AHC: Most Odious Moves of a President Pat Buchanan?

[MalcontentRex]

This is a bit of a spinoff of the thread I posted yesterday about Buchanan gaining a niche following in the American South sometime between 1990-2000, ish. This thread assumes that he has that niche and is able to ride it to the Oval Office.

Let's say he does better in TTL in the 1996 primaries and wins a bunch of Southern state GOP contests. He is not truly competitive overall, but is able to go tit-for-tat with Bob Dole for awhile and hangs on for a long time. When Dole inevitably wins in the end, he is met with much bitterness from the Falwell wing of the GOP which is of course highly concentrated south of the Mason-Dixon line, and some of these types in the Ralph Reed Christian Coalition and similar orgs threaten not to vote for Dole, seeing him as an insufficiently-conservative establishment figurehead.

As an attempt to head the above off, Bob Dole picks Buchanan as his running mate at the urging of Sen. Strom Thurmond. (This isn't ASB in my eyes because Buchanan was one of the key speakers at the 1992 RNC.)

Something leads to Dole/Buchanan just barely eking a win out in November 1996. Maybe Lewinskygate drops ten days before the election. Maybe there is a big tech stocks crash. Maybe that era's fever-swamp far-right conspiracists are able to somewhat successfully spin yarns about TWA Flight 800 or the Atlanta Olympics bombing. In any event, the result is that the GOP loses the popular vote but barely ekes out an EC victory (on the basis of the Solid South, as outlined on my other thread). I'll even say, just for fun, that his win only comes after a highly contentious Florida 2000-style vote-counting quagmire (let's have it be in two states this time, Kentucky and Arizona).

A relatively successful and uneventful first year+ of the Dole Administration passes before POTUS suffers an unfortunate massive coronary arrest thanks to improper use of a certain little blue pill in spring 1998. Suddenly... the late twentieth century's most loathsome right-wing demagogue finds himself as the most powerful man in the world with slim majorities of both houses of Congress and a fairly evenly divided SCOTUS.

The US of A is now the grand stage of the Western world's biggest poop show since Vietnam and perhaps WWII. What happens next in this potential dystopia?

--Does Buchanan attempt to rule like a normal POTUS, or is he completely incapable of reining in the inner fascist who instantly wants dictatorial authority?
--If the former, does he settle down into being a typical establishment, center-right GOPer or is he always an extremist who stays barely in the confines of social acceptability?
--If the latter, does the GOP stand with him? Does the military attempt to depose him? How successful is he?
--What kinds of wacky and potentially horrible policies would an uninhibited Buchanan pursue:
a--does he try to bring back segregation, or attempt to pack SCOTUS with judges he thinks might be friendlier towards segregation? Maybe he orders affirmative
action for WHITES?
b--does he try to outlaw Islam by executive order or send Muslim citizens to internment camps if they refuse to renounce the Koran, etc.?
c--does he go completely bonkers and declare war on one or more countries he doesn't like without provocation?
d--what does he say or do about homosexuality?
--OR, does he surprise us all with a surprisingly moderate and effective tenure of nearly 3 or nearly 7 years?
--Butterflies for the 2000 election? (These would have to be huge, to put it gently.)

Just how much luck does such a complete and utter wackjob as "Bitburg Pat" have before some semblance of sanity kicks in... does he live out his presumed lifelong dream of being America's fuhrer, for however long?


MalcontentRex

 

[overoceans]

On social issues, I think the most damage he would do would be via court appointments. Granted, that could be substantial.

I don't see him getting the US further involved in the mideast, unless he intends to totally renounce his isolationism. He'd probably continue support for Israel at its then-current level, though maybe with a reversion to Bush I policies, ie. more critical of expansion.

Probably he would start picking fights with China, Cuba and Vietnam, just for the sake of Cold War nostalgia. He wouldn't actually launch Bay Of Pigs II, but would work right-wing Miami Cubans into an approving frenzy believing that's what he was planning.

No late-90s NATO interventions in the Balkans, unless someone can convince him it was in the USA's immediate interest, which seems unlikely.

 

[MalcontentRex]

On social issues, I think the most damage he would do would be via court appointments. Granted, that could be substantial.

I don't see him getting the US further involved in the mideast, unless he intends to totally renounce his isolationism. He'd probably continue support for Israel at its then-current level, though maybe with a reversion to Bush I policies, ie. more critical of expansion.

Probably he would start picking fights with China, Cuba and Vietnam, just for the sake of Cold War nostalgia. He wouldn't actually launch Bay Of Pigs II, but would work right-wing Miami Cubans into an approving frenzy believing that's what he was planning.

No late-90s NATO interventions in the Balkans, unless someone can convince him it was in the USA's immediate interest, which seems unlikely.

The point of these paleos' "isolationism" is that it always only works one way, isn't it? Couldn't we see Buchanan declaring war on Israel because of his anti-Semitism and Holocaust revisionism--let alone the Islamic world? Invariably these types have dictators they are really fond of and their "inaction" is a veneer for supporting them.

 

[mr1940s]

Probable a lot of Anti-semitic gestures, such as when he worked for President Reagan and urged him to visit the Bitburg Military Cemetery to prove that "he wasn't controlled by Jews. "

 

[raharris1973]

Mainstays of the policy agenda are non-interventionism toward Europe and Africa and Middle East, protectionism, immigration limitation, anti-affirmative action, english-only laws, defunding public broadcasting, conservatizing the courts. Don't know really that he'd be any more norm breaking in his pursuit of these policies than any POTUS or VPOTUS who was actually elected.

 

[MalcontentRex]

Mainstays of the policy agenda are non-interventionism toward Europe and Africa and Middle East, protectionism, immigration limitation, anti-affirmative action, english-only laws, defunding public broadcasting, conservatizing the courts. Don't know really that he'd be any more norm breaking in his pursuit of these policies than any POTUS or VPOTUS who was actually elected.

I might agree with all that but wouldn't he push a racial agenda pretty hard? This is after all a man who minimized Adolf f'ing Hitler.

 

[overoceans]

I might agree with all that but wouldn't he push a racial agenda pretty hard? This is after all a man who minimized Adolf f'ing Hitler.

Right. But even as a mere columnist, he could only get away with minimizing Hitler, and even that was met with some quick denunciations from Republicans.

As a president presumably hoping for re-election and, more importantly, with a stable of congressmen and senators hoping for their own re-election, he's gonna have a lot less leeway for promoting his most eccentric views and policies.

 

[MalcontentRex]

Right. But even as a mere columnist, he could only get away with minimizing Hitler, and even that was met with some quick denunciations from Republicans.

As a president presumably hoping for re-election and, more importantly, with a stable of congressmen and senators hoping for their own re-election, he's gonna have a lot less leeway for promoting his most eccentric views and policies.

I can't see someone as consistently extreme and fanatical as Pat having it in him to moderate that much. He might go through the minimal motions of doing so but even if he were willing to throw Hitler under the bus, I think he has some grasp of who his core supporters are and doesn't want to alienate them too severely. Maybe he admits the Holocaust but says it was an "overreaction" to Jewish communism or partisans or the like?

 

[N7Buck]

"Maybe he orders affirmative action for WHITES?"
I would think he would get rid of racial discrimination such as affirmative action.

He would try to limit Illegal and legal Immigration. So wages would increase for the working class, H1B Visas are unlikely to happen, so wages for middle class workers in the tech industry wouldn't see their wages and standard of living lowered. Depending on how much Immigration is lowered, there could be a revival of unions, since there will be similarities among workers that allow them to unionise, it would be interesting to see how that would affect new industries like big tech.

I don't know much about Pat Buchanan, my understanding of his views & policies are; Immigration restrictionist, supports the interests of all racial groups within America.

Seeing people in the thread call him a dictator, sounds rather hyperbolic, so I don't know how much true there is to what people are saying about him in the thread.

An American politician espousing dictatorial politics & anti-semitism in the 1990s sounds hard to believe, because that politician would be completely excluded by the major political parties, how would that politician have any chance at becoming the President.

 

[MalcontentRex]

"Maybe he orders affirmative action for WHITES?"
I would think he would get rid of racial discrimination such as affirmative action.

He would try to limit Illegal and legal Immigration. So wages would increase for the working class, H1B Visas are unlikely to happen, so wages for middle class workers in the tech industry wouldn't see their wages and standard of living lowered. Depending on how much Immigration is lowered, there could be a revival of unions, since there will be similarities among workers that allow them to unionise, it would be interesting to see how that would affect new industries like big tech.

I don't know much about Pat Buchanan, my understanding of his views & policies are; Immigration restrictionist, supports the interests of all racial groups within America.

Seeing people in the thread call him a dictator, sounds rather hyperbolic, so I don't know how much true there is to what people are saying about him in the thread.

An American politician espousing dictatorial politics & anti-semitism in the 1990s sounds hard to believe, because that politician would be completely excluded by the major political parties, how would that politician have any chance at becoming the President.

Literally EVERYTHING about Buchanan was about race. He may have given shop dressing to abortion, guns etc. but his real message has ALWAYS been complete and utter hatred of anything/everything that isn't white Gentile.

Here's a good contemporary piece (warning, there is strong language here): https://www.salon.com/1999/09/04/pat/

Even Richard Nixon found the views of his former speech writer, Buchanan, too extreme on the segregation issue. According to a John Ehrlichman memo referenced in Nicholas Lemann's "The Promised Land," Nixon characterized Buchanan's views as "segregation forever."

If Richard Milhouse Nixon said Pat Buchanan was a rabid segregationist... I'd say that carries some weight.

 

[MalcontentRex]

Here's a specific question: if Pat Buchanan sits in the OO on September 12, 2001--what is his 9/11 response? With his devout anti-Semitic ideology, does he swallow up "trutherism" and prepare to launch a "retaliatory" war against Israel? Remember that Buchanan hates Israel more than any other country, and probably more than all other "bad" countries combined.

How much of the 2001 GOP would go along with this and does the public?

 

[N7Buck]

Here's a specific question: if Pat Buchanan sits in the OO on September 12, 2001--what is his 9/11 response? With his devout anti-Semitic ideology, does he swallow up "trutherism" and prepare to launch a "retaliatory" war against Israel? Remember that Buchanan hates Israel more than any other country, and probably more than all other "bad" countries combined.

How much of the 2001 GOP would go along with this and does the public?

Well 9/11 probably wouldn't happen if Pat Buchanan was President, because he would of taken the CIA warnings about a potential terrorist attack more seriously, and he was an isolationist, which means less American presence in the Middle East, which significantly decrease any Islamic Terrorism in America.

 

[Thisisnotausername]

a--does he try to bring back segregation, or attempt to pack SCOTUS with judges he thinks might be friendlier towards segregation? Maybe he orders affirmative
action for WHITES?

He's not bringing back segregation. This isn't the early 70s Buchanan of that Nixon quote you cite, this is Buchanan in 1998, when (de jure) segregation is dead and buried and only two years removed from 2000, when IOTL he ran for president with a black woman as his running mate. He'll take racist measures, sure, but they'll be things largely within what is normal for US politics of the era: limiting immigration, getting "tough on crime," directing the DOJ not to pursue civil rights cases and appointing judges hostile to those sorts of cases, that sort of thing. Getting rid of affirmative action yes, reverse affirmative action (how would you even justify that?) no.

b--does he try to outlaw Islam by executive order or send Muslim citizens to internment camps if they refuse to renounce the Koran, etc.?

Although Buchanan is likely to pursue Islamophobic policies, especially if he gets reelected and 9/11 happens when he's in charge, I really don't think anything as extreme and blatantly unconstitutional as banning Islam would be seriously considered.

c--does he go completely bonkers and declare war on one or more countries he doesn't like without provocation?

The man is a paleocon isolationist. His brand of foreign policy insanity would be trying to pull out of NATO and the UN, not spontaneously declaring frivolous wars.

d--what does he say or do about homosexuality?

Nothing good, but probably nothing radically worse than what contemporary Republicans said and did IOTL.

Here's a specific question: if Pat Buchanan sits in the OO on September 12, 2001--what is his 9/11 response? With his devout anti-Semitic ideology, does he swallow up "trutherism" and prepare to launch a "retaliatory" war against Israel? Remember that Buchanan hates Israel more than any other country, and probably more than all other "bad" countries combined.

How much of the 2001 GOP would go along with this and does the public?

No one. Support for Israel has strong bipartisan support and is a key part of Republican foreign policy. If he declared war on Israel under any circumstances, he'd be impeached and removed from office immediately. I don't think he would, though--it's not like he blamed Israel for 9/11 IOTL, after all, and that was with only his newspaper column and position as a TV panelist at stake, not the presidency. This gets at a problem with a lot of your questions, though, which is that you seem to think Buchanan is a lot more extreme than he actually is: the man may be a racist anti-Semite, but he is not, in fact, literally Hitler.

 

[MalcontentRex]

Good response Thisisnotausername. I have some things to do and will reply specifically later on today. In a nutshell, the reason why I fear the dystopian worst out of a Buchanan Administration is his entire career's worth of nakedly racial agitating was on full display for some 30 years, targeting not only all nonwhites, but Jews the worst and most specifically of all. If standard bigoted politicians put out a "dog whistle" when it came to racist signaling to their cores, Buchanan put out a dog trumpet. He might have actually had George Wallace beat.

 

[Bob in Pittsburgh]

I am sorry I cannot talk about current politics.

 

[SealTheRealDeal]

On one hand, his entire term in office would be a non-stop long, hot summer. On the other, far fewer of America's finest dead on the streets of [country subject to an intervention war]. So blursed rather than explicitly blessed or cursed.

edit: also the neo-cons are going to be frothing at the mouth with rage, categorize that as you wish.

 

[MalcontentRex]

I am sorry I cannot talk about current politics.

This TL takes place between 20 and 30 years ago, not sure how that is "current".

 

[MalcontentRex]

He's not bringing back segregation. This isn't the early 70s Buchanan of that Nixon quote you cite, this is Buchanan in 1998, when (de jure) segregation is dead and buried and only two years removed from 2000, when IOTL he ran for president with a black woman as his running mate. He'll take racist measures, sure, but they'll be things largely within what is normal for US politics of the era: limiting immigration, getting "tough on crime," directing the DOJ not to pursue civil rights cases and appointing judges hostile to those sorts of cases, that sort of thing. Getting rid of affirmative action yes, reverse affirmative action (how would you even justify that?) no.

Every racist hides behind "I have (black, Jewish, Asian, fill in the blank) friends." Yes I know who Ezzola Foster was and according to Wikipedia people at the time saw through the blatant tokenism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezola_Foster

Buchanan critics saw her as an affirmative action selection because she had never held a political office and is African-American.[2]

Segregation was gone and settled in the 1970s also and yet he supported it still.

Although Buchanan is likely to pursue Islamophobic policies, especially if he gets reelected and 9/11 happens when he's in charge, I really don't think anything as extreme and blatantly unconstitutional as banning Islam would be seriously considered.

Buchanan hated everyone/everything that's not Gentile white heterosexual male and Christian.

The man is a paleocon isolationist. His brand of foreign policy insanity would be trying to pull out of NATO and the UN, not spontaneously declaring frivolous wars.

Often, not always, "isolationists" are hiding behind a veneer of non-interventionism to hide extremely sinister international motives. I see Buchanan as the direct descendant of Father Coughlin and the "devout Christian" WWII "America Firsters" who were unsympathetic to European Jewry at minimum and outright fans of fascist movements at wost.

Nothing good, but probably nothing radically worse than what contemporary Republicans said and did IOTL.

Didn't Buchanan outright, verbatim say that LGBTs have no rights whatsoever during the 1992 campaign?

The man may be a racist anti-Semite, but he is not, in fact, literally Hitler.

Except that he basically did everything but outright praise Hitler... he pushed a senile Reagan to honor the SS buried at Bitburg, he said the Israel lobby was driving us to war with Iraq, he said that Nazi war criminals like Jan Demjanjuk were victims and martyrs, he publicly doubted whether Zyklon-B is really that lethal, so on and so on. If the Overton Window were just a smidge more to the right I'm quite sure he would have done that. This is a guy who was actually willing to side with Middle Eastern dictators, despite being a flaming Islamophobe, just because he hated Jews so very much.

Edit, now I remember PB actually DID praise Hitler and insult the Allies as weak: https://www.jweekly.com/1999/11/05/cause-for-alarm-pat-buchanan-s-views-on-hitler/

Buchanan has enjoyed a long psychic friendship with Hitler, whom he has called “a man of uncommon courage, a soldier’s soldier and a leader steeped in European history.”

 

[Thisisnotausername]

Every racist hides behind "I have (black, Jewish, Asian, fill in the blank) friends." Yes I know who Ezzola Foster was and according to Wikipedia people at the time saw through the blatant tokenism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezola_Foster

I never said he wasn't racist. I was simply pointing out that someone willing to make a black person his vice president, no matter how cynical his motivations, is unlikely to be someone who would make it a priority to legally reduce black people to 2nd class citizens. Do you think George Wallace would've taken on a black running mate if he thought it would've helped him electorally?

Segregation was gone and settled in the 1970s also and yet he supported it still.

The situation of segregation in the early 70s, when battles over things like desegregation busing were still raging, was very much not the situation of segregation in the late 90s a quarter of a century later, and to assume that a politician would support reinstituting segregation in 1998 because they did so in 1970 is foolish.

Buchanan hated everyone/everything that's not Gentile white heterosexual male and Christian.

But does he hate Muslims specifically so much that he'd destroy his political career by embarking on a quixotic quest to somehow ban an entire religion through executive order? I'm going to go with no.

Often, not always, "isolationists" are hiding behind a veneer of non-interventionism to hide extremely sinister international motives. I see Buchanan as the direct descendant of Father Coughlin and the "devout Christian" WWII "America Firsters" who were unsympathetic to European Jewry at minimum and outright fans of fascist movements at wost.

Somehow I do not think that anyone in the 90s was espousing non-interventionism as cover for letting Nazi Germany overrun Europe.

Didn't Buchanan outright, verbatim say that LGBTs have no rights whatsoever during the 1992 campaign?

Buchanan is no friend to the LGBT community, but neither was the Republican Party in the 90s. Straight from the 1996 Republican Party platform:

The sole source of equal opportunity for all is equality before the law. Therefore, we oppose discrimination based on sex, race, age, creed, or national origin and will vigorously enforce anti-discrimination statutes. We reject the distortion of those laws to cover sexual preference, and we endorse the Defense of Marriage Act to prevent states from being forced to recognize same-sex unions.

There is very little room for him to do significantly worse than this unless you think he'd make it legal to shoot gay people on sight or something (although given the policies you've suggested he might implement, I wouldn't be surprised if you did). Note also the commitment to opposing racial discrimination, which does not exactly scream "this is a party that would be totally down with just bringing Jim Crow back in its entirety out of nowhere."

Except that he basically did everything but outright praise Hitler... he pushed a senile Reagan to honor the SS buried at Bitburg, he said the Israel lobby was driving us to war with Iraq, he said that Nazi war criminals like Jan Demjanjuk were victims and martyrs, he publicly doubted whether Zyklon-B is really that lethal, so on and so on. If the Overton Window were just a smidge more to the right I'm quite sure he would have done that. This is a guy who was actually willing to side with Middle Eastern dictators, despite being a flaming Islamophobe, just because he hated Jews so very much.

Edit, now I remember PB actually DID praise Hitler and insult the Allies as weak: https://www.jweekly.com/1999/11/05/cause-for-alarm-pat-buchanan-s-views-on-hitler/

Pat Buchanan was indeed an anti-Semitic Nazi sympathizer who admired Adolf Hitler. But as awful as he is, not being literally Adolf Hitler is a pretty damn low bar, and unless I missed the part of the 2000 Reform Party Platform that calls for "a final solution to the Jewish problem," I'm pretty sure he clears it. If we're to evaluate how a Buchanan presidency would have gone, we need to look at the actual policies he advocated for, not just extrapolate his already appalling views to even greater extremes Rumsfeldia-style.

 

[Jiraiyathegallant]

He starts a series of wars and sanctions in the the Middle East that kills millions, displaced tens of millions, backs some of the worst governments in the world, makes massive money off stocks he owns in the MIC, militarizes the police with military surplus gear from his wars, arrests millions of people for victimless crimes, creates a secret spy program used to spy on both the American people and our allies leaders, covers up war crimes, arrests whistleblowers, creates a quasi caste system through affirmative action and discrimination laws that favor his voters, fails to do anything about out of control cost of living for normal people, cheats on his wife and lies about it under oath, bails out Wall Street, runs up a huge deficit, and goes on Epstein’s plane.