Revisiting Pat Buchanan’s 1992 Culture War Speech

Rush: The last two days, in covering the funeral and the presidency and the life and times of George H. W. Bush, quite unintendedly I ended up speaking a lot yesterday about history and the 1992 Republican National Convention. That happened because I was reacting to things I was seeing in the news, such as, “George H. W. Bush: The last man of civility, the last man of temperance, the last presidency with bipartisanship. Now with George Bush gone, so goes America. We’re never going to have these wonderful days again. Why can’t we go back to them?

“Of course, the reason we can’t is Donald Trump, blah, blah, blah.” You know the drill. I made the point yesterday, and it’s important to make it again, that what we’ve seen in the past two days — the funeral ceremonies and George H. W. Bush — we’re not looking at American politics as it used to be because it’s never been that way. We’re looking at what America culture used to be! When we’re watching the Bush family and the way they’re conducting their affairs and the way they are speaking of their fallen patriarch….

And the way his friends have eulogized him and the way the whole thing was planned, the way it was carried out, the way it was executed flawlessly. These are old American cultural values that are on display. It’s those that we have lost. It’s those values, it’s that culture, it is that America that people yearn for. Not a return to the fifties, but a return to a code, a return to a common-sense definition of morality and values and virtue, along with the democratic recognition that the majority rules with compassion for losers in the minority and so forth.

All of that’s gone! Now, they tried to tell us that what we were looking at was the way politics used to be in the way George H. W. Bush was being lauded, celebrated, praised. Not true, ladies and gentlemen! That’s not at all true. Our politics has never been that. American culture is what we saw on parade, a lost America. So, as evidence of this, I shared memories of the 1992 Republican convention where it could be said that the modern-day culture war actually began.

Now, you can say whatever you want about Pat Buchanan and you can think it. But tell me that he was wrong here. This is 1992. This is 26 years ago. A lot of people recognized where we were going 26 years ago, and it’s in arguable that we got there. It is inarguable. We are there, and the Bush funerals on both Wednesday and Thursday reminded people of a value structure and a culture that isn’t there anymore. It used to be. The Bush family lived it; it was theirs.

It was not our politics.

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