How Richard Nixon Ended Pat Buchanan's Type of Nationalism

Gary North - March 14, 2018

Pat Buchanan is a nationalist. I regard him as the most prominent nationalist in the conservative movement. He is famous for his defense of nationalism.

This is why it is so strange that he seems not to recognize that he was the speechwriter for the most important globalist of the 20th century: Richard Nixon. There is no one who has ever advanced the cause of globalism with the same success as Richard Nixon.

Some people might say that Woodrow Wilson is the best example of a globalist President. In rhetoric, yes. In practice, no. First, he was unsuccessful in getting the Senate to ratify the Treaty of Versailles. This kept the United States out of the League of Nations. Second, his position was repudiated by the voters in the election of 1920. Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge overwhelmingly trounced James Cox and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Most people forget that Roosevelt was the VP candidate. He was a Wilsonian, as he proved in his presidency.

Why do I say that Nixon was the most successful globalist in American history? It was not because of his trip to Red China in 1972, although that was the supreme symbolic act of his globalism. Far more important was his decision to abolish the draft in 1973.

Buchanan writes in his latest essay: "Men will fight for family, faith and country. But how many will lay down their lives for pluralism and diversity?"

There was a time when American men volunteered to fight. That was after the Civil War on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, but before World War I. Wilson reinstated the draft in 1917, which had ended in 1865. Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 signed a law inaugurating a peacetime draft. This was new in America.

Richard Nixon abolished the draft. That undermined the Wilsonian dream. Wilson in 1918 was successful in getting Congress to pass a law that was clearly unconstitutional. Of all the laws that have ever violated the Constitution with enormous consequences, that law is it. The Constitution is clear on the issue of the draft. Article I, Section 8 authorizes the powers of Congress.

15: To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions

There was no other draft. There was, therefore, no authorization for a draft to serve in foreign wars. This prohibition goes back to the Massachusetts Body of Liberties (1641), the second constitution in American history. (The first was the "Fundamental Orders" of Connecticut in 1639.)

7. No man shall be compelled to goe out of the limits of this plantation upon any offensive warres which this commonwealth or any of our freinds or confederats shall volentarily undertake. But onely upon such vindictive and defensive warres in our owne behalfe or the behalfe of our freinds and confederats as shall be enterprized by the Counsell and consent of a Court generall, or by authority derived from the same.

The man who persuaded Nixon to do this was free-market economist Martin Anderson. Anderson recognized that military conscription was a way for the federal government, and specifically the Department of Defense, to extract wealth out of a certain age group of male citizens that the citizens were unwilling to offer voluntarily. It was a form of theft. It was a form of wealth redistribution by government power. Anderson opposed this. He persuaded Nixon of the position, and Nixon abolished the draft.

More than anything else that Nixon did, this undermined the antiwar movement. In 1969, Nixon and Congress decided to abolish deferments for college attendance. That was the last safe haven available to middle-class American males. That led to an escalation of protests against the Vietnam War.

This was by far the greatest political victory for the postwar libertarian movement. Make no mistake about it: this was a Libertarian victory. I wrote about this in 2003. It began with a seminar held at the University of Chicago in 1966. It was a seminar on the economics of the draft. Milton Friedman participated. Other free-market economists also presented papers. The papers were published in a small-circulation quarterly journal, New Individualist Review, which was published by graduate students at the University of Chicago.

Here is what I wrote in 2003.

NIXON'S THE ONE

In March, 1969, Nixon had signed a directive to set up a 15-man presidential commission, the Commission on an All-Volunteer Force (Gates Commission), to study the ending of the draft. There were three economists in the group: W. Allen Wallis, Milton Friedman, and Alan Greenspan. Greenspan was still in his Randian phase. Wallis was a free-market scholar who had served on the board of trustees of Leonard E. Read’s Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), which published The Freeman. He was the president of the University of Rochester in 1969.

Unlike most presidential commissions, the Gates Commission produced a report that senior-level Administration officials actually read. The report was released on Feb. 20, 1970. As the National Defense University conference reported, the Commission had been evenly divided on the issue going into the project: five to five, with five undecided. By the end, the skeptics had been won over. The Commission’s report was unanimous: end the draft.

In 1973, Congress refused to extend the draft law. It expired automatically on July 1, 1973.

After this, the threat of military conscription disappeared in American life. It had been facing Americans since 1917. From that point on, the military was staffed by volunteers. Most of these volunteers have not come from the American middle class and upper middle class. For over four decades, teenage Americans and early young adult males have not had any major commitment to the American military.

The old emotional appeal of military service has faded almost completely in income groups above the lower middle class. This is where the money is in America and every other nation. This is where power lies in every nation. The fact that American males are no longer emotionally or legally connected to the military means that Pat Buchanan's version of nationalism has not existed for a generation. It is so far back in American history as to be irrelevant.

Nobody sings "Johnny Get Your Gun" anymore. Nobody is singing "Over There." George M. Cohan is known only for Born on the Fourth of July. My father had an LP of Cohan songs, and I liked them. But I spent the 1960's in higher education, away from the draft.

WORTH FIGHTING FOR

Consider Buchanan's observation: "Men will fight for family, faith and country." In the United States, we live in a system of religious pluralism. When and if you fight for the United States government, you are fighting for your faith as one among many. This is a defensive fight. When you fight for the United States abroad, you are not fighting for your religion abroad. The military does not mention this as a motivation for signing up.

In the Gulf War in 1991, chaplains in Saudi Arabia were commanded to remove all marks of their confession: crosses. This was repeated in the second Iraq war. Constitutional lawyer John Whitehead reported on this at the time. There were no organized protests in the United States. It got little publicity in the media.

You are not fighting for your family when you are shipped overseas to impose American foreign policy on some Third World nation. You are fighting for your country, which means you are fighting for the foreign policy of the latest President. You are fighting for Goldman Sachs. Wise men do not go into battle in order to defend the interests of Goldman Sachs. Volunteers do, but they joined for excitement, and also because they didn't have any kind of employment opportunities other than the military. They are lower-middle-class kids. I'm not speaking about the officer corps. I'm speaking about the grunts: the kids who get killed in the front lines. They are kids who had poor educations, few employment opportunities, and a desire to get out of the boredom of the lives they have experienced up until age 18. If this country were ever invaded, there would be volunteers to defend its borders. But this country is not going to get invaded by troops. Nuclear missiles, maybe, but the war would be over in a few days. So would anything resembling civilization. So, by defining nationalism and terms of what men will fight for, Buchanan has surrendered the practical case for nationalism. If that is the heart of nationalism, then nationalism is finished. Richard Nixon ended it.

LOCALISM

Buchanan describes the political order in terms of an either/or decision: globalism or nationalism. He ignores localism. But localism is where there is liberty. Local communities are where families have their roots. Communities are where they live geographically. Families can move freely within the nation, which is basic to liberty. The nation is a free trade zone. The United States is a gigantic free trade zone. This is the #1 legal source of its prosperity.

The globalists are losing. All around the world, they are losing. While it may look as though nationalism is winning, localism is regaining territory that was surrendered in the final third of the 19th century.

It is not just in the European Union that there are movements calling for secession. The idea of secession from the global world order is creating interest in a more extended secession, namely, from the national order. While I do not expect to see organized political movements in the United States that gain the public's ear regarding secession, there is going to be a form of economic secession. Regions will be able to cooperate with each other. People will become more committed to regionalism than they are today.

There is always a balance in a nation between localism and nationalism. The balance has tipped in favor of nationalism since the final third of the 19th century. It is now in the process of tipping back. Nationalism gets all the publicity, but localism is making a comeback.

When the modern welfare states at the national level go bankrupt, as all of them will, and they default on payments to oldsters and basically half the population, power will shift back to local communities. Power is where the money is, and if the money is not coming from the national government and the central bank, then it is going to be collected at the local level and spent there. Local political action will count for far more after the great default. We should be preparing for this ideologically. We should be preparing for this institutionally.