When Pat Buchanan Tried To Make America Great Again

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It’s impossible to say exactly when the rehabilitation of Patrick Buchanan began, partly because his banishment from polite company was never total. MSNBC rather publicly fired him in 2012—over the protests of Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski—after the publication of Suicide of a Superpower, the latest, though by no means the shrillest, in the series of duck-and-cover, they’re-coming-for-us screeds he’s been writing since 1998. 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.” And yet two years later, there he was again on Morning Joe, serenaded with the Welcome Back, Kotter theme song. On camera, Buchanan plugged his new book, The Greatest Comeback, which tells how he helped Nixon get elected president, a three-year siege that raised a repeat loser from the dead. Buchanan is a vivid storyteller, and his account draws amply on his personal archive of briefing papers, letters, and notes. The book also illuminates the Nixon years’ atmosphere of cultural embattlement, a political mood that looks more relevant than ever in the Age of Donald Trump. So do Buchanan’s three long-shot attempts, in 1992, 1996, and 2000, to become president himself. He never came close to winning, but each time he nagged at something, rubbed a nerve in just enough voters of a particular kind­—what he called “peasants” and we call the white working class—to send ripples of panic through the Republican party. The echoes of Buchananism in Trump’s campaign were a pet theme during the election and its aftermath. But if anything, the debt has been understated. Put most simply, Buchanan begat Trumpism as his former ally William F. Buckley Jr. begat Reaganism. The also-ran of the Republican hard Right is the intellectual godfather of our current revolution.

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It’s a curious fact of Buchanan’s political history that his crusades are remembered as other men’s defeats—George H. W. Bush’s in 1992 and Bob Dole’s in 1996. Both secured the Republican nomination, but only after Buchanan beat them up and exposed them as out-of-touch frontmen for the GOP elite. In ’92, amid a slumping economy, Buchanan railed against Japan’s “predatory trade policies” and an agreement with Mexico later called NAFTA. The United States, he suggested, should think about quitting the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. These heresies got him 37.5 percent of the vote in New Hampshire against the glass-jawed incumbent Bush. Four years later, declaring himself the tribune of “a conservativism that gives voice to the voiceless,” Buchanan won the state outright, beating Dole by a percentage point. Dole recovered in later primaries, but, like Bush, he staggered on rubbery legs to the finish line, where Bill Clinton was waiting. Trump also belongs to the company of the Buchanan-scarred. The confrontation happened in 2000, when Buchanan, having become a pariah within the GOP, made a quixotic last stand on the Reform party ticket. Trump, even more quixotically, sought the Reform nomination, too, swaggering in with a book to promote and hot-air talk of the $100 million he would spend to get on the ticket and then to win “the whole megillah.” Before Buchanan smacked him down, Trump got in some preemptive sore-loser licks. “Look, he’s a Hitler lover,” he said. “I guess he’s an anti-Semite. He doesn’t like the blacks, he doesn’t like the gays.” For once affecting a statesman’s high detachment, Buchanan said only that the Reform party and the presidency weren’t for sale.

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The protocol was for someone on staff to call network executives and ask for better treatment. Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, instructed Buchanan to do it. But he had another idea. The administration should go public, meet the enemy—”the collective power of the national press,” as he now puts it—head-on. “What we had to do was say: They are as political and ideological as we are. They’ve got all this power, and there’s a tiny handful of them, and they didn’t get it democratically the way we did. And we have a right to fight against that power using our First Amendment rights, just as they do.” Nixon agreed, and out of this came the most important speech in the modern history of the American media wars. Written by Buchanan, it was delivered ten days after Nixon’s “silent majority” address by Vice-President Spiro Agnew, himself a culture warrior itching to poke back at the liberal press, which had been ridiculing him since he was nominated. Unlike Nixon, who dismembered every draft, Agnew merely tinkered with them. The result was a full-scale assault on the media—on its practices and habits, the “instant analysis and querulous criticism” that came between the president and the public. Most remarkable were Buchanan’s speculations on the network executives themselves, “a tiny, enclosed fraternity of privileged men elected by no one and enjoying a monopoly sanctioned and licensed by government.” What did Americans know about this coterie? “Little other than that they reflect an urbane and assured presence seemingly well-informed on every important matter.” They lived and worked in New York or Washington, D. C., Buchanan had Agnew say, where they basked “in their own provincialism, their own parochialism.”

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Coarseness, never the meanest political vice, matters much less than we think. It is the lesson we learned in 2016. Buchanan has been imparting it for many years. Today, some remember the controversies over his denunciations of Israel and the Jewish lobby in the early 1990s. He was judged guilty of anti-Semitism by two of his heroes and allies, Buckley and Irving Kristol. But fewer remember what prompted the dispute. Buchanan was one of a small group of conservatives who opposed the first Iraq invasion—the event that set the GOP on the course that ended with the election of Donald Trump. The real battle, as usual, was over history. Liberals said the cold war had been about the march toward a globalized civil society. But for Buchanan and others like him, it had been a war against godless communism. Their heroes weren’t diplomats and Davos attendees. They were brutalists, like McCarthy, MacArthur, and Franco. Wills was right: Buchanan is a fanatic, though he has his own term for it. “We are conservatives of the heart,” he says of paleo-conservative America Firsters like himself. “This is one reason the New World Order, the whole idea, is gonna come down. It doesn’t engage the heart. Who’s gonna put on a bayonet and charge for some Brussels bureaucrat?”

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