The young British journalist knows his timing is good. Timothy
Stanley is at Politics and
Prose, a trendy independent bookstore in northwest D.C., to
promote his new tome
The Crusader: The Tumultuous Life and Times of Pat
Buchanan. Yet he possesses the modesty to realize that few
people came out on a Friday night to see him. The overflow crowd
was there to greet his subject, on hand just a day after his
separation from the network for which he worked for ten years
became common knowledge. Standing next to Buchanan, Stanley
quipped, “MSNBC’s loss is my gain.”
To his critics, Buchanan is a vile hatemonger who must be
hounded from the airwaves to purify the public debate. His
biographer reaches a different conclusion. “Whatever you think of
Pat Buchanan’s politics, he was always motivated by two things:
duty and love,” Stanley said at the end of his remarks. “And that’s
rare among politicians today.”
So rare that those who knew Buchanan personally could see it
across the political divide.”Pat sticks up for his people like
nobody I know,” Chris Matthews reminded MSNBC viewers. “He’ll laugh
with you about the frailties and foibles of those he served but he
never, ever quits being loyal to them.”
Democratic consultant Peter Fenn
told Politico, “I greatly respect Pat’s intellect, his
honesty and his decency.” He lamented that Buchanan was sacked to
make way for ideologically segregated “niche TV.” Even as Andrew
Sullivan
labeled Buchanan “a reactionary who flirted at times with what
only can be called neo-fascism,” he defended the conservative
commentator as “a compassionate and decent man in private and an
honest intellectual in public.”
Former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a 2008 Democratic
presidential candidate, called Buchanan “a sincere, colorful and
opinionated personality, and a decent man who deserved better.”
Matt Lewis of the Daily Caller, a conservative writer
without the “paleo” prefix, observed, “Philosophy aside, if you
were to poll the makeup artists, camera techs, and drivers, Pat
Buchanan is one of the best-liked pundits in the biz.”
Buchanan could have measurably improved both his political
career and his standing as a media personality if he suppressed his
most controversial views and discarded his more troublesome
friends. He had ascended to the top of the Washington power
structure alongside Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. But that is
not his way.
The man’s loyalty has probably been questioned by only two
associates: George H.W. Bush in 1992 and Bob Dole in 1996, both on
the night of the New Hampshire primary. Perhaps they got the last
laugh in 2000, when Buchanan’s opponents were Jesse Ventura, Donald
Trump, Ross Perot, and people who believed they could fly.
Echoes of Buchanan can nevertheless be heard throughout the
Republican presidential field: the no-holds-barred social
conservatism of Rick Santorum, the skepticism of post-Cold War
military adventures of Ron Paul, the 1990s “Republican revolution”
aura of Newt Gingrich. His sister Bay Buchanan is a
Mitt Romney supporter.
The casus belli of Buchanan’s ouster was his most
recent book,
Suicide of a Superpower. It contains ideas, MSNBC
president Phil Griffin told reporters, unfit for “national
dialogue, much less on MSNBC.”
Remaining on the network is Al Sharpton, whose denunciations of
“white interlopers” and “diamond merchants” helped provoke violence
against Freddy’s
Fashion Mart and the Jewish communities of
Crown Heights. You will search Buchanan’s oeuvre in
vain for anything approaching Sharpton at his most hateful.
Many of the demographic claims made in Buchanan’s book aren’t
particularly controversial. He borrowed the chapter titles about
the end of Christian America and white America from cover stories
in Newsweek and the Atlantic, respectively. His
tone is generally wistful, not angry. His thesis is less that
diversity is inherently undesirable than that it is difficult to
manage without other bonds, values, or experiences that bring
countrymen together.
Buchanan hasn’t always succeeded in bringing his countrymen
together either, often using words that wound people of colors and
creeds who don’t feel welcome in his vision of America. Despite
that real shortcoming, he is a patriot who has consistently
believed that his views are open to debate. Do his critics?
