Tom Piatak

October 15, 2008

Jonah Goldberg reminds us today that, for the neocons, the real enemy is always to the right.  Sure, Goldberg won’t vote for Obama, but what really gets him in a tizzy is the thought of right-wing populism stalking the land.  Goldberg warns his liberal readers that, if free market purists like himself weren’t in the GOP, the Republicans would be “taken over by Buchananites to the ‘right of’ Buchanan who would make Mike Huckabee look like Milton Friedman” and “the GOP would become a mixture of Jim Webb, Pat Buchanan and Mike Huckabee style populists.”  Oh the horror, the horror.

Goldberg’s warning rings more than a little hollow after the man Goldberg enthusiastically backed for President twice, George W. Bush, doubled the federal debt, poured billions down ratholes in the Middle East in a futile quest to impose democracy by force of arms, created a massive new entitlement in the prescription drug benefit, and enacted the absurd “No Child Left Behind” law, not to mention putting taxpayers on the hook for a trillion or so dollars to bail out Wall Street.  By contrast, all Buchanan wanted to do was return to the tariff policy that had been a bedrock of GOP policy from Lincoln until Eisenhower, in addition to being the policy favored by the Founders.  Of course, Bush does have the virtue, from Goldberg’s perspective, of having done virtually nothing to advance the social and cultural issues the GOP talks about every four years and then never does anything about.  What really terrifies Goldberg is a GOP run not by the solons of the Beltway, but by people who actually take at face value the party’s pronouncements on social conservatism and traditional values.