Pat Buchanan
Patrick J. Buchanan (1938–); Republican speechwriter (Nixon, Reagan), commentator, and three-time presidential candidate (1992 Republican primary, 1996 Republican primary, 2000 Reform Party); delivered the “Culture War” speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention; intellectual and political godfather of Trumpian nationalism
Buchanan’s 1992 Republican primary campaign — which won the New Hampshire primary with 37% against incumbent George H.W. Bush — introduced an explicitly nationalist, anti-immigration, anti-free-trade platform into Republican presidential politics for the first time in the modern era. His 1992 RNC speech declared: “There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.” Pat Robertson spoke immediately after him.
His 1996 primary campaign further developed the platform: opposition to NAFTA, opposition to legal and illegal immigration, hostility to multiculturalism. He won the New Hampshire primary again, alarming the GOP establishment. His 2000 Reform Party run was the last gasp of the pre-9/11 paleoconservative insurgency.
With Taki Theodoracopulos and Scott McConnell, Buchanan co-founded The American Conservative (2002) — providing a vehicle for paleoconservative opposition to neoconservative foreign policy before and after the Iraq War.
The 2016 Trump campaign was widely understood as the vindication of the Buchanan platform. Kevin Roberts volunteered for his 1992 campaign; Trump’s trade and immigration positions were essentially Buchananite. Buchanan himself enthusiastically endorsed Trump.
The Iberian Connection
Per Iberian Vistas (Zúquete & Hawley, 2025): Buchanan was, in his youth, “a great admirer of Franco.” The biographical detail (Getlin 1992, LA Times profile) is wiki-relevant because it places Buchanan’s paleoconservatism inside the same Iberian-Catholic-authoritarian admiration current that ran through the *NR* founding circle (William F. Buckley Jr., L. Brent Bozell Jr., James Burnham, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn). Buchanan is the political heir of that current as Bozell was its theological heir. The wiki’s structural reading: contemporary postliberal Iberian admiration (Vermeule, Pappin, Charles Haywood, Josh Abbotoy) is not a new development but a resurfacing of an admiration that ran continuously through the postwar conservative movement’s Catholic wing — Buchanan included.
Cross-References
- Paleoconservatism — the movement Buchanan led politically in the 1990s
- 2016 Election — Trump as Buchanan’s vindication
- Kevin Roberts — Heritage Foundation president who volunteered for Buchanan’s 1992 campaign
- Sam Francis — key paleocon intellectual who shaped the Buchanan platform
- Paul Gottfried — fellow paleocon intellectual
- National Conservatism — NatCon as the institutionalized, respectable successor to Buchananism
- Hard Right — Buchanan’s movement was the acceptable mainstream wing; the Hard Right was the fringe
- Francisco Franco — admired in youth
- Iberian Vistas — documents the connection