The GOP could face a revolt from within its tea party grassroots base if it nominates an establishment candidate without true conservative, anti-big government values, one of America’s leading conservative pundits tells Newsmax.TV in an exclusive interview.
Specifically, columnist and former Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan told Newsmax that the nomination of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the architect of a state insurance plan that many say inspired Obamacare, could prompt the tea party movement to form a third party.
“It’s a real possibility because the tea party folks and the Republican conservatives and social conservatives and others are very apprehensive of Mitt Romney and they don’t feel he is really one of us,” Buchanan told Newsmax.
“They’ve got reason for that feeling and that sentiment but if they do that, if, for example … they persuaded Ron Paul to run on a third party ticket, Barack Obama would be easily re-elected,” he added.
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Buchanan would certainly know. A former aide to President Ronald Reagan, he was one of the first conservative commentators to hold a prominent job as a TV commentator and syndicated columnist in the mainstream media.
From 1966 through 1974, Buchanan was an assistant to Richard Nixon, and from 1985 to 1987, White House Director of Communications for Reagan.
Buchanan ran twice for the Republican nomination for president and then in 2000 ran for the White House on the Reform Party ticket. He said he can see a third party candidate emerging in 2012 if Mitt Romney gets the GOP nod.
Of the current Republican candidates he said, “Certainly Michele Bachmann is one of us. I think Rick Perry is. I think Herman Cain is. If you are talking about a more traditional conservative certainly I would put Santorum in there.
“But the question is, ‘can they win?’ and my answer to those I’ve suggested is probably not. One of them may go win a primary or two but I don’t think they can win and defeat Romney.
“The one that has the best chance is Rick Perry and he has sort of broken his pick awful badly in the earlier debates.”
This is only the most immediate concern Buchanan has for his party. Demographic changes in the United States will make it almost impossible for conservative Republicans to get elected in the future, he writes in his latest book,
“Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025.”
Already California, once a GOP bastion, has reached the point where no Republicans hold statewide offices, and other states in which non-Hispanic whites are becoming a minority will follow, he writes.
“Richard Nixon carried California in all five elections in which he was on a national ticket. Ronald Reagan carried it four straight times, twice as governor, twice for president,” he pointed out in the Newsmax interview. “Nowadays a Republican can’t get elected in California.
“The reason is the demography has changed; the whites are now a minority in California and 90 percent of Republican votes in presidential elections are white folks. But the Hispanic votes and the Asian-Americans vote 60-70 percent Democratic. African-Americans vote 90-95 percent Democratic.
“So when the white folks become a minority, as they are a minority now in California and they are a minority now in Texas – eventually Texas is going to go the way of California and you’ll never elect another Republican president if he is running on anything like a conservative ticket.
“For the last 30-35 years the birthrate among white Americans has fallen below replacement levels, below zero population growth. By the time we reach 2020, there are going to be more white folks over 65 than under 17. So the white population is stagnating and will begin to die out.
“All of America in 2050 is going to look like California today,” he added.
In his new book the MSNBC political commentator says “America is disintegrating.” He told Newsmax that is because so many people believe America’s best days are in the past.
“Almost four in five Americans believe the country is on the wrong course,” he said. “The last three elections have been repudiating elections where Republicans were thrown out in 2006 and 2008, Democrats in 2010.
“There’s a feeling on the part of America that the best times are really behind her. As Merle Haggard said, ‘The good times are really over for good in America,’ and you will get a majority of Americans fearing that is the truth – and I share their apprehensions.”
He said one commentator suggested to him that the decline started on November 22, 1963, the day President John F. Kennedy was shot, as that ushered Lyndon Johnson into the White House with his plans for a Great Society.
“It was this enormously expansive project of government which transferred trillions of dollars from the productive sector to the non-productive and created a huge class of dependency in America – the size of a major European country, who pay no taxes but get benefits from free education to Medicaid to Food Stamps to Head Start, to Women’s, Children’s, Infants’ programs.”
And he said the Obama administration is part of the problem as it has done nothing to reverse the country’s decline.
“They agree with a lot of it,” he said. “The President of the United States praised the atheists and things up there at the inaugural. The President of the United States belongs, if you will, to the counter-culture – those are the folks who vote for him, those are the folks who are with him, they share his beliefs about right to life say, and gay marriage and all these other issues.”
Buchanan also blames the loss of faith among Americans as a contributing factor to the breakdown of society.
“Christianity as the faith of the American people, which was overwhelmingly predominant, has diminished to the point where only 75 percent identify themselves as Christians, and among young people, 25-30 percent profess no religion.
“Christianity is dead in Europe. As the Pope says, it has become a desert of godlessness. In the United States, the old mainstream Protestant denominations are splitting and breaking up, the Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists.
“One-in-three ‘cradle Catholics’ has lost the faith, one-in-10 Americans is a lapsed Catholic, two-thirds of the parochial schools have shut down in the last 50 years. That is the situation.
“The faith we had – Christianity – provided our moral code, our moral consensus and the moral community that we all share, the ideas of right and wrong, what should be done and what should not be done.
“When you disagree on fundamentals like that, it leads, frankly, to what we call culture wars, clashes over abortion, over gay rights, should there be prayer in the public schools? Should they celebrate Easter and Christmas?
“The wars continue endlessly and that is one of the things tearing the country apart.”
(Editor's Note: Get Pat Buchanan's New Book, "Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?" — Go Here Now.)