Pat Buchanan is retiring from writing. I’m joining the tributes because his columns helped to turn me away from neocon idiocy and BACK to the localist/socialist position I started with.

The linked article is a career biography showing how Buchanan started inside the Deepest waters of Imperialist Deepstate under Nixon, then gradually diverged toward the Harding/FDR/Ike tradition of neutrality. Divergence is rare. Most top-level public intellectuals start independent (or fake independent) and converge into the swamp.

Buchanan probably should have stopped writing 8 years ago. He lost touch with the utter insanity that began around 2014, and many of his recent columns seemed quaint or retro. Even so, he never lost touch with the permanent spirit of non-intervention and REAL populism.