Patrick Buchanan Reveals Himself to Be the First Trumpist

NY Slimes ^ | MAY 8, 2017 | JOE KLEIN

[Rockitz]

Book Review

NIXON’S WHITE HOUSE WARS The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever By Patrick J. Buchanan Illustrated. 436 pp. Crown Forum. $30.

Patrick J. Buchanan is a merry troglodyte, a naughty provocateur. He still calls homosexuality “sodomy,” just to get the goat of a community he will only reluctantly call “gay.” He writes that he wanted to be named ambassador to South Africa by President Ford so he could support the apartheid government. He thinks public television is “an upholstered playpen” for liberals. He considers “The New York Times” an epithet. His stump appearances in his outlaw 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns were a guilty pleasure for the reporters who followed him, a hilariously clever, and prescient, exhibition of right-wing populism. “Buchanan,” Richard Nixon once told him, “you’re the only extremist I know with a sense of humor.”

And it is Buchanan, not Nixon, who emerges as the central — and most intriguing — character in “Nixon’s White House Wars,” an entertaining memoir of that benighted presidency. Buchanan’s Nixon is a familiar figure: distant, awkward, smart, defensive and damaged, caring a bit too much what the Establishment — a word Buchanan uses frequently — thinks of him.

...

But Nixon sensed that Buchanan was onto something much bigger than vitriol, a new grand strategy for the Republican Party, a new majority anchored by the white working class, not just in the South, but also in the Northern ethnic, mostly Catholic, enclaves. This philosophy has been the driving vision of Buchanan’s life. It has made him one of the most consequential conservatives of the past half-century. Indeed, he’s a reactionary who was also an avatar: the first Trumpist.

...

[budj]

“Facts don’t care about your feelings.”

Bud Shapiro.

[nathanbedford]

Then he changed.

How so?

[Mycroft Holmes]

Lovely huge image. To see it better on varying sized screens try proportional spacing; like this...

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[KC Burke]

Yes that is a detail I didn’t put in but we were being so perverse that when I saw that on my preview I thought, well that is stupidly appropriate — LOL.

Thanks.

[tired&retired]

That was interesting...

[HKMk23]

I have a map of the United States; it’s actual size.

Last summer I folded it.

[Oklahoma]

In all of those years of watching Crossfire Buchanan seemed like Ronald Reagan’s intellectual son.

But when he began his Presidential quest he became a trade union loving, isolationist protectionist. He also starting sucking-up to the Palestinians and ragheads in general and turned into a dove on fighting Islamic extremism. When he started calling himself a Paleo-Conservative it signalled he had moved away from mainstream Conservatism. His feud with Buckley about Isreal and Zionists sealed his divorce. His current tolerance for Putin proves he should no longer be considered a movement Conservative.