On Dec. 10, 1991, a conservative pundit who had worked for three presidents and become a celebrity by hosting a cable television debate show declared he would run for elected office for the first time – and not just any office.
Pat Buchanan, a veteran of the Nixon, Ford and Reagan White Houses, announced his campaign for the presidency in front of a small yet raucous gathering of his supporters in New Hampshire. He would challenge in the upcoming primaries incumbent Republican President George H. W. Bush who, in Mr. Buchanan’s view, was a globalist who had lost touch with working-class Americans. In his 15-minute speech, Mr. Buchanan vowed to make “America First” by moving the party further to the right a generation before Donald J. Trump would triumph over the “establishment.”
“Beyond these shores, a new world is being born for which our government is unprepared and for which we are unprepared. The dynamic force that is shaping that new world in nationalism,” Mr. Buchanan said. With the Cold War over, it was time for the United States to focus on itself rather than its foreign alliances and formerly Communist enemies.
Two months later, Mr. Buchanan won 37.5% of the vote in the New Hampshire primary, a surprisingly strong showing against an incumbent president (Bush won 53%). By attacking illegal immigration, free trade, deindustrialization, cultural liberalism (i.e. gay rights) and the two-party establishment in his pugnacious yet media-friendly style, Mr. Buchanan sensed he might be able to fill the vacuum to the right of Bush (and Reagan, for that matter). And in his willingness to insult and demonize his opponents by appealing to racial and cultural grievances, Mr. Buchanan set the stage for Mr. Trump.
In this episode of History As It Happens, Vanderbilt University historian Nicole Hemmer, an expert on the rise of the New Right, discusses Mr. Buchanan’s enduring influence on the Republican Party. Rather than looking at fascism and Europe for explanations, the GOP’s rightward lurch can be traced to the 1990s with the Cold War’s end, Bush’s loss to Bill Clinton, the scorched-earth politics of Newt Gingrich, and the rapidly expanding empire of right-wing media personalities such as Rush Limbaugh.
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“Donald Trump was swimming in the same water as Buchanan in the 1990s. The two of them even vied briefly for Reform Party nomination in 2000. They use the same kind of language, the call to America First. America First was the slogan of Pat Buchanan’s 1992 campaign. The idea of protectionism instead of free trade, that America shouldn’t be quite so involved in the world, that it should be focusing on home, that anti-establishment conservative populism defines both of them,” said Ms. Hemmer, the author of “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s.”
Listen to the full interview with Nicole Hemmer by downloading this episode of History As It Happens.
