​The Ghost of Pat Buchanan in the House of Lords: Why Maurice Glasman's 'Spectator' Interview Should Clear Your Eyes About Modern Politics

​If you lived in the United States during the 1990s, political punditry had a distinct, combative soundtrack. At the center of it was often Pat Buchanan on The McLaughlin Group, unleashing a raspy, fire-and-brimstone populist pitch that felt radically out of step with the slick, centrist "End of History" consensus of the Clinton-Gingrich era. Buchanan spoke of a "culture war," fiercely opposed free-trade agreements like NAFTA, demanded hard borders, and treated the cosmopolitan, globalist elite with unadulterated contempt.

​To the mainstream media of the '90s, Buchananism was viewed as a dangerous, paleoconservative throwback.

​Fast forward thirty years. Switch on The Spectator’s YouTube channel and listen to the recent interviews with Lord Maurice Glasman—the academic, peer, and intellectual founder of "Blue Labour." As Glasman lambasts how "progressives killed Labour" and warns that a detached managerial elite has utterly abandoned the traditional working class, the hairs on the back of your neck might stand up.

​It is a bizarre, disturbing case of political time travel. A lifelong British socialist intellectual is playing the exact same political music that the godfather of the American Old Right composed decades ago.

​How did we get here?

​The Shattered Compass: Left-on-Economics, Right-on-Culture

​For generations, we have been told that politics is a simple, linear axis. The Left wants state intervention and social progressivism; the Right wants free markets and traditional values.

​But what happens when you slice that compass in half and stitch the opposing loose ends together? You get the populist twilight zone inhabited by both Buchanan and Glasman.