AHC: Most Odious Moves of a President Pat Buchanan?

[Bob in Pittsburgh]

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

Trump is too much of a Buchanan clone.

 

[MalcontentRex]

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.

I can believe all of that easily except for the part about Buchanan having an affair (and the Epstein thing which I assume was a joke on your end). Buchanan was an ultra-fundamentalist Catholic who vehemently opposed any kind of relations outside of wedlock. In fact didn't he oppose pretty much all sex-ed in public schools on top of that?

If you have something to base that on, I'm interested in hearing it. Was he ever credibly accused of sexual impropriety? It's not that the holy-roller types are never hypocritical in their morality (lol!)--it's simply that I never heard of such a thing and PB.

I assume the people he is spying on and having illegally arrested are those groups he hates (blacks, Muslims, Jews, LGBTs, Hispanic immigrants)?

 

[MalcontentRex]

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?

Wallace was way before my time but from what I know of separatists like that, he may well have found some "collaborator" that served his purposes. The apartheid regime in SA appointed friendly indigenous to run their bantustans. The Nation of Islam and KKK had at least an informal alliance, based on their mutual anti-Semitism and shared desire to establish racially pure enclaves for their respective peoples. So, yeah, if Wallace had been friends with some "Uncle Tom" black figure who was willing to tout "separate but equal!", perhaps this would have taken place.

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.

I thought outright segregation was pretty much settled by 1965 outside of the most backward parts of the South. Busing, maybe not, but the article and quote that I found specifically said Buchanan was still a militant, inflexible SEGREGATIONIST in the 1970s, not a busing skeptic or critical of "diversity" or any of those other dog-whistle code words. RMN doesn't strike me as the kind who minced his words.

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.

America was a lot more against Islam in the late 90s and early 2000s, particularly right after 9/11. Buchanan was a known sworn enemy of every religion not named "Christianity". He could have gotten away with quite a bit if he played his cards right. George W. Bush stepped in immediately to head off Islamophobia. Pat Buchanan was about as polar opposite as one could get from Dubya, and remain in the GOP.

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

I'm not saying that typical non-interventionists in the 1990s were closeted fascists who rued the loss of the Third Reich in WWII. I am saying that PAT BUCHANAN was a (not-so) closet fascist. As I said before, Buchanan was the direct descendant of Father Coughlin's America First Committee (ultranationalist Catholic radical who wanted Hitler to win). Coughlin supporters were fond of the phrase, "Wait 'til Hitler comes here" which was used as a taunt at Jews.

Obviously, I can't prove that Buchanan literally wanted the Third Reich to conquer the USA (though I can have my suspicions), but how "isolationist" can he have been to have been a proud supporter of literally the most conquering regime since Genghis Khan and Napoleon? https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/HolocaustSurvivors/pdfs/Peltz.pdf

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

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."

1: I don't recall George Herbert Walker Bush talking about denying gays basic human rights, to the extent that Pat did or at all.
2: Buchanan was an insurgent candidate, not the GOP establishment. For whatever its faults were, yes, I am aware that the mainstream GOP never supported or wanted segregation or outright legal discrimination. Pat Buchanan was never the mainstream GOP. If Pat were able to remake the party and platform in his own image, I have no doubt he would have thrown in a pro-segregation statement.

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.

You just said it, yourself. "Pat Buchanan was indeed an anti-Semitic Nazi sympathizer who admired Adolf Hitler." I don't know just how much more you need to go on on than that plain and obvious historical fact. Name one other somewhat prominent modern national figure that openly defended Nazism, praised Hitler, rewrote WWII, or spouted unfiltered, unadulterated hate for the groups that he detested. The closest I can think of is Helms and he was nowhere near as bad (or as open). David Duke is a good comparison but he was always on the absolute fringe.

Since you admit that he was a Hitler lover, are you actually going to deny that if he had that power, the policies he pursued wouldn't have reflected that even a little? Yeah, he wouldn't have been able to attempt an American Holocaust, but don't you think he would have attempted to put in place affirmative action for white Christians?

 

[Jiraiyathegallant]

I can believe all of that easily except for the part about Buchanan having an affair (and the Epstein thing which I assume was a joke on your end). Buchanan was an ultra-fundamentalist Catholic who vehemently opposed any kind of relations outside of wedlock. In fact didn't he oppose pretty much all sex-ed in public schools on top of that?

If you have something to base that on, I'm interested in hearing it. Was he ever credibly accused of sexual impropriety? It's not that the holy-roller types are never hypocritical in their morality (lol!)--it's simply that I never heard of such a thing and PB.

I assume the people he is spying on and having illegally arrested are those groups he hates (blacks, Muslims, Jews, LGBTs, Hispanic immigrants)?

The entire post was a joke listing things presidents have done or supported since 1996.

 

[SealTheRealDeal]

I can believe all of that easily except for the part about Buchanan having an affair (and the Epstein thing which I assume was a joke on your end). Buchanan was an ultra-fundamentalist Catholic who vehemently opposed any kind of relations outside of wedlock. In fact didn't he oppose pretty much all sex-ed in public schools on top of that?

If you have something to base that on, I'm interested in hearing it. Was he ever credibly accused of sexual impropriety? It's not that the holy-roller types are never hypocritical in their morality (lol!)--it's simply that I never heard of such a thing and PB.

I assume the people he is spying on and having illegally arrested are those groups he hates (blacks, Muslims, Jews, LGBTs, Hispanic immigrants)?

Did you seriously miss the part where they just listed things US presidents have done iOTL?

edit: ninja'd

 

[Strategos' Risk]

I actually wanted to make a thread about Pat Buchanan recently: what was his deal, exactly? It seems like he arose in popularity at a time after the Reagan Revolution and the end of the Cold War, as a very early resistor against the globalized multicultural future that we now live in today. This was the time of Perot, and it was also the time of David Duke. But while Duke came from a clear American tradition of far right bigotry as Southern populism stemming from a rejection of the Civil Rights era and the embrace of the Klan legacy, Buchanan's whole shtick seems kind out of the blue. He was a Catholic, an anti-Semite (though I guess juxtaposing those two you can point out Father Coughlin though very different timeframe as Buchanan's whole thing is flirting with Holocaust denial), and calling for culture war. But he wasn't even a Reagan era Moral Majority evangelical type! He wrapped up his form of reactionary social conservatism in very intellectual, non-populist trappings. It reminds me of Alan Keyes, another hard conservative Catholic who himself had quirky fixations (Western philosophy and classics from his mentor Allan Bloom). But what was Buchanan's thing?

Also, one wonders what Buchanan and Duke thought of each other. They were probably more aligned or not, but I'm imagining one of a Wikipedia election infobox set in the dystopian world where they run against each other, both representing a different strain of the '90s American far right. (You can even include Perot in it as the moderate liberal savior from them and Alan Keyes as another odd duck, but I was mostly thinking of a Buchanan vs. Duke match.)

 

[MalcontentRex]

The entire post was a joke listing things presidents have done or supported since 1996.

Yes I rather thought so, but the affair thing was out of place with the real historical Pat which is why it stood out more, but definitely Pat would have at least wanted to do everything else,

 

[Thisisnotausername]

I can believe all of that easily except for the part about Buchanan having an affair (and the Epstein thing which I assume was a joke on your end). Buchanan was an ultra-fundamentalist Catholic who vehemently opposed any kind of relations outside of wedlock. In fact didn't he oppose pretty much all sex-ed in public schools on top of that?

They weren't describing a Buchanan presidency, they were describing the OTL Clinton presidency in the most negative light possible.

I thought outright segregation was pretty much settled by 1965 outside of the most backward parts of the South.

The more traditional end date for the civil rights movement is 1968. I certainly wouldn't place the end of segregation before Loving v Virginia and the Fair Housing Act.

Busing, maybe not, but the article and quote that I found specifically said Buchanan was still a militant, inflexible SEGREGATIONIST in the 1970s, not a busing skeptic or critical of "diversity" or any of those other dog-whistle code words. RMN doesn't strike me as the kind who minced his words.

I don't care what he believed in the early 70s, I care about what he believed in the late 90s. Can you produce any evidence whatsoever that he still wanted segregation by that time? The man's a columnist who was regularly on TV, if he still wanted segregation in the 90s I'm sure it wouldn't be very hard to find a statement from him to that effect, especially given how much outrage such a view would have garnered.

Obviously, I can't prove that Buchanan literally wanted the Third Reich to conquer the USA (though I can have my suspicions), but how "isolationist" can he have been to have been a proud supporter of literally the most conquering regime since Genghis Khan and Napoleon?

Look, when I look at the things this guy says on foreign policy, there is very little to suggest he is interested in any sort of aggressive war or conquest. If you think otherwise, you need to provide citations, not "well he likes Hitler and Hitler liked attacking his neighbors, so logically..."

1: I don't recall George Herbert Walker Bush talking about denying gays basic human rights, to the extent that Pat did oyr at all.

I have, in my research, found many very unpleasant things Buchanan has said about the LGBT community. I have yet to see anything markedly worse than I would expect from a conservative Republican of his era, or any statement to the effect that gay people should not receive basic human rights. If you have any citations to the contrary, feel free to share.

2: Buchanan was an insurgent candidate, not the GOP establishment. For whatever its faults were, yes, I am aware that the mainstream GOP never supported or wanted segregation or outright legal discrimination. Pat Buchanan was never the mainstream GOP. If Pat were able to remake the party and platform in his own image, I have no doubt he would have thrown in a pro-segregation statement.

Then I am sure you will have no trouble finding a quote from any of his three presidential campaigns in which he promises to reinstitute segregation if elected, or any other pro-segregation statement from the time period in question.

Since you admit that he was a Hitler lover, are you actually going to deny that if he had that power, the policies he pursued wouldn't have reflected that even a little?

I would suggest that Pat Buchanan, while bad, is not bad in the same fashion or to the same degree that Hitler was, and that if we want to understand how he would act as president, we should look at what he said about how he would govern and what policies he would pursue instead of starting with those things and then extrapolating them to even greater extremes.

Yeah, he wouldn't have been able to attempt an American Holocaust, but don't you think he would have attempted to put in place affirmative action for white Christians?

No, because I can find literally nothing in which he says he wants that. If you have a citation to the contrary, feel free to share.

 

[MalcontentRex]

I actually wanted to make a thread about Pat Buchanan recently: what was his deal, exactly? It seems like he arose in popularity at a time after the Reagan Revolution and the end of the Cold War, as a very early resistor against the globalized multicultural future that we now live in today. This was the time of Perot, and it was also the time of David Duke. But while Duke came from a clear American tradition of far right bigotry as Southern populism stemming from a rejection of the Civil Rights era and the embrace of the Klan legacy, Buchanan's whole shtick seems kind out of the blue. He was a Catholic, an anti-Semite (though I guess juxtaposing those two you can point out Father Coughlin though very different timeframe as Buchanan's whole thing is flirting with Holocaust denial), and calling for culture war. But he wasn't even a Reagan era Moral Majority evangelical type! He wrapped up his form of reactionary social conservatism in very intellectual, non-populist trappings. It reminds me of Alan Keyes, another hard conservative Catholic who himself had quirky fixations (Western philosophy and classics from his mentor Allan Bloom). But what was Buchanan's thing?

Also, one wonders what Buchanan and Duke thought of each other. They were probably more aligned or not, but I'm imagining one of a Wikipedia election infobox set in the dystopian world where they run against each other, both representing a different strain of the '90s American far right. (You can even include Perot in it as the moderate liberal savior from them and Alan Keyes as another odd duck, but I was mostly thinking of a Buchanan vs. Duke match.)

Hi Strategos' Risk,

I don't have the time to do a proper pull-apart quoting right now so I'll just hit on what I bolded. I can attest from personal experience that both Buchanan and Keyes (more so the latter, albeit the former was more prominent overall in the American right) had some following in '90s right-wing evangelicaldom. I was just starting to be really aware of politics when Buchanan and Keyes were hitting their peak. As far as I could tell nobody thought anything of their Catholicism. Buchanan was largely viewed as being related to Ralph Reed, Jerry Falwell, etc. probably because of their shared positions on abortion, gays, etc. I suppose it is possible that some of these folks were genuinely unaware of Pat's extreme racism (or they professed to be against it but chose to overlook it).

I think Coughlin and the America First is indeed the closest exact replica of Buchanan despite his prime being sixty years prior. Buchanan may not have been that big in OTL, but the fact that he got any following at all, has to mean that there was at least a small minority of Americans upset about how desegregation and WWII went down.

I obviously can't ask them but I tend to think that Buchanan and David Duke are just about two peas in a pod, with Buchanan just a bit more willing to keep the quiet part quiet.

 

[RamscoopRaider]

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?

George Wallace actually sought out support from the NAACP during his first run for governor and received their support, having been considered a racial moderate to that point, his opponent got support from the KKK, losing here made him seek the segregationist vote. Then in the late 70's he changed his views, apologized to the black community and in his final term appointed a record number of black individuals to government posts. So yes George Wallace would have done that

So George Wallace is a poor comparison here, and we have evidence that he didn't really hold onto them that strongly, whereas nothing we have suggest Buchanan regrets his earlier views or doesn't hold them particularly strongly

 

[Strategos' Risk]

I think Coughlin and the America First is indeed the closest exact replica of Buchanan despite his prime being sixty years prior. Buchanan may not have been that big in OTL, but the fact that he got any following at all, has to mean that there was at least a small minority of Americans upset about how desegregation and WWII went down.

I obviously can't ask them but I tend to think that Buchanan and David Duke are just about two peas in a pod, with Buchanan just a bit more willing to keep the quiet part quiet.

I just am curious how Buchanan came to get to acquire that ideology. Especially someone like Buchanan who despite his rabble-rousing and pandering to bigotry, really dresses up his act in intellectualism (which I guess is also a very old-school pre-social media/internet style of conservatism regardless what kind of conservative you are). I can understand Catholics who are pro-life crusaders, or who make strategic alliances with Protestants like the Moral Majority to wage other culture war battles. I can even get Alan Keyes, because he subscribes to a uniquely American Catholic political philosophy called Declaration Principles which is obsessed with the Declaration of Independence in the same legal fundamentalist way most other paleocons and Americans conservatives are obsessed with the Constitution. But Buchanan, who's a Catholic from D.C. and also a racist, anti-globalization, Holocaust denier- I wonder how he came to be.

Maybe the banal answer is that he worked in the Nixon administration. The founder of the paleocon Constitution Party, Howard Phillips, was born Jewish and converted to evangelicalism of the Reconstructionist sort. Maybe there was just a bunch of conservative ideas floating around generally and people of many background flocked to them.

 

[MalcontentRex]

George Wallace actually sought out support from the NAACP during his first run for governor and received their support, having been considered a racial moderate to that point, his opponent got support from the KKK, losing here made him seek the segregationist vote. Then in the late 70's he changed his views, apologized to the black community and in his final term appointed a record number of black individuals to government posts. So yes George Wallace would have done that

So George Wallace is a poor comparison here, and we have evidence that he didn't really hold onto them that strongly, whereas nothing we have suggest Buchanan regrets his earlier views or doesn't hold them particularly strongly

Thank you for adding that. I wasn't even aware of that, but that fits in with what we already knew of Wallace--he represented the most reactionary end of the Southern political spectrum in the 1960s, but was still within the Southern Overton window of his day. While deeply troublesome, his platform wasn't out of the Mason-Dixon norm yet in 1968.

Buchanan was another animal completely. I'm not aware of any Southern politicians outside of David Duke that expressed sympathy for NSDAP or were WWII revisionists. He has never taken back anything he has ever said about blacks, Jews, Hispanic migrants, etc. I can only assume that even if he has to be quiet now about segregationism and admiration for Hitler, he still believes that all in his heart.

 

[marktaha]

Wallace was actually quite liberal on.economics.

 

[MalcontentRex]

I just am curious how Buchanan came to get to acquire that ideology. Especially someone like Buchanan who despite his rabble-rousing and pandering to bigotry, really dresses up his act in intellectualism (which I guess is also a very old-school pre-social media/internet style of conservatism regardless what kind of conservative you are). I can understand Catholics who are pro-life crusaders, or who make strategic alliances with Protestants like the Moral Majority to wage other culture war battles. I can even get Alan Keyes, because he subscribes to a uniquely American Catholic political philosophy called Declaration Principles which is obsessed with the Declaration of Independence in the same legal fundamentalist way most other paleocons and Americans conservatives are obsessed with the Constitution. But Buchanan, who's a Catholic from D.C. and also a racist, anti-globalization, Holocaust denier- I wonder how he came to be.

Maybe the banal answer is that he worked in the Nixon administration. The founder of the paleocon Constitution Party, Howard Phillips, was born Jewish and converted to evangelicalism of the Reconstructionist sort. Maybe there was just a bunch of conservative ideas floating around generally and people of many background flocked to them.

I think some of this was Buchanan's heritage and upbringing. Buchanan's mother was Bavarian and Bavaria was known as being the most hardline, "redneck" part of Germany, something like our own Deep South. His father was Scottish and Irish and presumably not a great fan of Great Britain and all its legacy. Remember that Ireland was 100% neutral during WWII and even sent condolences on the death of Hitler, and that Irish volunteers to join the Allies were ostracized in some portions of their culture.

Even with all that though, and the obvious connection to Father Coughlin/Lindbergh and America First!, I still say he has just as much commonality and heritage from the nastiest corners of Southern racism such as the Klan and Nathan Bedford Forest if not more. Most ethnic-white (Irish, Italian, German, Polish, Greek, etc.) Northern "hooligans", as backwards as they may have been, didn't have that dyed-in-the-wool, dogmatic racism in them that they revolved their entire meaning around. Mostly they just didn't want minorities in "their" neighborhoods and after that, out of sight/out of mind. Despite the Klan being vehemently anti-Catholic at one time, Buchanan embodied them to a pretty great degree.

As a third influence, he clearly was getting something out of Falwell, Anita Bryant, Ralph Reed, Dobson, Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggart, etc. His non-racial social-issues platform and demeanor much more resembled the evangelical preacher hard-right than conservative Catholic politics of the time (which were still split between Democrats and the GOP). The hard-line fundamentalist Catholic figures of the era were folks like Phyllis Schafly (spelling?), Justice Scalia, the aforementioned Alan Keyes, etc., none of whom resembled Buchanan much at all.

I have to wonder if (a) Buchanan was nursed on a rich, steady diet of romantic "Lost Cause" propaganda by his family or (b) experienced bullying or physical/sexual abuse from one or more members of the minority groups he so hated.

 

[MalcontentRex]

The more traditional end date for the civil rights movement is 1968. I certainly wouldn't place the end of segregation before Loving v Virginia and the Fair Housing Act.

I don't care what he believed in the early 70s, I care about what he believed in the late 90s. Can you produce any evidence whatsoever that he still wanted segregation by that time? The man's a columnist who was regularly on TV, if he still wanted segregation in the 90s I'm sure it wouldn't be very hard to find a statement from him to that effect, especially given how much outrage such a view would have garnered.

It seems we're on two different pages here or that you're not grasping this AHC. You are challenging me to prove that Buchanan tried to make segregation a continued reality in our real-life. This is an alternate history challenge. Of course Buchanan couldn't try to pass segregation--he lost all official power after the Reagan Administration ceased to exist and even prior to that he was never particularly influential (granted, a dementia-afflicted Reagan was more susceptible to suggestion, but I digress). Buchanan was never more than a low-level Cabinet member. He was never the heart and soul of the GOP or even a significant faction of it. He was never even a congressman or state governor. He couldn't have done the dystopian deeds of this thread that we all know he wanted to, simply because he had no way to at any point.

My thread is not "did Pat Buchanan try to bring segregation back in real life", it is "what horrible things would an actual President Buchanan have done or attempted?".

By the late 1990s, Buchanan had enough sense to figure out that segregation is totally out of our Overton Window, so he no longer talks about it. He still says plenty of racist and pro-Nazi things, in barely- if at all coded form. He has never disavowed any of his life's earlier beliefs or platform. Most other political figures with long careers who at one time held reprehensible beliefs have. What has stopped Buchanan from doing the same?

You tried to challenge me with George Wallace so let me challenge you now: if Buchanan were dictator of the world in 1998 and he could bring segregation back with one push of the button (or conquer Israel, or put all Muslims in internment camps if they don't renounce the Koran, or deport all Hispanics, or have all WWII textbooks rewritten, or pass a decree banning all birth control and sex ed and extra-heterosexual marital sex), do you honestly think he wouldn't? If so please explain your answer with evidence from his life.

 

[SealTheRealDeal]

By the late 1990s, Buchanan had enough sense to figure out that segregation is totally out of our Overton Window, so he no longer talks about it.

So in other words, he wouldn't try bringing it back even if he was president in the 1990s.

 

[Yankeewolf]

This seems like an incredibly hyperbolic denouncement of a figure who you seem to be particularly interested in painting as "LITERALLY HITLER". The wackiest part of a Pat Buchanan presidency wouldn't be him trying to declare a Butlerian jihad against Israel and declaring Adolf Hitler the Eternal Fuhrer of America second only to God Emperor Richard Nixon, It would be him trying to drag America out of the role of global leadership kicking and screaming in a time where there was open warfare in Yugoslavia and deep geopolitical issues regarding the status of the Former USSR. It seems his most 'wacky' idea at the time in the eyes of the Republican political establishment wasn't the "repeal of the Civil Right Act"(what????), It was the quite prescient(and obvious) observation that deindustrialization was going to be a disaster for the 'American Heartland' and cause a witch's brew of social decay as well shooting American Industrial Capacity and the American Middle Class in the foot!

 

[Thisisnotausername]

It seems we're on two different pages here or that you're not grasping this AHC. You are challenging me to prove that Buchanan tried to make segregation a continued reality in our real-life. This is an alternate history challenge.

I am not asking you to prove that Buchanan attempted to reimpose segregation when he had no power to do so. I am challenging you to produce evidence--any evidence--that had he become president in the 90s, he would have attempted to use the power of the presidency to reintroduce segregation. He ran for president three times: during any of those runs, did he say that as president, he would reintroduce segregation? Did he write a column saying that we should bring back segregation? Call for a return to Jim Crow on Crossfire? If, during the time period in question IOTL, he never once expressed the desire, as a pundit or as a presidential candidate, to bring back segregation, why should we believe that if he became president, he would immediately jump to do just that? How many politicians do you know of who embarked on such a major and controversial policy initiative after campaigning for office multiple times without ever mentioning it?

By the late 1990s, Buchanan had enough sense to figure out that segregation is totally out of our Overton Window, so he no longer talks about it. He still says plenty of racist and pro-Nazi things, in barely- if at all coded form. He has never disavowed any of his life's earlier beliefs or platform. Most other political figures with long careers who at one time held reprehensible beliefs have. What has stopped Buchanan from doing the same?

Just because he has never formally disavowed segregation does not mean he would seek to waste political capital on trying to restore it, something which would be so incredibly unpopular and brazenly unconstitutional that it would almost certainly fail and doom any prospect he had of reelection.

You tried to challenge me with George Wallace so let me challenge you now: if Buchanan were dictator of the world in 1998 and he could bring segregation back with one push of the button (or conquer Israel, or put all Muslims in internment camps if they don't renounce the Koran, or deport all Hispanics, or have all WWII textbooks rewritten, or pass a decree banning all birth control and sex ed and extra-heterosexual marital sex), do you honestly think he wouldn't? If so please explain your answer with evidence from his life.

It doesn't matter, because that's not the question you asked. The question you asked is "what would Buchanan do if he became president?" I am not interested in what Buchanan would do if the keys to the world were handed to him and no-one could stand in the way of him enacting whatever secret desires lie deep within his heart of hearts. I am interested in what Buchanan would do if made president, a circumstance under which his actions which would be subject to the limitations and pressures of that office and of that political situation, limitations which you do not seem to fully appreciate.

 

[Red_Neptune]

I don't see why everyone is so sure America is going to become a theocratic dictatorship or whatever. There are very real, very present, and very strong unspoken rules of the Presidency: you can speak anything you want, but when it comes to governing there are rules as to what you can do. For example, Obama's early years in the Presidency were remarkably liberal, and his foreign policy that seems a complete U-turn of the Bush doctrine: it pushed for reconciliation with Russia, closing of Guantanamo and torture camps, a phasing out of foreign wars, rejection of the War on Terror, and essentially kicking out the neocons. By 2015 Obama had pulled a full 180 on that: we were antagonistic against Russia, Guantanamo was still not closed, foreign wars were not ending, the War on Terror was still going on (albeit in a limited form), and instead of the neocons in power it was the neoliberals.

My point? The things Buchanan says he isn't going to do aren't the things he actually will do. What I really expect from Buchanan is a proto-Trump, but with a greater emphasis on religion. He will govern a lot like a standard Republican - i.e. hawkish, supporter of deregulation, someone who has close ties with religious leaders, etc. - but who has a lot of populist rhetoric. I am not sure why everyone here is so sure Buchanan will be an isolationist. This is a guy who, in 2008, wrote in an oped criticizing Obama as seeming:

"fated to fail as were Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter. And for the same reason: a belief in his own righteousness and moral superiority, and a belief that his ideals and his persona count mightily in the modern world...As for Barack, he behaves on the world stage like some Ivy League kid ashamed of the people he came from, letting one and all on campus know that he is nothing like his benighted family with its sordid history. In Cairo, he confessed that America had a hand in dumping over the regime in Iran in 1953. He did not mention that the United States forced the retreat of Joseph Stalin's army from Iran in 1946...Is Obama unaware that Egypt, Turkey and Saudi Arabia run prisons that make Guantanamo look like The Breakers at Palm Beach?...How many Guantanamo inmates plead to be sent home to Muslim countries?...If Obama believes he can build himself up by tearing America down, he is mistaken. Cynical foreigners will view it with snickering contempt, patriotic Americans with disgust."

These are the things someone like Jeanne Kirkpatrick or Donald Rumsfeld would write in order to justify their actions; someone who subscribes to isolationism isn't going to deride a foreign policy - regardless of whether their support for isolationism is based of left-wing or right-wing views - as "tearing America down." The main difference I see from him and standard Republicans is probably trade -- in that regard, he's going to be certainly quite protectionistic. But Republicans haven't shied away from that when necessary, and even Trump's trade policy is being shaped by former members of the Reagan and Bush I & II administrations.

 

[SealTheRealDeal]

I am not sure why everyone here is so sure Buchanan will be an isolationist. This is a guy who, in 2008, wrote in an oped criticizing Obama as seeming:

"fated to fail as were Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter. And for the same reason: a belief in his own righteousness and moral superiority, and a belief that his ideals and his persona count mightily in the modern world...As for Barack, he behaves on the world stage like some Ivy League kid ashamed of the people he came from, letting one and all on campus know that he is nothing like his benighted family with its sordid history. In Cairo, he confessed that America had a hand in dumping over the regime in Iran in 1953. He did not mention that the United States forced the retreat of Joseph Stalin's army from Iran in 1946...Is Obama unaware that Egypt, Turkey and Saudi Arabia run prisons that make Guantanamo look like The Breakers at Palm Beach?...How many Guantanamo inmates plead to be sent home to Muslim countries?...If Obama believes he can build himself up by tearing America down, he is mistaken. Cynical foreigners will view it with snickering contempt, patriotic Americans with disgust."

These are the things someone like Jeanne Kirkpatrick or Donald Rumsfeld would write in order to justify their actions; someone who subscribes to isolationism isn't going to deride a foreign policy - regardless of whether their support for isolationism is based of left-wing or right-wing views - as "tearing America down."

I don't see anything interventionist in that statement. I think you're forgetting that the right wing populist brand of American Isolationism is also based on American exceptionalism.

"other countries are inferior, we should fix them" vs "other countries are inferior, they aren't worth our time let alone our resources"