It was 1992 when author, journalist, politician, and political broadcaster Pat Buchanan warned us against the coming culture war. He had just congratulated George H. Bush for his success in the primaries during his run for president against his opponent William Jefferson Clinton.
We know the result of that election, of course, but it does not detract from the relevance of that message to the state of our culture and politics today.
He spoke of a masked ball where 20,000 liberals marched and listened to the moans of left-wing speakers decrying the performance of former president Ronald Reagan. Despite the economic boons that were made possible by Reagan in the 80s, his critics called it the worst time in history. Buchanan called the march the single greatest exposition of cross dressing he had ever seen.
He asked the crowd to try to understand that at a time when the country was more prosperous than it had ever been, the left could do nothing but complain. But it was worse than that. They wanted the heads of their political opponents, and they wanted the heads of those who saw the world differently to them.
Referring to them as the ‘Prophets of doom,’ Buchanan said, “No way, my friends. The American people are not going to go back into the discredited liberalism of the 1960s and the failed liberalism of the 1970s, no matter how slick the package in 1992. The 1980s were not terrible years in America. They were great years. You know it, and I know it. And the only people who don’t know it are the carping critics who sat on the sidelines of history, jeering at one of the great statesmen of modern time, Ronald Reagan.”
After the slump that accompanied the Carter administration, Ronald Reagan oversaw the most dramatic peacetime recovery in history, Buchanan said. It was a recovery that paved the way for 3 million new businesses and over 20 million new jobs. And they were high-quality jobs, unlike the ones Obama is credited with having created.
Now, to bring us up to the present; Donald Trump’s policies and his rhetorical style have created millions of new jobs in his first seven months and paved the way for major corporations to bring their production processes back to the United States. What we are looking at is a recovery that is set to eclipse that of the Reagan presidency. And today, just as they did then, liberal Democrats are crying wolf. They are calling Trump insane and incompetent, just as they did with Reagan, and they are calling Trump supporters all manner of names, just like they did to supporters of Ronald Reagan.
If you only change out some of the names and dates, Buchanan’s speech would sound perfectly sensible today. He spoke about the war on the family, explained that Hillary Clinton believed that children should have the right to sue their parents, and that marriage was a form of slavery. He spoke of the war on religion- on the right of religious people to act according to their beliefs. Today that right is threatened by left wing activists seeking out targets for litigation.
But Pat Buchanan has sent numerous warnings over the years. As the culture war in the United States grows hotter, with leftist agitators marching in the streets against Trump supporters, posing as KKK members and doing violence while disguised as conservatives, Buchanan’s fears dating back to the early 90s are realized in spades.
He warns us of the connection to nation building in the middle east, and of the nation stamping that took place during the Obama administration which paved the way for the flood of militant migrants into Europe and America.
In a 1991 article entitled, “Is there no room for new nations in the New World Order?” he wrote, “[We] have put America’s chips on the wrong horse. Can the U.S. believe that a Yugoslavia of disparate peoples who want greater freedom, who wish to be free of Belgrade, is a viable nation?”
Today, Croatia and Slovenia list under the banner of NATO.
That was a part of the agenda he decried during his 1992 speech – collectivism and leftist identity politics. Today, we see the same things coming from the Democratic party, and we also see that their endgame hasn’t changed — to bring disparate nations under the singular banner of globalism.
~ Conservative Zone
