THE UNREAL THING

By Barbara Ehrenreich

IT'S NOT OFTEN THAT SOMEONE CROSSES OVER TO THE losing side in the middle of a class war. Usually these days the flow is in the other direction, from the shattered forces of the have-nots to the triumphant party of the got-mines. But here's Pat Buchanan--a man whose campaign letterhead features a roster of CEOS--running around the country and bashing Big Business to sensational effect. The guardians of conservative p.c. are pummeling him as a traitor and a "left-winger" in every medium they command. Blue-collar people, in at least some settings, are embracing him as the great white hope--a sort of depigmented Jesse Jackson with a snarl.

But what exactly is the fuss? By now we ought to be used to the tired old rituals of campaign populism, in which the candidates don windbreakers and stage photo-ops with obliging factory hands before rushing back to the $1,000-a-plate fund-raising dinners where they commiserate with the big-money guys about those pesky "labor costs" and the need to accelerate the upward redistribution of wealth.

Buchanan doesn't sound like he's faking it. He says he's sorry now for all those years spent flacking for Big Business as a mainstream Republican operative. He claims his conversion came on the 1991 campaign trail when he met some poverty-stricken New Hampshirites and discovered they weren't, as he might have thought, degenerates and dope fiends but "the type of fellows I played ball with." And of course sooner or later some candidate--even one as sheltered as the Beltway insider Buchanan--had to trip over the bodies of the downsized and notice that the effervescent economy of Wall Street is not the same as the economy of, say, Pontiac, Michigan.

He has even backed off a little from his nasty habit of scapegoating. Though he still leads the right's "culture war" against gays and welfare moms and blasphemous artists, he's not blaming any of these familiar miscreants for falling wages or capital flight. If you want to talk about the decline of working-class America, you have to talk about footloose and irresponsible corporations. And the least you can say about Buchanan is that he, alone of all the candidates, talks the talk. He's against NAFTA and GATT, which locates him outside the great bipartisan, pro-business, free-trade coalition led by Clinton, Gingrich and Dole.

But that's as far as Buchanan's populism goes. Oddly, for a man who claims to be deeply moved by the plight of the working person, he has nothing to say about raising the minimum wage, banning the use of "replacement workers" as strike breakers, or defending occupational safety and health standards against the Republican onslaught. In fact, his economic program is little more than the old millionaire-friendly supply-side economics, garnished with a twist of nationalism. Business, says Buchanan, should be free to do whatever it wants, except perhaps flee across the border in search of even cheaper labor.

He has denounced Steve Forbes' flat-tax plan, for example, as something "drafted on the back of a menu . . . with the boys down at the yacht basin." But his own tax plan would cut inheritance and capital-gains taxes as well as income taxes for the wealthy. The legendary rationale for this kind of tax cut is that if you pump enough wealth uphill, sooner or later some of this money will trickle down to ordinary people in the form of decent-paying jobs. But this can't work when there are, as Buchanan himself says, "two economies" instead of one. Downsizing delights Wall Street, even when it means the K Mart class has to skip Christmas; and the stockbrokers all cringe when unemployment falls.

And no protege of the Tricky One could be naive enough to believe that free trade and "globalization" are the only source of the blue-collar blues. AT&T, for example, isn't planning to hire Malaysians or Mexicans to replace the 30,000 American workers whose layoffs have just been announced. When corporations want to boost the price of their stock or the pay of their executives by downsizing or lowering wages, they don't need any help from NAFTA or GATT.

So the fact that Buchanan now embraces blue-collar Democrats as "my folks" hardly means he's been born again as a "left-winger." The only reason he can pass for a champion of the working class is that the Democrats have abdicated that role. Bill Clinton never seriously tried to raise the minimum wage or otherwise level the ground separating worker and boss; and anyone who thinks Clinton got into office and then "lunged to the left" must have trouble getting their shoes on the right feet in the morning. If we have a two-party system anymore, it consists of a Clinton-Dole party of Big Business and, potentially, a Perot-and-Buchanan--style party of not quite so Big Business. For the constituency of the left--that majority of people whose only "business" is to sell their labor by the hour or by the week--1996 offers almost nothing at all. Unless, of course, they're willing to be bamboozled by another suit in sheep's clothing.