Now however, Buchanan’s politics embody the dominant strain within the GOP. And he’s viewed by many as a forerunner to Trump while the Bush dynasty and its brand of establishment conservatism have become anathema.
At the National Conservatism Conference in Washington this week, perhaps the second biggest applause line came when Rep. Riley Moore (R-W.Va.) discussed his effort to award Buchanan the Presidential Medal of Freedom on the stage. The only bigger reaction came when Trump border czar Tom Homan espoused the hardline immigration rhetoric that once made Buchanan an outlier within the GOP.
For Moore, Buchanan deserved the highest civilian honor in the United States because “he was right about pretty much everything 20 years before most people realized it.” In contrast, he told POLITICO Nightly, George H.W. Bush was “wrong about almost everything.”
The conference wasn’t exactly a welcoming venue for those who adhere to the brand of Republican politics that had dominated at the end of the 20th century and the dawn of the 21st century. Even the speaker delegated to defend Trump’s airstrikes against Iranian nuclear sites, Max Abrahms, a professor at Northeastern University, took pains to insist he was not “a neo-con” — an even more deadly pejorative than “liberal” at the venue.
“Buchanan has been revered by the under-30 crowd basically the entire time that I’ve been working in professional politics,” explained Nick Solheim, the head of American Moment, an influential right wing nonprofit. “[P]eople have been posting vaporwave edits of Pat Buchanan since 2016.”
In his view, the admiration for Buchanan was because young Republicans viewed him as a proto-Trump, “He stood for and believed in all the same things that the president originally ran on in 2015 and that’s specifically, you know, his views on trade, immigration and foreign policy across the board,” said Solheim.
The popularity of the former speechwriter-turned-television commentator was hard to miss at the conference. One of the most popular souvenirs available were notebooks given out by American Moment that had Buchanan’s face on the cover and the quote, “If a country forgets where it came from, how will its people know who they are?”
But even beyond the confines of the Washington, D.C., hotel ballroom, Republican voters have turned against the internationalist, free trade-oriented party of the past. As Moore put it, “the George Bush party is dead. We have moved past that.”
“Many of those folks that don’t like this new Republican Party, or I imagine most, at this point are probably Democrats, which is fine,” he jibed. “It’s probably better for us, and we’ve expanded our coalition into the working class and across many different demographics across this country, and I think we have a coalition that’s going to lead us towards a long-term governing majority.”
In other words, it was a party that moved on from Bush’s 1000 points of light, which wanted to “make kinder the face of the Nation and gentler the face of the world.” In its place is a more confrontational version, focused on the culture war that Buchanan talked about.
David Tell, a former aide to Bush on his 1992 campaign, agrees that Buchanan’s platform is eerily similar to the policies of Trump’s GOP. However, he added, there’s now a “Huey Long element not previously present in American conservatism.”
In a reminder of how rapidly this ideological transformation took hold, as recently as 2012 Buchanan was persona non grata, fired from his cable news perch after his book entitled Suicide of a Superpower — it was considered too controversial for its musings on the decline of Christianity and the harms of mass immigration.
When asked if the ascendancy of Buchanan would last and his school of thought would endure within the party, Moore said simply, “we’re here to stay. And this isn’t the end. This is just the beginning.”
// politico