Heritage History Month Day Twenty-One: Pat Buchanan

Happy Pat Buchanan Day!

It is day twenty-one of Heritage History Month and we are going to focus on the one person in this series who is still alive. Buchanan represents the last major political contender within conservatism who understood the nature of, and was prepared to categorically oppose, the Neoconservative hegemony within the Conservative movement.

Buchanan is one of the few figures who rejects the view of America as a propositional nation, and spent his years urging people to recognize us as a place and a people, not a body of ideas that anyone the world round could simply adopt to become an American. Thus, our political “values” cannot be exported around the world because our values are actually caught up with who we are, and the experiences we have gone through as a people.

Buchanan therefore adopted the non-interventionist foreign policy impulse to concern ourselves with what was good for our people and identity, rather than the government-sponsored militaristic and financial promotion of abstract political ideals. In doing so, he drew the ire of the War Party in Washington and the fake conservatives that sat as one faction of this more general American Regime. It was he who resurrected the phrase from the 1930s: America First!

Buchanan saw in the government-sponsored “free trade” deals of the 80s and 90s a giant mechanism of cultural decline. By exporting jobs overseas and restructuring American economic order, our nation would experience a flux of cheap consumer goods at the expense of social stability, the continuity of culture, and the character of our communities.

Additionally, he warned decades ago that America’s moral fabric was coming undone in our obsession of licentious conceptions of individual rights, that distorted the American tradition of liberty into a weapon of cultural degradation. Buchanan was considered a loon for warning about the Homosexual Agenda, and now we are fighting against sustained pedophilic activities and demonic transhumanists who operate under the guise of mere sexual deviants.

Buchanan was unable in 1992 to defeat the Establishment choice in George Bush for the GOP nomination. In accepting his defeat and subsequently endorsing Bush to oppose Clinton, he gave one of his most important speeches, known now as the Culture War speech. Buchanan, deeply aware as a Catholic that holistic culture wars are fundamental to the transformation of the soul of a nation, predicted the consequences of ignoring this Culture War. Buchanan recognized before so many others the culture of death that would arise in America’s repudiation of the catholic Faith she had inherited in either its Roman or Protestant forms.

Buchanan was one of the biggest political commentators to call into question things like the goodness of World War II, increased secularization, mass immigration, homosexual unions, the Israel Lobby in America, and the cultural genocide of Southern heritage (he is a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans). 

He also was keenly aware of the corruption of America’s elites and endorsed Sam Francis’ call for a “Revolution from the Middle,” finding the residues of Heritage America nestled deep in the Heartland. He issued a clarion call to these heartlanders to rise and awake, a call they may only now be heeding.

Before there was Trump, there was Buchanan. Long live the spirit of Pitchfork Pat.