Pat Buchanan understood the end of the book from the first chapter. His prescience and pugilism on behalf of the average American over 40 years — all playing out today — is worthy of a lot more honor than it has received. But that can change.
West Virginia Rep. Riley Moore is urging President Trump to give the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Buchanan, and once you know about him, you will understand how perfectly deserving he is of this award, particularly from President Trump. “Pat Buchanan was a man ahead of his time…He should be honored for defending the American worker, family, and our national sovereignty,” Moore posted on X.
Indeed, Buchanan led an America First movement that was more visionary than reactionary, sensing the nation was moving in the exact wrong direction by creating huge trade agreements that harmed working Americans, allowing in too many illegal aliens and letting them stay with increasing benefits, while involving ourselves in too many foreign entanglements. He worked with Presidents Nixon and Reagan and ran against incumbent George H.W. Bush after he broke his “no new taxes” pledge. He published 15 books and wrote a nationally syndicated column. And he was vilified in the media and by the left.
In this lifelong battle, he took the slings and arrows to give voice to “forgotten Americans” — those hard-working, blue-collar families that formed the core of our nation since we booted out the Brits. He coined the phrase “silent majority” to represent those Americans, the opposite of the professional protest crowd and chattering classes that continue today. The silent majority finally became very unsilent after Trump descended the elevator.
In his 1992 race for President, Buchanan hounded H.W. on the need to protect America’s manufacturing base, pull back on the overly naive idea of free trade with everyone everywhere (which was never free and certainly not fair), and he launched withering attacks on illegal immigration. He singled out illegal aliens as a driving force for several American pathologies and said clearly that the primary beneficiaries of such mass immigration were American corporations at the cost of Americans.
Prescient.
After his failed presidential run in 1996, he saw the end of the Cold War was not a reversion to the American norm, as he believed it should be, but an expansionistic adventure all around the globe. And it was being done at the same time as America was dialing in the peace dividend by rapidly dialing back defense spending. “As we pile commitment upon commitment, in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Persian Gulf,” he wrote in his 1999 book, A Republic Not an Empire, “American power continues to contract — a sure formula for foreign policy disaster.”
Very prescient.
Even more on the money, he not only thought America should be pushing our allies in Europe, Japan, and South Korea to take on their own security, but he argued that the U.S.-led NATO expansion to Russia’s borders was a colossal mistake, the biggest in post-Cold War American policy. “NATO expansion “is a rash and provocative act, unrelated to our true security interests and rooted in an ignorance of American history and traditions.” He said it changed NATO from being a necessary Cold War alliance against the Soviet Union to a vassal protectorate of the United States.
Mic drop prescient.
And like President Trump, he was attacked by all the people one would expect, starting with the media. He was called an isolationist, hater, anti-Semite, economic buffoon, and racist. The left never really changes its playbook.
No one is perfect. And Buchanan had the punch-hard mentality of Trump and occasionally swung wildly. He argued extensively in his 2008 book, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, that World War II was an “unnecessary war,” and even considered Winston Churchill a failed statesman. Churchill was hard on himself for his failures, but hardly a failed statesman.
Yet even with that stumble, the broad arc of Buchanan is as the first to articulate and run for President on the agenda that Donald Trump would embrace in 2016. And for his tenaciousness on behalf of the American working man, when so few people’s eyes were open to what was coming, he is more than deserving of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Rod Thomson is a former daily newspaper reporter and columnist, Salem radio host and ABC TV commentator, and current Founder of The Thomson Group, a Florida-based political consulting firm. He has eight children, seven grandchildren, and a rapacious hunger to fight for America for them. Follow him on Twitter at @Rod_Thomson. Email him at [email protected]
