Bringing America Home: How America Lost Her Way and How We
Can Find Our Way Back
By Tom Pauken
(Chronicles Press, 204 pages, $29.95)
There was a brief period in the 1990s when it looked like
the right was going to have a paleo moment. Pat Buchanan barely
lost to Bob Dole in Iowa and beat him in New Hampshire.
Republican members of Congress were railing against
“nation-building” abroad and filing lawsuits to keep Bill Clinton
from going to war in the Balkans. And Tom Pauken was the chairman
of the Texas Republican Party.
In the following decade, both the Republicans and the
conservative movement traveled in a very different direction.
There were many reasons for this, of course — Clinton’s
presidency came to an end and, with the 9/11 terrorist attacks,
so did the post-Cold War “peace dividend.” But Pauken’s rivals in
the Texas GOP, George W. Bush and Karl Rove, played a very
significant role. Compassionate conservatism replaced
government-slashing; soothing rhetoric about faith-based
initiatives replaced Buchananesque speeches about the culture
war; the “humble foreign policy” of candidate Bush gave way to
the president’s Bush Doctrine.
Around the same time Rove published his memoir, Tom Pauken
— a Goldwater-era conservative activist who served in the Nixon
and Reagan administrations — released his book Bringing
America Home, painting a very un-Rovian picture of what the
Republican Party and the conservative movement should look like.
Pauken might have titled it The Conscience of a
Paleoconservative.
The country caught a glimpse of Pauken’s vision last week,
when Tea Party insurgent Rand Paul triumphed over GOP
establishment favorite Trey Grayson in Kentucky’s Republican
primary for U.S. Senate. That contest pitted economic and social
conservatives against national-security hawks who were unmoved by
Paul’s appeals for smaller government — and alarmed by his more
restrained view of foreign policy. (Though the firestorm over
Paul’s post-election musings about the Civil Rights Act of 1964
was a reminder of the foot-in-mouth disease that can afflict
paleo politicians.)
Bringing America Home is a call to
arms for future Rand Pauls: conservatives who were frustrated by
the fact that the federal government did not shrink during the
Reagan administration or the Republican Revolution and that it
grew under the second Bush presidency. But Pauken’s isn’t simply
a libertarian treatise. He worries about a coarsened,
post-Christian culture. He is similarly concerned about the
erosion of the U.S. manufacturing base and the bursting of our
bubble economy.
And while Pauken is critical of what he describes as “the
neoconservative conquest of American foreign policy,” unlike
Paul’s father he does not attribute terrorism against the United
States solely to blowback. Pauken acknowledges “militant Islam”
and its political ambitions as a threat that can and must be
dealt with in a just-war context. “We are engaged in a religious
war,” he writes, “not because we wish it to be so, but because
our enemies have defined it in those terms.”
Not all of Pauken’s ideas are paleo favorites. The
border-adjusted value-added tax, increasingly fashionable among
conservatives ranging from heretical author Bruce Bartlett to
congressional Republicans’ budget point man Paul Ryan, is likely
to work better in theory than in practice. The political
objections to a tax that falls so heavily on consumers are
obvious. Even so, few VAT countries are low-tax-countries, a fact
that ought to give opponents of “big-government conservatism”
pause.
Pauken remembers how Republicans rode to victory in the
'90s backed by a coalition of tax-cutters, government-shrinkers,
gun owners, pro-life activists, and Christian home-schoolers. But
once the GOP and its conservative backers reached the Promised
Land, the federal leviathan looked less repulsive — bringing to
mind an old line about those who denounce Washington as a sewer
only to treat it like a hot tub upon their arrival.
Until recently, Pauken’s book might have seemed quaint: a
nice counterfactual of what might have happened had Buchanan won
the Republican presidential nomination in 1996 and empowered his
paleoconservative brain trust, but not a practical guide to
politics going forward. But the age of Obama has made once again
made possible a conservatism more interested in social issues and
small government than exporting democracy to the Middle
East.
At least such right-wingers can once again claim a place at
the table — consider Bill Kristol’s qualified defense of Rand
Paul during the Civil Rights Act feeding frenzy. Any paleos who
wish to take their seats might also consider reading Pauken’s
book.
