The NatCons v. Ukraine

“At least Hazony recognizes that the democratic world should defend Ukraine. Other nationalists do not agree.”

Pat Buchanan may seem like a relic of American political history. From the early 1990s to 2000, he was a marginal presidential candidate (twice vying for the GOP nomination, and once as the nominee for the Reform Party), but his only time in the White House was spent as an advisor to President Richard Nixon and as President Ronald Reagan’s communications director from 1985 to 1987. During his career as a political commentator in the 2000s, Buchanan was out of step with the mainstream American right: He loathed the George W. Bush administration’s neoconservative foreign policy, he was deeply suspicious of free trade, and his rhetoric on immigration and cultural issues was much more conservative than that of the Republican establishment.

Buchanan’s nationalist ideas stayed largely dormant on the American right until 2015: when Donald Trump declared his candidacy for president. The connection between Buchanan and Trumpism is clear, a fact that the former acknowledges with wry pride. “The ideas made it, but I didn’t,” he told Tim Alberta in a 2017 Politico Magazine profile. But beyond isolationism, xenophobia, and economic nationalism, Buchanan has something even more fundamental in common with President Trump: contempt for democracy.

“Democracy lacks content,” Buchanan wrote in a 2018 article. “As a political system, it does not engage the heart.” The title of this article is “Why the Authoritarian Right Is Rising,” and Buchanan’s explanation for the phenomenon is simple: Authoritarian nationalists such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán are winning elections because they are more committed to maintaining cultural and demographic unity than upholding abstract liberal values like democracy, secularism, and pluralism. This was the main theme of Buchanan’s political life in the decades after the Cold War, a theme the mainstream right in the United States would adopt a quarter of a century later.