No More Mr. Nice Guy: Patrick Buchanan and the Virtue of Prejudice
I missed this last week, in it we see the somehow always appearing in prime time white nationalist and anti Semite Pat Buchanan defending prejudice in the form of bigotry under his usual guise of defending [white, hetero, christian] tradition.
uchanan’s piece, which he called “The Death of Moral Community,” was carried on his website and eagerly snapped up by racist-sympathizing websites like VDARE. In it, Buchanan waxed wistful on the virtue of prejudice, citing quotations by Albert Einstein and Edmund Burke to argue, essentially, that if a prejudice has withstood the centuries, there must be a good and valuable reason for it.
Buchanan wrote, “Great minds once found merit in the ‘prejudices,’ or inherited wisdom, of a people, as a spur to virtuous behavior.” He invoked Burke, who wrote in the late 18th century: “Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek and they seldom fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice, and to leave nothing but the naked reason.”
Burke was speaking more to prejudice in the sense of “preconceived ideas” as opposed to “biased stereotypes,” but no matter. Buchanan invoked the same quotation in an August 2010 essay in which he sought to justify anti-Muslim prejudice.