dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

How social conservatives traded causes for clichés

Matthew Walther

May 25, 2020

"In 1992, after failing to unseat the incumbent George H.W. Bush from the top of the GOP ticket, Pat Buchanan delivered one of the most memorable speeches in modern American history at the Republican National Convention in Houston. The "Culture War" address is a masterpiece, rightly studied by rhetoricians, including those who find its contents loathsome. One of its most remarkable passages comes when, having recalled encounters on the campaign trail with factory workers and an unemployed legal secretary, he praises the native wisdom of the American working class, men and women outside the conservative movement who nevertheless embodied its principles:

My friends, these people are our people. … They come from the same schoolyards and the same playgrounds and towns as we come from. They share our beliefs and convictions, our hopes and our dreams. They are the conservatives of the heart. They are our people. And we need to reconnect with them. We need to let them know we know how bad they're hurting. They don't expect miracles of us, but they need to know we care. [Pat Buchanan]

This was nearly 30 years ago, but one could easily imagine President Trump saying something like it today. Certainly the group of voters to whom it refers belong to the same loosely defined but undoubtedly valuable demographic who were responsible for Trump's victory in 2016 and upon whom he will depend in 2020.

Otherwise, though, one wonders how relevant the speech really is. Where are the conservatives of the heart in 2020? How many of them still agree with Buchanan about "homosexual rights" or "the raw sewage of pornography that so terribly pollutes our popular culture"? What has aged better, his unabashedly reactionary moral views or his laugh lines about Al Gore, radical feminism, and the spotted owl? I think we know the answer.

Buchanan's strident traditionalism has given way to a new social conservatism, one that is simultaneously more concrete, grounded in real-world debates about Colin Kaepernick and Brett Kavanaugh rather than in abstractions and universalisms, and more nebulous, floating freely above such mundane questions as whether Trump has actually built the wall, much less gotten Mexico to foot the bill for it."

BREAK:

"Nowhere is the personalization clearer than in the case of something like the QAnon conspiracy. Here we see vast swathes of Trump's base simultaneously inventing non-existent victories for the president and absolving him of any blame for his numerous failures. Trump has not replaced the Affordable Care Act or saved millions of good manufacturing jobs or remade our trade relationship with China, it is true. But no one expects miracles, after all. Besides, has he not worked tirelessly, if invisibly, to root out corruption, to expose the sinister plots of the cabal behind the Democratic Party, to remove anthropophagic pedophiles from the upper reaches of the federal bureaucracy? Has he not, in accomplishing all these things thanklessly, amid the persecution of his enemies in the liberal media establishment, shown us he cares? Whatever individual Trump supporters might believe about the actual facts of the alleged conspiracy, the bare outline of QAnon — Trump winning for them simply by existing and holding the office of the presidency — is in fact an accurate representation of their feelings about him. Exposing the lizard people is just an outré way of saying "own the libs.""