Pat Buchanan announced last month that he has retired from journalism. Buchanan, who has been a part of American political life since he started working for former President Richard Nixon in 1966, has spent decades advocating certain conservative positions that have now become central to the American political conversation — especially since the rise of Donald Trump and populism.

A three-time presidential candidate, Buchanan argued for curbs on free trade and a temporary moratorium on immigration, as well as for pro-life policies and against American involvement in foreign wars. Buchanan also savaged political correctness.

These issues have all come to the forefront of American life, many becoming touchstones in recent years for Trump. Even the New York Times admitted that Buchanan spent his career raising important questions that our society has never seemed willing to discuss forthrightly and that “we are, for the moment, living in Pat Buchanan’s world.”

Buchanan knows this. In a 2016 interview for Politico, Buchanan recalled his New Hampshire visits when he was running for president in 1992: “Broken families, guys out of work, spousal abuse … you saw all this back then. I was astonished when Trump picked up on this. He’s talking about towns hurt, jobs lost. And he’s running a conservative populist, nationalist, America-first campaign.”

In 2023, that worldview has both positives and limitations. In 1992, the Soviet Union had just collapsed, and America was unchallenged in the world. Today, Russia has invaded Ukraine, and China, an economic superpower, is sailing spy balloons into American airspace. Simply reciting the slogan “America First” isn’t enough. The world is far too complex for that.

Buchanan was raised in the same environment I was — what some of us jokingly refer to as “the Catholic ghetto” of Washington, D.C. In fact, Buchanan went to the same Catholic schools as my father, Blessed Sacrament Parochial School and the famed Gonzaga Jesuit High School just blocks from the Capitol. These were places that had a deep impact on both men. Still, the differences between the two men reveal the blind spots in Buchanan’s populism.

The main thing that Buchanan understood was that the American working class was essentially conservative and would flock to a politician who defended their views. Buchanan’s supporters were the “unfashionable minorities,” the blue-collar uneducated workers, as opposed to what Buchanan calls the “media minorities.” Yet it was the “unfashionable minorities” the elites called on when it came time to do the manual labor, fight the wars, or enforce busing, he said.

Anyone who has spent any time in the last few years working manual labor jobs, as I have, has seen how popular the Buchanan philosophy is — and not just among whites. Increasing numbers of Latinos are voting Republican. The biggest Trump cheerleader I ever met was a Hispanic man I worked with in the kitchen of a restaurant. He had immigrated to America. Anyone who has spent time washing dishes or tossing mulch at a home improvement store can be both against welfare, suspicious of the policy recommendations of the elites, and for a high minimum wage.

Many working-class guys I worked with mostly agree with how Buchanan famously diagnosed the culture war in a 1992 convention speech: “The agenda that Clinton & Clinton would impose on America: abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units. That’s change, all right. But that’s not the kind of change America needs. It’s not the kind of change America wants. And it’s not the kind of change we can abide in a nation we still call God’s country.”

Since that speech, three conservative Catholics have ascended to the Supreme Court — one, Brett Kavanaugh, was raised in the same Washington Catholic ghetto as Buchanan and me. (Full disclosure: As a lot of people know, I’m friends with Kavanaugh ). Roe v. Wade was overturned. Yes, gays now have the right to marry, but that’s a harmless issue that most people, even conservatives, have no problem with. On the biggest issues, things like Roe, Buchanan has resoundingly won.

My own father was also the product of an Irish-Catholic neighborhood in Washington and the same schools Buchanan attended. Yet he turned out quite differently. Like Buchanan, my father was pro-life and strongly anti-communist. (At one point, he worked for President John F. Kennedy in the Labor Department.) Yet he also believed that while war was horrible and to be avoided, sometimes conflict was necessary. A writer and editor for National Geographic, he was for legal immigration and had a lifelong curiosity and respect for other cultures as well as a solid Catholic faith. (Buchanan and my father could have actually spoken Latin to each other.)

I still remember one night when the differences between the two men were laid out starkly before me. It was 1991, and William F. Buckley had just published a 40,000-word essay on antisemitism , a charge that had been leveled against Buchanan. Buchanan had claimed that only Israel and its American Jewish supporters were for the Gulf War; when he named the leading figures calling for military action, he left out any non-Jews.

While exonerating Buchanan of general antisemitism, Buckley did take issue with Buchanan’s words during the Gulf War, finishing with this conclusion: "I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to antisemitism , whatever it was that drove him to say and do it: most probably, an iconoclastic temperament.”

It was right around this time that my father and I had dinner with a good friend of ours, a writer who had published fiction in the New Yorker. I realized for the first time that my father had never, not once, been to Germany. I asked why, and his face became serious. “Because they were the enemy,” he said.

It would be hard to imagine Buchanan, who has argued that World War II was unnecessary, saying the same thing. Sometimes you have to fight — especially in defense of your friends.

Buchanan’s positions — pursuing a foreign policy that is best for America, not letting the Left roll over us in the culture war, and having judges who follow the Constitution — are now mainstream. In fact, many on the Right may now be more conservative than Buchanan, who said the following about the Jan. 6 Capitol riot: “What Americans watched was a mob occupation and desecration of the temple of the American republic. And the event will be forever exploited to discredit not only Trump but the movement he led and the achievements of his presidency.”

On that, both Buchanan and my father would agree.

Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of  The Devil' s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi . He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.