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Pat Buchanan

American politician and commentator

Patrick Joseph Buchanan (born November 2, 1938) is an American paleoconservative political commentator, columnist, politician and broadcaster. Buchanan was an assistant and special consultant to U.S. Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan, and was an original host on CNN's Crossfire. In 1992 and 1996, he sought the Republican presidential nomination against eventual nominees George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole, respectively, campaigning against Bush's breaking of his "Read my lips: no new taxes" pledge, as well as his foreign policy and positions on social issues. In 2000, he was the Reform Party's presidential nominee.

The last consequence of a dying Christianity is a dying people. Not one post-Christian nation has a birth rate sufficient to keep it alive….The death of European Christianity means the disappearance of the European tribe, a prospect visible in the demographic statistics of every Western nation.

Quotes

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The War Between the States was about independence.
 
Though Hitler was indeed racist and anti-Semitic to the core, a man who without compunction could commit murder and genocide, he was also an individual of great courage, a soldier's soldier in the Great War, a political organizer of the first rank, a leader steeped in the history of Europe, who possessed oratorical powers that could awe even those who despised him... Hitler's success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path.

1970s

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  • Though Hitler was indeed racist and anti-Semitic to the core, a man who without compunction could commit murder and genocide, he was also an individual of great courage, a soldier's soldier in the Great War, a political organizer of the first rank, a leader steeped in the history of Europe, who possessed oratorical powers that could awe even those who despised him... Hitler's success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path.

1990s

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  • The War Between the States was about independence, about self-determination, about the right of a people to break free of a government to which they could no longer give allegiance... How long is this endless groveling before every cry of 'racism' going to continue before the whole country collectively throws up?
    • Buchanan's syndicated column (July 28, 1993).
  • As you may have heard in my last campaign, I am called by many names. “Protectionist” is one of the nicer ones; but it is inexact. I am an economic nationalist. To me, the country comes before the economy; and the economy exists for the people. I believe in free markets, but I do not worship them. In the proper hierarchy of things, it is the market that must be harnessed to work for man – and not the other way around.
    • Speech: Chicago Council on Foreign Relations (November 1998)

2000s

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  • In the wake of Jean-Marie Le Pen's capture of 17 percent of the vote in the first round of France's presidential election, the French Establishment, too, has shown great tolerance for fascist tactics in resisting any rebirth of the European Right. … Though Le Pen has made radical and foolish statements, there is no evidence he is a Nazi. His hero is not Hitler but Joan of Arc, and he and his National Front have accepted defeat in every election they have lost. No, Le Pen is hated and feared not just for who he is, but for the issues he has raised. ... As it is often the criminal himself who is first to cry, "Thief!" so it is usually those who scream, "Fascist!" loudest who are the quickest to resort to anti-democratic tactics.
    Today, the greatest threat to the freedom and independence of the nations of Europe comes not from Le Pen and that 17 percent of French men and women who voted for him. It comes from an intolerant European Establishment that will accept no rollback of its powers or privileges, nor any reversal of policies it deems "progressive."
  • A cabal of polemicists and public officials seek to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America’s interests.
    • When asked: Why were you against the war in Iraq?.
    • The Globalist (March 2003).
  • I have family roots in the South, in Mississippi. When the Civil War came, Cyrus Baldwin enlisted and did not survive Vicksburg. William Buchanan of Okolona, who would marry Baldwin’s daughter, fought at Atlanta and was captured by General Sherman. William Baldwin Buchanan was the name given to my father and by him to my late brother... As a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, I have been to their gatherings. I spoke at the 2001 SCV convention in Lafayette, LA. The Military Order of the Stars and Bars presented me with a battle flag and a wooden canteen like the ones my ancestors carried.
  • Listen up, me name be Buchanan, me knows enough things bout politics. Get involved, mack daddies. Y'all better realize, that nothing be a better way to get your kicks. West side, aight?
    • As quoted in "Rekognize" (25 July 2004), Da Ali G Show.
  • They charge us with antisemitism, The truth is, those hurling these charges harbor a 'passionate attachment' to a nation not our own that causes them to subordinate the interests of their own country and to act on an assumption that, somehow, what's good for Israel is good for America.
    • Neo-Conned! Just War Principles: A Condemnation of War in Iraq (eds. Liam O'Huallachain and J. Forrest Sharpe, 2005)
  • Neocons say we attack them because they are Jewish. We do not. We attack them because their warmongering threatens our country.
    • Neo-Conned! Just War Principles: A Condemnation of War in Iraq (eds. Liam O'Huallachain and J. Forrest Sharpe, 2005)
  • If Americans are the most efficient workers on earth and work longer hours than almost any other advanced nation, why are we getting our clocks cleaned? Answer: While American workers are world-class, our elites are mentally challenged. So rhapsodic are they about the Global Economy they have forgotten their own country. Europeans, Japanese, Canadians and Chinese sell us so much more than they buy from us because they have rigged the rules of world trade.

The Death of the West (2002)

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  • In 1960, only sixteen million Americans did not trace their ancestors to Europe. Today, the number is eighty million. No nation has ever undergone so rapid and radical a transformation.
  • Uncontrolled immigration threatens to deconstruct the nation we grew up in and convert America into a conglomeration of peoples with almost nothing in common — not history, heroes, language, culture, faith, or ancestors. Balkanization beckons.
  • In half a lifetime, many Americans have seen their God dethroned, their heroes defiled, their culture polluted, their values assaulted, their country invaded, and themselves demonized as extremists and bigots for holding on to beliefs Americans have held for generations.
  • What was right and true yesterday is wrong and false today. What was immoral and shameful — promiscuity, abortion, euthanasia, suicide — has become progressive and praiseworthy. Nietzsche called it the transvaluation of all values; the old virtues become sins, and the old sins become virtues.
  • The West is dying. Its nations have ceased to reproduce, and their populations have stopped growing and begun to shrink. Not since the Black Death carried off a third of Europe in the fourteenth century has there been a graver threat to the survival of Western civilization.
  • This struggle to preserve the old creeds, cultures, and countries of the West is the new divide between Left and Right; this struggle will define what it means to be a conservative. This is the cause of the twenty-first century and the agenda of conservatism for the remainder of our lives.
  • Why do predictions of the Death of the West not belong on the same shelf as the predictions of 'nuclear winter' and 'global warming'? Answer: the Death of the West is not a prediction of what is going to happen, it is a depiction of what is happening now.
  • The new hedonism seems unable to give people a reason to go on living. Its earliest fruits appear to be poisonous. Will this new "liberating" culture that our young have so enthusiastically embraced prove the deadliest carcinogen of them all? And if the West is in the grip of a "culture of death," as the pope contends and the statistics seem to show, is Western civilization about to follow Lenin's empire to the same inglorious end?
  • For it is this cultural revolution that has led to just such a "profound modification in the ideas" of peoples. And those ideas have made Western elites apparently indifferent to the death of their civilization. They do not seem to care if the end of the West comes by depopulation, by a surrender of nationhood, or by drowning in waves of Third World immigration.
  • While world population had doubled to six billion in forty years, the European peoples had stopped reproducing. Their populations had begun to stagnate and, in many countries, had already begun to fall. Of Europe's forty-seven nations, only one, Muslim Albania, was, by 2000, maintaining a birthrate sufficient to keep it alive indefinitely.
  • The prognosis is grim. Between 2000 and 2050, world population will grow by more than three billion to over nine billion people, but this 50 percent increase in global population will come entirely in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, as one hundred million people of European stock vanish from the earth.
  • As Western peoples have begun to die, the vacant rooms in the House of the West will not long remain vacant. In America, the places prepared for the forty million unborn lost since Roe v. Wade have been filled by the grateful poor of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. As Europeans forgo children, the places prepared for them, too, will be occupied by strangers.
  • The hearts of many on the Right are in cutting marginal tax rates and eliminating the capital gains tax. Good causes to be sure. But what doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his country? Is whether the GDP rises at 2 or 3 or 4 percent as important as whether or not Western civilization endures and we remain one nation under God and one people? With the collapsing birthrate, open borders, and the triumph of an anti-Western multiculturalism, that is what is at issue today — the survival of America as a nation, separate and unique, and of Western civilization itself — and too many conservatives have gone AWOL in the last great fight of our lives.
  • Immigration is a necessary subject for national debate, for it is about who we are as a people. Like the Mississippi, with its endless flow of life-giving water, immigration has enriched America throughout history. But when the Mississippi floods its banks, the devastation can be enormous.
  • Traditionalists can run, but they can't hide. With our public schools and public square de-Christianized, our private schools and private institutions are next. Through the hook of public money, all will be made godless, all forced to conform to the catechism of a revolution that declares infallibly, "All lifestyles are equal."
  • The sexual revolution has begun to devour its children. The statistics on abortion, divorce, collapsing birthrates, single-parent homes, teen suicides, school shootings, drug use, child abuse, spouse abuse, violent crime, incarceration rates, promiscuity, and falling test scores show how this society, in which the cultural revolution is ascendant, is decomposing and dying. Empty nurseries and full waiting rooms outside the psychiatrist's office testify that all is not well. But before this diseased culture runs its course, it may take the West down with it.
  • We are two countries, two peoples. An older America is passing away, and a new America is coming into its own. The new Americans who grew up in the 1960s and the years since did not like the old America. They thought it a bigoted, reactionary, repressive, stodgy country. So they kicked the dust from their heels and set out to build a new America, and they have succeeded. To its acolytes the cultural revolution has been a glorious revolution. But to millions, they have replaced the good country we grew up in with a cultural wasteland and a moral sewer that are not worth living in and not worth fighting for—their country, not ours.

Where the Right Went Wrong (2004)

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  • There is no conservative party left in Washington. Conservative thinkers and writers who were to be the watchdogs of orthodoxy have been as vigilant in policing party deviations from principle as was Cardinal Law in collaring the predator-priests of the Boston archdiocese.
  • The Beltway Right has entered into a civil union with Big Brother.
  • Under the rubric of conservatism, the Republican party of Bush I and II has been reinventing itself into what conservatives would have once recognized as a Rockefeller party reciting Reaganite rhetoric.
  • A civil war is going to break out inside the Republican Party along the old trench lines of the Goldwater-Rockefeller wars of the 1960s, a war for the heart and soul and future of the party.
  • Neoconservatives are the boat people of the McGovern revolution.
  • Kristol's warning that neoconservatives could go to Kerry was an admission of what many have long recognized. The neoconservatives are not really conservatives at all. They are impostors and opportunists.
  • Nine days after an attack on the United States, this tiny clique of intellectuals [Neocons] was telling the President of the United States...that if he did not follow their war plans, he would be charged publicly with a "decisive surrender" to terrorism.
  • The Bush Doctrine is a prescription for permanent war for permanent peace, though wars are the death of republics.
  • The Bush National Security Strategy is the imperial edict of a superpower out to exploit its present supremacy to make itself permanent Lord Protector of the universe.
  • The Bush Doctrine is democratic imperialism. This will bleed, bankrupt and isolate this republic. This overthrows the wisdom of the Founding Fathers about what America should be all about.
  • Listening to the neoconservatives, Bush invaded Iraq, united the Arab world against us, isolated us from Europe, and fulfilled to the letter bin Laden's prophecy as to what we were about.
  • If Iraq collapses in chaos and civil war, there will be a ferocious fight in this country over who misled us and who may have lied us, into war. Into the dock will go the neoconservatives whose class project this was.
  • Terrorism is the price of empire. If we do not wish to pay it, we must give up the empire.
  • We are not hated for who we are. We are hated for what we do. It is not our principles that have spawned pandemic hatred of America in the Islamic world. It is our policies.
  • If war is the continuation of politics by other means, terrorism is the continuation of war by other means.
  • America's enemy in the Islamic world is not a state we can crush with sanctions or an enemy we can defeat with force of arms. The enemy is a cause, a movement, an idea.
  • U.S. dominance of the Middle East is not the corrective to terror. It is a cause of terror. Were we not over there, the 9/11 terrorists would not have been over here.
  • The Sharon Plan is not a peace plan. It is a unilateral solution to be imposed by Israel.... A Palestinian leader who signs on to this surrender of land and rights would be signing his death warrant.
  • As China is the one nation with the size, population, ideology and power to contest the United States for hegemony in Asia, is war inevitable? Answer: No more inevitable than was war between Germany and Great Britain in 1914.
  • It is false to say President Bush presided over a "jobless recovery." His trade deficits have created many millions of jobs in China.
  • Free trade is the serial killer of American manufacturing and the Trojan Horse of World Government. It is the primrose path to the loss of economic independence and national sovereignty. Free trade is a bright shining lie.
  • Globalization is the economic treason that dare not speak it name.
  • Bush has compiled a fiscal record of startling recklessness.
  • There is no conservative party in Washington. There is a Democratic Party of tax-and-spend and a Republican Party of guns and butter and tax cuts, too. Washington is all accelerator, the brakes are gone.
  • The dirty little secret is that Congress no longer wants the accountability that goes with the wielding of power.
  • The Left has found the Ho Chi Minh Trail around democracy...to impose its views and values upon our society without having to win elections or persuade elected legislators.
  • Ten years after NAFTA, Mexico's leading export to America is still — Mexicans. America is becoming Mexamerica.
  • If the success of the Bush presidency hinges on the outcome of the war in Iraq, that war is even more critical to the cabal that exploited 9/11 to maneuver us into it... All the neocon eggs are in the Baghdad basket.
  • If America is about anything, she is about freedom. We have seen in the burgeoning Department of Homeland Security and at our airports and in the color-coded alerts the beginning of the erosion of that freedom.

State of Emergency (2006)

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  • What can be said for a man who would allow his home to be invaded by strangers who demanded they be fed, clothed, housed and granted the rights of the first-born? What can be said for a ruling elite that permits this to be done to the nation, and who celebrate it as a milestone of moral progress?
  • Chicano chauvinists and Mexican agents have made clear their intent to take back through demography and culture what their ancestors lost through war.
  • Will the American Southwest become a giant Kosovo, a part of the nation separated from the rest by language, ethnicity, history and culture, to be reabsorbed in all but name by Mexico from whom we took these lands in the time of Jackson and Polk?
  • With perhaps 4 million illegal aliens having broken in in Bush's five-and-a-half years in office, and our border states being daily breached by thousands more, can anyone say President Bush has protected the states of this Union against that invasion? In an earlier America, this dereliction of constitutional duty would have called forth articles of impeachment.
  • High among the costs of immigration is the appearance among us of diseases that never before afflicted us and the sudden reappearance of contagious diseases that researchers and doctors had eradicated long ago. Malaria, polio, hepatitis, tuberculosis and such rarities of the Third World as dengue fever, Chagas' Disease and leprosy are surfacing here...
  • By 2050 there will be almost 2.5 times as many people here as in 1960: 420 million. The share of the population of European descent will be a minority as it is today in California, Texas and New Mexico. And that minority will be aging, shrinking and dying. There will be as many Hispanics here, 102 million, as there are Mexicans today in Mexico...
  • By nation of origin of our people, by 2050, America will be a Third World country. Our great cities will all look like Los Angeles today. Los Angeles and the cities of the Southwest will look like Juarez and Tijuana...
  • Mass immigration is swamping the GOP base. Tens of millions of immigrants who vote Democratic, once they are naturalized and registered, have come and are coming to America. History may yet record that the Immigration Act of 1965 act converted 'The Emerging Republican Majority' of Kevin Phillips' classic work into the Lost Colony of the 21st century.
  • In 1960, the U.S. population was 89% white. By 1990, it was 76%. Today, it is under 70%. By 2050, white Americans, the most loyal voting bloc the Republican Party has, that provides 90% of all GOP votes, will be just another minority because of an immigration policy championed by Republicans. When John Stuart Mill called the Tories "the Stupid Party," he was not entirely wrong.
  • With the Constitution, the law, and the politics on the side of doing his duty and securing our broken border, why does President Bush not act? What is paralyzing the White House? Answer: Political correctness, political cowardice, political opportunism, a sense of guilt for America's sins, and twin ideologies that have a grip on our elites not unlike a religious cult. The proud old boast, "Here, sir, the people rule!" no longer applies. We no longer live in a truly democratic republic.
  • The Bush plan is economic treason against the American worker. That "civil rights leaders" are silent about the dispossession of the black working class, that unions are not marching to denounce this sellout of blue-collar and white-collar America, only tells us that the amorality of the transnational corporation has infected both. Solidarity be damned, it is all about money now.
  • The MEChA slogan is "Por la Raza todo. Fuera de La Raza nada," which translates, "For the race, everything. Outside of the race, nothing." The MEChA slogan seems a conscious echo of the Fascist slogan of Mussolini: "Everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing above the state."
  • What makes the Pastor-CFR [Council on Foreign Relations] plan remarkable is that those who would abolish America are out of the closet. The penultimate step to world government, a North American Union built on the model of the European Union, to one day merge with it in a World Union of Nations and Peoples, is before us on the table.
  • The temptation is to think that Vicente Fox, who heads a country 46% of whose people would like to live in the United States, is but another failed Third World visionary prattling on for the benefit of globalists who have been beavering away on their impossible dream for generations...
  • The reality is otherwise. [Vicente] Fox & friends are far closer than all but a few realize to making inevitable a North American Union where American sovereignty is dissipated and the republic is no more.
  • This strategy aims directly at a reannexation of the Southwest, not militarily, but ethnically, linguistically and culturally through transfer of millions of Mexicans into the United States and a migration of "Anglos" out of the lands Mexico lost in 1848. In California, the project is well advanced.
  • Stated bluntly, the Aztlan Strategy entails the end of the United States as a sovereign, self-sufficient, independent republic, the passing away of the American nation. They are coming to conquer us.
  • Democracy is not enough. If the culture dies, the country dies.
  • Who would lay down his life for the UN, EU or a "North American Union?"… Every true nation is the creation of a unique people, separate from all others. Indeed, if America is an ideological nation grounded no deeper than in the sandy soil of abstract ideas, she will not survive the storms of this century any more than the Soviet Union survived the storms of the last...
  • A true nation is held together not by any political creed but by patriotism.... For two centuries, men have died for America.
  • The seething racial resentment in the Third World against the West — decades after independence and trillions in foreign aid — should cause second thoughts about opening our borders to mass immigration from that world. Not everyone coming here brings in his heart the passionate attachment to America we attribute to the peoples of Ellis Island.
  • Young Asian males are nine times as likely as white youth to belong to a gang and Hispanic youth are 19 times more likely. A disproportionate share of Hispanic young and poor are thus assimilating into a misogynistic, rebellious, youth sub-culture of drugs, gangs, crime, contempt for formal education, and hostility to police.
  • Like the Paris riots, the struggle over French history raises grave questions for Europe. How does the presence of 20 million Muslims who come from nations where men believe their grandfathers were exploited and persecuted by Europeans advance the unity and security of Europe? How is Europe made stronger by such "diversity"?
  • Islamization of Europe is an unavoidable consequence, indeed, an inevitability, once Europe ceased to reproduce itself. The descendants of the men who went out from Europe to conquer and Christianize the world have decided to leave the world. The culture of death triumphs, as the poor but fecund Muslims, expelled centuries ago, return to inherit the estate.
  • In his litany of famous immigrants who have contributed mightily to America, JFK does not mention a single woman, African or Asian. All are males and all were from Europe, except one West Indian: Alexander Hamilton. And JFK assures the nation, "Immigrants would still be given tests for health, intelligence, morality and security..."
  • Our illegal population alone exceeds the all the Irish, Jewish and British immigrants who came. Each year, we catch more people breaking in at the border than all the Swedes and Norwegians who came to America in 200 years. Half a million illegal aliens succeed in breaking in every year, more than all the Greeks or Poles who came legally from the Revolution to 1960.
  • The crisis of the West is a collapsing culture and vanishing peoples, as a Third World that grows by 100 million people, the equivalent of a new Mexico, every 18 months, mounts the greatest invasion in history of the world. If we do not shake off our paralysis, the West comes to an end.
  • Concerned about his legacy, George W. Bush may yet live to see his name entered into the history of his country as the president who lost the American Southwest that James K. Polk won for the United States.
  • If we do not solve our civilizational crisis -- a disintegrating culture, dying populations, and invasions unresisted -- the children born in 2006 will witness in their lifetimes the death of the West. In our hearts we know what must be done. We must stop the invasion. But do our leaders have the vision and will to do it?

2010s

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  • Israeli and U.S. interests often run parallel, but they are not the same. Israel is concerned with a neighborhood. We are concerned with a world of 300 million Arabs and a billion Muslims. Our policies cannot be the same. If they are, we will end up with all of Israel’s enemies, who are legion, and only Israel’s friends, who are few.
  • Though blacks are outnumbered 5-to-1 in the population by whites, they commit eight times as many crimes against whites as the reverse. By those 2007 numbers, a black male was 40 times as likely to assault a white person as the reverse. If interracial crime is the ugliest manifestation of racism, what does this tell us about where racism really resides — in America?
  • The counterculture of the ’60s would be used as a foil to build 49-state landslides for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, but then the ’60s views and values were embraced by the elites and came to dominate the culture in the time of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Given his baggage, “Slick Willy” of Yoknapatawpha County would have been a comic figure in the 1950s. Today he is the Democratic Party’s beau ideal of a statesman.
  • Historically, as the faith dies, the culture and civilization to which it gave birth die, and then the people die. And a new tribe with its own gods comes to occupy the emptying land. On the old and new continents, it is the native-born of European ancestry who are de-Christianizing, aging and dying.
  • People are agitating for the overthrow of the old order and a new deal for America. For there is a palpable sense that the game is rigged against Middle America and for the benefit of insiders who grow rich and fat not by making things or building things, but by manipulating money.
  • The great and growing populations of mankind are in the Third World. Countless millions are determined to come to the West, legally if they can, illegally if they must. And the more who succeed, the more who come. Either Western nations take tough measures to secure their borders, or the Western nations will be swamped. The character of their countries will be altered forever, and smaller countries will become unrecognizable. And as this is happening, ethnic and racial clashes will become more common, as they are now becoming across Europe.
  • Given the shrinking populations inside Europe and the waves of immigrants rolling in from Africa and the Middle and Near East, an Islamic Europe seems to be in the cards before the end of the century.
  • Military intervention for reasons of ideology or nation building is not an Eisenhower or Nixon or Reagan tradition. It is not a Republican tradition. It is a Bush II-neocon deformity, an aberration that proved disastrous for the United States and the Middle East.
  • What is the moral argument for an affirmative action that justifies unending race discrimination against a declining white working class, who have become the expendables of our multicultural regime?
  • “Angry white male” is now an acceptable slur in culture and politics. So it is that people of that derided ethnicity, race, and gender see in Donald Trump someone who unapologetically berates and mocks the elites who have dispossessed them, and who despise them. Is it any surprise that militant anti-government groups attract white males? Is it so surprising that the Donald today, like Jess Willard a century ago, is seen by millions as “The Great White Hope”?
  • The 1960s and early 1970s were a time of social revolution in America, and President Nixon, by ending the draft and ending the Vietnam war, presided over what one columnist called the “cooling of America.” But if Hillary Clinton takes power, and continues America on her present course, which a majority of Americans rejected in the primaries, there is going to a bad moon rising.
  • the folks Obama and Clinton detest, disparage, and pity are the white working- and middle-class folks Richard Nixon celebrated as Middle Americans and the Silent Majority. They are the folks who brought America through the Depression, won World War II, and carried us through the Cold War from Truman in 1945 to victory with Ronald Reagan in 1989. These are the Trump supporters. They reside mostly in red states like West Virginia, Kentucky and Middle Pennsylvania, and Southern, Plains and Mountain states that have provided a disproportionate share of the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who fought and died to guarantee the freedom of plutocratic LGBT lovers to laugh at and mock them at $2,400-a-plate dinners.
  • America’s media seem utterly lacking in introspection. Do they understand why so many people hate them so? Do they care? Are they so smugly self-righteous and self-regarding they cannot see?
  • Trump did not create the forces that propelled his candidacy. But he recognized them, tapped into them, and unleashed a gusher of nationalism and populism that will not soon dissipate.
  • Middle America believes the establishment is not looking out for the nation but for retention of its power. And in attacking Trump it is not upholding some objective moral standard but seeking to destroy a leader who represents a grave threat to that power. Trump’s followers see an American Spring as crucial, and they are not going to let past boorish behavior cause them to abandon the last best chance to preserve the country they grew up in.
  • Putin has read the new century better than his rivals. While the 20th century saw the world divided between a Communist East and a free and democratic West, new and different struggles define the 21st. The new dividing lines are between social conservatism and self-indulgent secularism, between tribalism and transnationalism, between the nation-state and the New World Order. On the new dividing lines, Putin is on the side of the insurgents. Those who envision de Gaulle's Europe of Nations replacing the vision of One Europe, toward which the EU is heading, see Putin as an ally.
  • We today confront a Chinese Communist dictatorship and superpower that seeks to displace America as first power on earth, and to drive the U.S. military back across the Pacific. Who is responsible for this epochal blunder? The elites of both parties. Bush Republicans from the 1990s granted China most-favored-nation status and threw open America’s market. Result: China has run up $4 trillion in trade surpluses with the United States. Her $375 billion trade surplus with us in 2017 far exceeded the entire Chinese defense budget. We fed the tiger, and created a monster.
  • On many issues — naming Scalia-like judges and backing Reagan-like tax cuts — President Trump is a conventional Republican. Where he was exceptional in 2016, where he stood out starkly from his GOP rivals, where he won decisive states like Pennsylvania, was on his uniquely Trumpian agenda to put America and Americans first—from which the Bush Republicans recoiled. Trump alone pledged to kill amnesty and secure the border with a 30-foot wall to halt the invasion of our country. Trump alone pledged to end the de-industrialization of America and bring back our lost factories and lost jobs. Trump alone pledged to end the democracy-crusading and extricate us from the endless Mideast wars into which George Bush, Barack Obama and the War Party had plunged the nation. And, upon how he delivers on these three uniquely Trumpian issues will hang his political fate and history's assessment of whether he was a good, great or failed president.
  • While our forefathers would have not hesitated to do what was needed to secure our borders and expel intruders, it is not a settled matter as to whether this generation has the will to preserve the West. Progressives may parade their moral superiority as they cheer the defeat of the "zero tolerance" policy. But they have no solution to the crisis. Indeed, many do not even see it as a crisis because they do not see themselves as belonging to a separate tribe, nation or people threatened by an epochal invasion from the Third World. They see themselves as belonging to an ideological nation, a nation of ideas, whose mission is to go forth and preach and teach all peoples the gospel of democracy, diversity and equality.
  • Free trade is the policy of fading and failing powers, past their prime. In the half-century following passage of the Corn Laws, the British showed the folly of free trade. They began the second half of the 19th century with an economy twice that of the USA and ended it with an economy half of ours, and equaled by a Germany, which had, under Bismarck, adopted what was known as the American System. Of the nations that have risen to economic preeminence in recent centuries—the British before 1850, the United States between 1789 and 1914, post-war Japan, China in recent decades—how many did so through free trade? None. All practiced economic nationalism.
  • With secularism’s triumph, we Americans have no common religion, no common faith, no common font of moral truth. We disagree on what is right and wrong, moral and immoral. Without an agreed-upon higher authority, values become matters of opinion. And ours are in conflict and irreconcilable. Understood. But how, then, do we remain one nation and one people?
  • Leftists may still dominate mainstream media. But their unconcealed hatred of Trump and the one-sided character of their coverage has cost them much of the credibility they had half a century ago. The media are seen as militant partisans masquerading as journalists.

Suicide of a Superpower (2011)

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We must stop the invasion. But do our leaders have the vision and will to do it?
  • The last consequence of a dying Christianity is a dying people. Not one post-Christian nation has a birth rate sufficient to keep it alive….The death of European Christianity means the disappearance of the European tribe, a prospect visible in the demographic statistics of every Western nation.
  • White America is an endangered species. By 2020, whites over 65 will out-number those 17 and under. Deaths will exceed births. The white population will begin to shrink and, should present birth rates persist, slowly disappear.
  • Peoples of European descent are not only in a relative but a real decline. They are aging, dying, disappearing. This is the existential crisis of the West.
  • Historians will look back in stupor at 20th and 21st century Americans who believed the magnificent republic they inherited would be enriched by bringing in scores of millions from the failed states of the Third World.
  • We may deny the existence of ethnonationalism, detest it, condemn it. But this creator and destroyer of empires and nations is a force infinitely more powerful than globalism, for it engages the heart. Men will die for it. Religion, race, culture and tribe are the four horsemen of the coming apocalypse.
  • We borrow from Europe to defend Europe. We borrow from the Gulf states to defend the Gulf states. We borrow from Japan to defend Japan. Is it not a symptom of senility to be borrowing from the world so we can defend the world?
  • Are vital U.S. interests more imperiled by what happens in Iraq where were have 50,000 troops, or Afghanistan where we have 100,000, or South Korea where we have 28,000 — or by what is happening on our border with Mexico? … What does it profit America if we save Anbar and lose Arizona?
  • We are trying to create a nation that has never before existed, of all the races, tribes, cultures and creeds of Earth, where all are equal. In this utopian drive for the perfect society of our dreams we are killing the real country we inherited — the best and greatest country on earth.
  • Where equality is enthroned, freedom is extinguished. The rise of the egalitarian society means the death of the free society.
  • Half a century on, the disaster is manifest. The robust and confident Church of 1958 no longer exists. Catholic colleges and universities remain Catholic in name only. Parochial schools and high schools are closing as rapidly as they opened in the 1950s. The numbers of nuns, priests and seminarians have fallen dramatically. Mass attendance is a third of what it was. From the former Speaker of the House to the Vice President, Catholic politicians openly support abortion on demand.
  • Through its support of mass immigration, its paralysis in power to prevent 12-20 million illegal aliens from entering and staying, its failure to address the “anchor-baby” issue, the Republican Party has birthed a new electorate that will send it the way of the Whigs.
  • Mexico is moving north. Ethnically, linguistically and culturally, the verdict of 1848 is being over-turned. Will this Mexican nation within a nation advance the goals of the Constitution — to “insure domestic tranquility” and ‘make us a more perfect union’? Or have we imperiled our union?
  • We have accepted today the existence in perpetuity of a permanent underclass of scores of millions who cannot cope and must be carried by society — fed, clothed, housed, tutored, medicated at taxpayer’s expense their entire lives. We have a dependent nation the size of Spain in our independent America. We have a new division in our country, those who pay a double or triple fare, and those who ride forever free.

2020s

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  • The 1960s radicals who vilified our country as "Amerika" were rightly called "anti-American." Today, the difference between what they said about America and what our highest elected leaders are saying is hard to discern.
  • In relative terms, America is not so dominant a power as it was 20 years ago, while her adversaries seem stronger and more united. Our most powerful rival, Xi Jinping's China, seems belligerent and bellicose compared with the China we brought into the World Trade Organization. Looking back, and looking ahead, the trend line is not good.
  • Whatever we may think of Putin, he is no Stalin. He has not murdered millions or created a gulag archipelago. Nor is he "irrational," as some pundits rail. He does not want a war with us, which would be worse than ruinous to us both. Putin is a Russian nationalist, patriot, traditionalist and a cold and ruthless realist looking out to preserve Russia as the great and respected power it once was and he believes it can be again. But it cannot be that if NATO expansion does not stop or if its sister state of Ukraine becomes part of a military alliance whose proudest boast is that it won the Cold War against the nation Putin has served all his life.

Quotes about Buchanan

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Listed in alphabetical order by author or source.
  • Patrick Buchanan, for one, claims that his views represent the true faith of the American right. He wants to drive the neocon infidels from the temple (or, more accurately, from the church). Unfortunately for Mr. Buchanan, his version of conservatism--nativist, protectionist, Isolationist--attracts few followers, as evidenced by his poor showings in Republican presidential primaries and the scant influence of his inaptly named magazine, the American Conservative. Buchananism isn't American conservatism as we understand it today. It's paleoconservatism, a poisonous brew that was last popular when Father Charles Coughlin, not Rush Limbaugh, was the leading conservative broadcaster in America. ... Pretty much all conservatives today agree on the need for a strong, vigorous foreign policy. There is no constituency for isolationism on the right, outside the Buchananite fever swamps.
  • I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism. If you ask, do I think Pat Buchanan is an anti-Semite, my answer is he is not one. But I think he's said some anti-Semitic things
    • William F. Buckley National Review (December 1991), cited by Linda Chavez An Unlikely Conservative: The Transformation Of An Ex-liberal (New York: Basic Books, 2002).
  • Buchanan had never held elective office, but he'd worked as an advisor in both the Nixon and Reagan administrations, and was an outspoken pundit on the far right of American politics, with regular appearances on PBS, CNN, and his own syndicated radio show. He was a principal architect of the "southern strategy," which he'd laid out in a 1971 memo to President Nixon, whereby the Republican Party captured white Democratic voters in the South by appealing to their racism. In a 1993 column, Buchanan wrote, "How long is this endless groveling before every cry of 'racism' going to continue before the whole country collectively throws up?"
    • Amy Goodman Democracy Now!: Twenty Years Covering the Movements Changing America (2016)
  • Many people did not care for Pat Buchanan's speech; it probably sounded better in the original German.
  • It wasn’t as much what Buchanan had said as how he said it. Others had taken similar positions before: protectionism; putting the American workers first; cultural conservatism. None of these were particularly objectionable, even in combination. But to dub political disagreements as a war, to imply that those on the other side were an enemy to be defeated, was a bridge too far. It’s 1992! How could we be having this conversation? The Cold War had ended, and it had given way to a New World Order. America was supposed to be a “kinder, gentler” nation. Everyone knew that it was time to melt down the knives and put the pitchforks away. “Everyone,” that is, except for those completely outside the mainstream of political discourse.
    • Michael Malice, The New Right: A Journey to the Fringe of American Politics (1992)
  • The post-1972 primary system was especially vulnerable to a particular kind of outsider: individuals with enough fame or money to skip the “invisible primary.” In other words, celebrities. Although conservative outsiders Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan, and Steve Forbes did not manage to overcome the effects of the invisible primary during the 1980s and 1990s, their relative success provided clues into how it might be done. Forbes, an extraordinarily wealthy businessman, was able to buy name recognition, while Robertson, a televangelist who founded the Christian Broadcasting Network, and Buchanan, a television commentator (and early Republican proponent of white nationalism), were both colorful figures with special media access. Although none of them won the nomination, they used massive wealth and celebrity status to become contenders.
    • Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (2018) How Democracies Die. New York: Crown.
  • The Reagan White House also harbored the former Nixon aide Pat Buchanan as its communications director. Buchanan's politics were rooted in the 1930s America First isolationism of Charles A. Lindbergh and the diatribes of the right-wing "radio priest" Father Charles Coughlin, with their eccentric fixations on imaginary Jewish internationalist cabals. In the waning days of Reagan’s presidency, Buchanan remarked that "the greatest vacuum in American politics is to the right of Ronald Reagan."
  • [On his attempts to run for president] All those efforts failed, but their stark themes of isolationism, lost national greatness, immigrant invasion, and racial fear provided a template for Donald Trump’s MAGA campaign a quarter-century later. "American carnage" was the favored far-right image at least two decades before Trump.
    Meanwhile, a step away from Buchanan—how distant a step has long been subject to debate—an assortment of antisemitic and white nationalist organizations remained on the political fringes during the Reagan period.
    • Sean Wilentz "American Carnage" The New York Review of Books (August 17, 2023)
    • From a review of Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism by Jeffrey Toobin (Simon & Schuster)
  •  I congratulate you on your victory. From the cosmopolitan United States of America we have finally heard the voice of a patriotic leader. Your slogans are close to our hearts, especially the words "America for Americans." Your goals are noble. Mr. Buchanan! Both of us are free-spirited and independent politicians. I congratulate you as a brother in arms in the struggle for national liberation. Today in our press both the democrats and the communists are whining about politicians like us, which again confirms that democrats and communists in all countries are enemies of the people. Because of this, the slogan "Patriots of all countries, unite!" is more relevant than ever. You call Congress "Israeli-occupied territory." We have the same situation here in Russia. The USA and Russia are not free countries. They are two great powers, but they are occupied. Therefore, in order to survive, we should set aside territory in both the US and Russia for the settlement of this bothersome tribe. I sincerely wish you victory in the upcoming presidential elections and I hope you can realize your slogans, and especially your policy of protectionism. If both of us come to power, I promise you that we will be able to resolve all our troublesome problems for the good of both nations. In the shortest possible time we will end fighting in the Balkans and untangle the problems in the Middle East. We will establish a strong peace throughout the whole world, and we won't let anyone violate it.
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