Pat was part of the earliest "religious right", Reagan and Rush. They made Goldwater want to puke. Pat is always everything anti-Israel, like his butt-buddy John Sunununu. And anti-everything Dems on whatever. He's in the top 10 for why America has come unglued since Repubs gained the Senate in 1982.
I know Pat Buchanan better than most. We use to correspond back during the era of snail-mail.
On the American political spectrum I would put Pat, conservative-right. I put myself a few steps left of Pat.
Remember, Pat Buchanan just wasn't part of the Reagan administration but also the Nixon administration and was behind coming up with Nixon's "Southern Strategy."
>" In 1968, Nixon chose Spiro Agnew for vice president. Why? Agnew had routed George (“Your home is your castle!”) Mahoney for governor of Maryland but had also criticized civil-rights leaders who failed to condemn the riots that erupted after the assassination of King. The Agnew of 1968 was both pro-civil rights and pro-law and order.
When the ’68 campaign began, Nixon was at 42 percent, Humphrey at 29 percent, Wallace at 22 percent. When it ended, Nixon and Humphrey were tied at 43 percent, with Wallace at 13 percent. The 9 percent of the national vote that had been peeled off from Wallace had gone to Humphrey.
Between 1969 and 1974, Nixon – who believed that blacks had gotten a raw deal in America and wanted to extend a helping hand:
* raised the civil rights enforcement budget 800 percent;
* doubled the budget for black colleges;
* appointed more blacks to federal posts and high positions
than any president, including LBJ;
* adopted the Philadelphia Plan mandating quotas for blacks
in unions, and for black scholars in colleges and
universities;
* invented “Black Capitalism” (the Office of Minority Business
Enterprise), raised U.S. purchases from black businesses
from $9 million to $153 million, increased small business
loans to minorities 1,000 percent, increased U.S. deposits
in minority-owned banks 4,000 percent;
* raised the share of Southern schools that were
desegregated from 10 percent to 70 percent. Wrote the
U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 1975, “It has only been
since 1968 that substantial reduction of racial segregation
has taken place in the South.”
The charge that we built our Republican coalition on race is a lie. Nixon routed the left because it had shown itself incompetent to win or end a war into which it had plunged the United States and too befuddled or cowardly to denounce the rioters burning our cities or the brats rampaging on our campuses.
Nixon led America out of a dismal decade and was rewarded with a 49-state landslide. By one estimate, he carried 18 percent of the black vote in 1972 and 25 percent in the South. No Republican has since matched that. To see Kristol colluding with the Times to rewrite that history to make liberals heroes and Republicans villains tells us more about him than about the era.
And where were the necons, when Goldwaterites and Nixonites were building the New Majority? Going all the way with LBJ."<
The Neocons and Nixon's Southern Strategy - Patrick J. Buchanan - Official Website
