Pat Buchanan is the Father Coughlin of our time

Friday, October 8, 1999 | by

Earl Raab

When you think Pat Buchanan, think Father Charles Coughlin six decades ago, the chief engineer of the most dangerous anti-Semitism to ever plague America.

Like Buchanan, Coughlin started his career as a respectable figure in the mass media, and he was not so publicly anti-Semitic. But both men share the same tell-tale beliefs.

Coughlin was an isolationist, latching on to the America First sentiments of the time: Let Europe settle its own problems. Hitler had no interest in attacking the United States. Our national interest was in protecting our own borders.

Now read Buchanan's comments about that period, in his new book, "A Republic, Not an Empire." He writes, "Hitler made no overt move to threaten U.S. vital interests…Hitler had not wanted war with the West."

That might have come out of one of Coughlin's radio speeches. And Buchanan has applied this isolationism to our intervention in the Balkans, the Middle East and elsewhere. Never mind the massacres, real and threatened. They do not involve "U.S. vital interests."

Coughlin was not an elitist or an "economic royalist." He was a populist, holding himself out as a friend of the working class. His newspaper was called Social Justice. His followers, in the millions, caught in the Depression, were mainly working class.

Unfortunately for Buchanan, there is no economic depression. Still, his main call is also to the working class; he tells them how much our open trade policy will hurt them. And Coughlin's sectarian religious tone is also matched by Buchanan who has called for a religious struggle, a kulturkampf, in this country.

Neither men were known as anti-Semites when they started. And anti-Semitism did not lead them to their positions. Rather, their positions, compounded by frustration, led to virulent anti-Semitism.

Coughlin was frustrated by the fact that neither major party embraced him, nor allowed him the political power that he sought. He ended up blaming the Jews, for the usual reasons. Only our entry into the war brought him to enforced silence.

It is not as easy to be openly anti-Jewish in today's America, but Buchanan has moved from hints to more open statements about the Jewish "amen corner" and to flirtations with open anti-Semites. Arch-conservatives like William Buckley in the National Review and neo-conservatives like Josh Muravchik in Commentary have chronicled and attacked his anti-Semitism.

The American populace is immensely more enlightened than it was in Coughlin's time, and Buchanan has not, like his predecessor, made anti-Semitism an open plank in his platform. But if a systematic and well-organized anti-Semitism comes to the United States, under conditions of national stress, it will be engineered by Buchanan or his ilk—not by the likes of the man who recently attacked the Jewish community center near Los Angeles.

It is important for the Jews to become actively involved not just at the point when such an anti-Semite appears, but when conditions enable the Coughlins and Buchanans to ride to power—even before they become open bigots.

America's "vital interest," for example, has come to include an active concern with human rights around the world. It is in the self-defense of Jews, as well as in the defense of their values, that we be actively engaged in fighting any efforts to restrict that national interest to our borders.

Some Jewish leaders just met with Republican presidential front-runner George W. Bush, urging the Texas governor to reject Buchanan, which he has not yet done. Other Republican presidential hopefuls Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) and Elizabeth Dole have made the same plea. It is in the interest of national education, of maintaining our enlightened state, that such a public rejection take place.

When Jews enter the arena to oppose Buchananism, the target should not just be his anti-Semitism, but his distortion of American vital interest and his degradation of American values, the precursors of his bigotry.