Patrick Joseph Buchanan, Jr. (1938-)

American conservative journalist, television commentator, and politician, Patrick Buchanan may be best remembered for his speech at the 1992 Republican Convention when he declared “[T]here is a religious war going on . . . for the soul of America.”  The speech was controversial for calling upon religious conservatives to “take back the culture, and take back our country” from a secular liberal elite.  From his writings and press appearances, Buchanan’s political positions have been described as traditionally conservative or paleoconservative, although a more accurate account would be a social and cultural conservative combined with a populist economic outlook and a realpolitik, almost isolationist, view of American foreign policy.  He also is known for his controversial views on restricting immigration, defending some Nazi war leaders, labeling Dr. Martin Luther King as “a criminal,” and criticizing U.S. support of the state of Israel, the last position causing some to accuse him of anti-Semitism.

Buchanan was born on November 2, 1938 in Washington D.C., where he was educated in the Roman Catholic school system, graduating from Georgetown University in 1961 with degrees in English and Philosophy.  In 1962 he earned a Master’s degree at Columbia University in Journalism and that same year became an editorial writer for the St. Louis Globe Democrat newspaper.  He was an early supporter of Richard Nixon and became an advisor to the Nixon campaign in 1966, landing him the positions of advisor and speechwriter in the Nixon’s White House until 1974.  Buchanan would return to the White House in 1985, serving as Communication Director under President Ronald Reagan until 1987.  When he was not serving or running for the presidency, Buchanan writes as a syndicated political columnist and makes appearances as a commentator on national television news shows, such as The McLaughlin Group, Crossfire, Buchanan & Press, Scarborough Country, and MSNBC News.

Buchanan campaigned for the Republican’s presidential nomination in 1992 and 1996; and as the Reform Party presidential candidate in 2000.  Having lost the 1992 primary to President Bush, Buchanan criticized the liberal views of Bill Clinton in his famous “culture war” speech at the Republican Convention.  In 1996, he again lost the Republican nomination to Senator Bob Dole.  Believing the Republican Party has abandoned traditional conservative principles in favor of neo-conservative ones – a philosophy that favors an expansive federal government and a preemptive military foreign policy – Buchanan left the Republican Party in 2000 and campaigned for the presidency on the Reform Party ticket, winning 0.4% of the popular vote.

Buchanan’s political and religious views are best presented in his own books, such as Right from Beginning (1988), The Great Betrayal (1988), A Republic, Not an Empire (1999), The Death of the West (2000), and Where the Right Went Wrong (2004).  In these works as well as in his numerous press appearances, Buchanan has advocated a conservative social agenda.  Being staunchly anti-abortion, Buchanan favors a strictly pro-life Supreme Court as well as school prayer, tax breaks for two-parent families, and bans on gay marriage.  These socially cultural views are often religiously based, and seek to impose a conservative Christianity upon a liberal political culture.  But if Buchanan’s social positions are rooted in a conservative Christianity, so are his populist views on economic relations, with a call for higher tariffs on imports and a repeal of NAFTA to protect domestic industries and the working families that sustain them.  Finally, Buchanan’s isolationist foreign policy also can be understood as part of the American Christian tradition as seeing the United States as “a city on a hill” to remain aloof from world affairs so as to remain untainted from its political and moral corruption.

References

Buchanan, Patrick J.  Right from Beginning.  Washington D.C.:Regnery, 1990.

Grant, George.  Buchanan: Caught in the Crossfire.  Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1996.

Scotchie, Joseph. Street Corner Conservative: Patrick J. Buchanan and His Times. Alexander, NC: aBooks, 2002.

This was originally published with the same title in in Roy P. Domenico and Mark Y. Hanley, eds., Encyclopedia of Modern Christian Politics (Greenwood Press, 2006), 82-83.

Print