative party and never has been. Sooner or later, for the reasons Buchanan mentions (and others), real conservatives will have to start a Conservative Party of some sort because their voices will always be ignored by the Republican leadership.

Just try to talk to the vast majority of Republican politicians about contraception, divorce, pornography, abortion, and increasingly, gambling, and watch his eyes glaze over.