{"id":126954,"date":"2017-05-09T23:54:54","date_gmt":"2017-05-10T03:54:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/buchanan.org\/blog\/?p=126954"},"modified":"2017-05-10T00:33:53","modified_gmt":"2017-05-10T04:33:53","slug":"patrick-buchanan-reveals-first-trumpist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buchanan.org\/blog\/patrick-buchanan-reveals-first-trumpist-126954","title":{"rendered":"Patrick Buchanan Reveals Himself to Be the First Trumpist"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Joe Klein – The New York Times<\/a><\/p>\n

Patrick J. Buchanan is a merry troglodyte, a naughty provocateur. He still calls homosexuality \u00e2\u20ac\u0153sodomy,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d just to get the goat of a community he will only reluctantly call \u00e2\u20ac\u0153gay.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d He writes that he wanted to be named ambassador to South Africa by President Ford so he could support the apartheid government. He thinks public television is \u00e2\u20ac\u0153an upholstered playpen\u00e2\u20ac\u009d for liberals. He considers \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The New York Times\u00e2\u20ac\u009d an epithet. His stump appearances in his outlaw 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns were a guilty pleasure for the reporters who followed him, a hilariously clever, and prescient, exhibition of right-wing populism. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Buchanan,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Richard Nixon once told him, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re the only extremist I know with a sense of humor.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

\"Nixon's<\/a>And it is Buchanan, not Nixon, who emerges as the central \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and most intriguing \u00e2\u20ac\u201d character in \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Nixon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s White House Wars,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d an entertaining memoir of that benighted presidency. Buchanan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Nixon is a familiar figure: distant, awkward, smart, defensive and damaged, caring a bit too much what the Establishment \u00e2\u20ac\u201d a word Buchanan uses frequently \u00e2\u20ac\u201d thinks of him. The not-so-tricky president is a policy moderate; he has surrounded himself with brilliant, if mainstream, experts like Henry Kissinger and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. There is also a retinue of traditional moderate Republican aides like Ray Price and Leonard Garment, and technocrats like H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. Buchanan, the house wing nut, finds all this moderation frustrating; he began as a peripheral figure in the Nixon White House, a political gunslinger perhaps a bit too hot for the high-rent nuances of governance. Over time, however, Nixon realized that the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153liberal establishment\u00e2\u20ac\u009d was unwilling to cut him a break \u00e2\u20ac\u201d even as he created the Environmental Protection Agency and maintained many Great Society programs \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and a gunslinger could have his uses. Buchanan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s pen provided the ammunition for Vice President Spiro Agnew\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s attacks on the media (which seem downright civilized compared with current presidential standards). But Nixon sensed that Buchanan was onto something much bigger than vitriol, a new grand strategy for the Republican Party, a new majority anchored by the white working class, not just in the South, but also in the Northern ethnic, mostly Catholic, enclaves. This philosophy has been the driving vision of Buchanan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s life. It has made him one of the most consequential conservatives of the past half-century. Indeed, he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a reactionary who was also an avatar: the first Trumpist.<\/p>\n

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Buchanan was born in Washington, D.C., in 1938, although his family\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s roots are in Mississippi. He celebrates ancestors who fought for the Confederacy, but his most enduring loyalty is to the conservative Catholic Church of the 1950s \u00e2\u20ac\u201d the church schools he attended, the Knights of Columbus, the Legion of Decency, Sodality and the Holy Name Society. His people are the white ethnic \u00e2\u20ac\u0153unfashionable minorities,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d as opposed to the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153media minorities.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d He was kicked out of Georgetown University for a year after a drunken fight with the Washington police: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I was ahead on points, until they brought out the sticks.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d But he attended the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism \u00e2\u20ac\u201d one of his few Eastern elitist credentials, which he used to become an editorial polemicist for the conservative St. Louis Globe-Democrat. He was astonished by the 1960s. Well-off draft dodgers offended him; the New York construction workers who beat up the protesters were his team. Teddy Kennedy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ability to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153survive\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Chappaquiddick was a confirmation of Buchanan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s worldview. Nixon, he believed (correctly), would have been crucified if he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d done something similar. He and Nixon \u00e2\u20ac\u0153were like working-class kids in an elite university who, caught smoking pot in the dorm, would be expelled and disgraced for life, while the legacy students would be confined to campus for the weekend.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

It was the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153legacy\u00e2\u20ac\u009d students in the C.I.A. and on John F. Kennedy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s staff who had started the war in Vietnam \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153legacy\u00e2\u20ac\u009d students who opposed it; the children of Irish pipe fitters had to fight it. Despite the war\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s provenance, Buchanan was an unabashed hawk who believed Vietnam was necessary to stem the tide of Communism. He continued to believe this even as Nixon proved that Communism wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t monolithic by embracing the Russians in d\u00c3\u00a9tente and going to China \u00e2\u20ac\u201d Buchanan was along for the Beijing trip, appalled. Still, Buchanan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s assessment of the impact of the defeat in Vietnam on American society has real power to it: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The American establishment that led us to victory in World War II \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 would never recover from Vietnam, never regain the confidence of the nation. For Vietnam was not an unwinnable war for a country that had reduced the Japanese empire to smoldering ruins in four years. \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 The simple truth is the American establishment lost the war in Vietnam because it lacked the will to win it.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

This is where Buchanan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s philosophy begins. The country that Nixon inherited in 1969 was \u00e2\u20ac\u0153no longer one nation and one people, but a land divided by war and race and culture and politics.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d The Establishment was feckless, guilt-driven, hypocritical. Buchanan saw school busing to achieve racial integration as a domestic Vietnam. It was social engineering imposed by a liberal judiciary upon white ethnic communities \u00e2\u20ac\u201d the Irish, Italians, Poles \u00e2\u20ac\u201d who had nothing to do with slavery. Once again, the rich kids weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t drafted to ride the buses. Buchanan advised Nixon that the administration\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s position should be: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153outlawing all segregation, but not requiring racial balance.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d This line extends to affirmative action, which he calls \u00e2\u20ac\u0153racial injustice.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d These are the opening battles of Buchanan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s culture war. His case is primal and compelling. These issues are not merely about tribal racial prejudices; they are about class.<\/p>\n

Buchanan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s political calculus is that the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153silent majority\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is larger than the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153fashionable minorities,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d who include violent antiwar protesters \u00e2\u20ac\u201d nearly five bombings a day in 1971-72! \u00e2\u20ac\u201d racial agitators, limousine and lifestyle liberals. In fact, the only real weapon that the counterculturalists have is the elite media, which he described, in a memo to Nixon, as their true adversary: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Nixon White House and the national liberal media are as cobra and mongoose.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Does any of this sound familiar?<\/p>\n

Nixon won the 1972 election in a historic landslide, using Buchanan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s strategy, but lost the war. Buchanan was boggled by Watergate, which he considered stupid. Why bug the Democrats when Nixon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s new majority is about to win bigly? Somehow he managed to skate through the scandal, compartmentalized, kept out of the loop, but asked for cleanup advice \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and famously told Nixon to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153burn the tapes.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

It is easy to be horrified by Buchanan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s gleeful excesses, but that is the reaction he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hoping to elicit. Humorless upper-crust liberalism is the fattest of targets. Beneath the vitriol, though, Buchanan has spent his career raising important questions that our society has never seemed willing to discuss forthrightly. What should be the limits of identity politics? In a democracy, should courts or legislatures decide basic policies like abortion, busing and campaign finance? Should we trade the higher prices that will come from protectionism for the increased stability that might come from keeping more blue-collar jobs at home? These are the issues that Buchanan has been thumping for the past 50 years, and that Donald Trump exploited in 2016. They cannot be dismissed. We are, for the moment, living in Pat Buchanan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s world.<\/p>\n

Read more at The New York Times…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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By Joe Klein – The New York Times Patrick J. Buchanan is a merry troglodyte, a naughty provocateur. He still calls homosexuality \u00e2\u20ac\u0153sodomy,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d just to get the goat of a community he will only reluctantly call \u00e2\u20ac\u0153gay.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d He writes that he wanted to be named ambassador to South Africa by … <\/p>\n

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