The Great Betrayal: How American
Sovereignty and Social Justice Are
Being Sacrificed to.. by Patrick J.
Buchanan
Nationalism Vs. Free Trade.
Political pundit and two-time Republican presidential candidate Pat
Buchanan is best known for his sharp-edged cultural conservatism. The
Great Betrayal, however, is an economic manifesto that promotes what
Buchanan calls economic nationalism. Buchanan believes that free trade
serves the interests of Wall Street, not Main Street. Transnational
corporations rake in huge profits, but ordinary Americans see few
benefits. Instead, they suffer from free trades bad consequences: flat
wages for workers, increased drug trafficking, and environmental
deterioration. Markets should serve people, says Buchanan, not the other
way around. The economy is not the country; the country comes first, he
writes. Buchanan offers a protectionist political agenda--one that many

modern conservatives may not like, but one that Buchanan says puts him
in the fine tradition of Washington, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. A
forceful polemic challenging elite economic opinion. -- John J. Miller
Personal Review: The Great Betrayal: How American
Sovereignty and Social Justice Are Being Sacrificed to.. by
Patrick J. Buchanan
oncerning matters of commerce, why are foreigners eating our lunch?
Because too many of America's business and governmental leaders
believe in a free lunch, writes Patrick J. Buchanan in this valuable volume.
Buchanan's pungent pen lays the fault for the deindustrialization of
our country at the door of the U.S. government. While heckling globalist-
minded businesspeople for their avarice and lack of patriotism, Buchanan's
over-arching theme of realism echoes Bernard Mandeville - Greed cannot
be rooted out but it can be properly channeled and the U.S. government,
through its tax and trade policies, has the power to accomplish this.
The preamble of the Constitution as well as the actions of America's
founders (especially George Washington and Alexander Hamilton) brim
with what Buchanan calls "enlightened" economic nationalism. One hopes
the author doesn't mean "enlightened" in the same way George W. Bush
uses "compassionate" when putting it before "conservatism."
While establishment politicians and professional talking heads may
recoil in horror, students of language will note that tariffs are assumed
natural because nature is uneven. The words "customs" and "duties" testify
that international trade restrictions and taxes are long-standing and
considered just as well as obligatory. Consider also "political economy."
Political implies communal consideration, reflecting Aristotle's definition of
politics as people deliberating how best to order our lives together. Thus
economics is not solely a private matter, author Buchanan, America's
leading spokesman of populist conservatism, reminds us.
Republicans need to rediscover their protectionist heritage dating
back to Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln for the good of the republic as
well their own electoral success, our author states. Connecting with Middle
America through traditional morality while doing the economic bidding of
transnational corporations leaves voters cold and frustrated. By embracing
free trade, Democrats are selling out their union backers as well as lower-
income supporters such as blacks, Buchanan writes.
In reviewing Republican trade history Buchanan meets personal as
well as societal ironies (most dissolve into non-ironies if you subscribe to
the view that the GOP has always been a big-government party). A
staunch free-trader while serving presidents Nixon and Reagan, Buchanan
began to revise his views after leaving government. Annoying questioning
of religious and national commitments of free-traders by our author
prompts the question: Was Pat Buchanan less of a Christian when he was
a free-trader? My answer: No. He just happened to be duped by a
superficially appealing ideology. Is Bill Kristol less of a Jew for holding by
neoconservatism? No. Kristol's brain happens to be in the grip of an
ideology started by his father. Perhaps that makes Bill a loyal son and a
lousy political scientist but it says little about his Judaism.

Incomplete and speculative scholarship of this kind is the weakest
part of "The Great Betrayal." Buchanan is unfair to Classical School
economist David Ricardo. In relating Ricardo's theory/law of comparative
advantage Buchanan misses the fact that Ricardo was striving for
description, not prescription. Buchanan rightly criticizes Ricardo for
discounting nationalism and one might say more attention could have been
paid to the power of technology to narrow expense gaps but the main point
is Ricardo was trying to do for economics what Isaac Newton did for
physics. Later people like Richard Cobden and Karl Marx seized Ricardo's
ideas for use in their revolutions but Ricardo himself was not articulating a
party platform.
Buchanan's shabby treatment of David Hume is particularly galling.
Hume is incorrectly labeled "a militant atheist." In fact, the great Scotsman
accepted the argument from design, saying there was nothing more
obvious than the existence of G-d (see Blackstone Audio's "Giants of
Philosophy" tape series for this and more). What apparently riles
Buchanan is that Hume criticized institutionalized Christianity, saying it and
other organized religions often provide "a cover for faction and ambition."
Although we should classify Hume as a deist, his criticisms are squarely in
the moral tradition of great Christian dissenters such as Soren Kierkegaard
and Leo Tolstoy.
The flogging of Hume points up conservatism's greatest ongoing
dilemma - should we be loyal to principles or to institutions?
Hume's "History of England" employed the same method as
Buchanan's "Great Betrayal" - correcting the historical record and
determining the implications for future practice. This is rich irony. Because
of their judicious, non-partisan approaches both men are attacked by
ideologues of the Right and Left.
The European Union and empires in general receive hot and cold
treatment from Buchanan. Loss of national identity is clearly on the
author's mind yet he adds that smaller nations such as Austria will likely
never be self-sufficient again.
A vital connection is made when Buchanan points out that empire
began to erode protectionism and constitutional government. The
smoldering sparked by the Spanish-American War amid rock-ribbed
protectionism by William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt eventually
went ablaze with Dwight Eisenhower offering U.S. markets as low-hanging
fruit to foreign countries in exchange for sticking with the West in the Cold
War. Buchanan argues persuasively that such bribery was unnecessary.
Crescendo is reached when Buchanan reminds us that economics is
a means to an end. "What is wrong with the global economy is what is
wrong with our politics; It is rooted in the myth of economic man." (p. 287).
Along the way he opens eyes and hearts by chronicling the debasement of
America's manufacturing base (providing the prose companion to Billy
Joel's song "Allentown."). Ferreting out the hidden costs of free trade is
another enormous contribution.
Buchanan's endorsement of industrialism and strong, central
government is sure to give some conservatives pause. The godfather of
U.S. conservatism, Russell Kirk, wrote that industrialism has done more to

undermine conservatism than any other single phenomenon. Henry Ford's
assembly line techniques promoted the idea that one thing is just as good
as another (where as the natural conservatism of men's minds is attuned
to differences and gradations). Yet that same Ford that Kirk criticized is
quoted by Buchanan as an upholder of family values - "The man does the
work in the shop, but his wife does the work in the home. The shop must
pay them both." (p. 93).
Biblical passages (the Tower of Babel, the rivalry of Jacob and
Esau) can be seen as lending support to Buchanan's view that nations
don't have soft lips but sharp elbows. He shepherds us to the realism of
Friedrich List - between the individual and the mass of humani
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