Buchanan Retires His Pen

E leven years ago, I sat in Patrick Buchanan’s living room in McLean, Va. I asked about his work as a writer, and he told me about his routine. He and his wife, Shelly, sit together and read the morning’s newspapers — the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post — which he marked up with pen and pencil. In many ways, column-writing was not so different from preparing news briefings for Richard Nixon or memoranda for the Reagan White House. Then he went down to his massive study, with history books overcrowding the shelves, and he wrote.

Why was he so different from other conservative columnists? His writing was not spiffy like George Will’s, or sweetly decorated like Peggy Noonan’s. In some ways, his style seemed at odds with his own intellect. Buchanan is a pessimist about Western civilization, deeply haunted by Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West. And yet, his writing evinced a boyish thrill at the cut and thrust of daily politics. “I don’t know that it is a style,” Buchanan told me, “I write and I cut, tightening and tightening and tightening it until it is pure dynamite, and then I send it out.” Even if in his heart, he believes that Western civilization was destroyed at the Battle of the Somme, he writes as if the whole pot is still waiting to be claimed.

And this week, after many decades, the short-fuse and big-bang style of Buchanan won’t be found in America’s newspapers or syndicated across the internet. Buchanan, at age 84, has retired the pen. This is no small thing for the man credited with coining or popularizing so many of the phrases — from “the silent majority” to “the culture war” — that we use to describe our politics every day.

If Matthew Continetti’s history The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism could be said to have leading and supporting characters, only William F. Buckley Jr. would rival Buchanan for the lead spotlight across nearly four decades, closing the 20th century. Buchanan entered the scene just after graduating from Columbia University’s master’s program in journalism, when he began writing for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. After a few weeks, a position opened up for an editorial writer. There Buchanan wrote his hand-grenade-style columns in support of Barry Goldwater, and the Globe-Democrat became one of the few papers in the country to endorse Goldwater.

Buchanan’s conservatism followed his own Catholic father’s. Skepticism of wars of choice went back not just to WWI but to the conservative anti-imperialism that informed opposition to the Spanish–American war. It was with his father that Buchanan began to read Westbrook Pegler and George Sokolsky, two hot-handed anti-communist writers, who vocally supported Senator Joe McCarthy.

In a way, Buchanan could say that he leaves the ring at a time when his loneliest stands against Bush-style conservatism and the Wall Street Journal editorial board are most popular. On immigration, from 2006 until today, it is a populist pitchfork-style revolt that has prevented a GOP Congress from passing a major immigration amnesty.

On trade, Buchanan rebuked George H. W. Bush’s senior economic adviser, Michael Boskin, who had shrugged at the idea of trade deficits with the quip “Potato chips, computer chips, what’s the difference? They’re all chips.” The Buchananite candidacy of Donald Trump dramatically shifted the entire American political consensus on trade with China. What began under Trump as a petty fight over niggling tariffs and purchases about soybeans is rapidly developing under Biden into a determined effort by the United States to recapture technological dominance and lost manufacturing jobs. Now a Taiwanese chipmaker is preparing to invest $40 billion in manufacturing in Arizona.

During the Cold War, Buchanan was a die-hard Cold Warrior; Nixon credited him as the White House’s top supporter of the U.S. intervention on behalf of Israel in the strategic airlift of weapons and supplies during the Yom Kippur War. But after the Cold War, Buchanan preached that superpowers die in needless wars of choice. As he retires in 2023, the more pro-war party is the Democratic Party. And nearly half of Republican voters now tell pollsters that the United States is doing too much to support Ukraine.

Not blessed with children, Buchanan has only ideological heirs. And the only other columnist who writes to the right wing as accessibly and directly is Ann Coulter. Buchanan has been much more than a columnist, of course. And his controversies are better litigated at another time — certainly National Review has litigated them at length several times before.

I never knew him all that well and felt that it would be rude to try to insinuate myself in what looked like a contented life. But decades ago, when I wrote to him to tell him that I was having trouble getting a copy of his book on trade, The Great Betrayal, he sent back a signed copy with a note joking that I was the only one interested in it because it had the misfortune of coming out the same week as Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress. In 2003, he co-founded the magazine that gave me my start, the American Conservative. If there is a never-ending battle for American conservatism, Buchanan will be remembered as one of the greatest contenders. It’s only fitting to mark the moment he laid down his mighty pen.