The Conservative Who Turned White Anxiety Into a Movement

In May 1995, Pat Buchanan appeared at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., to announce an immigration policy that would become the centerpiece of his presidential campaign. “We have an illegal invasion of this country,” Buchanan warned. To resist it, he called for a “Buchanan Fence” patrolled by the military along the southern border, a five-year moratorium on legal immigration, and a constitutional amendment that would deny citizenship to children born in the U.S. to undocumented parents.

The platform was designed to stave off something Buchanan had long dreaded: “If present trends hold,” he noted a few years earlier, “white Americans will be a minority by 2050.” Buchanan was the first major politician to transform white anxiety about that prospect—which the Census Bureau first predicted in 1990—into an organizing principle for the conservative movement. (Never mind that the idea of a majority-minority tipping point is contested by social scientists, who argue that ever-changing norms about racial self-identification are blurring the numbers.) “The question we Americans need to address, before it is answered for all of us, is: Does this First World nation wish to become a Third World country?” he wrote in 1990.

Buchanan never came close to winning the presidency, but the fear he incited of a majority-minority future has become integral to the Republican Party and Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign. Like Buchanan, Trump has made opposition to undocumented immigration the cornerstone of his presidential bid. Although he and his supporters try to portray this as a matter of law and order, they often admit that their chief concern is America’s shifting ethnic composition.

“People are just alarmed by what they see in the changes in the demographics in our country,” South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, a Trump surrogate, said in Iowa this year. A few weeks earlier, Trump accused migrants of “poisoning the blood of our country.”

[From the October 2022 issue: The long unraveling of the Republican Party]

For Buchanan and Trump, immigration isn’t just about America’s ethnic identity. It’s also about electoral power. Even as the GOP slowly diversifies, white Americans continue to make up a disproportionate share of its base, leading many conservatives to view nonwhite immigration as an existential threat. “Either the Republican Party puts an end to mass immigration,” Buchanan wrote in 2011, “or mass immigration will put an end to the Republican Party.”

Buchanan may have been the first prominent politician to focus on the majority-minority tipping point, but the American right’s preoccupation with declining white power isn’t new; it shaped the right’s defense of slavery and the violent overthrow of Reconstruction. By the time Buchanan ran for president, it wasn’t new for him either. He’d begun politicizing white resentment at the start of his career, creating a blueprint that would prove hugely influential for the GOP.

As a young speechwriter for Richard Nixon, Buchanan helped conceive of the “southern strategy” that Republicans used to appeal to white voters who were alienated by the civil-rights movement. Buchanan counseled Nixon to ignore “liberal issues” like housing, education, and unemployment. “The second era of Reconstruction is over,” he wrote to the president in 1970. “The ship of integration is going down.”

When he ran for president in the 1990s, Buchanan was still criticizing the civil-rights laws of the 1960s, trying to court revanchist white voters, such as supporters of the Klansman turned presidential candidate David Duke. He described the Voting Rights Act as “regional discrimination against the South” and visited Confederate monuments while campaigning in states such as Georgia and Mississippi. “Who speaks for the Euro-Americans?” he asked. “Is it not time to take America back?”

Buchanan first ran for president in 1992 under the slogan “Make America First Again,” a riff on Ronald Reagan’s “Let’s Make America Great Again.” He mounted a strong challenge to incumbent President George H. W. Bush in the New Hampshire primary, winning more than a third of the GOP electorate. After capturing nearly 3 million votes that year, Buchanan received a coveted keynote spot at the GOP convention, where he spoke apocalyptically about “a cultural war … for the soul of America.”

Although Buchanan didn’t win a single state, Republicans adopted some of his positions on immigration as the official party platform, pledging to “equip the Border Patrol with the tools, technologies and structures necessary to secure the border.” (Buchanan’s sister and campaign manager, Bay Buchanan, insisted that “structures” meant walls; “they don’t build lighthouses on the border,” she said.)

Four years later, Buchanan ran again and won the New Hampshire primary. During the campaign, he portrayed his effort to preserve Judeo-Christian values and white power in the face of a massive demographic shift as part of America’s oldest struggle, calling his followers “the true sons and daughters of the Founding Fathers.”

After he lost the nomination, Buchanan was sidelined by the GOP establishment. Instead of getting a prime-time slot at the convention, he was blocked from speaking entirely. Buchanan became disillusioned and left the GOP for Ross Perot’s Reform Party, where he briefly squared off against Trump in the 2000 primary. “Look, he’s a Hitler lover,” Trump said of Buchanan on Meet the Press in 1999. “I guess he’s an anti-Semite. He doesn’t like the Blacks. He doesn’t like the gays. It’s just incredible that anybody could embrace this guy.”

Buchanan won the Reform nomination but received fewer than half a million votes in the general election. He spent the 2000s in the political wilderness, watching as the country’s white population grew by just 1 percent from 2000 to 2010 while the Black population grew by 15 percent, and the Hispanic and Asian populations by 43 percent. Every few years he published screeds with titles like The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization and State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America. “The people who put the GOP in power are not growing in numbers nearly as rapidly as immigrants and people of color who want them out of power,” he wrote in 2006. “The fading away of America’s white majority entails an existential crisis for the GOP.”

These writings, mostly ignored at the time, appeared prophetic after Barack Obama’s election in 2008, when Republicans fretted over the diverse coalition assembled by the first Black president. As Buchanan became more marginalized, his ideas paradoxically found greater favor within the GOP. His concerns about white displacement, which Republican leaders had mostly tried to downplay in the 1990s and 2000s, were now being pushed into the mainstream of the party, with GOP activists questioning Obama’s claim to the presidency. “For the first time in our lifetimes, outside the South, white racial consciousness has visibly begun to rise,” Buchanan observed in 2010. He seemed emboldened, writing the following year that “equal justice for the emerging white minority” was more important than extending rights to formerly marginalized communities.

When the RNC conducted its high-profile “autopsy” after Obama’s reelection in 2012 and urged congressional Republicans to pass immigration reform to improve the party’s standing with minority voters, Buchanan told the GOP to focus instead on courting white voters who hadn’t gone to the polls. At the start of Obama’s second term, when the Senate took up immigration reform, Buchanan warned that it would “create millions of new citizens who will vote to bury the Party of Ronald Reagan forever.”

[Ronald Brownstein: Trump’s ‘knock on the door’]

These views clearly influenced Trump and his advisers. In August 2014, the GOP consultant Kellyanne Conway released polling showing that white voters who were unhappy about demographic change would turn out in higher numbers if a candidate emphasized “stricter enforcement of current immigration laws” and demanded that “illegal immigrants … return to their home countries.” While Trump prepared to launch a seemingly quixotic bid for the presidency, his chief strategist Steve Bannon called the missing-white-voter theory and Conway’s polling on immigration “the intellectual infrastructure” of Trump’s campaign.

If Buchanan helps explain the start of Trump’s presidency, he also helps explain its culmination on January 6. One year after the insurrection, the University of Chicago’s Project on Security and Threats released a study of the more than 700 people charged with breaching the Capitol. It had a surprising conclusion. Unlike many Republicans, the insurrectionists didn’t come from the country’s reddest or most rural counties. Instead, they were more likely to reside in counties whose white populations had experienced significant declines, such as Harris County, Texas, a majority-minority area that includes Houston. The study described a political movement “partially driven by racial cleavages and white discontent with diversifying communities.”

In a larger national poll, the Chicago Project found that 8 percent of the public believed both that Joe Biden’s presidency was “illegitimate” and that force was “justified” to return Trump to power. Of these 21 million Americans, three-quarters agreed that “the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate … with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World.” Fears of a “Great Replacement” were the “most important driver of [the] insurrectionist movement,” the survey concluded.

The fact that Trump has found so much more political success than Buchanan did 30 years ago in exploiting white anxiety suggests that it will worsen as the supposed majority-minority tipping point approaches. That’s coming sooner than Buchanan once feared; white Americans, census data now suggest, will technically be a minority by 2045. Buchanan may have failed to hold back demographic change, but the backlash he sparked is only getting stronger.

This article has been adapted from Ari Berman’s new book, Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—And the Fight to Resist It.