Pat Buchanan as humorless Chicago Criterion boy

Michael Kazin reviews Patrick Buchanan's Where the Right Went Wrong. Predictably, Buchanan is revealed to be "paleoconservative" and anti-Semitic. It gets interesting, though, when Kazin points out that Buchanan is making a "call to emulate an ideal right that never existed," that "[u]nderneath the pugnacious hide of Patrick J. Buchanan beats a heart of pure nostalgia," albeit nostalgia for something imaginary.

The conservatism that seeks to return to a past that never existed is, I believe, not only the least appealing conservatism (in that it frequently gets mixed up with all sorts of anti-Semitic and anti-everyone fantasies) but also the least conservative. What is being conserved? How, exactly, does this sort of "conservatism" differ from any other progressive, idealistic philosophy? Paleoconservatism, in theory, is a return to what conservatism once was, or at the very least, a desire to return to an America that once was. Could it be that Buchanan doesn't even deserve the (derogatory) label of paleocon?

Discussing the U of C's conservative publication, the Chicago Criterion, in the Maroon a couple years ago, I wrote that "maybe the writers see themselves as members of a fantasy olden-days prep school world, with bits of Eton, scruffy, male-on-male harmless play, with secret societies à la Dead Poets Society mixed in. Since I don’t know any of them personally, I cannot attest to whether or not all, or even one, of them could be called blond or scruffy, but their pigmentation and degree of scruffiness is beside the point. The class they wish to represent in the Criterion is one that simply does not exist."* Now, the Criterion's attempt to represent and preserve an imaginary social class was (and is) generally tongue-in-cheek, as becomes clear after one reads through several issues, but Buchanan apparently means business.

*For the record: I later met these young men, who were not expecially blond or scruffy but were in fact quite fashionable. I also wrote for the Criterion a few times, and will attest to the fact that no one made me take any oath of paleoconservatism--or conservatism in general for that matter--in order to do so.