If he does think that, then this shows once again how the Buchanites have become purely reactive in their thought processes, not directed toward a rational good, but only reacting against what they don’t like. They don’t like the secular left, so they automatically sympathize with our Muslim enemies who are the opposite of the secular left. Not only is this position immoral and treasonous, it even fails on its own terms, since it is the secular left that has encouraged the Islamization of Europe. It hasn’t occurred to the Buchananites that some people in Europe are trying to resist the secular left, by defying Islam. The Buchananites cannot see any of this, because they only see reality through their “script,” a script written in the ink of resentment. ~Lawrence Auster

I’m afraid that I happen to agree for the most part with Mr. Auster on this particular point, but I think it is a mistake to generalise from Mr. Buchanan’s rather odd take on the Danish cartoon business about the entirety of his thought or that of those who generally agree with him, much less to make general statements about their “psychology.” Imputing a desire for surrender to Islam to Mr. Buchanan’s remarks clearly takes things too far, as no one could seriously believe that Mr. Buchanan wants anything of the kind.

My tendency of late to critique some of Mr. Buchanan’s columns comes from the conviction that the Buchananism of A Republic, Not an Empire, The Death of the West and now The American Conservative defends certain principles that these recent columns have seemed to be compromising or muddling. But there should be no doubt that I would consider myself a Buchananite (that’s certainly how I voted in 2000), and that Mr. Buchanan may have made a bad judgement in this case but has not thrown in the civilisational towel.

As I noted in an earlier post this week, I found Mr. Buchanan’s reaction entirely puzzling. If Europe is not going to roll over and die, not just demographically but as part of the Western world with a particular way of life, these are the sorts of fights the Europeans must fight. Perhaps it is only by showing them that their liberal order is genuinely in danger from large-scale Muslim immigration, as the Dutch have already started to understand, that they will find the desire to defend what they have. It is telling that the Jyllands-Posten is a paper of the right, expressing the tremendous dissatisfaction in Denmark with Muslim immigration that catapulted a specifically anti-immigration party to a strong third-place finish in the last round of national elections. Albeit a little more crude, perhaps, the Jyllands-Posten readership probably shares some of the same basic concerns of Buchananites in America, and with good reason.

If far-left newspapers republished the cartoons and did so in a general spirit of contempt for religion, which is not the main issue, that does not make the cartoons illegitimate nor does it make the response of threatening violence and calling for censorship any more justifiable in the eyes of religious Americans. Generally, Mr. Buchanan has been at the forefront of warning Europe against its collapse and arguing for solidarity with Europeans for cultural and strategic reasons. He would be the last to elide the differences between Islam and other religions in support of an anti-secularist or anti-leftist “ecumenical jihad” or anything of the kind.

Perhaps what he intended with this column was more of a warning along the lines that you should not insult a proud and angry man, because he will come after you to answer the insult. Unfortunately, what has come across is the idea that we should somehow feel a certain solidarity or understanding for radically alien Muslims who have been offended rather than side with the people and the way of life with which we are actually connected and in which we have a meaningful, albeit remote, stake. I briefly entertained these ideas at one time, imagining that there could be some kind of right-wing international united against various and sundry revolutionary forces, but I snapped out of that pretty quickly.