At first glance, for Republicans, the 2016 election does not look much like the 1992 election.
For one, the GOP had an incumbent, George H.W. Bush, in the White House in 1992. Today, the presidency is held by Democrat Barack Obama. In 1992, despite some grumbling from the base, Bush was able to serve as an effective leader of the party, holding together the various wings of the GOP. Today, the Republicans are divided along a number of fault lines, with no clear, unifying voice able to mediate the party’s internal strife.
One thing the 2016 election does share with the 1992 election, however, is the presence of an insurgent populist in the GOP primary who makes the Republican establishment very anxious.
The former presidential advisor to Richard Nixon campaigned hard against his party’s incumbent in 1992, earning support from working class conservatives and the religious right with his criticism of U.S. trade policy and his stark moral traditionalism. Like Trump, Buchanan was accused by critics of practicing dog-whistle politics – stoking racial resentment to court the white working class.
Buchanan did not win any states in the GOP primary, but he turned in a strong showing in New Hampshire – earning 37 percent to Bush’s 53 percent – that revealed significant disquiet about Bush among the GOP rank and file and presaged difficulty for the incumbent in the fall.
Ahead of the New Hampshire primary in 1992, “Face the Nation” spoke with Pat Buchanan about his campaign and his vision for the country. The similarities between Buchanan’s message and Trump’s message are striking.
Buchanan stressed the need to “make America first again” (sound familiar?) by reviving manufacturing and heavy industry. He warned that “the Japanese” are undermining the American economy by besting the U.S. in international trade. He outlined an economic vision that he called “much more dramatic” than anything being proposed by Bush, deriding the incumbent’s plans as “Mickey Mouse.”
Perhaps the most obvious connection between Trump and Buchanan, though, is their similarly pugilistic approach to the practice of politics.
“There is no substitute for a president who will fight,” Buchanan explained in 1992. “They know that in the crunch, when it comes to politics in Washington, D.C., George Bush will not fight. And I think they know Pat Buchanan will.”
Many things have been said about Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign – that he shies away from a fight is not one of them.
Read more at CBS News….
Excellent. Big fan of Mr. Buchanan and his point of view. He is a visionary, but ahead of his time. He also was the presidential candidate of the libertarian party in 2000, and did better than expected in Palm Beach County, Florida, and saved us from AL Gore
Buchanan ran in 96′ as well .His strongest showing ever, but two factors contributed to his failure.One, American’s hadn’t seen the level of middle class , due to blue collar job loss see today, and two Buchanan was unwilling to hammer the GOP establishment on their globalist open border policies and free market bullshit, at the level to which Trump thumps them daily.But, every event in it’s proper time..
How an obscure adviser to Pat Buchanan predicted the wild Trump campaign in 199
http://theweek.com/articles/599577/how-obscure-adviser-pat-buchanan-predicted-wild-trump-campaign-1996
“What if you dropped all this leftover 19th-century piety about the free market and promised to fight the elites who were selling out American jobs? What if you just stopped talking about reforming Medicare and Social Security and instead said that the elites were failing to deliver better health care at a reasonable price? What if, instead of vainly talking about restoring the place of religion in society — something that appeals only to a narrow slice of Middle America — you simply promised to restore the Middle American core — the economic and cultural losers of globalization — to their rightful place in America? What if you said you would restore them as the chief clients of the American state under your watch, being mindful of their interests when regulating the economy or negotiating trade deals?
That’s pretty much the advice that columnist Samuel Francis gave to Pat Buchanan in a 1996 essay, “From Household to Nation,” in Chronicles magazine. Samuel Francis was a paleo-conservative intellectual who died in 2005. Earlier in his career he helped Senator East of North Carolina oppose the Martin Luther King holiday. He wrote a white paper recommending the Reagan White House use its law enforcement powers to break up and harass left-wing groups. He was an intellectual disciple of James Burnham’s political realism, and Francis’ political analysis always had a residue of Burnham’s Marxist sociology about it. He argued that the political right needed to stop playing defense — the globalist left won the political and cultural war a long time ago — and should instead adopt the insurgent strategy of communist intellectual Antonio Gramsci. Francis eventually turned into a something resembling an all-out white nationalist, penning his most racist material under a pen name. Buchanan didn’t take Francis’ advice in 1996, not entirely. But 20 years later, “From Household to Nation,” reads like a political manifesto from which the Trump campaign springs.
Donald Trump, Sam Francis And The Emergence Of The Alternative (“Dissident”) Right
http://www.vdare.com/articles/donald-trump-sam-francis-and-the-emergence-of-the-alternative-dissident-right
It was nothing less than historic when talk radio titan Rush Limbaugh respectfully quoted Sam Francis on January 20, saying he was “undeservedly smeared” as a white supremacist. Limbaugh claimed “populism” and “nationalism” have overcome “conservatism” in terms of popularity and that Donald Trump is building a new kind of coalition on the American Right [Nationalism Trumps Conservatism Says Limbaugh, WND, January 20, 2016]
Significantly, rather than falling back on lame slogans about how “true conservatives” need to stamp out this rebellion, Limbaugh actually sought to understand why it is happening, turning to Sam Francis’s discussion of the Pat Buchanan insurgency in a 1996 Chronicles article, From Household To Nation. And Limbaugh used Francis’s analysis to attack a GOP Establishment that he charged does not understand its own voters.
Limbaugh argued ordinary conservative voters aren’t “wonks” who are “dyed-in-the-wool conservative theoreticians absorbed in such things as the free market and all these other bells and whistles.” Instead, they’re attracted to someone willing to actually confront and defeat the Left, after years of what voters see as continuous retreat in Washington DC.
Perhaps most importantly, Limbaugh specifically identified the refusal of the GOP to do anything about Open Borders as the catalyst for voters’ anger. [Understanding Trump’s appeal, Rush Limbaugh, January 20, 2016]
“Stalking Horse for Jack Kemp”
What a dummy Schieffer is.
Buchanan wasn’t the Libertarian candidate in 2000; Harry Browne was.
Good catch, FT. He was the candidate of Ross Perot’s reform party. I’ve been wrong about that for years.