“The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” So warned President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell address. History repeatedly confirms the axiom: authority tends to centralize and turn away from the concrete loyalties of family, community, and nation. American conservatism today is fractured along precisely this fault line. On one side are America First conservatives who insist the nation’s primary duty is to its own people—protecting domestic industries with tariffs, reversing collapsing birthrates, securing borders, and avoiding endless military entanglements abroad. On the other are those who champion free trade, assertive global leadership, and a hegemonic vision of America’s role in the world. The seismic debates over tariffs on China and especially over U.S. military action in Iran have exposed just how profound the divide has become: one camp prioritizes American workers, families, and sovereignty; the other embraces an interventionist mission. Entangled with these debates over the direction of American responsibility are disagreements regarding the proper nature of federal authority: Do America’s challenges merit an assertive central response, or are more decentralized, subsidiary forms of government the only way to foster decentralized goods. Few figures illuminate the history of these divides more clearly than Pat Buchanan.
Pat Buchanan’s paleoconservative ideology—marked by isolationist foreign policy, economic protectionism, and cultural localism—emerged as a distinct voice in the late-twentieth-century American Right. Buchanan framed globalism as a betrayal of family, church, and nation, consistently emphasizing national sovereignty and the priority of local communities over international entanglements. This localist stance, often dismissed as nativist grievance, reflects a deeper coherence when viewed through the lens of Catholic social teaching. Specifically, Buchanan’s thought implicitly applies the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, the concept that authority and responsibility should reside at the lowest competent level (e.g., family over state, nation over global bodies) before higher powers intervene. Rooted in papal encyclicals like Rerum Novarum (1891) and Quadragesimo Anno (1931), subsidiarity insists that the state or global institutions should support, not absorb, natural local units. Buchanan, a lifelong Catholic formed in the pre-Vatican II tradition, was neither a theologian nor an academic but a journalist and three-time presidential candidate. He never framed his arguments in explicitly Catholic doctrinal terms, yet the structural parallels are unmistakable: his insistence on family, church, and nation as the primary arenas of loyalty and authority closely mirrors subsidiarity’s preference for the local and competent.
Buchanan’s localism frustrated two dominant perspectives within the Religious Right: the evangelical belief in America’s prophetic role in global affairs (often tied to dispensationalist theology) and the neoconservative push for military and ideological intervention overseas. By understanding how Buchanan translated Catholic localism into a forceful anti-globalist politics, we can better understand the theological fractures that persist within the Religious Right and that reverberate in today’s populist debates.
The Doctrinal Foundations of Subsidiarity
The principle of subsidiarity stands at the heart of modern Catholic social teaching as a bulwark against both unchecked centralization and atomizing individualism (Pius XI 1931, §79; Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church 2004, §§185–188) It holds that social functions and decision-making authority should be exercised by the smallest, most proximate, and most competent unit capable of handling them—beginning with the family, ascending only to the parish, the local community, the nation, and, as a last resort, more global authorities. Higher bodies exist to support and coordinate lower ones not to supplant them.
This vision of ordered, organic authority emerged as the Church’s direct response to the social crises of industrialization and totalitarianism. Rerum Novarum (“Of New Things”), issued by Pope Leo XIII in 1891, laid the cornerstone. The encyclical confronted the brutal realities of the Industrial Revolution: twelve- to sixteen-hour workdays, child labor beginning at ages five or six, subsistence wages, urban slums, and the collapse of traditional craft guilds. Unrestrained capitalism left laborers “isolated and helpless, to the callousness of employers and the greed of unrestrained competition” (Leo XIII 1891, §3). At the same time, rising socialist movements threatened to replace one evil with another—class warfare, the abolition of private property, and state ownership that would destroy the family and religious liberty. Leo offered a “third way”: the Church defended private property and free enterprise while insisting on just wages, the right to unionize, and the sanctity of the family as the foundational social unit (Leo XIII 1891, §§12–15, 36–38, 49–51).
Forty years later, Pope Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno (“In the 40th Year,” 1931) commemorated and expanded this legacy amid even graver crises. The Great Depression exposed the failures of laissez-faire economics. Communism had revealed its totalitarian face, and fascism offered a false alternative through state idolatry. In this context, Pius XI explicitly articulated the principle of subsidiarity and paired it with solidarity—the mutual responsibility of all members of society. He condemned both “economic dictatorship” and collectivism, calling instead for a reconstruction of the social order through vocational groups that would mediate between individual and state (Pius XI 1931, §§78–80, 81–87). Quadragesimo Anno thus deepened the Church’s critique of both capitalist excess and socialist tyranny while providing a positive blueprint for subsidiarity in action.
Together, these encyclicals strengthened loyalty to the centralized authority of the papacy in Rome and extended the Church’s moral reach into economics, politics, and civil society. This laid the intellectual foundation for a distinctly Catholic alternative to both liberal globalism and the internationalist strains of socialism while at the same time centralizing the Church’s voice.
Buchanan’s Catholic Formation
Pat Buchanan’s Catholic formation unfolded during the high-water mark of Catholic influence in the United States. Born in 1938 in Washington, D.C., he came of age in the 1940s and 1950s, the golden era of American Catholicism. The Church had grown from a marginalized immigrant faith to the nation’s largest denomination, reaching roughly 22 percent of the population by 1960. Parochial schools enrolled more than five million students; hospitals, universities, and seminaries proliferated; and figures like Bishop Fulton Sheen commanded national television audiences. Mass attendance routinely exceeded 70 percent, and the faith provided what Buchanan later described in Right from the Beginning (1988) as “a code of morality, a code of conduct, a sure knowledge of right and wrong.” He recalled a Church that was “militant, confident and uncompromising,” one that taught absolute truth—“We had the Way, the Truth, and the Light. Other ways were not equally valid. They were false”—and anchored his large Irish-Scottish family and neighborhood community.
Buchanan’s own education reinforced this formation: he attended elite Jesuit institutions, including Gonzaga College High School and later Georgetown University, where the rigorous Thomistic and encyclical tradition was deeply instilled in the curriculum, further embedding the principles of subsidiarity and ordered social authority into his intellectual formation.
This was the pre-Vatican II Church at its zenith: disciplined, culturally cohesive, and politically potent. Cold War anti-communism aligned Catholic teaching with American patriotism, and John F. Kennedy’s 1960 election symbolized full integration into national life. Buchanan’s Jesuit education and immersion in the encyclical tradition equipped him with an instinctive hierarchy of loyalties—family first, then parish, then nation—long before he entered politics. He later lamented the post-Vatican II shift toward a “Church Milquetoast,” linking liturgical changes and ecumenism to the broader cultural erosion he decried throughout his public career.
Thus, when Buchanan later championed national sovereignty, cultural rootedness, and resistance to global abstractions, he was not inventing a new ideology but giving political voice to the subsidiarity he had absorbed in his youth. His formation at the peak of U.S. Catholic confidence—before the reforms of the 1960s and the scandals that followed—explains both the coherence of his thought and its eventual collision with the evangelical and neoconservative currents that came to dominate the Religious Right.
The 1992 Culture War Speech
In his prime-time address to the 1992 Republican National Convention, Pat Buchanan crystallized his vision in what immediately became known as the “Culture War” speech. Understood as a partisan rallying cry and a catalogue of far-right objections to social issues—most notably abortion, gay marriage, radical feminism, pornography, and the exclusion of religion from public life—the address also reveals a coherent hierarchy of loyalties that mirrors the Catholic principle of subsidiarity. Although Buchanan never invokes Rerum Novarum or Quadragesimo Anno by name, the speech’s rhetorical structure and substantive claims embody the doctrine’s core insistence that authority and responsibility must begin at the most proximate and competent levels (family, parish, local community, and sovereign nation) before any higher association may legitimately intervene.
Buchanan pivots to the deeper stakes of the election with the declaration that “There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.” This framing positions the soul of America not as an abstract national ideal to be engineered from Washington or global cosmopolitan centers, but as something cultivated in the concrete, lived realities of families, neighborhoods, churches, and local communities—the very “lowest competent units” prioritized by subsidiarity.
The rhetorical structure most vividly enacts subsidiarity’s ordered hierarchy. Recounting the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Buchanan describes young National Guard troops who “took back the streets of Los Angeles, block by block.” He then turns directly to his audience: “And as those boys took back the streets of Los Angeles, block by block, my friends, we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country.” The tensions in Buchanan’s muscular subsidiarity are apparent here. On the one hand, restoration begins at the most immediate level and radiates outward. Problems are addressed first by those closest to them and most directly competent. On the other hand, his analogy to the National Guard indicates the forceful role that more centralized authorities might play in directing these local efforts. Can the ends of subsidiarity be obtained by methods that mirror the centralized power sought by progressives?
Buchanan frames the progressive cultural agenda—including the nationwide legalization of unrestricted abortion, the redefinition of marriage, the equation of family with oppression by radical feminism, and the broader assault on traditional norms—as a direct attack on these natural units. Imposing such policies at the federal level by judicial fiat overrides the legitimate authority and moral formation properly belonging to families, parishes, and local communities, thereby perpetrating the very overreach that the encyclicals condemned as “an injustice, a grave evil and a disturbance of right order” (Pius XI 1931, §79).
Thus, in the Culture War speech, Buchanan offers an implicit political translation of pre-Vatican II Catholic social teaching. The same hierarchy of loyalty he absorbed in his 1940s–1950s formation—family and parish first, then sovereign nation—now confronts the universal abstractions of elite cosmopolitanism.
National Sovereignty as the Competent Unit
In A Republic, Not an Empire (1999), Buchanan extends the subsidiarity-inspired localism of the Culture War speech into foreign policy and economic order. The book asserts that the sovereign nation itself is the lowest competent unit for matters of war, peace, trade, and alliances. Higher associations—military empires, global institutions, or supranational trade regimes—must support the nation without absorbing or supplanting it.
Buchanan’s turn toward economic protectionism marked a dramatic break from the free-trade orthodoxy he himself had once championed as a Reaganite. Once a vocal supporter of open markets, he became alarmed by the human suffering caused by the rapid loss of manufacturing jobs, the disintegration of industrial towns, and the steady erosion of national economic sovereignty—stories of displaced workers and broken families that echoed the Catholic emphasis on the dignity of labor and the protection of the vulnerable. In A Republic, Not an Empire, he condemns agreements such as NAFTA and GATT as “the wholesale surrender of America’s national sovereignty to multilateral institutions and global organizations.” He describes free trade not as neutral commerce but as “the serial killer of American manufacturing and the Trojan Horse of World Government.” This protectionist stance flows directly from subsidiarity and the Catholic emphasis on solidarity and individual dignity: the nation must retain competent authority over tariffs, labor standards, and trade policy so that it can shield its own families, workers, and local communities from being absorbed or disrupted by impersonal global market forces. In this sense, Buchanan’s shift represented a return to the encyclicals’ “third way”—rejecting both socialist centralization and unrestrained global capitalism—in favor of a coherent economic nationalism that prioritizes the concrete good of American communities over abstract ideals of cosmopolitan efficiency.
The same logic governs his broader foreign-policy. Buchanan repeatedly anchors his vision in the classical American tradition of strategic restraint, drawing especially on George Washington’s Farewell Address and the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. He argues that the form of government nations adopt is their own business and that a foreign policy declaring global democracy as its goal is arrogant and utopian. Attempts by the United States to impose democracy or remake other societies represent precisely the injustice the encyclicals condemn: assigning to a “greater and higher association” what subordinate units—the sovereign nation in its own context—are best equipped to handle.
The Fracture in the Religious Right
Having traced the structural parallels between Buchanan’s paleoconservative hierarchy of loyalty and the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, it remains to examine why this localist vision proved irreconcilable with the dominant currents of the late-twentieth-century Religious Right. Buchanan’s insistence that authority and responsibility begin at the lowest competent units—family, parish, local community, and sovereign nation—was, for the most part, not directly refuted. Instead, it was quietly marginalized within a coalition increasingly energized by two powerful strands: an evangelical dispensationalist theology that cast America’s global leadership and unconditional support for Israel as sacred, prophetic duties and a neoconservative commitment to ideological interventionism.
The evangelical component was anchored in dispensationalist premillennialism. In this worldview, the modern State of Israel’s 1948 rebirth was a direct fulfillment of biblical prophecy. Support for this state therefore became a non-negotiable religious obligation. Jerry Falwell repeatedly declared: “To stand against Israel is to stand against God. We believe that history and scripture prove that God deals with nations in relation to how they deal with Israel.” Pat Robertson echoed the same conviction: “The emergence of a Jewish state in the land promised by God to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was ordained by God. We believe that God has a plan for this nation which He intends to be a blessing to all the nations of the earth.” These doctrinal imperatives framed U.S. global engagement—military aid to Israel, opposition to territorial concessions, and a forward posture in the Middle East—as participation in God’s unfolding plan for history. Within this theological scaffolding, Buchanan’s call for national sovereignty, avoidance of entangling alliances, and rejection of America as “the world’s policeman” appeared insufficiently attuned to America’s prophetic vocation.
The neoconservative current supplied a complementary doctrinal architecture that was secular in origin but religiously resonant. Emerging from former liberals and ex-Trotskyists disillusioned with the New Left, neoconservatives championed an assertive American foreign policy aimed at promoting liberal democracy and containing tyranny. Norman Podhoretz explicitly rejected Buchanan’s “America First” localism as dangerous isolationism. In his 1992 essay “Buchanan and the Conservative Crackup,” he portrayed Buchanan’s skepticism of overseas commitments as having no pmlace in mainstream conservatism. William Kristol and Robert Kagan, in their seminal 1996 Foreign Affairs article, warned against Buchanan-style neoisolationism and called instead for “benevolent global hegemony” grounded in moral clarity and military primacy.
Although neoconservatism was not theologically driven in the same sense as dispensationalism, it meshed seamlessly with evangelical globalism. The language of “democracy building,” “human rights,” and “moral leadership” provided a secular translation of the prophetic duty to defend Israel and confront evil abroad. The result was a powerful pragmatic alliance: evangelicals supplied the grassroots fervor and biblical justification, while neocons supplied the intellectual rationale and policy blueprints. Daniel McCarthy’s 2025 reflection on Podhoretz’s legacy underscores the enduring cost of this fusion, noting that neoconservative interventionism—by generating refugee flows and regional instability—ultimately made both Jews and Americans less safe, precisely the outcome that, ironically, Buchanan’s restraint might have mitigated.
This compound fracture on the political right was rendered more decisive by the shifting demographic and cultural realities of American Christianity. While the Catholic share of the U.S. population remained relatively stable at roughly 20–24 percent through the 1990s, the institutional and cultural influence of the pre-Vatican II Church that had formed Buchanan was waning amid liturgical reforms, secularization, and serious scandals—most notably the widespread clerical sexual abuse of minors and the institutional cover-ups that came to light in the early 2000s. Meanwhile, evangelical Protestantism—louder, more media-savvy, and politically mobilized—came to dominate the public face of the Religious Right.
Conservative kingmakers further compounded this marginalization. Figures such as William F. Buckley Jr. lent weight to accusations that Buchanan harbored racist or antisemitic tendencies. Yet in Buchanan’s extensive body of work there is no evidence of systematic racism or antisemitism; he repeatedly and unequivocally condemned Hitler and the Nazi regime, and his observations about Israel’s influence on Congress reflected an America First skepticism of foreign lobbies rather than ethnic animus. Critics point to his 2001 book The Death of the West and its discussion of declining birthrates among European-descended populations as evidence of racial animus. Buchanan, however, framed these demographic trends as a civilizational concern: the rapid transformation of the United States driven by low native birthrates and mass non-Western immigration risked eroding the cultural cohesion essential to American identity.
The Enduring Fracture and Its Costs
Nor has this fracture healed. The sharp divisions on the American right over President Trump’s recent military actions against Iran—particularly those that go well beyond targeted strikes on nuclear facilities into broader infrastructure attacks and regime-change efforts—vividly illustrate the persistence of the very tensions Buchanan embodied. While disabling Iran’s nuclear program could arguably serve vital national interests given Tehran’s apocalyptic rhetoric, paleoconservative voices have warned against hubristic efforts to impose an American vision on this country and the costs of a wider entanglement.
These costs are not abstract. The long-running “forever wars” that emerged from the convergence of neoconservative interventionism, elite globalism, and evangelical dispensationalism have carried substantial domestic burdens. Post-9/11 U.S. military operations in the Middle East have cost American taxpayers approximately $8 trillion (including direct spending, veterans’ care, and interest on borrowed funds) while contributing to the deaths of over 900,000 people through direct war violence and millions more indirectly (Crawford and Lutz 2019; Costs of War Project 2025). Domestically, the human and financial toll has fallen disproportionately on middle- and working-class Americans. Abroad, regional instability has fueled large-scale migration flows, intensifying competition for jobs, housing, and public resources. In this sense, expansive involvement abroad has come at the direct expense of domestic priorities, risking the neglect of our own people and the erosion of national cohesion. Such outcomes reinforce, on a secular level, the underlying logic of subsidiarity: when higher authorities set global goals that are abstracted from their primary responsibilities, they divert resources and attention away from the lower, more competent units of family, community, and nation.
There remains a final irony worth noting. The principle of subsidiarity, with its insistence on devolved authority to the lowest competent level, emerged from within the extraordinarily centralized Catholic Church of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—a hierarchy that issued sweeping papal edicts from the Vatican’s apex, hardly the living embodiment of its own doctrine.
This tension also underscores a certain historic poignancy to Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno. Issued amid the genuine pastoral crises of industrialization and the rise of totalitarian ideologies, these encyclicals represented a noble, if imperfect, attempt by the Church to assert moral authority against industrialization and the competing evils of fascism and communism. In recovering subsidiarity through Buchanan’s lens, we not only illuminate the theological fractures of the Religious Right but also glimpse how localist principles, born of such high-stakes historical moments, may best be realized through decentralized methods.
Image Credit: New York Magazine
