OPINION:
In all the excitement about the election and the sentiments about some of President-elect Donald Trump’s nominees, the essential contribution of the one man who started the political revolution that has finally borne fruit a hundredfold has yet to be recognized.
Patrick Joseph Buchanan was born in November 1938 in the District of Columbia. He attended Gonzaga (no one is perfect) and then Georgetown and Columbia. His first job out of graduate school was writing editorials for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, and in 1966, he became the first paid staffer on Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign.
Ultimately, he worked at close range for Nixon and President Ronald Reagan. Among other things, he coined the phrase “silent majority” to describe those voters who were unlikely to join protests but who formed the quietly competent, reliable and hardworking core of the American experiment.
But it was in 1992 that fate finally found him. After President George H.W. Bush broke his vow not to raise taxes, Mr. Buchanan reluctantly decided to run for the 1992 Republican nomination against the president. He knew it would be a long, lonely and thankless fight, and it was. Nevertheless, he persisted.
In that 1992 race, he emphasized the need to preserve American manufacturing and, as needed, moderate our enthusiasm for free trade across borders. He attacked illegal immigration as the source of numerous pathologies and correctly identified businesses as the principal beneficiaries of that crime. He argued that we were already locked in a culture war, and not just with those on the left. He suggested that we didn’t need to be involved in every war.
In short, he was the first politician to unambiguously embrace and articulate what would become the America First agenda upon which Mr. Trump has built his political empire. Were it not for Mr. Buchanan, Mr. Trump would not have twice been elected president and we would not be trying to tease out the mathematics of the merits and demerits of his nominees in the middle of an election year in November.
Of course, Mr. Buchanan lost in 1992, but he opened the door for Ross Perot, who also denounced illegal immigration and free trade, especially the North American Free Trade Agreement. The Republicans split then (as now) over free trade. They lost in 1992 to Bill Clinton, who lost Democratic congressional majorities in 1994 in the wake of the contentious 1993 vote to ratify NAFTA.
Most Americans are, mercifully, unaware of history. That is almost certainly a good thing. Americans run the world and have made life better for almost everyone on the planet in large measure because they are not tangled up in the past.
That said, everyone who is scrambling for work or views or social supremacy in Mr. Trump’s orbit — and everyone who may benefit from his presidency, which includes, hopefully, all Americans and, in turn, everyone on Earth — should take a moment and be grateful to Mr. Buchanan. He was essential to all of this.
• Michael McKenna is a contributing editor at The Washington Times. He volunteered on the 1992 Buchanan for President campaign.
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