Incense for Emperor

On Thursday 30 years ago, Patrick J. Buchanan delivered a primetime speech at the Republican National Convention, Houston, Texas. Buchanan lost all of his primary elections to President George H.W. Although he received just under three million votes to the nine incumbents, Bush did not win. He arrived in Houston knowing who his opponents were, the Democrats that had held their convention in New York City a month prior and not Bush-supporting Republicans.

Buchanan described that earlier meeting as a “giant masquerade ball up at Madison Square Garden–where 20,000 liberals and radicals came dressed up as moderates and centrists–in the greatest single exhibition of cross-dressing in American political history.”

In those final days of the American Century Pat Buchanan couldn’t have predicted how bad it would get. We don’t have hard numbers ready at hand, but I’d be willing to bet there is more cross-dressing per capita in American public libraries today than you might have had the misfortune of finding at the Democrats’ 1992 convention.

That was the whole point. Buchanan’s ’92 address has gone down in history as the “culture war speech,” after one pivotal line: “There is a religious war going on in this country. This war is as crucial to our nation’s future as the Cold War. It is also a cultural war.

He warned fellow comrades about the “agenda that Clinton & Clinton would impose upon America–abortion at will, a litmus for Supreme Court review, gay rights, discrimination towards religious schools, women fighting units, and abortion on demand.”

Abortion was at that time a crucial point. Buchanan noted that Pennsylvania Governor Bob Casey, a pro-life Democrat who was a part of the rapidly disappearing species of Democrats that support abortion, had been denied an opportunity to address the DNC about the sanctity and value of human life. Casey, through his office had just given his name to the famous Supreme Court case where Pennsylvania’s prolife law was stripped and Roe was reinstated.

It seemed in the wake of Planned Parenthood v. Casey that the genocide of the unborn would march on unrelentingly until the end of time–or, at least, until the end of America. But Buchanan has lived to see Roe v. Wade completely overturned. Dobbs, though, marks not an end to the culture war but merely the start of a new campaign. The rhetoric of spiritual combat that Buchanan employed a generation ago is only more relevant now that Roe‘s demise has pushed it back into the open.

Buchanan was also a prophetic voice on homosexuality. After Mario Cuomo accused him of Nazi rhetoric on primetime CBS, Buchanan expanded on the speech’s controversial lines in a September 14 column. He wrote

Americans are a tolerant people. However, the majority of Americans believe that homosexual practices, regardless of their origin, are morally and medically harmful. This is often referred to as “homophobic” or “reactionary.” However, our belief systems are grounded in the Old Testament and New Testament and in natural law, tradition and even the writings of Thomas Jefferson, who believed homosexuality should be treated as harshly as rape.

This is more than just right. Buchanan wanted that privilege, which was what most Americans have been believing since Truth conquered the last pagan empire. It was not a place of hatred, violence, or persecution. He just objected “to the non-negotiable requirement that this lifestyle’ be sanctioned lawfully, and that gays have equal rights to adopt, marry, and serve as troop leaders within Boy Scouts

” We can’t accept this,” Buchanan said. It is as if we were forced to do this. But the right–enough to tip the scales, at the very least–refused listening. America has come to this place because every concession and every refusal to fight, each time that conservative movement leaders scoff at radicals or disengage themselves from them, was a step in the right direction. Public-school libraries are filled with queer pornography, drag queens and other child entertainment are common, while juvenile sex is becoming more normalized. Women from the Third World are used as rental wombs to produce American designer babies. If you suggest that certain people should not be troop leaders in (no longer existing) Boy Scouts or that they should not be encouraged to adopt and marry, then you will not only be cast into outer darkness by the radical left, but also by the Bush Republicans.

Because this is, as Buchanan recognized thirty years ago, an all-encompassing religious war. It was not in 1992, nor is it now, about simple disagreements over policy or tone, over where to set limits or how far to compromise. This is and always has been a battle for life between two unrelated understandings of America’s national character, and of the moral order in the universe.

We’ve only come so close once before. Buchanan reflected on the Civil War and the effort to change its history. He encouraged his readers,

, to go to Gettysburg to see the famed battlefield.

Look across that mile-long field and visualize 15,000 men and boys forming up at the tree line. Seeing them walk across the field into the flames of gun and cannon, they know that they will never return home, or see their family again. Nine out of ten had never owned a slave. These men were fighting for what men always fight for: their family, country, friends and faith. They fought for the ashes and temples of Gods, their fathers.

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I am an American son in spirit and fact. However, Confederate causes are not something that I sympathize with. Buchanan is a descendant of Mississippi war veterans and might think otherwise. But I have admiration for the partisans and I hope I could also face it for my family, faith and friends.

The same can’t be said about the shock troops involved in the culture war. I cannot imagine–nor would I want to–my own great-grandson, another century down the line, writing a paragraph like the one quoted above about the terrorists who firebomb churches and women’s centers in support of the right to slaughter the unborn; about the mad scientists who mutilate children and manufacture babies in the name of liberation; about the wild mobs that burned our cities and looted our stores and murdered for sport in the summer of 2020.

But this, too, was predictable by 1992. In that September column Buchanan quoted Muggeridge quoting Dostoevsky’s Peter Vekovinsky in The Devils: “‘A generation or two of debauchery followed by a little sweet bloodletting and the turmoil will begin.’ So indeed it has.”