Pat Buchanan Turns Left?

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An ambitious new political magazine hit the stands late last year with bold pronouncements against the war on Iraq, the culture of greed in corporate boardrooms, and numerous Bush administration policies. Its back pages included a compelling essay about the quirky genius and strong social commitment of Neil Young. An obituary sadly noted the passing of Jim Chapin, one of the leading lights of Democratic Socialists of America. Casual newsstand browsers would assume that the progressive press had gained a new voice. And they would be wrong, at least in the way we typically look at American politics.

This well-funded, bi-weekly journal is named The American Conservative, and its co-editors are Pat Buchanan, a longtime champion of the Republican right, and Taki Thedoracopulos, a veteran conservative journalist with a reputation for jet-set living.

Liberals and leftists will surely find points to dispute in the magazine?s coverage, particularly its strong views about immigration, but the mean-spirited ?culture wars? rhetoric that fueled Buchanan?s 1992 run at the Republican presidential nomination is nowhere in sight. (A gay conservative, Justin Raimondo, wrote an article in the first issue.) The appearance of The American Conservative signals a strategic shift among one faction of the conservative movement and hints at the possibility of a startling political realignment. Already Arianna Huffington, key Republican strategist Kevin Phillips, writer Michael Lind, former Clinton basher David Brock, and prominent British philosopher John Gray have traveled significantly leftward along the political spectrum.

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