Pat Buchanan has a new book out on President Richard Nixon, and veteran political analyst Joe Klein uses it as an occasion to make grand, and ultimately myopic, claims about Buchanan’s own importance. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Klein argues that Buchanan is “one of the most consequential conservatives of the past half-century. Indeed, he’s a reactionary who was also an avatar: the first Trumpist.” This is an accurate assessment: Buchanan’s mixture of “America First” isolationism, Christian tribalism, white identity politics, and autarkic economics prefigured Trumpism.

Yet Klein botches his analysis of both Buchanan and President Donald Trump by whitewashing Buchanan’s bigotry, presenting it as a form of trolling designed to enrage liberals. Just as bohemian artists loved to épater la bourgeoisie, Buchanan loves, by Klein’s account, to épater les bien pensants. Klein’s review begins:

Patrick J. Buchanan is a merry troglodyte, a naughty provocateur. He still calls homosexuality “sodomy,” just to get the goat of a community he will only reluctantly call “gay.” He writes that he wanted to be named ambassador to South Africa by President Ford so he could support the apartheid government.

In the last paragraph, Klein returns to the idea of Buchanan as a naughty pundit who loves to provoke educated snobs:

It is easy to be horrified by Buchanan’s gleeful excesses, but that is the reaction he’s hoping to elicit. Humorless upper-crust liberalism is the fattest of targets. Beneath the vitriol, though, Buchanan has spent his career raising important questions that our society has never seemed willing to discuss forthrightly. What should be the limits of identity politics? In a democracy, should courts or legislatures decide basic policies like abortion, busing and campaign finance? Should we trade the higher prices that will come from protectionism for the increased stability that might come from keeping more blue-collar jobs at home?



The thrust of Klein’s argument is clear. We should dismiss Buchanan’s incendiary comments on race and sexuality as mere prankishness, and concentrate on his more lofty thoughts about “the limits of identity politics,” judicial activism, and trade policy. Or to use the famous distinction applied to Trump himself, Klein wants us to take Buchanan seriously but not literally. Unfortunately, as with Trump, if you don’t take Buchanan literally, you are not taking him seriously. Buchanan’s racist, sexist, and homophobic comments aren’t just for cable news entertainment, but at the heart of his ideology.

As Buchanan has made clear in his voluminous writing, he’s a deeply committed authoritarian with strongly hierarchal and anti-democratic views. In his autobiography Right From the Beginning (1988), he says that as a child, the heroes of his household were the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, the anti-communist demagogue Joesph McCarthy, and General Douglas MacArthur. Buchanan’s father taught him that these were “men who were fighters, men who waged war relentlessly against the true enemy.” Buchanan has never really left this creed behind, which explains why he now prefers the Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin to a liberal leader like Barack Obama.