Buchanan’s Revolution: How Pitchfork Pat raised a rebellion—and why it failed

Buchanan’s Revolution
Share|

How Pitchfork Pat raised a rebellion—and why it failed.
By Timothy Stanley | February 8, 2012
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.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/blog/buchanans-revolu...