Dan of GayPatriot looks at Pat Buchanan and dubs him an ex-conservative:

I would say that Pat Buchanan represents the last of the conservative anti-Semites. Except that in 1992, Pat Buchanan made clear that he was no longer a Reagan conservative. As you may recall, in his celebrated speech to the Republican National Convention that summer, not only did he make angry statements, but he spoke far longer than the time allotted to him, thus, delaying the speech of the man who was to speak later that evening, a man whose ideas Buchanan once claimed to have championed — Ronald Wilson Reagan.

By going over his time limit, Pat Buchanan bumped that great American’s speech out of prime time. It would be Ronald Reagan’s last address to a Republican National Convention. Any true Republican, knowing that he was speaking before Ronald Reagan, would, instead of extending his remarks (as Buchanan did), have cut them short, out of respect for the then-octogenarian Gipper. And acknowledged how humbled he was to be on the same platform as that great man.

But, apparently indifferent to delaying Reagan’s speech, Buchanan, in his arrogance, rambled on and on, his angry remarks hurting his party. On that day in 1992, Pat Buchanan, in deed if not in word, abandoned contemporary conservatism and cast himself with those on the extreme fringe, his hateful words contrasting so clearly with Ronald Reagan’s optimistic vision.

So, this month, when Pat Buchanan criticizes Israel, he does so not as a representative of contemporary American conservatism, but of a conservatism long past, whose reactionary attitudes were melted away by the velveteen voice of Ronald Wilson Reagan — and that good man’s appeal to our best hopes and the noble ideals on which this great nation was built.

When the Gipper met David Horowitz shortly after leaving the White House, he confided to Horowitz, "I had second thoughts [about the left] long before you did". (That's a close paraphrase--I don't remember the exact quote from Horowitz's autobiography.) President Reagan was a staunch former supporter of FDR and Harry Truman who famously said:

I started out in the other party. But 40 years ago, I cast my last vote as a Democrat. It was a party in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised the return of power to the States. It was a party where Harry Truman committed a strong and resolute America to preserving freedom. F.D.R. had run on a platform of eliminating useless boards and commissions and returning autonomy and authority to local governments and to the States. That party changed, and it will never be the same. They left me; I didn't leave them.

In contrast, as I noted a year ago, Pat Buchanan has moved in the opposite direction in recent years:

The remaining strain of isolationism on the right are paleoconservatives, of which Pat Buchanan is the most prominent example--and it's not surprising that in the effort to prop up his isolationist beliefs, he's been more than willing to come full circle with the left himself.

Reagan's optimistic, expansive view of conservatism took him to the White House--twice. It's safe to say Pat's brand never will.