by Patrick J. Buchanan – May 29, 1998

In an era when professors were surrendering by battalions to student radicals, Agnew denounced the “levelers and ideologists” and attacked affirmative action and reverse discrimination policies that some Republicans, even today, lack the courage to oppose…

“New York City University Tightens Admissions Policy,” read the headline. The New York Times story told of how CUNY’s board had voted to deny admission to students who fail proficiency tests in reading, writing and mathematics. Wrote Times reporter Karen Arenson, this represents “the most fundamental change in standards since instituting open admissions nearly three decades ago.”

by Patrick J. Buchanan – May 26, 1998

A strict interpretation of patriotism [is] injurious to business,” wrote famed artillery maker Alfred Krupp. True to his word, Krupp sold to both sides in the Franco-Prussian war.
On the eve of World War I, Krupp’s firm was filling “Russian orders for the latest artillery pieces and French orders for specially designed anti-Zeppelin guns while soliciting British orders for warships. In the 1880s, Hiram Maxim sold the ‘Maxim gun,’ the first modern machine gun, to his adopted homeland of Britain and to its future enemies, the Boers of South Africa and the German Reich.”

by Patrick J. Buchanan – May 22, 1998

A single vote in the Senate last week told us all we need to know about the real motives behind the $516 billion tobacco bill.

An amendment was offered by Sen. Lauch Faircloth to cap the fees of trial lawyers involved in this deal at $250 an hour. The lawyers would thereby be limited to $2,000 a day, $10,000 a week, $520,000 a year. Said the conservative North Carolinian, this bill is turning into a trial lawyers’ “pot of gold.”

Faircloth’s amendment was crushed, 58-39.

by Patrick J. Buchanan – May 19, 1998

Now that India has blown the doors off of the world’s nuclear club, we may just see a membership explosion. And though the CIA was caught with its satellites down by those five blasts in 72 hours, President Clinton should not have been surprised.

The Pakistanis warned the White House in April that India was going nuclear, and the Hindu-nationalist BJP party in New Delhi had declared its intention to make India a nuclear power.

by Patrick J. Buchanan – May 18, 1998

Letter to The Wall Street Journal

Reading the five letters to the Editor (May 18) deployed to counter my lonely missive (May 12) celebrating the Protectionist Era (1865-1913) and rebutting the Smoot-Hawley myth, I am persuaded that remedial history should be a required course for all economists.

Prof. Kent Jones writes that my tariff ideas represent “government intervention in the manner of an unrepentant socialist.” But from 1789 to 1913 tariffs produced from 50% to 90% of all federal revenue. Were those tarifites-Washington, Hamilton, Madison, Clay, Webster, Jackson, Lincoln, McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt-all “unrepentant socialists”?

by Patrick J. Buchanan – May 15, 1998

“Lo, all our pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre!” So wrote Rudyard Kipling in “Recessional,” his 1897 poem penned at the peak of the British empire for the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria.

Two decades later, in 1918, a fateful year for Germany, the great historical pessimist Oswald Spengler produced “The Decline of the West.” On the eve of Hitler’s accession to power in 1932, Spengler wrote, “Optimism is cowardice.”

by Patrick J. Buchanan – May 12, 1998

To any with a nodding acquaintance of history, this nation is taking an incredible gamble. When Spain, Holland, and Britain began to import what they once produced, and rely on finance and trade for their prosperity, not manufacturing and production, terminal decline set in. By 1917, free-trade Britain, blockaded, almost went under for lack of the food Britain used to grow and the arms and munitions Britain used to make. A reliance on trade had left the empire at the mercy of German submarines and dependent for its survival on protectionist Americans…

by Patrick J. Buchanan – May 8, 1998

“How does this guy survive?”

As I learned on an April book tour, that question perplexes and puzzles. How does the president continue to ride so high in public approval, despite revelations that would end the career of a college or corporate president? How? A few reflections.

First, Bill Clinton is a lame-duck president in his last term, not a candidate his party can dump. Had the revelations about Monica and Kathleen Willey hit before 1992, or even 1996, some in his party might have moved against Clinton, rather than go into an election debating what we debate today. But, as Clinton has no intention of resigning, his party has no choice but to defend its flawed leader.

by Patrick J. Buchanan – May 4, 1998

“The real divisions of our time,” writes the scholar Christian Kopff, “are not between left and right but between nations and the globalist delusion.” Thus, we all have a stake in the experiment to create a giant artificial nation called the “United States of Europe.”

Why artificial? Because, unlike France, Germany and Italy, the European Union possesses none of the attributes of a nation — a common language, culture, history and heroes. Europe’s peoples have been separate for centuries. Unlike America, this new Europe is simply a customs union tied together by bureaucracy and greed. As Ernst Renan wrote long ago, “A Zollverein is not a fatherland” — a customs union is not a country.

by Patrick J. Buchanan – May 4, 1998

“The real divisions of our time,” writes the scholar Christian Kopff, “are not between left and right but between nations and the globalist delusion.” Thus, we all have a stake in the experiment to create a giant artificial nation called the “United States of Europe.”

Why artificial? Because, unlike France, Germany and Italy, the European Union possesses none of the attributes of a nation — a common language, culture, history and heroes. Europe’s peoples have been separate for centuries. Unlike America, this new Europe is simply a customs union tied together by bureaucracy and greed. As Ernst Renan wrote long ago, “A Zollverein is not a fatherland” — a customs union is not a country.