Was Pat Buchanan simply too far ahead of his time ?
I was looking at very old threads and found this: Pat Buchanan? - Factual Questions - Straight Dope Message Board
“Pat Buchanan is an extremely conservative Republican who takes the general ultra-conservative positions (anti-gun-control; anti-abortion; anti-immigration) and extrapolates them to ends that many observers find absurd (such as advocating that a great big wall be put up on the U.S.-Mexico border to prevent illegal Mexican immigration). He’s also a big gas-bag, giving exhorting, inflammatory speeches that play on the theme of America being under attack, but such speeches are remarkably thin on actual substance, once you get by the rhetoric. It’s the combination of his conservative politics and his combined paranoid and over-wrought speechifying that leads to the comparisons to Hitler – such as Molly Iven’s comment that while she understood his address, she imagined it sounded better in the original German. I don’t think she (or other commentators)really think he’s a Nazi.”
Another post in the same thread:
IMHO, Pat Buchanan represents the worst of both worlds: he’s socially conservative and fiscally liberal (well… fiscally protectionist anyway). Some of his economic ideas sound downright un-Republican. He vehemently opposes any sort of free trade policy. As such, he appeals to white, blue-collar, christian folks who decry the moral decay of the nation but who are also afraid of the big corporate fat-cats shipping their jobs to Mexico (not to mention being afraid of Mexicans coming here and taking their jobs). I also find it amazing that he blatantly uses the phrase “America First”, thereby associating himself with the organization back in the '30’s (which included some Nazi sympathizers) that wanted to keep the U.S. out of World War II.
Obvious parallels to the current president – why did policy platform work for “Trump 2016” but failed for “Buchanan 2000” - was Pat just too far ahead of his time ?