Pat Buchanan

Pat Buchanan (1938–) is a fascist and paleoconservative "reformer" who ran for the Republican nomination for president of the United States a few times. He began his career in politics working for (who else?) Nixon, and went on to work for Ford and Reagan as an advisor.

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“”We disagree so violently on almost everything that it's a real pleasure to drink with him. If nothing else, he's absolutely honest in his lunacy — and I've found, during my admittedly limited experience in political reporting, that power & honesty very rarely coincide.
—Hunter S. Thompson, in a letter to Garry Wills (Octobert 17th, 1973)[1]

He then built himself up as something of a pundit on the newly-minted venue of cable news. Beginning with the television show Buchanan-Braden in 1982, he became a rotating talking head for CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. He seemed reasonable but kooky until February 2012, when his employers got fed up with his racism and gave him the boot, kicking him off of the Morning Joe Show though he remains friends with his co-workers.[2]

Political career

The first time he ran for president in 1992, he challenged George H. W. Bush for the Republican party nomination, and after he failed, he gave a speech at the convention that hit every single culture war target. In fact, he was the one of the first to use the phrase "culture war" in that very speech. Many have suggested that the speech he gave so frightened moderate Republicans that they swung to either Perot or Clinton.

In his second run for the Republican nomination in 1996, he managed to eke out a victory in the New Hampshire primary along with three other early contests. This gave the Republican establishment a brief scare but Bob Dole easily steamrolled him in "Super Tuesday."

His third run was on Ross Perot's Reform Party ticket in 2000. There was much controversy over his run, as many said he essentially took over the party in a coup, lured by the prospect of $12 million in federal matching funds, then left the party in a shambles. He did very poorly, though the design of the "butterfly ballot" ended up giving him quite a lot of votes in certain liberal, predominantly Jewish precincts in Florida. He was willing to acknowledge that those votes were not likely for him, especially given that he is seen as very antisemitic by Jewish advocacy groups,[3][4], and even fellow conservatives.[5] That and the fact that he rants about the "Israel lobby" every chance he gets.[6][7]

Views
“”Buchanan comes from a very different place ideologically than old Southern racists. He’s a hyper-conservative Catholic, part of an intellectual movement that admired the Spanish and Portuguese fascist regimes. His racism happens to line up more or less with the opinions of segregationists, but he gets there from a different route. That same fascist/authoritarian ideology is why he admires Putin so much.
—Chris Ladd[8]

What does Pat Buchanan stand for? Well, most famously, his opposition to free trade and immigration, both legal and illegal. This has given him some VERY unlikely bedfellows, such as when future Socialist Party USA candidate Brian Moore endorsed him in 2000.

Anti-war?

He is, along with Ron Paul, Ralph Nader, Noam Chomsky, Ramsey Clark, and a handful of other people, among the only categorical anti-war voices since the end of the Cold War. (As opposed to people like Howard Dean who was only against the second Iraq War but supported the first, John Kerry who was against the first and for the second, and Pat Robertson who was only against the NATO bombing of Serbia but supported bombing everyone else.) Of course, this is because Buchanan describes himself as neo-isolationist. By this, he does not mean that the US should not involve itself in other people's disputes; rather, he seems to believe that the US government should have no foreign policy, period. That means no UN, no NATO, no NORAD, etc. To a layperson, he could easily be considered an "economic nationalist"—but his isolationism and hatred of anyone who isn't a heterosexual WASP make it more likely he is just xenophobic. Buchanan's rationale, of course, is that American lives are much too precious to be wasted on pagan filth.

Springtime for Putin

Following the Russian annexation of Crimea, Buchanan declared that God was on Russia's side and "the West is Gomorrah."[9][10] He also spoke in favor of Putin's anti-Gay law, calling on Americans to implement similar bulwarks against "gay propaganda".

Torture

Despite being against the "War on Terror", he has supported the use of torture on potentially innocent people suspected of terrorism.[11]

Holocaust diminution

Buchanan enjoyed a long psychic relationship with Adolf Hitler,[12] whom Buchanan has called:

“”... an individual of great courage, a soldier’s soldier in the Great War, a leader steeped in the history of Europe, who possessed oratorical powers that could awe even those who despised him. But Hitler’s success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path.[13]

He crystallized his views in his 2008 book Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War, wherein he basically takes a pro-German view of World Wars I and II, says that the US shouldn't have gotten involved in WWII, that Churchill helped provoke Japan to attack Pearl Harbor, and that Hitler could have been contained. Naturally, historians,[14] pundits[15] and non-Nazis generally[16] took strong exception.

Unsurprisingly, it had some fans on the far right.[17]

Creationism

A Traditionalist Catholic, Buchanan is an evolution denialist, to the surprise of nobody.[18]

Second career

He worked a stint at MSNBC, despite all of the racist, horrible things he has said publicly and the station's "liberal" slant (although it's likely that MSNBC kept him around for precisely this reason, in the hopes that he'd say something embarrassingly bigoted and make the right look bad. Two can play at that game![19][20][21][22] Though they eventually fired him.[23])

gollark: With a regex.
gollark: How do I match the code bit and the haskell bit in that?
gollark: Okay, pretend the backslashed backticks are just regular backticks.
gollark: AARGH.
gollark: How would I go about matching```++exec\`\`\`haskellcode goes hereover multiple lines\`\`\````

See also
  • Chronicles (magazine): Archaic, right-wing magazine which Buchanan writes for.
  • Paleoconservatism: A far-right ideology that combines hardline social conservatism, nationalism, and 17th-century fiscal policy. Essentially, it is a scary a revival of Alexander Hamilton's antiquated ideals.
  • Hunter S. Thompson: Bizarrely enough, they were drinking buddies. Your guess is as good as ours.
  • Donald Trump: Racist demagogue and ideological successor both economically and politically, up to and including the fascism. Like Buchanan, he was outspoken in his criticism of U.S.-Israeli aid... until he won the presidency and revealed that he was just another Zionist neocon.
  • William S. Lind,File:Wikipedia's W.svg Buchanan's ideological buddy
  • Conspiracism, fascism, ignorance, Islamophobia etc. (wouldn't be nice to crash the servers with too long a list)

References
  1. Fear and Loathing in America (2000) ISBN 0747549648
  2. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/pat-buchanan-booted-msnbc-months-suspended-controversial-book-article-1.1024404
  3. ADL:Patrick Buchanan: Unrepentant Bigot
  4. Salon:Who's afraid of Pat Buchanan?
  5. William F. Buckley, The New York Times:The Enmity Within
  6. Pat Buchanan: Hitler apologist
  7. On Pat Buchanan’s Holocaust denial
  8. In the comments section
  9. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/vladimir-putin-christian-crusader/
  10. http://buchanan.org/blog/putin-one-us-6071
  11. http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=31437
  12. "All Donald Trump should worry about is being the president" The Free-Lance Star. January 30, 2000.
  13. "Pat Buchanan In His Own Words: On Nazis and the Holocaust", via the archives of the Anti-Defamation League.
  14. cf. Victor Davis Hanson and John Lukacs
  15. cf. Christopher Hitchens
  16. cf. Geoffrey Wheatcroft
  17. cf. This article on LewRockwell.com
  18. http://www.theamericancause.org/a-pjb-050808-darwin.htm
  19. http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200907170011 http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2553
  20. http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/04/09/buchanan-both-sides-civil-war/
  21. http://www.adl.org/main_Extremism/Buchanan_Edwards.htm
  22. http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/pat-buchanans-racist-rant
  23. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-17079971
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