Patrick J. Buchanan recently announced that he would retire from opinion writing, the vocation that gave him his start in politics, so I suppose I should reflect a little on his legacy. I’ve long believed there’s a case to be made that Buchanan, not Buckley, not Goldwater, and not even Ronald Reagan, is the most consequential right-wing figure of the past century. That is a central contention of the book I’m currently laboring to finish.
Throughout his career, Buchanan formed the advance guard, or the rear guard depending on your perspective, of the Conservative Movement. After Goldwater’s disastrous defeat at the hands seemed to be the conclusive referendum on what mainstream Americans’ thought of Conservatism, Buchanan was really the first person to take the movement and its ideology into the highest reaches of power. He did this by attaching himself to Richard Nixon, a man that most Conservatives disliked and distrusted. He was to be something of a designated liaison officer to the right for Nixon, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan was to serve for liberals, but his ferocious loyalty to the man transformed him into something else: a factotum, one of his most trusted advisors, and even something, at least in Buchanan’s eyes, a surrogate son. He invented the term “silent majority,” told Nixon to adopt an “anti-establishment” stance, which appealed to Nixon’s own insecurities and prejudices, and thereby laid the foundation for modern right-wing populism.
Buchanan’s memos as White House advisor shaped policy in ways that have profound effects to this day. For instance, in 1971, the United States Congress passed Comprehensive Child Development Act, which would have created a national system of daycare, after-school programs, as well as health care for children. A child of poverty, the depression, and the Keynesian consensus, Nixon was not intrinsically allergic to this kind of expansive state initiative. The administration had even taken a role in shaping the bill. Nixon asked his advisors for two statements: one that would for passing, one for vetoing. Even Nixon advisors on the right thought the rationale for its rejection should just be its cost. Pat Buchanan’s vision went farther: he saw it as a threat to the institution of the idea of the family itself, and thereby to Western civilization, then faced with the double threat of godless Communism abroad and insidious liberalism at home. His language made its way into the President’s veto. Even before the grassroots power of Conservatism could make itself felt as a political force later in the 1970s, Buchanan was its spear tip.