A Very Short Introduction to the History of Pitchfork Populism
In August 2016, while accepting the Republican nomination for president in Cleveland, Ohio, Donald Trump uttered five words that many observers instantly recognized as a rupture from the past. The system is rigged, he declared—and “I alone can fix it.” The Atlantic’s Yoni Applebaum described the speech as “breaking with two centuries of political tradition” in which political aspirants proclaim that the key to overcoming the country’s challenges is for people to put their faith in God, or in the American project and American values, or in each other. Not anymore: From then on, the solution would be to hand power to the one man who, like David before the Philistines, could bring an evil system down.
The departure from a Reaganite political ethos was glaring. The fortieth president preached an upbeat, inclusive politics in which America stood as a beacon of freedom to the world, a city on a hill. He spoke of limiting the power of the state and trusting individuals to make decisions for themselves. He read Friedrich Hayek and honored Frank Meyer. How did the Republican Party go from lionizing Ronald Reagan to worshipping Donald Trump? And why did fusionist ideas seem to disappear from the political picture?
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Trumpism differs from old-school fusionism on at least three major dimensions: its attitude toward power, its views on economic policy, and its rhetorical emphases. Let us take them in turn.
Where fusionism calls for a small, decentralized government with a limited scope of action, Trump’s emergence on the political scene marked a shift toward a strongman approach to conservative politics—a sense that the lone way to combat what has gone wrong with America is by concentrating authority in the hands of someone with a willingness to wield it, unapologetically, without concern for etiquette or procedural constraints. Trump has an expansive view of the power he should possess as president, and he bristles at the idea that either moral or legal concerns should circumscribe its exercise. To give a full accounting of his record would be impossible, but it is worth our while to take a brief tour of the evidence.
In the wake of a 2015 terrorist attack in Paris, Trump called for surveilling Muslim Americans and said he would “strongly consider” closing some mosques; neither suggestion passes First Amendment muster. He once promised to “bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding” if elected and insisted that “the other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families.” He has suggested that law enforcement should be able to shoot rowdy protesters and migrants attempting to cross the southern border. And he has repeatedly threatened to prosecute his political opponents, declaring (for example) that members of the House select committee that investigated the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot should be jailed and that news outlets and tech companies that treat him badly should be shut down.
During his first term in the White House, Trump frequently ordered members of his administration to abuse the legal system for his benefit and was frustrated by their noncompliance. As former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson recalled in 2018, “I’d have to say to him, ‘Mr. President, I understand what you want to do, but you can’t do it that way. It violates the law.’” In his second term, Trump has worked to avoid that problem by surrounding himself with staffers, military leaders, and political appointees who will do his bidding, no questions asked. He has used dubious emergency declarations to unilaterally impose tariffs on friendly trading partners, to remove alleged gang members from the country without following the normal deportation process, and to launch congressionally unauthorized military strikes on boats he claims are trafficking narcotics in the waters off of Central and South America. He has claimed the power—contrary to both statute and Supreme Court precedent—to refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress if he disagrees with its use. And he has ordered the Justice Department to open investigations into people, such as George Soros, he does not like.
In 2018, Trump asserted that he has an “absolute right to PARDON myself,” something that would essentially render him unaccountable to the law. In 2020, discussing the state-level pandemic response, he told the press that “when somebody is president of the United States, the authority is total.” In 2021, Trump demanded that then–Vice President Mike Pence intervene to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. To his credit, Pence refused; four years later, Trump replaced him with a running mate in J. D. Vance who said he could be counted on to do what his predecessor would not. In early 2025, the newly inaugurated president shared an AI-generated image of himself wearing a crown accompanied by the words, “LONG LIVE THE KING.”
In 2022, Trump declared on social media that because the election two years earlier had (in his estimation) been illegitimate, “a Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” National Review’s Charles C. W. Cooke responded that the statement should “mark his banishment from political contention” in the future.
What Trump did in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election was monstrous. What he has taken to suggesting since then is even worse. American patriots do not seek to overturn legitimate election results or recommend the suspension of the United States Constitution; they respect and defend both at all costs. Donald Trump is not a patriot. He is, in his heart of hearts, a tyrant.
Trump’s behavior did not, of course, turn out to be politically disqualifying. In fact, some of the most powerful institutional players on the American right were soon running interference for him and working to advance his view of executive authority. In a blog post debuting its Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation gloated that “the conservative movement increasingly knows what time it is in America. More and more of our politicians are willing to use the government to achieve our vision, because the neutrality of ‘keeping the government out of it’ will lose every time to the left’s vast power.” In an interview with The New York Times, the president of Heritage, Kevin Roberts, described the think tank’s role as “institutionalizing Trumpism.” (Asked in the same interview whether he believed that Biden had won in 2020, Roberts said, “No.”) While much of Project 2025 consisted of traditional GOP policy proposals, it also included a chapter arguing that the president can limit or evade congressional oversight of executive branch agencies and that litigation decisions at the Department of Justice must be “aligned with the President’s policy agenda,” an instruction that would seem to place political considerations ahead of the impartial pursuit of justice.
On no policy issue has this questionable approach to executive power been more clear than immigration enforcement. That was true to a certain extent during Trump’s first term—see the attempts to ban entries from Muslim-majority countries and the use of family separation at the border in an effort to deter future migration—but it has been even more acute during the early months of his second term. From arresting green card and student visa holders for the offense of having criticized Israel’s treatment of Gaza to shipping detainees to El Salvador and South Sudan in defiance of court orders (and then claiming it did not have the ability to retrieve those detainees, even in cases where the deportation was carried out in error) to authorizing masked enforcement officers to engage in racial profiling and worse, the Trump administration has exhibited an almost total indifference to the rule of law with regard to immigration.
Its actions have been egregious enough to provoke anxiety in some right-of-center quarters. In May 2025, the conservative columnist Ross Douthat sat down for an interview with Vance and expressed his concerns as follows:
There are elements of what you might call a kind of war-on-terror mentality that you’re taking vis-à-vis people allegedly associated with gangs and cartels that seems to me similar to the approach taken to anyone associated with Islamic terrorism and so on in the aftermath of September 11. You and I remember that in more than a few cases this ended up with situations where the U.S. was taking people into custody and remanding them to black sites who turned out, unsurprisingly, not to be number-one Al Qaeda terrorists.
It is somewhat difficult for the media to do this, but to the extent that it’s possible for the media to examine the figures and individuals that you guys have been trying to essentially remand to prison in El Salvador without extensive legal process, it just seems like this system is ripe for war-on-terror-style abuses, where you are going to be sending people to a prison in El Salvador that advertises itself as a terrible place, and, one, some of those people are probably going to be innocent. Two, some of them are going to be people who have committed a crime, who have some kind of gang affiliation, but who under normal American non-wartime law would end up going to jail for six months or a year or something.
And they’re going to disappear, potentially, into a system for a decade or more. And that just seems like you are creating a context where injustice is inevitable.
Douthat’s worries were not universally shared. Some on the right—Vance foremost among them—have been happy to justify the administration’s tactics on the grounds that, as the Harvard Law School professor Adrian Vermeule put it, “due process like all other law is only properly law when it is rationally ordered to the common good.” (Here as elsewhere, “the common good” seems to function as a blank check for presidential use.) Or as one Dissident Right commenter announced, “I don’t care about being a ‘nation of laws.’ . . . If it takes a ‘dictator’ to actually get anything DONE, then that’s what I want.” Even as public approval of the Trump presidency slid into negative territory in early 2025, the cult of personality around Trump made it difficult for Republican officeholders to oppose his wishes.
A second area where Trump has reversed major tenets of twentieth-century conservatism is economic policy. Where the fusionist perspective is favorable to free markets at home and free trade abroad, Trump is comfortable with aggressive interventions into the economy aimed at masterminding certain outcomes. The strategy was epitomized by a “deal” he struck in 2017 with the Taiwan electronics manufacturer Foxconn to build a $ 10 billion plant in Wisconsin that was supposed to provide thousands of jobs for Americans. Foxconn happily accepted a package of state and federal subsidies totaling some $ 4 billion, yet the project, touted by Trump as a shining example of his “America First” agenda, failed to materialize as planned.
Trump has been even more aggressive in the realm of international trade. A protectionist through and through, he ran for president three times promising to impose tariffs on imports in order to boost American producers against foreign competition. “I have a different vision for our workers,” he said in his 2016 convention speech, making explicit his rejection of old-school conservative economics. “It begins with a new, fair trade policy that protects our jobs and stands up to countries that cheat . . . I am going to bring back our jobs to Ohio and Pennsylvania and New York and Michigan and all of America, and I am not going to let companies move to other countries, firing their employees along the way, without consequences.” In his second term as president, he has gone so far as to impose heavy and ever-shifting tariffs on close allies such as Canada and the European Union.
Some of this is a reflection of the strongman approach to power. When Trump threatens American manufacturing companies with retaliation if they build facilities overseas, as he did with Carrier and Harley-Davidson during his first term, he is claiming a right to dictate business decisions to private actors and weaponizing legitimate government functions for political purposes. As the Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein put it in a 2016 defense of such practices, Trump knew he would “have to engage in a few more bouts of well-publicized arm twisting before the message finally sinks in in the C-Suite. He may even have to make an example of a runaway company by sending in the tax auditors or the [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] inspectors or cancelling a big government contract.” Those actions would inevitably be struck down by the courts, Pearlstein admitted. But “most companies won’t want to risk such threats to their ‘brands,’” so “they will find a way to conform to the new norm, somewhat comforted by the fact that their American competitors have been forced to do the same.”
Such behavior weakens the rule of law, or the principle, as Friedrich Hayek wrote, that “government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand—rules which make it possible to foresee with fair certainty how the authority will use its coercive powers in given circumstances and to plan one’s individual affairs on the basis of this knowledge.” To employ the government’s lawful authorities to retaliate against a company for an action (opening a factory in Thailand, say) that is perfectly legal constitutes an obvious abuse of power—the kind of quasi-official bullying one expects from a Latin American caudillo, not from the leader of a constitutional government of limited and enumerated powers.
In addition to being an assault on the rule of law, the Trump economic program runs afoul of the classically liberal belief—also advanced by many traditional conservatives, including Russell Kirk—that humility and a light governmental touch are necessary because of Hayek’s “knowledge problem.” However well-intentioned, human beings cannot know enough to successfully micromanage a complex modern economy. Forcibly overruling the market almost always leads to inefficiencies that make the country as a whole poorer. Steel and aluminum tariffs introduced during Trump’s first term with a goal of benefiting domestic producers, for instance, harmed not just foreign makers and American importers, but every American industry that relied on steel and aluminum as inputs, such as beer companies that need metal for cans and kegs. The net result was fewer U.S. manufacturing jobs, precisely the opposite of the policy’s stated intention. Subsidies, price controls, and other economic interventions are likewise apt to have negative unintended consequences, as the Foxconn boondoggle showed.
On government spending, too, Trump has left the traditional conservative reservation. Other recent Republican presidents may have failed to solve the country’s debt-and-deficit problem, but they all made gestures (at the very least) to the importance of basic fiscal responsibility. Trump has been a shameless profligate; not only does he spurn calls from fiscal hawks such as former House Speaker Paul Ryan to address America’s unsustainable entitlement system, but he demands that Congress spend even more money than it is already inclined to. In 2020, his administration pushed through a $ 2.2 trillion pandemic-assistance bill that dwarfed the Obama administration’s historic 2009 stimulus package. It included $ 1,200 payments to millions of Americans and was followed by a second round of $ 600 checks that Trump, then facing reelection, denounced as not generous enough. The inflation of the early Biden years was surely attributable in part to the recklessness of his predecessor.
Trump is no consistent ideologue, and on some issues—tax cuts and certain forms of deregulation in particular—he has almost looked like a standard-issue Republican. His decision to tap SpaceX founder Elon Musk to run a newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the early days of his second administration appeared to reflect a fusionist-friendly skepticism toward the bloated and unaccountable administrative state. He has added many well-qualified judges and justices to the federal bench, resulting in (among other things) the overturning in 2022 of Roe v. Wade. He has also reversed Democratic executive actions that imposed genuinely dubious and unpopular “diversity, equity, and inclusion” requirements on federal agencies, schools, and other institutions.
In a few areas, Trump has arguably hewed to Reagan’s campaign promises more faithfully than Reagan did. The former California governor ran in 1980 on abolishing the Department of Education (which had only just been established as a standalone cabinet agency that year) but could not get Congress to accede. Trump was not able to either, but he went ahead with plans to cut nearly half of the department’s employees and outsource many of its functions anyway. On a similar note, while Republicans have for generations threatened to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and its quasi-subsidiaries PBS and NPR, it was Trump who finally got it done.
Still, whatever progress he has made from a fusionist perspective must be balanced against his administration’s disdain for the rule of law. Musk’s short-lived and shambolic DOGE efforts, which embodied the famous Silicon Valley ethos of “disruption,” seemed to produce as much chaos and inefficiency as actual reform. And on tax policy, Trump has been more interested in taking credit for saving his constituents money than in figuring out how to avoid blowing a hole in the federal budget. As conservative and libertarian economists have noted with growing alarm, the debt accumulating on his watch is an anchor that at best will weigh down the American economy for years to come and at worst could sink it outright.
The conservative columnist George Will has argued that the Trump presidency has been the most progressive in American history, inasmuch as progressivism’s “core components” include the use of industrial policy to pick economic winners and losers, the effort to build political coalitions made up of “government-dependent factions,” the willingness to borrow endless sums of money, the belief in “presidential supremacy,” and so on. Even some on the left have admitted that Trump is closer to them on substantive issues than old-school conservatives ever were. All the way back in July 2015, ThinkProgress was publishing a progressive case for his candidacy, which noted that he had voiced support for universal health care and opposition to cutting Social Security. More recently, the journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon, who previously identified as a Marxist, declared herself a member of the “MAGA left.”
But it is not only Trump’s rejection of economic liberty and embrace of government power that have been such a shock. It is also his cheap insults, his attacks on fellow Republicans, and his willingness to transgress norms and encourage an ugly us-versus-them mentality among the American people. Consider his promises to pay the legal fees and issue pardons for supporters who attack hecklers at his rallies or otherwise engage in political violence on his behalf. Or the fact that he has urged cops not to “be too nice” to criminals being taken into custody, seemingly excusing police brutality. He refers to immigrants and leftists as “animals” and “vermin,” calls the news media “the enemy of the American People,” and makes up childish nicknames (such as “Little Marco” and “Crazy Kamala”) for his political rivals. He once told a group of nonwhite Democratic members of Congress to “go back” to “the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came,” even though three of the four were born on U.S. soil.
That last comment was widely condemned as xenophobic, but Trump’s lack of a filter is part of his selling proposition. In 2015, the conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh described his listeners’ feelings about the future president as “even when he’s not on message . . . he comes across as somebody that says things they would like to say.” The idea that political incorrectness is a virtue, signifying authenticity and even courage, is nothing new: Explaining the appeal of George Wallace, the infamous Alabama segregationist, the right-wing Dartmouth professor Jeffrey Hart once wrote, “Wallace suggests freedom from the conventional taboos. The man says what he thinks. Wouldn’t it be fun to do that?” Trump’s rhetorical choices, like his aesthetic choices, are calculated to demonstrate in no uncertain terms that he shares his base’s disdain for left-wing norms and values.
This may be the place where he most dramatically departs from Reagan-style politics. The former speechwriter and Reagan administration alum Peter Wehner in early 2016 described Trump as “the antithesis of so much that Ronald Reagan stood for: intellectual depth and philosophical consistency, respect for ideas and elevated rhetoric, civility and personal grace.” The fact that he was then favored to win the Republican nomination “shows how far the GOP has drifted,” Wehner added. The former president’s son, Ron Reagan Jr., agreed. “Just on a human being kind of level,” he said, “I can’t think of two people who are more diametrically opposed.” Trump is crudity and cruelty personified, a walking repudiation of the Judeo-Christian virtue so close to the heart of traditionalists such as Russel Kirk.
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One potential answer to the question of how the Republican Party could have been so thoroughly transformed so quickly is that the seeds of Trumpism were there all along.
The post-Reagan years saw a split open up between “neoconservatives” and “paleoconservatives.” The neocons, a cadre of erstwhile leftists with strong anticommunist bona fides but a more anemic commitment to free markets (the godfather of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, famously could summon only “two cheers for capitalism”), had swiftly gained influence on the right beginning in the 1970s. The paleocon worldview—economically protectionist, militarily noninterventionist, socially traditionalist, and rabidly anti-immigrant—represented a vitriolic rejection of neoconservatism and its philo-internationalist orientation. A common aphorism at the time held that a neocon was a liberal who had been mugged by reality; Stan Evans joked that a paleocon was a conservative who had been mugged by a neocon.
Both groups departed in important ways from their fusionist forebears, but the paleos saw themselves as reviving an earlier “America First” understanding of conservative politics. Under Presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge, the GOP of the 1920s had been skeptical of international military engagement (presaging Trump’s disavowal of the Iraq War during his 2016 run and hostility to U.S. involvement in Ukraine’s defensive war early in his second term). While generally supporting free markets at home, Harding and Coolidge also championed high tariffs to protect American producers from competition abroad. “Paleo,” which means “old” or “ancient,” self-consciously hearkened back to the Republican Party of that era.
The face of the paleocon movement was “Pitchfork Pat” Buchanan, a journalist and political operative who had worked in the Reagan White House and was an ardent free-trader before breaking paleocon in the late eighties. No sooner did the Soviet Union collapse than Buchanan and his populist allies began agitating for sharp changes to the GOP agenda. In 1992, Buchanan announced his decision to challenge incumbent President George H. W. Bush for the Republican nomination with these words: “He is a globalist, and we are nationalists. He believes in some pax universalist. We believe in the old republic. He would put America’s wealth and power at the service of some vague new world order. We will put America first.” The paleocons were concerned less with keeping the government small than with ensuring it be used to promote the right causes and help the right people.
Like Brent Bozell before him, Buchanan thought of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco as a bracing model of strong leadership. And like Trump a few decades later, he took pride in being willing to offend. “There are a lot of Americans who are very intimidated from saying candidly what they think,” he once told the Washington Post. He was referring specifically to his willingness to criticize Israel, but the same could go for controversial statements he made about any number of sacred cows. As with Trump, that turned out to be an effective tactic: “People liked him because he said outrageous things, because he flouted political norms,” the Vanderbilt historian Nicole Hemmer explained. As one Buchanan supporter put it, “We’re scared to say what we think some of the real problems are in this country for fear of being called a racist or extremist. Pat says it for us.”
During the nineties, “the sunny optimism of the Reagan era fell away, and grievance politics took over,” Hemmer wrote. Though Buchanan’s candidacy fizzled, the excitement it generated helped encourage the Texas billionaire Ross Perot to enter the general election as an Independent. He ran on a platform that, like Buchanan’s, rejected free trade and military adventurism. Astonishingly, despite an erratic campaign in which he dropped out in the summer and then reentered the race that fall, Perot claimed nearly a fifth of the 1992 popular vote.
George Will likes to say that Barry Goldwater won in 1964; it just took sixteen years to count the vote. The quip emphasizes that Goldwater paved the way for Reagan’s eventual success. Some paleocon sympathizers today similarly argue that Buchanan won the 1992 primaries; it just took twenty-four years (enough time for Trump’s ascent) for the ballots to be counted.
According to Hemmer, the paleocons introduced a certain “coarseness” into the discourse that “valued scoring political points above hewing to ideological principles.” But Buchanan was not the only Republican pugilist who made waves in the 1990s. Newt Gingrich became House Minority Whip in 1989 and Speaker in 1995. He brought a “scorched-earth approach” to both roles, weaponizing ethics investigations against his Democratic colleagues and lamenting that “one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage [our candidates] to be nasty.” (Gingrich “referred to his strategy as a long-term game of three-dimensional chess,” the author Rick Perlstein wrote in Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976–1980. “If he chipped away the public’s trust in the House, and with that the party that controlled it, the public would throw the rascals out—and Republicans would inherit the wreckage.”) He also enlisted the pollster Frank Luntz “to train Republicans to speak a new language,” Hemmer explained, “one that would demonize their opponents and shroud even their most unpopular policies in a gauze of punchy, positive words.” Ironically, Gingrich was forced to resign from Congress in 1999 following a corruption scandal of his own, while the American Association for Public Opinion Research censured Luntz in 1997 for unethical polling practices.
Then there were the hard-edged conservative media darlings who emerged in this period: talk radio hosts such as Limbaugh, who trained a maniacal fan base to shout “feminazi!” whenever Hillary Clinton’s name came up; cable news stars such as Ann Coulter, with her penchant for referring to Democrats as “retards” and “faggots”; and writers such as Dinesh D’Souza, whose controversial 1995 book, The End of Racism, led the Black conservatives Glenn Loury and Robert Woodson to sever ties with the American Enterprise Institute rather than share an affiliation with its author.
The New Right of the 1970s and 1980s, populated by “second-generation conservatives” such as the Heritage Foundation cofounder Paul Weyrich, the fund-raising pioneer Richard Viguerie, and the anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schlafly, was something of a bridge between the midcentury fusionists and those later figures. As social conservatives, troubled by obscenity on television and resentful of court rulings against school prayer, they were definitely not libertarians. But as hardened anticommunists and children of the Goldwater revolution, they were broadly pro-market and anti-New Deal, supportive of global trade, and suspicious of government authority. More than anything else, they wanted to beat the left, and they were willing to engage in hardball politics to do it.
According to Viguerie, the New Right was ideologically no different from the earlier generation of fusionist conservatives, but it was operationally different. Instead of thinkers and writers, it was made up of activists and influencers. Their goal was to translate conservative ideas into action. “We got up in the morning and asked ourselves, ‘What five, six, seven things can I do today to put the Democrats out of business?’” Viguerie recalled. “It’s not what [older conservatives such as] Goldwater would do. They had strong beliefs, and they would vote, and they might make speeches around the country, but they were not meeting and planning. We were meeting and planning.” He and his allies began holding weekly gatherings to discuss “how do we pass this legislation, defeat this legislation, elect this person, defeat that one,” he said. “To the extent there was anything that could be called Hillary Clinton’s vast right-wing conspiracy, that probably would have been it.” They formed single-issue pro-life, right-to-work, and Second Amendment advocacy groups. They mentored back-bench Republican congressmen, including a former history professor from Georgia with presidential ambitions (Gingrich). They called for votes on measures they knew would never pass solely to force Democrats to take positions that would be unpopular, making them easier to defeat at the next election.
And they had little patience for old-fashioned “respectability politics” that favored “elite validation” over results. “The enemies of the New Right were compromise, gradualism, and acquiescence in a corrupt system,” Matthew Continetti wrote. “The New Right believed in aggressive political combat.” That made them willing, in ways that Meyer had not been, to partner with an unsavory character like George Wallace, or to accept a more powerful federal executive, or to otherwise moderate their commitment to individual liberty, if that is what they thought it would take to beat the left.
Was it inevitable that this take-no-prisoners approach would degenerate into the brand of “will-to-power” politics we see today? That is debatable, but it would be hard to deny that, as a pair of critics alleged in a 2018 paper for the American Political Science Association, fusionist principles over time gave way to “the exploitation of grievance and status resentments” and “over-the-top appeals for money, phony controversies, fixations on trivialities, larger-than-life media personalities, and lurid scandals.” In the process, the New Right left its mark on the cast of conservative characters who came after, from Buchanan and Limbaugh to Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump.
All these figures appealed to a group sometimes referred to as the “middle American radicals,” or MARs. This was a constituency of socially conservative blue-collar workers who had supposedly been long ignored by Republican elites. At the 1999 Iowa Straw Poll, Buchanan gave a speech that was hostile to trade and immigration, as his speeches always were. But according to Hemmer, “his biggest applause line” was when he declared that if he won the presidency, “his first act would be to place Bill Clinton under arrest.” More than any particular policy commitment, the MARs seemed motivated by a desire to see their enemies humiliated. Trump, of course, would return to that well, leading crowds in exuberant chants of “Lock her up!” and assuring rallygoers, “I am your retribution.”
The “middle American radicals” terminology was popularized by a friend of Buchanan’s named Samuel T. Francis, who was influenced in turn by the work of the former National Review senior editor (and Frank Meyer antagonist) James Burnham. Francis got his start in the New Right, but even before he was run out of mainstream politics for making racist remarks, he identified as a nationalist and a revolutionary rather than a conservative. He called for a “new myth of the nation as a historically and culturally unique order that commands loyalty, solidarity, and discipline” and admitted that “the real meaning” of the phrase “America First” was not only that America’s national interests should trump the interests of other countries but also that America’s national interests should trump the interests of individual American citizens. Decades before Trump and the Dissident Right took up the cause, Francis was arguing for a “Caesarist” approach to executive power and urging the right to abandon support for the checks and balances provided by Congress and the courts. His politics were explicitly grievance-driven and anti-liberal. He expected the MARs to rise up against the technocratic “managerial regime” that controlled their lives in what he considered a form of soft totalitarianism; Buchanan was to be the leader of the middle American revolution.
Francis pushed a crude and uncompromising hostility to foreigners. Opposing illegal immigration “was not an unusual position for a conservative to take,” the political scientist George Hawley has explained. “However, while most conservatives rely on rhetoric regarding the rule of law or perhaps the challenges associated with assimilation . . . Francis was open about opposing immigration specifically because it was changing the racial and ethnic makeup of the nation. His candidness on this issue set him apart even from other paleoconservatives.” There was a strong class-war element to Francis’s thought as well. “The rich give in to the demands of the poor,” he said, “and the middle-income people have to pay the bill.” He coined the term “anarcho-tyranny” to describe a system in which the government fails to punish actual criminals and instead directs resources toward nannying and bullying law-abiding people—a notion that struck a nerve with many middle Americans, then and now.
Francis would lose his job as a columnist at the Washington Times for expressing opinions too flagrantly racist for the conservative establishment to ignore. Buchanan’s views also drifted further into disconcerting territory. He has flirted with Holocaust revisionism and eulogized the Confederacy. In the early 1990s, Bill Buckley assessed his record—particularly his implications that a Jewish lobby was manipulating the United States into a foreign policy at odds with America’s national interest—and reluctantly concluded that Buchanan had “said things about Jews that could not reasonably be interpreted as other than anti-Semitic in tone and substance.” In 1999, National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru wrote that “Buchananism is a form of identity politics for white people” where “loyalty to the tribe” is the preeminent value. In 2002, Buchanan cofounded a paleocon magazine, The American Conservative, as an outlet for right-wing opponents of the Iraq War; by 2010, he had taken to penning articles for the white nationalist website VDARE and found himself ever less welcome in polite society.
Daniel McCarthy, a former editor of The American Conservative, has written that the paleoconservatism of Buchanan and Francis, with its “themes of economic nationalism, immigration restriction, an ‘America First’ foreign policy, and hard-line opposition to multi-culturalism,” found “an unmistakable echo in the Trump campaign of twenty years later.” That is clearly true, though there are limits to the comparison. Fiscal responsibility still carried weight for the paleocons, which is hardly the case with MAGA today. Like Trump with his COVID checks, Francis advised the GOP to jettison its free-market economic program and embrace government expenditures for the benefit of Republican-voting constituencies. But unlike Trump, who has said Congress should just go ahead and abolish the debt ceiling, Buchanan really did want to reduce federal spending. (A balanced-budget amendment was likewise at the heart of the Perot campaign.) Trump has also moved the GOP to the left on social issues such as abortion and gay marriage—the opposite of the effect Buchanan hoped to have on his party.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right (University of Notre Dame Press, 2026). It is part of an ongoing collaboration with the University of Notre Dame Press. You can read other excerpts from this collaboration here. All rights reserved.
