Lawrence Auster at View from the Right offers some trenchant analysis pertaining to my interview with Pat Buchanan on C-SPAN BookTV's "After Words" show last weekend:
As for Buchanan, on the positive side, Buchanan's central theme is in my view the central theme, namely that if a country fails to make its own countryhood primary in its politics, its economics, and its moral system, everything that the country does only serves its own undoing.
On the negative side, Buchanan remains deeply naive on the subject of Islam, refusing to see it as a threat to America; or, like the neocons, he says that Islam is an existential danger to Europe, but not to America. As though the Islamization of Europe would not represent the most profound threat to America. In my view Buchanan's blindness to the real nature and program of Islam is explained by his long-standing animus against Israel. To speak of Islam as a serious danger to us would be to treat Israel's mortal enemy as our mortal enemy. But because Buchanan identifies with the mortal enemy of Israel, that is something he cannot do. It is like Ernest Jones's famous Freudian explanation of Hamlet. According to Jones, the reason for Hamlet's mysterious inability--which Hamlet himself cannot understand--to take action against his uncle Claudius for having murdered Hamlet's father and married Hamlet's mother is that Hamlet himself unconsciously desired to kill his father and marry his mother. Hamlet thus identifies with Claudius for doing what Hamlet himself unconsciously wanted to do, and so he is incapable of treating him as an enemy or punishing him.
Buchanan's conflicted mentality on the subject of Israel came out when he said that the model of nationhood for America to follow is Israel, since Israel cares about its own nationhood, common culture, and identity. Leaving aside the oddity that Buchanan seems not to know that Israel since the early 1990s has, like other Western countries, effectively abandoned its national ideology Zionism for post-Zionism, national guilt, and multiculturalism, his praise of Israel in this context is simply bizarre. Buchanan himself strongly supports leftist Tony Judt's proposal for a "one-state solution," whereby the Israelis and the Palestinians would be joined into a single state. This "solution" would of course instantly destroy the Israeli nation that Buchanan recommends as a model for America. That Buchanan would engage in such a blatant contradiction strongly suggests to me that he has not admitted into consciousness the full extent of his anti-Israel animus.