Looking Back, Looking Around: Pat Buchanan's 'Culture War' Speech
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Thomas Hawk, "Repeat," 2006
On a hot August night in Houston, Texas, the first night of the 1992 Republican National Convention, Pat Buchanan stood up to deliver a speech. He began by laying to rest his own primary challenge - “[W]ell, we took the long way home, but we finally got here” - before declaring his support for the presumptive nominee, George H. W. Bush, and drawing a strong contrast between the convention he was kicking off and the Democratic National Convention held the previous month:
Like many of you last month, I watched that giant masquerade ball at Madison Square Garden–where 20,000 radicals and liberals came dressed up as moderates and centrists–in the greatest single exhibition of cross-dressing in American political history.
Decrying the “malcontents of Madison Square Garden,” Buchanan argued that the “failed liberalism of the 1960s and ‘70s” would never return, the Reagan years having wrought a permanent change in the world order that was also a shift in American attitudes towards their nation. As Buchanan went through a litany of accomplishments - millions of new jobs and businesses, the liberation of Grenada and Afghanistan (the latter “by U.S. weapons”), free elections in Nicaragua overseen by “Ronald Reagan’s contra army,” the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall - he said that over and above all these things, Reagan’s most important accomplishment was to “make us proud to be Americans again.” As Buchanan saw it, Americans had “never felt better about our country,” had “never stood taller in the eyes of the world.”
In Buchanan’s view, all these achievements were being endangered by ‘the Clinton agenda,’ one pushed by Democratic radical-feminist “prophets of doom:” “abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, (and) women in combat units.” As Buchanan elaborated,
…that’s change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America wants. It is not the kind of change America needs. And it is not the kind of change we can tolerate in a nation that we still call God’s country.
Buchanan also described the two presidential candidates in a series of opposing scenes: George H. W. Bush joining the Navy one day after Pearl Harbor and Bill Clinton sitting “in a dormitory in Oxford, England” figuring out how to dodge the draft during Vietnam; Bush presiding over the liberation of Eastern Europe while Bill Clinton “had breakfast once at the International House of Pancakes;” Bush a “defender of right-to-life, and lifelong defender of the Judeo-Christian values and beliefs on which this country is built” while Clinton is married to a woman who “believes that 12-year-olds should have a right to sue their parents” and who “has compared marriage as an institution to slavery–and life on an Indian reservation.” Buchanan’s rebuke? “Speak for yourself, Hillary.”
Buchanan also attacked Al Gore’s environmentalism and supposed fiscal irresponsibility before referring again to his own primary challenge, exhorting Buchanan supporters to “come home” to the Republican party in supporting Bush’s candidacy:
Yes, we disagreed with President Bush, but we stand with him for freedom to choose religious schools, and we stand with him against the amoral idea that gay and lesbian couples should have the same standing in law as married men and women.
We stand with President Bush for right-to-life, and for voluntary prayer in the public schools, and against putting American women in combat. And we stand with President Bush in favor of the right of small towns and communities to control the raw sewage of pornography that pollutes our popular culture.
We stand with President Bush in favor of federal judges who interpret the law as written, and against Supreme Court justices who think they have a mandate to rewrite our Constitution.
My friends, this election is about much more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe. It is about what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton & Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side. And so, we have to come home, and stand beside him.
As he continues, Buchanan’s rousing peroration to his party draws a picture of religious and cultural war, a stark scene of opposition between two utterly different images of America: an America of patriotic young men, of small towns full of hard-working socially-conservative blue-collar workers fearing for their jobs, and an America of cross-dressers and environmentalists, of gay and lesbian activists, and of radical feminists. He ends by offering what he calls “a message of hope,” one that doubles as the starkest image of his entire speech: Buchanan describes a cadre of 19- and 20-year old troopers from the 18th Cavalry, advancing towards a mob during the Los Angeles riots, their guns drawn, and his voice rising in volume tells his audience “as they took back the streets of LA, block by block, so we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country.” The room erupts in cheers of “USA! USA!” and “GOP! GOP!” as a sea of people wave their campaign signs, mouths open and arms in the air, as ecstatic as celebrants in a mystery cult.
There are a number of remarkable things about this speech. One is that Buchanan’s rhetorical frame, the picture he is drawing in his listener's mind, is doubled, his vision of America simultaneously whole(some) and fractured. He begins by referring to the Democratic National Convention as “the greatest single exhibition of cross-dressing in American political history” and goes on to describe an America in which liberals barely figure except as pesky distractions, yawping outside the traditional conservatism of the “home” in which Buchanan Republicans must stand beside their nominee, a traditional, conservative home the Hillary Clintons of the world are arrayed against. As Buchanan imagines ardent, family-hating feminists massing behind their symbolic stand-in, Hillary Clinton, at the most perverse public event he can envision - a political convention full of liberals, held in New York City, broadcast on a major network in prime time on national TV, that is at the same time a “masquerade ball” chock full of cross-dressers - he declares that the militarized, internationalist America Reagan built will not (cannot?) accommodate the presence of “Clinton and Clinton” and their Vietnam-era “failed liberalism,” especially not in the nation’s most symbolic ‘home.’
Cool story. What is important about this? By paying attention to how Buchanan whips up his listeners you can see that Buchanan’s tone of moral panic, which is closely related to his obvious fear of non-binary gender presentation, and his insistent identification of his party’s male opponent with a “radical feminist” infamous for her belief in women’s equality with men, all point towards a funky possibility. The possibility? That Buchanan (consciously or not, that's not the point here) constructs white, heterosexual, male, public dominance in such a way that it is guaranteed by women's domestic docility and LGBTQI people's erasure. The other guarantee of the American moral order in this speech is more visible on the surface, and it is also the final 'message of hope' Buchanan offers as I described above: the military control of people of color whose protests against police brutality, left unheard, became a riot.
What I find most remarkable about all of this – the speech, the riots, the animus against feminism – is that so many are still so surprised by similar events occurring twenty-five years later.
On one hand it is surprising that so many police officers still can't seem to stop beating people, it is surprising that the ERA still hasn't passed, and it is also surprising that even the gains made in terms of "the amoral idea that gay and lesbian couples should have the same standing in law as married men and women" remain uncertain. The state of play in 2017 seems not to have changed since 1992, the political problems besetting American lives are still unsolved, and neither Barack Obama nor the internet changed things as much as we expected them to. But on the other hand, this surprise is not innocent. It may be akin to innocence, but it is an innocence strongly blended with ignorance and the desire to maintain the same moral order Buchanan called for, without being called out for it. Being surprised by the state of the nation and being surprised by people's experience of the nation as it differs from your own are basically the same thing.
This brings that 'culture war' right down to where it is most meaningful to me: the personal. We don't have a culture war, Mr Buchanan, but we do have a culture that warns us not to get too close, that wants people to carefully regulate their expressions of emotion, that forbids men to cry or women to speak forcefully. And so we clump up online to find self-support but we don't talk to the people next to us on the elevator, and a lot of us are okay at arguing over non-issues like celebrities' life choices, but we aren't very good at offering real emotional support in the moment, especially with people we feel we don't resemble. And politicians that exploit that emotional ignorance and learned inability are the real problem.