How Pat Buchanan conquered America: reliving the 1990s in the 2012 GOP race.

• Author: Doherty, Brian
• Position: Republican Party

Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?, by Patrick J. Buchanan, Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's, 488 pages, $27.99

The Crusader: The Life and Tumultuous Times of Pat Buchanan, by Timothy Stanley, Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's, 455 pages, $27.99

YOU'VE GOTTA LOVE Pat Buchanan, the columnist-turned-candidate who told one reporter on the campaign trail in 1992 that many people take an instant dislike to him because "it saves time," and gleefully posed in a black cowboy hat, proclaiming, "I'm the bad guy."

Unless you think Buchanan is a dangerous, hateful, racist monster, that is. The progressive watchdog group Color of Change certainly doesn't love the guy. In January the advocacy organization demanded that MSNBC, the mostly left-leaning cable network where Buchanan had been a regular commentator for a decade, fire him. MSNBC president Phil Griffin complied, saying, "I don't think the ideas ... put forth [in Buchanan's new book, Suicide of a Superpower] are appropriate for the national dialogue, much less on MSNBC." After he was sacked, the former presidential candidate turned fighting Irishman, complaining in his syndicated column that MSNBC had given in to those who "brand as racists and anti-Semites any writer who dares to venture outside the narrow corral in which they seek to confine debate." While "prattling about their love of dissent and devotion to the First Amendment," he growled, "they seek systematically to silence and censor dissent."

As Oxford University historian Timothy Stanley explains in his insightful biography The Crusader: The Life and Tumultuous Times of Pat Buchanan, Pitchfork Pat is enough of a jolly polemical gut fighter to mostly laugh off insults and attacks. But when he feels punched by a friend, he gets hurt and punches right back.

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."

In fact, pretty much everything that constitutes modern-day Fox News can be traced to Buchanan, although Fox's own fighting Irishman, Bill O'Reilly, is both less intellectual and less independent-minded than the prototype. Fox thoroughly embodies what Buchanan knew the right wing required back in the Nixon era. "They need a daily plateful of dissent, action, excitement and drama, which it is fair to say are not conservative long suits," he wrote. How things have changed.

The 2012 presidential race also has Buchanan's fingerprints all over it. Both Ron Paul and Rick Santorum carry variations on Buchananite themes. By digging deeply into the crusader's three runs for president--in 1992 and 1996 as a Republican and in 2000 on a third-party ticket--Stanley sheds light on the bewildering patchwork of principle and personality driving 2012 Republican...