Online: | |
Visits: | |
Stories: |
Story Views | |
Now: | |
Last Hour: | |
Last 24 Hours: | |
Total: |
Pat Buchanan gave a fantastic interview this morning on @CNN – way to go Pat, way ahead of your time!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 9, 2016
No, if Pat Buchanan were running in 2016, he would have more appeal to the social conservatives who are backing Cruz and Carson in Iowa. Otherwise, Trump has taken Buchanan’s old message, secularized it, and spiced it up with celebrity. Interestingly, Trump once denounced Buchanan as a Neo-Nazi, condemned his “dangerous ideas,” and quit the Reform Party because “this is not company I wish to keep.”
Trump now says that Buchanan was way ahead of his time. For his part, Buchanan is happy to have been vindicated by history. If Trump wins the nomination, there is a new poll out which shows that 20 percent of Democrats would defect to vote for Trump while 16 percent of Republicans would defect to vote for Hillary. In the interview below, Buchanan says that he wants Trump to campaign in the general election in the Rust Belt and slam Clintons for NAFTA, the WTO, and Wall Street deregulation.
The New York Times interviewed Buchanan for a new article, “For Republicans, Mounting Fears of a Lasting Split”:
“The Republican Party is facing a historic split over its fundamental principles and identity, as its once powerful establishment grapples with an eruption of class tensions, ethnic resentments and mistrust among working-class conservatives who are demanding a presidential nominee who represents their interests. …
Rank-and-file conservatives, after decades of deferring to party elites, are trying to stage what is effectively a people’s coup by selecting a standard-bearer who is not the preferred candidate of wealthy donors and elected officials. …
The issues animating grass-roots voters — opposition to immigration, worries about wages and discomfort with America’s fast-changing demographics — are diverging from and at times colliding with the Republican establishment’s interests in free trade, lower taxes, less regulation and openness to immigration. …
The divide was evident at a recent Greenville, S.C., gathering of bankers and lawyers, reliable Republicans who shared tea and pastries and their growing anxieties about where their party is going. In a meeting room near the wooded shore of Furman Lake, the group of mostly older white men expressed concern that their party was fracturing over free trade, immigration and Wall Street. And they worried that their candidates — mainstream conservatives like Jeb Bush — were losing.
“It’s all really hard to believe that decades of Republican ideas are at risk,” said Barry Wynn, a prominent Bush donor at the meeting. …
Patrick J. Buchanan, a Nixon and Reagan adviser who ran for the Republican nomination in 1992 and 1996 by stressing the economic and cultural concerns of working-class Americans, said these voters were roiling the party because they had “suffered long enough.”
Mr. Buchanan cited years of job losses and wage stagnation that he blamed on free-trade deals and cheap labor from illegal immigrants, as well as hardships from foreign wars that have hit families whose children enlisted in hopes of better lives.
“The chickens have come home to roost,” Mr. Buchanan said. “Putting the party back together again will be very hard after this nomination race. I think the party is going to shift against trade and interventionism, and become more nationalist and tribal and more about protecting the border.”
The horror! The horror!
All of the cuckservative establishment’s men might go down the primary! For the first time in generations, the Republicans might nominate someone who is not an open borders, free-trading globalist enthralled to neo-liberal economics. The curtain might fall on the post-World War II era in which the US was the “leader of the free world.”