Pat Buchanan Quotes

Easy issues are at the heart of what sociologist James Davison Hunter (119911) forecast as the emerging polarization of American politics. In Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, which is often cited as the impetus for Pat Buchanan's fiery speech at the 1199z Republican National Convention and the dawn of polarized politics, he suggests that the emergence of new social issues, such as abortion, the death penalty, and gay rights, make polarization inevitable.

Twenty-five years later, Pat Buchanan has been proven correct. There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. On one side of the battlefield is the religion known as progressivism. On the other stands the New Right.

[T]he West did not invent slavery; the West ended slavery.

there are a few still running around that have not been assimilated—Dennis Kucinich, Pat Buchanan, Ralph Nader, Ron Paul—but nobody listens to them, because the pod politicians have told us that they are crazy.

But I am scared. Everybody's scared." "You know what I mean, like scared scared. Like coward scared, like if you never went to begin with. But with everything you've done nobody's going to doubt you." Then she made a somewhat frantic speech about a website she found that listed how certain people had avoided Vietnam. Cheney, Four education deferments, then a hardship 3-A. Limbaugh,4-F thanks to a cyst on his ass. Pat Buchanan, 4-F. Newt Gingrich, grad school deferment. Karl Rove, did not serve. Bill O'Reilly, did not serve. John Ashcroft, did not serve. Bush, AWOL from the Air National Guard, with a check mark in the "do not volunteer" box as to service overseas. "You see where I'm going with this?' "Well, yeah." "I'm just saying, those people want a war so bad, they can fight it themselves. Billy Lynn's done his part.

In 2003, the United States invaded a country that did not threaten us, did not attack us, and did not want war with us, to disarm it of weapons we have since discovered it did not have,” wrote Pat Buchanan, placing the blame for the war on the neocons’ hijacking of the conservative movement,

Politicians used AIDS to energize anti-gay supporters and religious conservatives who heralded it as a consequence of immorality. Pat Buchanan, an adviser to President Reagan, declared, “The poor homosexuals—they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution.” A

As much as anybody since George Wallace or Pat Buchanan, he has overtly sent dog whistles of race out to white working-class voters. That gratuitous defamation of group after group, person after person, is just anathema to Obama. He genuinely believes this guy would be a calamity for the country.” Unlike the Bushes, who outsourced their political thuggery, Donald Trump does his own wet work. “He

The disaster, as Dad and others saw it, was the emerging AIDS crisis and the cultural attacks instigated by conservative against gay men and women in the early 1980s. It was found in the cruel indifference of President Ronald Reagan, who wouldn’t publicly address the epidemic until the end of his second term, after twenty thousand Americans had died, and the hostile rhetoric of conservatives close to Reagan like Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, and Pat Buchanan, Reagan’s future speechwriter. In 1983, Buchanan wrote of AIDS, “The poor homosexuals–they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is extracting an awful retribution.

After all, Malthus was wrong. Marx was wrong. Democracy did not die during the Great Depression as the Communists predicted. And Khrushchev did not 'bury' us. We buried him. Neville Chute's On the Beach proved as fanciful as Dr. Strangelove and Seven Days in May. Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb never exploded. It fizzled. The Clash of 79 produced Ronald Reagan and an era of good feelings. The Club of Rome notwithstanding, we did not run out of oil. The world did not end at the close of the second millennium, as some prophesied and others hoped. Who predicted the disappearance of the Soviet Empire? Is it not possible that today's most populous nations -China, India, and Indonesia- could break into pieces as well? Why do predictions of the Death of the West not belong on the same shelf as the predictions of 'nuclear winter' and 'global warming'? Answer: the Death of the West is not a prediction of what is going to happen, it is a depiction of what is happening now. First World nations are dying.

And this is what [Donald] Trump has proven: beneath the surface of the American consensus, the belief in our founding fathers and the faith in our ideals, there lies another America--[Pat] Buchanan's America, Trump's America--one that sees no important distinction between democracy and dictatorship. This America feels no attachment to other democracies; this America is not "exceptional." This America has no special democratic spirit of the kind [Thomas] Jefferson described. The unity of this America is created by white skin, a certain idea of Christianity, and an attachment to land that will be surrounded and defended by a wall. This America's ethnic nationalism resembles the old-fashioned ethnic nationalism of older European nations. This America's cultural despair resembles their cultural despair. The surprise is not that this definition of America is there: it has always existed. The surprise is that it emerged in the political party that has most ostentatiously used flags, banners, patriotic symbols, and parades to signify its identity.

Information or allegations reflecting negatively on individuals or groups seen less sympathetically by the intelligentsia pass rapidly into the public domain with little scrutiny and much publicity. Two of the biggest proven hoaxes of our time have involved allegations of white men gang-raping a black woman-- first the Tawana Brawley hoax of 1987 and later the false rape charges against three Duke University students in 2006. In both cases, editorial indignation rang out across the land, without a speck of evidence to substantiate either of these charges. Moreover, the denunciations were not limited to the particular men accused, but were often extended to society at large, of whom these men were deemed to be symptoms or 'the tip of the iceberg.' In both cases, the charges fit a pre-existing vision, and that apparently made mundane facts unnecessary. Another widely publicized hoax-- one to which the President of the United States added his sub-hoax-- was a 1996 story appearing in USA Today under the headline, 'Arson at Black Churches Echoes Bigotry of the Past.' There was, according to USA Today, 'an epidemic of church burning,' targeting black churches. Like the gang-rape hoaxes, this story spread rapidly through the media. The Chicago Tribune referred to 'an epidemic of criminal and cowardly arson' leaving black churches in ruins. As with the gang-rape hoaxes, comments on the church fire stories went beyond those who were supposed to have set these fires to blame forces at work in society at large. Jesse Jackson was quoted was quoted in the New York Times as calling these arsons part of a 'cultural conspiracy' against blacks, which 'reflected the heightened racial tensions in the south that have been exacerbated by the assault on affirmative action and the populist oratory of Republican politicians like Pat Buchanan.' Time magazine writer Jack White likewise blamed 'the coded phrases' of Republican leaders for 'encouraging the arsonists.' Columnist Barbara Reynolds of USA Today said that the fires were 'an attempt to murder the spirit of black America.' New York Times columnist Bob Herbert said, "The fuel for these fires can be traced to a carefully crafted environment of bigotry and hatred that was developed over the last century.' As with the gang-rape hoaxes, the charges publicized were taken as reflecting on the whole society, not just those supposedly involved in what was widely presumed to be arson, rather than fires that break out for a variety of other reasons. Washington Post columnist Dorothy Gilliam said that society in effect was 'giving these arsonists permission to commit these horrible crimes.' The climax of these comments came when President Bill Clinton, in his weekly radio address, said that these church burnings recalled similar burnings of black churches in Arkansas when he was a boy. There were more that 2,000 media stories done on the subject after the President's address. This story began to unravel when factual research showed that (1) no black churches were burned in Arkansas when Bill Clinton was growing up, (2) there had been no increase in fires at black churches, but an actual decrease over the previous 15 years, (3) the incidence of fires at white churches was similar to the incidence of fires at black churches, and (4) where there was arson, one-third of the suspects were black. However, retractions of the original story-- where there were retractions at all-- typically were given far less prominence than the original banner headlines and heated editorial comments.

Leftist organizations are aggressively seeking to redefine America in their own Godless image,” wrote Jerry Falwell. “They hate the idea of Christmas with a deep abiding hate,” declared Pat Buchanan.16

The perfect totalitarian state is one where the all-powerful political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced because they love their servitude.” —PAT BUCHANAN

Many labor leaders are aware that the global economy is robbing communities of control over our own destiny (former AFL-CIO president Lane Kirkland said as much during the anti-NAFTA struggle), but they do not link up with local communities to struggle against NAFTA and other legislation, because they do not understand or accept that the struggle to rebuild and control our communities is the wave of the future.9 That is why they are on the defensive and behind the eight ball in so many struggles, for example, the recent Detroit newspaper strike. On the other hand, as so often happens, it is right-wing reactionaries like the Militiamen and Pat Buchanan who have their fingers on the pulse of the people. Attacking these groups for their reactionary politics will only increase their defenders and supporters. As we wrote back in the early 1970s, “we must not allow our thought to be paralyzed by fear of repression and fascism. One must always think realistically about the dangers, but in thinking about the counter-revolution a revolutionist must be convinced that it is a ‘paper tiger.’”10 What we need to do instead is encourage groups of all kinds and all ages to participate in creating a vision of the future that will enlarge the humanity of all of us and then, in devising concrete programs on which they can work together, if only in a small way, to move toward their vision. In this unique interim time between historical epochs, this is how we can elicit the hope that is essential to the building of a movement and unleash the energies that in the absence of hope are turned against other people or even against oneself. That is why more and more I have been conducting and urging others to conduct visioning workshops using this basic format. When people come together voluntarily to create their own vision, they begin wishing it to come into being with such passion that they begin creating an active path leading to it from the present. The spirit and the way to make the spirit live coalesce. Instead of seeing ourselves only as victims, we begin to see ourselves as part of the continuing struggle of human beings, not only to survive but to evolve into more human human beings.

The behavior of Douglas, Pierce, Buchanan, and the Supreme Court (presided over by Roger B. Taney) aroused Lincoln’s suspicion. “These things look like the cautious patting and petting a spirited horse, preparatory to mounting him, when it is dreaded that he may give the rider a fall,” he said. Switching the metaphor, he continued: “We can not absolutely know that all these exact adaptations are the result of preconcert.” Nevertheless, “when we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places and by different workmen—Stephen [Douglas], Franklin [Pierce], Roger [B. Taney], and James [Buchanan], for instance—and when we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortices exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too few—not omitting even scaffolding—or, if a single piece be lacking, we can see the place in the frame exactly fitted and prepared to yet bring such piece in—in such a case, we find it impossible to not believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first lick was struck.

In October 1967 Richard Nixon published a now-famous article in Reader’s Digest titled “What Has Happened to America?” The article, which was actually written by Pat Buchanan, wrapped up all the nation’s turmoil in one package: Liberal permissiveness, Nixon/Buchanan claimed, was the root of all evil.3 “Just three years ago,” the article began, “this nation seemed to be completing its greatest decade of racial progress.” But now the nation was “among the most lawless and violent in the history of free peoples.” Urban riots were “the most virulent symptoms to date of another, and in some ways graver, national disorder—the decline in respect for public authority and the rule of law in America.” And it was all the fault of the liberals.

Pat Buchanan. Buchanan, a former Nixon aide with a rapier tongue and a pugnacious personality, didn’t mask his disdain for what he called the “revenge- obsessed” and “hairy-chested Nazi hunters” at the Justice Department. He believed that the entire Nazi-hunting team should be abolished,

Some nine hundred thousand Jews had died at Treblinka, but to Pat Buchanan, Holocaust revisionist, it was only a deportation point, Sher thought to himself.