Word: buchananism
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...themes of the angry left-behind resonate 40 years later in Buchanan's constituency, whom technology and cultural anarchy have left stranded. He has perfect pitch for their loss. He has perfect pitch for the '50s, his left-behind decade--his prelapsarian world...
...Buchanan's adolescent universe was as tribal as the Balkans, divided into parishes. He came from Blessed Sacrament. On weekends, the Buchanan boys and other warriors from Gonzaga would load up someone's father's car with six-packs (the Buchanans wrecked half a dozen of their dad's Oldsmobiles, until his insurance was canceled) and go marauding, like whiteboy Crips and Bloods, but armed with only their fists and a fierce Hibernian truculence. In their cars, they would slowly circle the Hot Shoppe on Connecticut Avenue, hoping for girls, settling for a fight...
...look at Buchanan's face now and see, when it is at rest, the design of a Greek mask of tragedy, a curious effect. When Buchanan speaks I hear the driving, urgent undershadow of menace (promises of dark things, of retribution) that Senator Joseph R. McCarthy conjured; their voices are eerily similar, and, like Pat, Joe McCarthy had considerable personal charm...
Time traveling with Pat--back to the '50s, to the culture war of the cold war, with that sissy Adlai Stevenson orating in flickering grays on the Philco. Gonzaga did not make Buchanan a demagogue, but something in the school's inherent anger long ago and its bullying, underdog-wants-to-be-overdog righteousness went into Pat's brain, and came out nasty and dangerous...
...Buchanan's constituency is divided between the angry blue-collar dispossessed, whose grievances are economic, and the religious Fundamentalists, whose issues are moral. But both groups share Buchanan's aggrieved nostalgia for American economic and moral pre-eminence. They want economic protectionism and moral protectionism, the patriarchal stabilities...