1992 was a polarizing year in American politics—the year of the Rodney King riots, of the lingering crack epidemic and burgeoning AIDS crisis, of an economy mired in steep unemployment and a sense of defeat by an unstoppable Japan. Incumbent President George H.W. Bush had betrayed his “no new taxes” pledge, and the war he won against Iraq failed to pay dividends for Americans at home.
It was the year that Patrick J. Buchanan first challenged the Republican establishment in the electoral arena. He had finished a strong second in New Hampshire that January; in August he would give what became known as the “culture war” speech at the Republican convention in Houston—rousing the right and horrifying the nation’s press corps.
Between New Hampshire in January and Houston in August, the strengths and weaknesses of Buchanan’s campaign stood out in clear relief. Who was this renegade Republican, and what did the movement he led portend for the country?
Some commentators called Pat the white man’s Jesse Jackson. It was said in jest but had a ring of truth. Buchanan was now a spokesman for conservative white males everywhere—Republican, independent, even Democrat. Pat looked at the returns from the polling stations and dreamed of building a new coalition of cultural traditionalists and economic populists, an alliance of nostalgiacs. The brigaders wanted to go back to the world before Toshiba, Jane Fonda, and Lee Harvey Oswald. They wanted to bathe in the warmth of a perpetual summer of ’63.
Pat’s friends said that he didn’t represent a point of view so much as a social force. This force had been around for a long time; railing against immigration at the hair salon or throwing empty beer cans at the TV every time Ted Kennedy tried to socialize something. But it was Pat who brought these people to the polls, and it was a small body of intellectuals that tried to define what they felt and thought about the great crapshoot of American politics. Pat started to refer to this marriage of anger and ideas as the Middle American Revolution.
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