Brian Doherty on How Pat Buchanan Conquered America
From our June issue, Senior Editor Brian Doherty reviews Pat Buchanan's new book Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?, and Oxford historian Timothy Stanley's new biography, The Crusader: The Life and Tumultuous Times of Pat Buchanan. As Doherty observes, Buchanan is the last of a dying breed of old-school right-wingers. Yet current American political culture owes an astonishing amount to this Irish Catholic son of D.C.'s Georgetown neighborhood, even as he fades into disgraced bestsellerdom. Notions such as the "silent majority," liberal media bias, and the modern culture war all sprang, more or less fully formed, from the head of this former Nixon and Reagan aide, as did a Republican critique of "vulture capitalism."
