Right wing terrorists erect gallows and noose at U.S. Capitol, Jan. 6, 2021
If you do not recognize the name Patrick Buchanan, he is the right wing Republican extremist who years ago helped motivate the MAGA types whose successors are harming America and threatening U.S. government officials today. Buchanan’s long background in Republican politics encompasses work for GOP presidents from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan. This work included writing speeches filled with red meat for the Republican base, and coining the term “Silent Majority” for Nixon, a white power dog whistle. In between these White House stints, Buchanan was the co-host of CNN‘s Crossfire (note: the author worked on the Crossfire program), pioneering the “food fight” format that is so prevalent on cable TV news today, where Buchanan bullied many liberal guests. When Buchanan went to work for President Ronald Reagan, he caused controversy by criticizing Israel “and its amen corner in the United States,” and continued a long-running apology campaign for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. The Buchanan Nazi apology tour reached its nadir when Buchanan encouraged Reagan to visit a cemetery in Bitburg, Germany where members of the Waffen-SS were buried, and to say that these Nazi soldiers “were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.”
Buchanan then ran for president in the 1992 Republican primaries against incumbent George H.W. Bush. Buchanan’s platform consisted of promoting “our Western heritage” over “some landfill called multiculturalism,” defending “nationalism” such as anti-free trade policies, assailing immigration, and opposing loan guarantees to Israel. Buchanan won the New Hampshire primary, but lost the rest and eventually endorsed Bush against his Democratic opponent, Bill Clinton. However, Buchanan was granted a 30-minute prime time speech at the Republican National Convention (RNC), where he emboldened the types of GOP thugs who committed last January’s terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol and the lawmakers within.
Here is the video of Buchanan’s 1992 speech:
In his speech, among many other divisive statements, Buchanan claimed:
Like many of you last month, I watched that giant masquerade ball at Madison Square Garden [the recent Democratic National Convention]—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.
The agenda [Bill] Clinton and [Hillary] Clinton would impose on America—abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units—that’s change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America needs. It is not the kind of change America wants. And it is not the kind of change we can abide in a nation we still call God’s country.
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.
At the time, Buchanan’s “Culture War” speech was considered alarming. For example, President Bush’s political strategist, Lee Atwater, advised Republicans to use code words to hide their overt racism:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
Today, however, the mainstream Republican Party has moved to where the Buchanan right wing Lunatic Fringe used to stand, and the GOP goes further in both words and deeds than Buchanan’s speech every day. At least Buchanan did not advocate killing of political opponents. Republican U.S. Senate candidate Sharron Angle felt no such qualms in 2010, however, when she called for “Second Amendment remedies” against Democratic opponents. Likewise, for years, Donald Trump has been saying openly about (and doing to) Mexicans, women, blacks, Muslims and others what many Republicans could only hint at before. And now, we have Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. According to CNN:
Greene, who represents Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, frequently posted far-right extremist and debunked conspiracy theories on her page, including the baseless QAnon conspiracy which casts former President Donald Trump in an imagined battle against a sinister cabal of Democrats and celebrities who abuse children.
In one post, from January 2019, Greene liked a comment that said “a bullet to the head would be quicker” to remove House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In other posts, Greene liked comments about executing FBI agents who, in her eyes, were part of the “deep state” working against Trump.
In short, racism and violence, which Patrick Buchanan only alluded to in his 1992 RNC speech, is now the Republican Party brand. At least that brand was rejected in the 2020 presidential and U.S. Senate elections, and the Republican Party is currently in shambles. Perhaps the party leaders who emerge from the wreckage will want to operate in a more peaceful and civil manner.
Photo by Tyler Merbler, used under Creative Commons license. https://is.gd/2vjMBF
