Pat Buchanan. Glad you brought him up. Local and national talk radio and TV all loved to have Pat as a guest and ridicule him for running 5th in a 4 party race for President. Virtually nobody agreed with him or voted for him. Hosts ridiculed him for being the only anti-immigrant conservative and taking the big government side on that issue.
Virtually all conservatives held the capitalist position of let-the-free-market-decide.
Post 2001 people looked for a scapegoat. It wasn’t politically correct to attack Muslims who controlled our oil. So the invasion from the South became the scapegoat.