CID1990 wrote:
I've always liked Buchanan. Of course it is hard to publicly take his positions in today's climate. Trump did so by dumbing them WAY down.
There are definitely parallels between him and Trump but I think Trump arrives at them by accident. Buchanan is much smarter and better educated than Trump. It's no mystery that the populists liked Buchanan but at the end of the day the base couldn't follow him because they couldn't understand what the hell he was saying.
Kinsley recalls his old colleague renting a vacation home on Maryland’s Eastern Shore that had an extra bedroom, where Buchanan could store boxes of books he would read while there. “Pat might be a nut, but he’s not a con man. Trump is both a nut and a con man,” Kinsley tells me. “You have to give Pat a certain amount of credit for intellect. He really thought through policy problems, and that’s where he’s not like Trump at all.”
Wow! What a tremendous read! I used to listen to the Pat Buchanan radio show, co-hosted by the Reverend Barry Lynn (of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State fame). I often disagreed with but admired Pat back then and have continued to do so ever since. The Nixon administration with Buchanan and Ben Stein as speech writers always intrigued me. I think there may have been more brain power in that White House than perhaps any since.
Pat is hard right, but when one of your go-to news sources is antiwar.com and you count Hunter S. Thompson, Bill Press, Michael Kinsley, and Barry Lynn among your admirers, you deserve some serious credit and to be listened to.
I also found this paragraph very JSOesque:
Trump or no Trump, Buchanan has only become more alarmed about America’s political trajectory. The Republican Party is “running out of white folks,” he says, and historically immigrant groups have voted overwhelmingly Democratic. “If you bring in 100 million people and they vote 60 percent Democratic and 40 percent Republican, you’re buried,” Buchanan tells me. “What I’m saying is the America we knew and grew up with, it’s gone. And it’s not coming back. Demographically, culturally, socially, in every way, it’s a different country. And I think it’s come to resemble more of an empire than a nation and a people.”