"Ron Paul's an old friend of mine and I like him, admire his consistency and his political courage. He's a man who is willing to stand up there alone and vote his convictions when people laugh at him, which is one of the most difficult things to do in politics."

Pat Buchanan on Ron Paul, the Internet and Ethnic Politics in the 21st Century

The Daily Bell

Daily Bell: What do you think of Ron Paul and the strides he has made and the traction he is getting?

Pat Buchanan: He has done extremely well. Ron Paul's an old friend of mine and I like him, admire his consistency and his political courage. He's a man who is willing to stand up there alone and vote his convictions when people laugh at him, which is one of the most difficult things to do in politics.

Some of the ideas Ron Paul is championing now – some of them – are ideas that I championed in the 1990s. For instance, the idea that the United States has to give up the empire, to cut back and pull our horns in a bit, that we cannot be the policemen of the world, that we cannot give orders to the world. This idea is gaining traction and gaining ground. It's not a majority view yet in the Republican Party but it is moving ahead.

This idea about smaller government is obviously consistent with Republican philosophy. But, candidly, I don't think they'll be able to accomplish a great deal in the next four years even if the Republicans win. They've accomplished next to nothing, or very little in the last year when they had control of the House. On securing the border and halting mass immigration, I don't have much hope of great progress.

So I think Ron Paul has done a fine job. But do I think his ideas will be incorporated into the platform or the policy of a dominant Republican Party in 2013? We have to wait and see but I doubt it seriously. I truly believe that the American economic problems are going to be solved by massive inflation wiping out a lot of this debt – and wiping out the real savings of a lot of Americans.

Daily Bell: Do you still vote? Would you vote for him?

Pat Buchanan: Well, I'm in Virginia so I can only vote for Ron Paul or Mitt! (LOL) And that leaves out Perry and Newt and all the others, so I'll wait for the primary to get here but I can't endorse any candidate because I'm on television and we are not allowed to.

Daily Bell: Ron Paul is getting some press now but why does he get such bad press or no press? We know mainstream media is controlled but what are your thoughts about it and if you agree it is controlled, by whom?

Pat Buchanan: The mainstream media is deeply hostile to Ron Paul's ideas. The mainstream media is caught up with the idea of globalism, caught up with the idea that America should be the dominant force in virtually every region of the world. It is caught up in the idea that government has the answers to a lot of issues.

Mainstream media is predominantly left of center, undeniably, and Ron Paul represents the antithesis of what it believes, morally, politically and every other way. But I do think they are also getting caught up in the idea that Ron Paul is growing in strength, and he has a lot of young people supporting him. So if you see Ron Paul win Iowa, and go on to win New Hampshire, that will make what happened to me in 1996 look like a mainstream media endorsement. (Laughing again).

Daily Bell: Are you an Austrian, economically?

Pat Buchanan: No, not really, but I'm obviously not a Keynesian. On trade I disagree with Ron Paul because I'm a believer in the Economic Nationalism of Hamilton and Henry Clay and the Republican Party from 1860 to 1928 when the United States was turned from a county that produced half of what Great Britain produced, into a giant that produced more than all of what Europe produced. Free traders decide policy based on what is best for the world and for the consumer. Milton Friedman wrote that even if other nations don't practice free trade we should get rid of all tariffs and allow them to dump their goods in the US market at any price they want because the consumer would benefit. Libertarians tend to put the consumer first and I put the country first.

Daily Bell: What do you feel is government's role in society?

Pat Buchanan: Government's role in society is to keep the peace and protect the inherent rights of the people, especially the minority, but to allow the majority to build a society that reflects its views, values and beliefs, and to pretty much get out of the way. In a country of 300 million you need more government controls than you would need in a country of 3 million. One consideration is, for instance, we have highways spanning the country and you've got to have speed limits. Here's where I disagreed with my old friend Ronald Reagan, who told me in 1976 that he wondered why we needed driver's licenses. I told him I grew up in DC, and thought they were necessary. (Laughing) But he used to drive a tractor without a license. And I understood that in Dixon, Illinois but we were a different world by the 1950s.

Daily Bell: Should the American federal government be pruned back?

Pat Buchanan: Many of the Great Society programs were a terrible mistake. In 1965 we weren't starving in Washington, DC, but there was nobody on food stamps. Now, one in every five citizens in DC is on food stamps. Nationwide there are about 47 million on food stamps at a cost of $77 billion. Do I think all that is necessary? Of course not. As I say, no one was starving and if anyone were at the local level we could handle it. We have all kinds of private programs for food, but once you get these things written into law they're hard to get rid of.

When I was a kid my mother made us sandwiches and we took them to school. Milk was a nickel but the Buchanans had nine kids. We didn't buy milk and get milk at lunch. We were to drink water. It wasn't hardship but when I see how much money they spend on school breakfasts and school lunches and the eligibility runs up to middle class....All these things are added, one on another.

Let me say this. You have four elements of the budget. One is the interest on the debt. The second is what you might call the empire – the wars, the defense budget, the CIA budgets, the nuclear budgets, all the intelligence agencies, and that amounts to about one trillion dollars. Third, you've got the big entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare, which are even larger together, I think, than the empire budget. Fourth is the Great Society budget, where food stamp programs, unemployment insurance, all these programs – school lunches, earned income tax credits, basically massive income transfer programs, redistributive programs, and all those elements.

I don't see the two parties getting together and rolling back any one of these four. The Democrats aren't going to let you touch the Great Society programs or the entitlement programs. Republicans aren't going to let you raise taxes or go after the empire, and you can't touch interest. I don't know how you succeed in making serious cuts. So I think we continue down the road we are on, which is the path that the Italians are trotting on today and they are trotting right after the Greeks.

Daily Bell: How does America make changes with this mentality? What would you do if you could start an education program to change American thinking now?

Pat Buchanan: You know, people who read my book say, "Pat, you are not a roaring optimist," and I'm not. Look at the education system. We have dumped trillions of dollars into it in the last 45 years, since 1965, and what do we have to show for it? We have test scores that continue go down until they revise the tests to make them easier, so the scores will stop going down. You are getting no real progress there. The United States as a country has fallen into the middle level of Western countries in terms of its test scores, and it's headed toward Third World status.

To turn that around, you have to reject certain conventional beliefs about education and introduce ideas that are unacceptable. Do I think we are going to to this? No, I don't. I think our politics are getting increasingly to the point where anyone who suggests we are going in the wrong direction is so demonized and is called so many names that it's intimidating. People simply refuse to face up to the truth.

The country is in the grip of an ideology that seeks to lead us toward some sort of Utopia . But that's a country that's never existed before. We had a successful country in 1960, and it was still successful in the 1980s when Reagan was there. But we have since embraced ideas that preclude our succeeding and those ideas have changed the mindset of the American people.

Daily Bell: Is America too militaristic?

Pat Buchanan: I don't know that it's too militaristic, but America is very interventionist. Why? Because we've convinced ourselves that we have found the solutions to history's great questions. Some Americans are almost neo-Trotskyite. Trotsky believed he had the right idea about how men should be ruled and the Communists should impose those ideas on the world. And the world democratic revolution that Bush was preaching, and that many of his followers still preach is the mirror image. They believe we have some right to interfere in the internal affairs of countries all over the world since we have found the Rosetta Stone to solving all the world's problems. If only these backward peoples will embrace democracy and human rights and all these ideas that we have embraced, the world will be a far better place. We are seeking some grand utopian goal and we are going to fall short. The whole world is resisting us now. Do I know how to stop this or change this ? No, I don't.

Daily Bell: Is the US headed toward martial law?

Pat Buchanan: Well, down the road I think the US is headed toward a much more militarized domestic society. I notice that half a million people got a gun for Christmas this year (LOL)! That tells me there are a lot of people that agree with Pat Buchanan about where we are going.

Daily Bell: Where do you stand on the war on terror? Is al Qaeda still a real threat to the US?

Pat Buchanan: When we were attacked, we were victims of terrorism. It was an outrage and we went after the people that did it and rightly so. We did the right thing in dumping over the government in Afghanistan, and going in and trying to kill Bin Laden and his collaborators, and running them down around the world because of what they did.

What astonishes me is that people don't understand why they did what they did. Americans didn't read the fatwa, the declaration of war against the United States. So I don't think we properly understand their motives. Their motives are really not that exceptional. People say our enemies don't like what Hollywood is producing. But our enemies didn't bomb Hollywood. My view is that the main reason they attacked us is because they believe that we are infidels, and that we are imperialists, and that we are interfering in their affairs, and that we are all over their world – and they want us to get the hell out. They are using the same tactics that Algerians and Viet Cong and the other organizations have used. They use terror attacks even against civilians to convince imperial powers to get out of their country. They want us out of their part of the world.

Some may want to create their own caliphate. I don't think those guys could organize one. They detest us, mainly because we are over there. They were over here because we were over there.

In that sense, Ron Paul was correct. He was not saying we were responsible for 9/11 but he is saying that 9/11 happened because these folks are protesting - not just our existence or our Constitution. They didn't sit in some cave and say, "Hey did you see how the Americans have a constitutional right to bear arms?" They saw us moving into Saudi Arabia, they saw what we were doing to the Iraqis, they saw our support for what the Israelis were doing to the Palestinians – and they said, 'We have to get these people out of our countries, out of our civilization, and out of our lives. We are tired of it. We detest their culture, we detest their presence and the way to get them out is through acts of terror. And if we can wave a red flag in front of the American bull, it will come charging over here. And the same thing will happen that happened to the Soviet Empire.'" And they are right.

Daily Bell: Give us your thoughts on Global or One World Order?

Pat Buchanan: We have been fighting the new world order ever since Bush declared it in 1991. That was one of the issues I ran on. I said we are Americans first and we are a separate and unique country and we don't want to disappear in any new world order. We need to preserve our sovereignty and independence.

This is behind my belief in economic patriotism. You want the country to be self-sufficient the way it was before WWI and WWII. We could have stayed out of both wars. Nobody was going to bother us; we produced everything we consumed, except I think for tea, coffee, bananas, and chrome, or something like that. And that's the kind of country I believe in.

But I do believe this. The new world order is in crisis. Take a look at what's happened to the Kyoto protocol. The Canadians walked out. They said we aren't taking any part. That's it. The Chinese are taking that stance, too. The Doha Round of trade negotiations failed. The Americans are not going to pay the $20 billion annually to the Third World to prepare for global warming that Hillary Clinton promised. That's out the window.

The European Union is in trouble and the Eurozone is on the cusp of disaster. You see the small nationalist parties, anti-immigrant parties in Europe sprouting and some of them are already in power or approaching power. You see those forces and they are all against this new world order, this federation of mankind, and all the rest of it. Those ideas go back to Emmanuel Kant and Woodrow Wilson. And the movement forward toward that, which was dramatic between 1990 and 2010, I see halted and moving in reverse. The Eurozone could come crashing down. In those times you see people who are more nationalistic saying, "Let's take care of ourselves and let's not worry about this globalism." The globalist and anti-globalist forces are more evenly matched now.

Read the whole interview here:
http://lewrockwell.com/buchanan/buchanan209.html