The Republican National Convention sent chills down the sensitive spines of progressive journalists across the country, who saw in Milwaukee tidings of doom and gloom. One such excitable soul is Chris Lehmann, D.C. bureau chief at The Nation. According to him, the occasion marked the day Republicans put on the grisly garb of “blood-and-soil politics” and transformed into the party of Pat Buchanan.  

Lehmann should be thanking the GOP. The truth is that the Republican Party has managed to murder Buchananism while wearing its face as a mask, like Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs.  

The focus of the story in The Nation is the speech delivered at the RNC by Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate. In both the selection of Vance as Donald Trump’s new running mate and in Vance’s oratory, Lehmann sees the specter of Buchanan, pitchfork aloft in hand. He writes:  

Trump’s own listless, meandering, and astoundingly long acceptance speech on the convention’s last night only made it all the more clear that the MAGA torch is being passed to a more focused and clear-eyed generation of ideologues, with Vance as their de facto leader. But the party’s fulsome embrace of a blood-and-soil brand of economic nationalism, as epitomized by Vance’s speech before the convention on Wednesday, shows that it’s Pat Buchanan who is the ideological forefather of the 21^st-century Republican Party.

Lehmann is correct that Trumpism has been an incoherent ideology, defined by a stark difference between rhetoric and reality. But his assessment of Vance is completely baffling.  

First, Vance’s real views are still somewhat opaque, given that he hasn’t held political office very long and has undergone a dramatic shift from an Obama-admiring, anti-Trump Republican to now, apparently, the heir apparent to MAGA. Second, Vance’s speech at the convention was a far cry from radical. He said that America is home to a real, flesh and blood historical people, but that it’s also “founded on brilliant ideas” and that it welcomes “newcomers into our American family,” so long as “we allow them on our terms.”  

Similar arguments were made by other RNC speakers, like biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who condemned illegal immigration while praising the farce that is mass legal immigration today. Ramaswamy’s businesses have utilized the H-1B visa program, notoriously a source of cheaper labor for companies that don’t want to pay an American worker a proper wage. But more to the point, condemning illegal immigration while exalting legal immigration, which is, under the status quo, deeply problematic in its own way, is not exactly a paleoconservative battle cry.   

In fact, it’s hard to comprehend how Lehmann watched the entire convention—assuming he did—and came away thinking it was something Pitchfork Pat would call his own.  

The first night of the convention featured Amber Rose, a rapper who characterized Christian beliefs as “manipulative” and just recently praised Satanism as a “very rational, logical religion” that helps “a lot of women to get abortions.” Prominent Trump-aligned influencers attacked those who condemned the decision to turn Rose into a new face of the new party. The GOP platform itself was gutted by Trump, with Republican activists describing what was effectively a coup in which delegates had little to no say in defining what the party stands for and believes going forward. Christians and social conservatives were told to take the scraps or kick rocks. The Log Cabin Republicans even declared total victory. The group’s president tweeted on the first night of the RNC: “It’s official! The national GOP platform has been stripped of all anti-LGBT language! Inclusion won! Thank you @realDonaldTrump!”   

That was another way of saying that LGBT ideology in the GOP had steamrolled its opponents. And who might that opponent be? According to former Trump administration ambassador Richard Grennell, the enemy has a name, and it’s name is Pat Buchanan.   

Back in 2021, the Republican National Committee, led then by Ronna McDaniel, launched its first-ever “RNC Pride Coalition” in partnership with the Log Cabin Republicans. The announcement was accompanied by a gala at Mar-a-Lago. Grennell, of course, was there and told Fox News about how at long last the forces of darkness (Buchanan’s Brigade) were on the retreat. “In 1992, I was working on the Bush-Quayle re-election campaign on national staff, and I sat and listened to Pat Buchanan speak at the Houston Republican Convention,” he said. “He outlined a strategy where gay people were not welcomed in the Republican Party.”   

Perhaps Buchanan believed that we should not surrender ground on the timeless and transcendent to accommodate new and ephemeral pieties, which, under Lehmann’s dreaded new GOP, have prevailed for now.  

The GOP has certainly changed its vintage. Buchananism, however, it is not. Attempts by both the left—and the right—to suggest otherwise are as strange as they are confused. Indeed, some on the right ran with Lehmann’s characterization as a kind of taunt. All they accomplish in doing so, however, is allowing their critics to define their own movement, which blinds them to its incoherence and thus prevents them from confronting the contradictions that undermine it.