Good Old Pat

Reflecting on Pat Buchanan's Legacy

Patrick J. Buchanan recently announced that he would retire from opinion writing, the vocation that gave him his start in politics, so I suppose I should reflect a little on his legacy. I’ve long believed there’s a case to be made that Buchanan, not Buckley, not Goldwater, and not even Ronald Reagan, is the most consequential right-wing figure of the past century. That is a central contention of the book I’m currently laboring to finish.

Throughout his career, Buchanan formed the advance guard, or the rear guard depending on your perspective, of the Conservative Movement. After Goldwater’s disastrous defeat at the hands of LBJ seemed to be the conclusive referendum on what mainstream Americans’ thought of Conservatism, Buchanan was really the first person to take the movement and its ideology into the highest reaches of power. He did this by attaching himself to Richard Nixon, a man that most Conservatives disliked and distrusted. He was to be something of a designated liaison officer to the right for Nixon, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan was to serve for liberals, but his ferocious loyalty to the man transformed him into something else: a factotum, one of his most trusted advisors, and even something, at least in Buchanan’s eyes, a surrogate son. He invented the term “silent majority,” told Nixon to adopt an “anti-establishment” stance, which appealed to Nixon’s own insecurities and prejudices, and thereby laid the foundation for modern right-wing populism.

Buchanan’s memos as White House advisor shaped policy in ways that have profound effects to this day. For instance, in 1971, the United States Congress passed Comprehensive Child Development Act, which would have created a national system of daycare, after-school programs, as well as health care for children. A child of poverty, the depression, and the Keynesian consensus, Nixon was not intrinsically allergic to this kind of expansive state initiative. The administration had even taken a role in shaping the bill. Nixon asked his advisors for two statements: one that would for passing, one for vetoing. Even Nixon advisors on the right thought the rationale for its rejection should just be its cost. Pat Buchanan’s vision went farther: he saw it as a threat to the idea of the family, and thereby to Western civilization, then faced with the double threat of godless Communism abroad and insidious liberalism at home. His language made its way into the President’s veto. Even before the grassroots power of Conservatism could make itself felt as a political force later in the 1970s, Buchanan was its spear tip.

William F. Buckley, who I think Buchanan surpassed both intellectually and as a political force, was his hero and reading the early National Review was almost been a spiritual experience for the young Catholic. “My first reaction was not unlike that of John Keats, “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer,” Buchanan wrote in his memoir, Right From the Beginning. “There was nothing within the pages of Bill Buckley’s blue-bordered magazine with which I disagreed…what National Review did was take the word conservatism, then a synonym for stuffy orthodoxy, Republican stand-pat-ism and economic self-interest, and convert it into the snapping pennant of a fighting faith.” Educated by Jesuits, “the Pope’s Marines,” into a Church Militant where anticommunism was practically a sacrament, the prospect of membership in an elite corps appealed to Buchanan. 

As a young man, he certainly put the fighting into “fighting faith.” Toughness, pugilism, aggression and bellicosity were the cardinal virtues in the Buchanan household. His father, an accountant, hero-worshipped Joe McCarthy, General Douglas MacArthur, and Generalissimo Francisco Franco. Pat was one of nine children. Buchanan and Bros. became a firm of roving hooligans, graduating from terrorizing the neighborhood children and crashing house parties to more serious affrays. “Pop,” a strict disciplinarian who would avail himself of the belt, did not punish his boys for fighting, but was just curious to know if they had acquitted themselves well when they came home bruised and bloodied. Buchanan boasted of he and his brothers beating a man so severely they had to “hold him up,” presumably to finish up his working over. Later, sitting in the police station, Buchanan caught sight of the man, who had been the aggressor on his telling: “His appearance made it all worthwhile. His face was almost as unrecognizable and he had a thick bandage covering a wound on the back of his head. Which had, we were told, been opened up by some sharp instrument, perhaps a beer can.”

The Buchanan horde also possessed an ethnic consciousness, which their Jewish neighbors, the Bernsteins, would feel the edge of. When Harry Bernstein drove over to complain about the Buchanan boys playing football in the yard at midnight, the boys nearly tipped over his car, with cries of “Get the Jews!” He called the cops. Later that night, beer bottles rained down on the Bernstein house. Harry’s daughter Karen told Buchanan’s biographer, “They didn’t like the Jews. There’s no question about it…They would call us ‘Dirty Jew.’” 

Buchanan’s evident dislike of the Jews appeared again when he was a member of the Reagan White House.  He had encouraged Reagan to lay a wreath at Bitburg cemetery where Waffen-SS soldiers were buried so as not to be seen as “succumbing to the pressure of the Jews.” When Cardinal O’Connor apologized for Catholic antisemitism, Buchanan wrote, “If U.S. Jewry takes the clucking appeasement of the Catholic cardinalate as indicative of our submission, it is mistaken.” While still at the White House he defended the good name of John Demanjuk, the retired Ukrainian-American autoworker accused by U.S. prosecutors of being a concentration camp guard who gassed hundreds of thousands at Treblinka, in the process even going so far as questioning whether gassings on that scale were possible.

After leaving the White House, Buchanan became a national figure on television, as a sought after talking head to present the right wing view. He earned the respect and affection of his colleagues, many of them liberals and some of them Jewish liberals, who often came to his defense when the charge of antisemitism was raised. Around the time of the Gulf War, which he opposed, he became friends with the paleoconservative writers Joseph Sobran and Samuel Francis. The three dined regularly at a Chinese restaurant in McClean, Virginia, where Sobran, a former English professor, not long after fired from National Review for incessant Jew-baiting, regaled the others by doing Shakespeare’s Richard III, replete with hunchback and limp. Their columns started to echo each other. Buchanan: “If communism was the god that failed the Lost Generation, democracy, as ideal form of government, panacea for mankind's ills, hope of the world, may prove the Golden Calf of this generation.” Sobran: “Now that democracy has overthrown communism, we can turn to the problem of how to overthrow democracy.” Francis: “[S]erious conservatives ought to ponder is whether the failure of the Reagan experiment means that conventional conservative policies can be implemented in a mass democracy.”  Francis and Sobran urged their friend, who had flirted with the idea in 1988, to run for president. 

In 1992, fed up with what he felt to be the dominance of neoconservatives and moderates in the G.O.P., Buchanan embarked on a primary campaign against George H.W. Bush, then seeking his second term. The precipitant was Bush’s decision to sign the Civil Rights Act of 1992. “His platform in many ways is expected to parallel that of Louisiana state Rep. David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan wizard, who is in a surprisingly close race for governor of his state,” the Washington Times reported at the time. He managed to damage, but not defeat, Bush, and in the process created the politics of the contemporary Republican party, Donald Trump and his epigones. And Buchanan resurrected the slogan and battle cry “America First,” once thought to be forever tainted by its association in the 1940 with Nazi sympathizers. Back in ‘92, His ally and supporter Murray Rothbard eerily augured the future foreshadowed by Buchanan’s run:

And so the proper strategy for the right wing must be what we can call “right-wing populism”: exciting, dynamic, tough, and confrontational, rousing and inspiring not only the exploited masses, but the often-shell-shocked right-wing intellectual cadre as well. And in this era where the intellectual and media elites are all establishment liberal-conservatives, all in a deep sense one variety or another of social democrat, all bitterly hostile to a genuine Right, we need a dynamic, charismatic leader who has the ability to short-circuit the media elites, and to reach and rouse the masses directly. We need a leadership that can reach the masses and cut through the crippling and distorting hermeneutical fog spread by the media elites.

I think will leave it there for now. God willing, you’ll be able to read about all this more when I finish the book. You can also read my earlier piece in The Baffler, which forms the stem of the project.