Michael Brendan Dougherty profiles the irascible, iconoclastic pundit and former politician Pat Buchanan, who describes himself as "a right-wing troublemaker from Northwest [DC] that likes poetry." The thing about Buchanan is that, unlike so many in Washington, he's actually intellectually sincere and internally coherent. Which became a problem:
Buchanan never signed up to be in the conservative klatsch. The movement frankly bored him even as he was trying to bring it into the Nixon fold. “I was never in that,” he says now, recalling all the little organizations like Young Americans for Freedom or the Liberty Society. "In the conservative movement there is all this talking and meeting. I viewed a lot of it as just a waste of time. I learn more when I’m reading.”
He liked many of National Review’s writers, to be sure. But when Garry Wills asked him if they had any influence, he could recall none. "I was going to say Burnham, but when I read Suicide of the West I already agreed with it," Buchanan says before quoting Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, “The heart has reasons that reason does not understand.” Years later he would tell the 1992 Republican convention that the party needed to reconnect with people who don’t read Adam Smith or Edmund Burke, but who remain "conservatives of the heart." He could have been referring to a less tutored version of himself.
My defense of Buchanan, after he was fired from MSNBC, here. Reader responses here and here.
The Dish 