From our June issue, Senior Editor Brian Doherty
reviews Pat Buchanan’s new book Suicide of a Superpower: Will
America Survive to 2025?, and Oxford historian Timothy
Stanley’s new biography, The Crusader: The Life and Tumultuous
Times of Pat Buchanan. As Doherty observes, Buchanan is the
last of a dying breed of old-school right-wingers. Yet current
American political culture owes an astonishing amount to this Irish
Catholic son of D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood, even as he fades
into disgraced bestsellerdom. Notions such as the “silent
majority,” liberal media bias, and the modern culture war all
sprang, more or less fully formed, from the head of this former
Nixon and Reagan aide, as did a Republican critique of “vulture
capitalism.”