On the surface, Alan Keyes offers many on the traditional right a whole host of issues and sound bites to agree with, particularly during the debates of the 2000 GOP. For all of his overblown rhetoric (equating income taxes with slavery) and occasional buffoonery (such as getting himself arrested by showing up uninvited to a debate in the 1996 elections, followed by Al Sharpton-style cries about "racism" and a threatened hunger strike), much of what Keyes has to say about abortion, dismantling the IRS, and recently, his attacks on New World Order outfits such as the World Trade Organization often seems on the mark.

The problem of course is that with the possible exception of the abortion issue, little if anything Keyes says can be taken at face value or accepted as genuine. While during the 2000 elections he took a principled stance in denouncing US involvement in the Balkans and mouthed anti-UN and anti-New World Order rhetoric, the fact of the matter is that Keyes is a true Johnny-Come-Lately on the anti-globalism issue. After all, he proudly served as Ambassador to the United Nations under the Reagan administration, and we never heard any anti-interventionist or anti-globalist rhetoric from Keyes in the 1996 election, and most certainly not in his abortive 1992 run for the Senate.

Certainly a man has the right to change his position on any number of issues, and when one does so in the direction of nationalism and anti-globalism it is to be commended and encouraged rather than criticized. The main quarrel with the "anti-globalism" of Keyes, however, is that it is utterly insincere. For all of his bravado on the issue, Keyes continues to side with the globalist establishment on a number of issues.

Quite noticeably, he parrots the GOP party line in labelling enemies of the open-borders lobby as "racists" and "xenophobes." For one allegedly sympathetic to "Americanism", such vehement support for opening our nation to the Third World is an odd stance indeed. Equally dissonant are a number of foreign policy views Keyes has taken. Quite unusual for a Catholic, Keyes has adopted the neocon line of Israel first, peppering his WorldNetDaily columns with Zionist diatribes worthy of Norman Podhoretz. Most troubling of all perhaps was that unlike true nationalists such as Pat Buchanan, Keyes not only refused to speak on behalf of Michael New when the brave man refused to serve under a UN uniform, but Keyes went so far as to side with the United Nations on the issue.

One should also add that this alleged great champion of Constitutional Liberties has jumped aboard the "War on Terrorism" bandwagon, in spite of the fact that the "War on Terrorism" in its present form is little more than an excuse to wage war against nations that had nothing to do with 9/11 and to curtail the civil liberties of dissidents by santimonious windbags like Karl Rove and William Bennett. One could go on about Keyes' hypocrisy about these and a whole host of other issues (such as his apologetic attitude towards black rioters in 1992, revealing that Keyes is not above playing the racial victim himself while condemning such actions in some of his rivals), but I imagine that by now the reader gets the point.

This of course begs the question of why Keyes jumped aboard an ersatz traditionalist, anti-globalist bandwagon to begin with. One needs look no further than the company Keyes keeps to find the answer. His roommate at Harvard was none other than that great "anti-globalist" and "Constitutionalist" William Kristol, now editor of the official neocon rag The Weekly Standard. Interestingly enough, Kristol also served as a member of Keyes' 1992 campaign staff. Indeed, all through his career Keyes has surrounded himself with prominent neoconservatives and parroted the neocon line on a range of issues. In matters nearest to the neocon heart: open borders, aid to Israel, and the largely fraudulent "war on terrorism," Keyes continues to sing their tune.

On those points where Keyes has in the past dissented from the establishment line, it seems to have been purely for show in campaign years. Knowing they had a friend and ally in Keyes, the neocons used him as an effective stalking horse in the 1996 campaign to siphon anti-abortionist and Christian conservative votes away from Pat Buchanan (to a lesser extent, John McCain's good friend, the neocon-approved Gary Bauer entered the race to fulfill the same function in the 2000 elections).

In the last election cycle, knowing that Buchanan's national sovereignty issue played well with the grassroots in 1996, the neocons scripted Keyes to denounce the World Trade Organization, the UN, and the stationing of US troops in the Balkans. In Keyes they had an obviously non-viable fraud of a candidate who could nevertheless split the social conservative vote enough to ensure the victory of candidates spouting the neocon line, such as McCain (or, if they had to settle for second best, Bush), and during the 1996 elections the strategy seemed successful (the relevance of the strategy was rendered void when Buchanan withdrew from the GOP in the fall of 2000).

In return for his services to the neoconservative cause, the establishment, faux-"conservative" media bigwigs have rewarded him with something he had wanted all along, a television slot on MSNBC where he could self-importantly pontificate to his heart's content. Such are the wages paid by GOP apparatchiks to their functionaries.

June 10, 2002

Contact the author. [burbot65@hotmail.com]