Buchanan Feeds Class War in the Information Age

In his book "The Great Betrayal," Buchanan lists the objects of his wrath, including "lobbyists, academics, journalists, executives, professionals, high-tech entrepreneurs." Journalists may protest, "We don't make enough money to be on the wrong side of the class war." But if you look down the row at press conferences, you realize Buchanan has a point. Reporting used to be a whiskey-and-beer profession. Now it's Harvard and Stanford grads, sipping bottled water and angling to get contracts on MSNBC. The new class war is between what Buchanan calls his "peasant army," which means the people who eat big breakfasts at Denny's and like to go hunting and power-boating, against what he calls the "lords and barons," the professionals who prefer earth-tone wardrobes and salads made from obscure brands of lettuce.

At a rally in Iowa last summer, for example, Buchanan was on stage in white slacks, brown shoes and a red, white and blue baseball cap, whipping the crowd into a frenzy about the evil elites who betray the working man. There were about eight journalists standing to the right of the stage. They had on their khakis and light-blue Oxford shirts. They looked through their round, horned-rimmed glasses at their little notebooks. In that Buchanan throng, they looked like the Weenie Corner at a Monster Truck rally.

Every time Buchanan would attack the "Washington pundits" (talk about being a traitor to your class!), he'd stare at the journalists with a weird smile. At first, it seemed he was letting them in on a private joke. But as he stoked up his class-warfare rhetoric, his smile began to seem like the sort a farmer might give to a succulent turkey on Thanksgiving morning. At the height of the rally, the class resentment was at full throttle. If Buchanan had yelled, "First, we kill all the Palm Pilot owners!" the crowd would have torn those journalists to shreds.

Buchanan's main argument is that the working class has been betrayed by an information-age elite. The elite benefits from free trade while the working class does not. This elite doesn't mind sending troops overseas, because their children are in college, not the army.

Buchanan has sparked a fury with his theory that the United States should have tried to make peace with the kaiser in World War I and Adolf Hitler in World War II. It sounds like a wacky side issue. But Buchanan's notions about the world wars are central to his understanding of the world. He wants to show that America's elites have always betrayed the working class by getting them involved in needless wars.