Bill Berkowitz for BuzzFlash: From Pat Buchanan's Fiery Culture Wars to "The Big Lie" and the "Golden Calf" of Trump
April 30, 2021
Former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is one of the dots connecting rabid Republican cultural warrior Pat Buchanan with Donald Trump and “The Big Lie.” (Gage Skidmore)
By Bill Berkowitz
Watching Republican members of Congress mostly sitting on their hands during Joe Biden’s address to a joint session Congress, which laid out new audacious and ambitious programs, it appeared as if the Party is trapped in a wasteland of resentment, disrepute and ignominy. One can easily envision an RV caravan of Party officials, culture warriors, and right-wing militias heading for Mar-a-Lago, to be blessed by, and get their marching orders from Donald Trump.
“He called for trillions in new spending in a robust expansion of government’s role in multiple arenas of American life in ways that would have been impossible to contemplate in Barack Obama’s presidency,” Politico’s John F. Harris reported. “He plunged into subjects—racial and class inequities, immigration, gun violence—that were rubbed raw until bleeding in Donald Trump’s.”
While the Party of No is badly in need of a therapeutic intervention, do not, under any circumstances, count on its current status as being permanent. There have been all-to-many premature obituaries written, only to be shelved during a GOP resurrection.
In 1992, Pat Buchanan was riding high as the rogue candidate for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. Although he ultimately did not become the Party’s nominee, he attracted enough support in the primaries to be awarded a prime time slot at the Party’s convention in Houston. His balls-to-the-wall speech was all about culture wars and the battle taking place for the soul of America. “The agenda Clinton and Clinton would impose on America — abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat — that’s change, all right,” said Buchanan, “But it is not the kind of change America wants.”
And while George H.W. Bush lost his re-election bid to Bill Clinton, Buchanan’s speech – coming some ten-plus after the founding of the Moral Majority and other Christian right politically influential organizations – was a blueprint for the GOP’s culture wars future. In 1994, the Newt Gingrich-led Republican revolution resulted in the Party winning control of both the House of Representatives and Senate, a net gain of 54 seats in the House, and a pickup of eight seats in the Senate.
Nearly thirty years later, the Republican Party is still immersed in culture war issues, however now they’ve added a new dynamic: Trumpism’s Big Lie, and support from right-wing domestic terrorist groups.
Despite its lack of ideas or positive political agenda, the Republican Party still maintains a strong infrastructure, think tanks, public policy institutes, a coterie of committed billionaires, Fox News talk show hosts, News Max, and OANN, radio talk show personalities, judges, publishing houses, Op-ed writers and Internet bots, trolls, and gas-lighters.
This year’s CPAC weekend was an excursion to Paranoid Park, an expedition to a parallel universe, with its assortment of culture warriors, Stop the Stealists, QAnon supporters, and a host of who the f**k knows what they’re thinking American citizens. The only thing missing was a drop-in by Joe the Plumber.
Instead of moving through the seven stages of grief -- shock and denial; pain and guilt; anger and bargaining; depression; the upward turn; reconstruction and working through; and, acceptance and hope – the Party, and the CPAC crowd, in seemed to dig its heels in at the “anger and bargaining” stage, while worshiping at a Golden Calf statue of the Donald.
In the near future Republican Party leaders will attempt to:
*Keep up with their denial that the January 6 Republican-led riot on the Capital was an act of insurrection
* Drive a wedge between moderate and progressive Democrats
* Carry out obstruction, obstruction, obstruction in the Senate
* Crank up the culture wars/cancel culture memes
* Continue stoking up anger of the “Stop the Steal” base
* Snuggle with “The Donald”
* Support voter suppression initiatives in the states
* Play footsie with white supremacists: Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and neo-Nazis
In a recent column, Pat Buchanan criticized President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’ commenting on the guilty verdict of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd, disputing their claim that America was birthed in systemic racism. “The 1960s radicals who vilified our country as ‘Amerika’ were rightly called ‘anti-American.’ Today, the difference between what they said about America and what our highest elected leaders are saying is hard to discern.”
Buchanan wrote: “What other nation has provided the same measures of personal and political freedoms and material blessings for 40 million Black people as has the United States?”
These days, Buchanan is a second tier player in the right-wing echo chamber, albeit with regular opinion columns appearing in newspapers across the country. As he did nearly thirty years ago, he is still calling for culture wars, this time accompanied by the expanded legions of the Right.
Bill Berkowitz is an Oakland, California-based freelance writer covering right-wing movements. His work has appeared in BuzzFlash, The Nation, Huffington Post, The Progressive, AlterNet, Street Sheet, In These Times, and many other print and online publications, as well as being cited in several books.
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