It is astonishing that the retirement of Pat Buchanan, one of the most influential conservatives of the last half century, has gone by almost entirely without media notice. "If Matthew Continetti’s history The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism could be said to have leading and supporting characters, only William F. Buckley Jr. would rival Buchanan for the lead spotlight across nearly four decades, closing the 20th century," notes Michael Brendan Doherty in the National Review. At age 84, Buchanan has outlasted Buckley and, further, lived to see the resurgence of paleo-conservatism in the Republican party.
He wrote right-wing, isolationist columns and books for 60 years, suffused with controversy. Throughout his career Buchanan espoused toxic antisemitism and xenophobia, topped with a soupcon of racism. Throughout it all it should be noted that he did it with an impish smile, that of a boy caught doing something naughty. I don’t think Buchanan ever had a harsh word to write about Hitler, except to say that his ideas had power. It didn’t help Buchanan’s cause that throughout the late 80s and 90s, he was obsessed with defending accused Nazi war criminals. Even Bill Buckley, his friend, had to conclude that it was not possible to defend Buchanan from the charge of anti-semitism during the 90s. "I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism, whatever it was that drove him to say and do it: most probably, an iconoclastic temperament," he wrote.
Buchanan began his career at the age of 23 as a journalist at the St. Louis Globe-Democrat (now defunct) in 1961. “There Buchanan wrote his hand-grenade-style columns in support of Barry Goldwater, and the Globe-Democrat became one of the few papers in the country to endorse Goldwater,” continues Doherty. And though Goldwater eventually lost the 1964 election to LBJ in one of the greatest landslides in US history, he laid the groundwork for Ronald Reagan’s Presidency. Similarly, Pat Buchanan, though he only received one third of the vote in the Republican primary in ‘92, and less in his subsequent Presidential candidacies, laid the groundwork for Trump’s paleo-isolationism. Buchanan’s relationship with New Hampshire began with his column for the paleoconservative Union-Leader, which stopped running him upon his retirement in January.
Buchanan is not just a writer, of course, he is also a politician of sorts. He has run three unsuccessful Presidential candidacies in 1992, 1996, and 2000. In losing in 92 and 96, however, he exposed the weaknesses of the eventual winners: Bush the Elder and Bob Dole. In 2000, he even beat Donald Trump for the Reform Party nomination en route to getting torched by Bush the Younger. True to character, Trump let fly corrosive venom upon losing. "Somebody said, 'Pat, he called you a Nazi, a Hitlerite.' I said, 'With Trump, you have to realize, these are terms of endearment,' " Buchanan presciently, recounted at the time.
Buchanan disappeared from the media fishbowl around 2012, when he was fired by MSNBC for writing the Spenglerian-titled tome Suicide of a Superpower. "With chapter titles like ‘The Death of Christian America,’ ‘The End of White America,’ and ‘The White Party,’ it sounded the alarm of demographic apocalypse, offering pungent observations such as: ‘U. S.-born Hispanics are far more likely to smoke, drink, abuse drugs, and become obese than foreign-born Hispanics,’” wrote Sam Tenenhaus in 2017 for Esquire. In hindsight, the Pat Buchanan-MSNBC marriage was probably doomed from on wedding night.
The parallels with Goldwater do not end there. His culture war speech at the Republican National Convention in August 1992 echoed Barry Goldwater’s fiery 1964 Convention speech. Goldwater’s timing, like Buchanan’s, was off. It took the end of the Cold War and the Great Recession for an audience to be appreciative of paleoconservative populism. “This is the path the party chose when it traded Reaganism for Buchananism, making Mr. Buchanan’s endless campaign for the presidency, despite its losses, one of the most consequential in American history,” concluded Nicole Helmer, in a Guest Essay for the New York Times. That is why it is so surprising that so little has been made of his influence in the Republican party.
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