Ron Paul Was My Pat Buchanan
Ron Paul is turning 90 this month. One of the most influential political figures of his time, Paul has meant many things to many people.
Here’s at least a part of what he’s meant to me.
When I was 20 years old, I supported Pat Buchanan for president.
A southerner living in Boston, I was there for his 1996 Lexington battlefield campaign rally where Paul jeered at student protesters. “Come on, children, stop it or I’ll take away your Pell grants.” It was also exciting to see Buchanan on the covers of TIME and Newsweek, and to be living next door to New Hampshire on the night he won that state’s Republican primary. Around this time, I was just discovering Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, the Old Right, Chronicles, and other paleo-flavored things that piqued my baby brain.
I was part of an antiwar conservative populist movement that captured America’s attention in a big way. Buchanan’s heterodox ideas, at least to the young me, were different and inspiring. Even though he never got the nomination, I reckoned that the Buchanan Brigades were about to change the Republican Party and American politics forever.
Instead we eventually got George W. Bush and the War on Terror: the exact opposite of the Buchananite conservative populism that had once animated me so. It was a bummer. So much so, that working in my hometown of Charleston, South Carolina as a radio pundit from about 1999 onward, I eventually quit calling myself a “conservative” on the air and in my columns, lest anyone confuse my politics with Dick Cheney’s.
After Buchanan’s lesser 2000 Reform Party presidential bid, I resigned myself to expecting nothing that good—that revolutionary—happening again.
Until it did. On May 15, 2007, Ron Paul stood on a presidential debate stage and told a Republican audience that did not want to hear it that the reason the U.S. was attacked on 9/11 was because of our constant foreign intervention.
Rudy Giuliani was pissed. The former New York City mayor demanded a retraction from Paul to thunderous applause.
Instead, Paul doubled down and proceeded to explain the CIA-created concept “blowback” to shed light on Osama bin Laden’s motives.
The then-firmly ensconced neoconservative Republican establishment agreed that Paul torpedoed his campaign that night.
Instead, it skyrocketed. This magazine dubbed the exchange with Giuliani “The Ron Paul Moment.”
The libertarian Republican congressman began drawing thousands to his rallies, with lots of young people. He also jumped significantly in most polls and drew record-breaking donations. In his 2012 campaign, Paul even placed a strong second in the New Hampshire Republican primary, a contest some observers thought he could have won if not for the home-region advantage of the winner, the former governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, getting in the way.
Paul’s unwavering antiwar stance was more stark than Buchanan’s due to the environment. Buchanan’s critics focused on his religious right appeal as much or more as any of the other ideas that captured supporters like me. But, while the GOP of the ’90s was certainly still largely pro-war, by 2008, eight years of Bush-Cheney had cemented a thoroughly neoconservative GOP—with so many rank and file not even understanding what that meant, which was part of its effectiveness—that didn’t want to hear some congressman tell them that the Iraq war was wrong, that torture was wrong, that wasting so much money abroad was wrong, and that the U.S. should never do any of that ever again.
For me, this was “Go, Pat, Go” part two, and it was called the “Ron Paul Revolution.” I recognized the excitement in so many of the young people who flocked to Paul, whose ideas they had never expected to come from a conservative Republican, if they had even heard them before. I was happy for them. I was them!
I was not the only person of a certain age and background to feel this way about both phenomenons. I was in my 30s when Paul’s movement exploded and old enough to understand the differences on issues between Buchanan the nationalist and Paul the libertarian constitutionalist. I knew what libertarianism was. I read Tom Woods in The American Conservative all the time. I also became more libertarian during this time.
Despite the differences between Buchanan and Paul, it was their populism—idea-driven, rebellious, organic, and genuine—that made them both appealing to many Americans who wanted to challenge the same old Washington. After Buchanan’s and Paul’s moments, I was not surprised by the rise of the populist Tea Party movement in 2009 and ’10. I was not surprised by the socialist Bernie Sanders populist presidential campaign in 2016. Relatedly, I was not surprised to learn that Buchanan had endorsed Paul when the latter returned to Congress in the ’90s, nor was I shocked to eventually learn that one of the first political rallies attended by my former boss, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), and his wife Kelley was for Buchanan.
It all made sense. During the 2008 election, Buchanan would declare on MSNBC that Ron Paul won debates. Buchanan wrote in 2012, “Most important to Paul are the issues he has campaigned on: a new transparency and accountability for the Federal Reserve, a downsizing of the American empire, and an end to U.S. interventions in foreign quarrels and wars that are none of our business.”
Buchanan added that Paul could be a “prophet in his own time.”
Both Buchanan and Paul were populist precedents to Donald Trump, who also promised radical reform and actually did become president. Trump, like Buchanan and Paul, was definitely on the right, but drew from a cross-section of voters from across the political spectrum.
In 1996, I was 20 years old and supported Pat Buchanan for president. In 2008, I was 34 and supported Ron Paul. In 2024, I was 50 and voted for Donald Trump for president for the first time and for many of the same reasons, particularly when Elon Musk, RFK Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard joined his campaign.
These men are not the same, and their ideas are certainly not either. But it was the populist waves of the last three decades that each harnessed in different eras and that finally delivered one of them to the White House.
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Buchanan and Paul helped build that. Trump broke the dam.
Whether Trump can actually live up to, deliver, and leave behind a meaningful populist legacy is now on him.
Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul already did their parts.
