It’s hard to imagine that two such dissimilar characters as Pat Buchanan and Alan Dershowitz could have in common an authoritarian streak as wide as the New Jersey Turnpike.

Both have just published books that offer extensive tours of their minds, suggestions of how they got to be so opinionated and numerous clues about how they have each boosted the art of self promotion to levels of virtuosity rarely achieved by Beethoven before deafness engulfed him and tragically curtailed his rate of composition.

Both Buchanan and Dershowitz share a tone deafness to civil liberties that is not surprising in the former and somewhat appalling in the latter, who’s grown rich on the fees of clients who include O.J. Simpson, Claus von Bulow, Larry Flynt, Meir Kahane, Leona Helmsley and Mike Tyson.

Dershowitz’s book, “Shouting Fire: Civil Liberties in a Turbulent Age” is his 17th. If I read him correctly, he takes a tolerant attitude toward the use of torture to make terrorists talk. Presumably, Dershowitz favors torturing people only in those cases he would personally approve of. I wonder if he’s considered how widely torture is practiced in large parts of the world by regimes that believe they are perfectly justified in pulling out people’s fingernails? Even selective approval of such atrocities is a slippery slope to a moral cesspool most of us would prefer to not wallow in.

Buchanan’s book, “The Death of the West,” is a minced hash of the usual arguments why the door to American immigration should have been slammed shut right after Buchanan’s Germanic ancestors got off the boat from Europe.

It is merely tiresome in its standard banalities but becomes more sinister when he starts flirting with racism. This comes across as nothing more than a crude argument that the American gene pool is being polluted by the larger populations of the nonwhite world. Actually, it was irreversibly mongrelized when the first white settlers began displacing and slaughtering the indigenous Indians. Buchanan sprinkles his work with birth-rate statistics that are supposed to scare us witless but scare him even more witless.

Basically, what Pat’s saying is that America has been taken over by godless feminists, counter-cultural liberals, gun-control fanatics who “have replaced the good country we grew up in with a cultural wasteland and moral sewer that are not worth living in and not worth fighting for.”

He argues that “the pill and the condom have become the hammer and sickle of the cultural revolution” and that “Western women are terminating their pregnancies at a rate that represents autogenocide for peoples of European ancestry.” In other words, I suppose, Pat despises America. He thinks it’s become a dump. This can’t be what he means to say so I guess we’re left with a watery message as meaningless as it is fatuous.

There are certain things all decent people find repulsive even when they imagine they are being done to help save a great nation. Neither Buchanan nor Dershowitz gives much hope that they have the moral judgment or authority to know when they go too far or even when good taste suggests that they would do themselves a favor to shut up.