April 12, 2019
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
Latest Essay Published
at RECKONIN.com – Pat Buchanan and the Counter-revolution of the Deplorables
Friends,
Back on April 6 the installment in the MY CORNER series was a short
appreciation of author and columnist Patrick Buchanan as a kind of prophet for
the past thirty years—a kind of predecessor in his own way and with his
particular insights—leading to the “Counter-revolution of the Deplorables” in
2016 and the resultant election of Donald Trump, who seemed to channel and
incarnate electorally many of those views and that vision.
And I expressed the hope and wish that
Buchanan’s role would not be like that of the ancient prophetess Cassandra (in the
Greek dramatist Aeschylus’s the Agamemnon),
memorably quoted by the great late nineteenth century Southern writer and
philosopher, Robert Lewis Dabney—“predestined to prophesy truth and never to be
believed until too late.”
That short essay was picked up
by Reckonin.com and published with a few minor edits on April 9, and I pass it
along to you today:
RECKONIN’
Pat
Buchanan and Our American Greek Tragedy
by Boyd D. Cathey April 9, 2019
The journalist and sometime
political figure Patrick J. Buchanan has been both a dear friend and mentor to
me for over thirty years. I have written more than once that I believed had it
not been for Pat’s writings and eloquent voice, the “counter-revolution of the
‘deplorables’ “ we witnessed in 2016, and the election of Donald J. Trump as
president, may well not have happened, at least in the form that it did.
Pat, through his books on
different aspects of American politics, foreign policy, economics, immigration,
and culture—and through his regular columns—was, or so it seemed at times, a
lonely voice in the wilderness (the “vox clamantis in deserto” as Scripture
reads) who, to quote one of my unfavorite political personalities Jesse
Jackson, appealed to our better natures to “keep hope alive!”
The “Buchanan Brigades” and
“pitchfork battalions” of the 1990s never really went away. After them came the
“Tea Party.” And after that—and with the continued abject submission
to the Deep State managerial elites by the Republican Party of Bob Dole, Bush
Jr., the unlamented John McCain, and the political chameleon Mitt Romney—much
of the conservative base began to realize that as a vehicle for real opposition
to the steadily advancing administrative state, the GOP was practically a
nullity, indeed, it actively collaborated in the triumph of the managerial
elites.
Almost all the Republican
leadership was bought and paid for by crony capitalists and international
commercial interests, led by the nose by a zealous Neoconservative
intelligentsia which had forcibly taken control of the older “conservative
movement,” casting out and barring the door to traditionalists, old rightists,
paleo-libertarians, and, in particular, Southern conservatives, at least those
who would not deny their Confederate heritage.
In fact, the Republican Party
had never been truly a friend of the South, despite its attempts to enact some
sort of transgendered façade—the “Southern strategy”—during the Nixon and
Reagan administrations. Certainly there were those like the late Senator Jesse
Helms of North Carolina who understood the imperative of connecting the older
heritage and traditions of the Southland with a new political framework, a new
political nomenclature, if you will. But he also understood like few
others the real danger that Southern Republicanism would become just another
appendage of a national GOP establishment which had swallowed
hook-line-and-sinker the egalitarian and globalist nostrums, the ideology that
dominated that party for much of its history since the defeat of South in 1865.
And, indeed, the Southern
branch of the Republican Party now headlines such fervent globalists and mad
egalitarians as Senators Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott, both of South Carolina.
Graham never saw a foreign war that he did not want to involve this nation in,
nor an “undemocratic” country he did not want to impose “American democracy”
on. Scott, a fanatic for what he calls “civil rights,” has become a
zealous doorkeeper who believes he is the chosen one to prevent even good and
decent conservatives from assuming higher appointive office if, for instance,
they actually had dealings with Senator Helms thirty years ago. The recent
situation where he personally vetoed the nomination of the eminently qualified
North Carolina attorney Thomas Farr for a federal judgeship is a brutal case in
point. Farr’s crime? He supported Helms’s campaign and gave it his
legal counsel.
Buchanan fought mightily
against this sorry state of affairs, and his columns continue to serve as a
clarion call for those who supported Donald Trump in 2016 and have placed their
hopes in him for a real counter-revolution against the elites, both
Democratic and Republican.
They—we—must not be disillusioned, for the conflict is too severe, too final.
The struggle goes on, and oftentimes within the
Trump administration, itself.
One-hundred and twenty-five
years ago the great and prescient Southern writer, Robert Lewis Dabney, a
notable theologian and former chief-of-staff to “Stonewall” Jackson, foreseeing
the future disasters of unleashed egalitarianism, crony capitalism, women’s
suffrage, and the craze for “progress,” exclaimed, in a paraphrase of the Greek
dramatist Aeschylus (in the Agamemnon): “I am the Cassandra of Yankeedom
predestined to prophesy truth and never to be believed until too late.”
Pat Buchanan--the proud
descendant of Confederate soldiers--continues to serve as a prophet, a clarion
voice in deserto, reminding
us of the firmament of the old republic, its principles and foundations. Those
principles and those foundations have been clouded and perverted not only by
their confirmed enemies on the Left, but also by those who falsely claim to be
their friends and defenders. It is they who luxuriate behind their walled
mansions in Silicon Valley or within their million dollar gated communities
along the Potomac who hold us in contempt, they who plot our destiny from the
board rooms on Wall Street or in the well-guarded offices of the European Union
in Bruxelles.
May Pat’s voice and his searing
philippics continue long and clear…and be believed!
***********
[This essay appeared in a slightly different form on Boyd Cathey's
blog at: https://boydcatheyreviewofbooks.blogspot.com/2019/04/april-6-2019-my-corner-by-boydcathey.html]
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