Back in the 1980s conventional wisdom held that America was moving rightward under Ronald Reagan. But that is not what Patrick Buchanan saw when he surveyed the country as Reagan’s presidency was coming to a close. In his autobiography, „Right from the Beginning”, published in 1988, Mr Buchanan, a Republican stalwart who had worked for Reagan and Richard Nixon, lamented that the „once-Christian country” had abandoned the Judeo-Christian values he was raised on as a Catholic.
His critique might ring a bell. A secular leftist movement with „its own methods for punishing heretics and policing orthodoxy”, Mr Buchanan wrote, was imposing its values by obsessing over perceived racism, sexism and environmental harm, spreading socialism, censoring speech and teaching young Americans to despise their history. Mr Buchanan inveighed against „an absurd ‘trade war’” to restrict Asian products as „an act of almost terminal stupidity for the West”. Following the lead of the editor William F. Buckley, also a Republican and a Catholic, Mr Buchanan saw free trade as essential to America’s struggle with the Soviet Union.
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