In fact, even as the movement has grown more implicitly Buchananite, it has grown more explicitly ideological and internally policing. The new generation of conservatives is stylistically combative but more moderate in policy than even a Bob Dole or Lamar! Alexander.
Conservatism swaggers and sneers across the Internet and media landscape. But it’s populated by Hollow Men with vague slogans about “limited government”, easily broken by the next Media Matters campaign.
The story of Pat Buchanan is the story of someone defending a culture he directly experienced, discovering a movement to facilitate that defense—and then realizing that the movement was out for itself and not for the constituency and the culture that supported it.
Buchanan once wrote that he understood conservatism as a youth through experience and only later “learn[ed] to conscript the intellectual arguments of the sages to reinforce the embattled arguments of the heart.”
But for America’s youth today—I speak as a member of Generation Y, born during Reagan’s first term—there is no tradition, no people, and no country to speak of, just the mute protest of your own bones that it didn’t have to be this way.
Stanley’s book ends too soon. Buchanan’s greatest role may be yet to come, as the cultural Marxist Left throws off its liberal mask and moves to ban books like Suicide of a Superpower (and websites like VDARE.com).
The real story of Pat Buchanan’s importance has yet to be written.
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