Franco was the absolute dictator of Spain and his regime incorporated most of the characteristics of fascism.
That Franco was not personally sympatico with Hitler and Mussolinw changes things not one whit: Hitler and Mussolini were not altogether sympatico with each other.
Nor does it matter that Franco had enough sense to prevent Hitler from sending German troops into Spain.
Franco did send a contingent troops — I think it may have been called the Blue Division — to fight alongside German troops on the Russian front.
But this is all beside the point.
Franco was the absolute dictator of Spain who ruthlessly surpressed any and all political opposition, and Pat Buchanan lionized the man.
That makes Buchanan suspect to say the least.
I see. So we'll just continue to the throw words about without bothering to understand what they mean. And any attempt to clarify the meaning of such words, we will smugly dismiss as "sophistry."
Time was, conservatives understood that language itself is a primary battlefield, that words (like Ideas) have Consequences. The Left certainly gets this, which is one of main reasons they have won nearly every major cultural battle over the last 50 years.
Hitler was indisputably man of the Left, a national socialist. Unfortunately, this was a rather inconvient fact for both the Soviet regime as well as the American administration. So at Nuremburg we agreed never to use the term national socialist and consented to promote the official Soviet propaganda that the evil right had been vanquished by the forces of the good left.
So that simple bit of sophistry resulted in 50 years of conservatives being demonized as "Nazis" and a tide of European socialism that we're still struggling with today.