WASHINGTON — Last week, Patrick J. Buchanan left the Republican Party and joined the Reform Party, hoping to become its nominee for president. If he ever has any doubts about whether he did the right thing, all he has to do is look out over the people who show up at his rallies.
Buchanan crowds don't look like Republican crowds, they don't clap like Republican crowds and they don't eat like Republican crowds. There are none of those Chamber of Commerce officers in golf shirts and tasseled loafers. Instead, Buchanan draws the beefy, 300-pound guys with tattoos up their arms and sleeveless T-shirts. He draws the guys with shaggy biker beards, and the Teamsters who park their rigs in the lot and get hoarse chanting, "Go, Pat, go!" It may be hard to classify exactly which political category these people belong to, but they are certainly not Republicans.
Buchanan is also right to leave the party because he is trying to do something that is anathema to GOP doctrine. Back in 1992, Buchanan gave a speech at the Republican convention in Houston declaring a culture war, which the GOP faithful were happy to enlist in. But over the past six years, Buchanan has stopped talking about culture war and started talking about class war, which the GOP faithful do not want any part of. Sometime in that intervening period, Buchanan decided he was going to be the savior pf the proletariat.
Furthermore, he's trying to create a new kind of class war for the information age. Angry populists used to rail against Wall Street barons in their top hats. But now half the country has money in mutual funds, so it's no longer elite to be making "unearned income" in the stock market. In the information age, class resentment is directed at the third-wave/fast-company keyboard jockeys: all the high-tech impresarios who go to work in jeans and hiking boots with their cell phones dangling from their belt loops on mountain-climbing carabiners. That's where Buchanan directs his ire, not only at the malefactors of great wealth, but at the malefactors with graduate degrees.
