America First Remains Viable and Untried

On Monday, Pat Buchanan turned 88. I leave it to others who knew and worked with him to sing his praises; I have little new to add. I can say simply that his record speaks for itself.

It is, however, my privilege to help run the magazine he founded. When in the Trump years you’ve run into conservatives in the under-50 DC set, they’ve always been enthusiastic about Pat and the idea of his magazine, even when they can’t tell you a single thing it’s published in the past year. People knew how much the Trump thing owed to our founder’s own campaigns and work, down to the slogan “America First,” and being on board with Trump meant a certain reverence for Pitchfork Pat. 

What a lot of rice Christians they turned out to be. When the U.S. had its little Caribbean caper in January, we here at The American Conservative got a lot of flak from our fellows in the press and our contacts in the administration for not getting with the program. Of course, their supposed hero had also expressed reservations about military action in Venezuela, but nobody has ever said one of this gang’s flaws is reading too much. When the outbreak of the Iran War, whose stupidities quickly became too gross to be ignored, vindicated our criticisms about Venezuela, somehow we didn’t get a lot of apologies.

Semafor reports that younger administration staffers are dispirited about the whole war thing. It’s a tough world out there. Of course, nobody seems dispirited enough to do anything in particular about it, such as finding a less destructive line of work. But I am sad to hear they’re dispirited. You’re only young once; if you’re going to sacrifice your 20s to a hilarious kleptocratic junta with an insane foreign policy and a fairly limited commitment to things like good taste and the law, I somehow think working in Baku is a little more fun. 

But I don’t want to dwell on the failings of the cretinous humanoids who go into politics and government (mostly). The actually forward-looking point is that America First—immigration sanity, trade and economic realism, and foreign-policy restraint—has not in fact been tried in any serious, dedicated way. What the current management and its ministers have delivered is Bushism without all the personal decency and intellectual seriousness. It turns out, based on yesterday’s midterm results, that “Bushism, but even more evil and retarded” is not enormously popular outside the 30 percent of the country that will vote for anything with an R next to it. 

This is basically the stuff of optimism. That is to say, immigration sanity, trade and economic realism, and foreign-policy restraint all still have a politically viable lane. Trump the candidate beats Trump the president. The boy from Queens may have poisoned the term “America First”—we’ll have to see how 2028 goes—but the actual policy suite is still there, and it’s still something that can grab the interest of the American people. At any rate, they’ve given it a spin a couple times lately, and they have heartily rejected its opposites. Had these things been tried seriously and failed, we’d be having a different conversation; but, as of this writing, there is little compelling reason to welcome the warm, meaty caresses of Ted Cruz or whatever other creatures surviving from the pre-Trump era are lurking in the wings. 

I expect that, by Pat’s 98th, young apparatchiks will be telling me again what a grand comic I’m running, inherited from such an illustrious founder. Very true, very true. But maybe this time they’ll actually read the magazine.