In celebration of our national heritage, we continue our Pride in America series by honoring Pat Buchanan.
If President Donald Trump has an intellectual antecedent and mentor, it is journalist Pat Buchanan. In fact, it would be harder to think of a post-WWII journalist who has had more influence than Pat Buchanan.
Buchanan’s roots as both a journalist and political operative go back to the early Nixon years, but it was Buchanan’s speech at the 1992 Republican convention that recognized the differences between the Democrats and Republicans were not just about economics. He rightly pointed out that the modern Democratic Party had moved left while pretending otherwise. Referring to the Democratic Party convention in New York, Buchanan said:
My friends, like many of you [...] last month, I watched that giant masquerade ball up at Madison Square Garden, where 20,000 liberals and radicals came dressed up as moderates and centrists in the greatest single exhibition of cross-dressing in American political history.
And then Buchanan went on to observe that there was a cultural war, and the two major parties were on opposite sides:
Friends, this election is about more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe and what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself. For this war is for the soul of America. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton & Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side. And so to the Buchanan Brigades out there, we have to come home and stand beside George Bush.
While Buchanan supported President Bush for the 1992 Republican nomination after battling him in the primaries, he again challenged the eventual Republican nominee Bob Dole in the 1996 election. In 2000, he was the Reform Party nominee. He did so because he observed that the globalist establishment had taken over and now had two wings, the Democrat wing and the Republican wing. And he was not about to remain silent.
It was Pat Buchanan who first championed, on a national stage, opposition to illegal immigration, endless foreign interventionism, and the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs. These key themes were later picked up by candidate Donald Trump.
In addition to his newspaper columns, Buchanan authored 14 books, including those with provocative titles such as “The Death of the West,” “Suicide of a Superpower,” “Where the Right Went Wrong,” and “A Republic, Not an Empire.”
In addition to being a gifted writer, Buchanan also had a tremendous understanding of America’s history and its place in the world.
If you want an example of the famous aphorism, “The pen is mightier than the sword,” look no further than Pat Buchanan.
