The pathetic non-leadership of Kevin McCarthy, the Republican Party’s titular Speaker of the House of Representatives, came to an embarrassing but merciful end on Oct. 2, 2023, after only 9 months. Eight members of what Theodore Roosevelt would have called the Republican lunatic wing (Trumpistas/MAGAs) fired him for the unpardonable sin of working with Democrats on two occasions to keep the government operating. For a constitutional democratic-republic with a two-party system to work, it’s essential for each party to be a loyal opposition with which compromises can be made to at least partially achieve the people’s needs.
The House Republican clown show continued for three weeks without a speaker so that nothing could be accomplished – which is probably what they had in mind. House Majority Whip Tom Emmer and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise were briefly considered but were rejected by the revolutionary Trumpistas because both Emmer and Scalise recognized the legitimacy of the Biden presidency. Ohio’s Jim Jordan was also considered but was known by too many as a bloviating madman incapable of legislating anything. They settled on Louisiana’s Mike Johnson who thinks like Jim Jordan but is perceived as a nice guy who opposes the Constitution’s concept of the separation of church and state .
Both Jordan and Johnson actively participated in efforts to subvert the Election of 2020 to keep Donald Trump in the presidency. Needless to say, Mike Johnson cannot be trusted to defend the Constitution and has no business being two heartbeats away from the presidency. Nevertheless, all 220 Republicans present voted for him: They are all Trumpistas now. How did the party of Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Eisenhower descend into an anti-government, anti-democracy, dysfunctional, authoritarian cult that refuses to recognize the legitimacy of the other party?
As I’ve mentioned before in this series of essays, the divisiveness of Barry Goldwater, Nixon and Reagan was inspired by the segregationist campaigns of Alabama’s George Wallace. Nixon and Reagan were also strongly influenced by the “southern strategy” proposed by Kevin Phillips, who at 28 published “The Emerging Republican Majority” advocating the southernization of the party nationwide. During Nixon’s 1968 campaign, Phillips told conservative columnist Gary Wills, “The whole secret of politics is knowing who hates who(m).”
Among the party’s many other consequential steps that ultimately produced the cult of Donald Trump were the presidential primary campaigns of Patrick Buchanan in 1992, 1996, and 2000. In 1985 he took leave of his right-wing TV punditry to serve as Ronald Reagan’s communications director. He was brought in to appease the growing right-wing extremists known as The New Right. Buchanan – and The New Right – considered Reagan’s extremism to not be reactionary enough and too accommodating with Democrats so as to prevent Republicans from getting rid of programs like Social Security and Medicare. When he eventually sought the presidency for himself, he emulated the even more extreme views of Louisiana’s David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan,.
Buchanan was critical of the four-year record of Bush-Quayle at the 1992 Republican Convention. That’s when he delivered his infamous “culture war” speech in which he blatantly described a terrifying, divisive “religious war going on in our country for the soul of America.” It was a forerunner to Trump’s bizarrely apocalyptic and inventive inaugural address in 2017. He advocated immigration reduction and social conservatism, opposing multiculturalism, abortion, and gay rights. There were still moderates in the Republican Party at that time, and they were alienated by Buchanan’s intolerant ravings. The late, great columnist Molly Ivins described his speech: “It probably sounded better in the original German,” alluding to the days of the Third Reich.
In his 1963 Ich Bein ein Berliner speech, John F. Kennedy admitted that our system wasn’t perfect, but observed that we haven’t had to build a wall to keep our people in. Reagan pleaded to Mr. Gorbachev, “Tear down this wall.” Their topic, of course, was the Berlin Wall. I used to tell my history students that as long as the Soviet Union existed, the Berlin Wall would never come down and Germany would never be reunited. The wall came down in 1989. That was the writing on the wall. The Soviet Union broke up two years later in 1991.
One of our greatest achievements for a longtime was having the longest unguarded border in the world separating us from Canada and Mexico. That was something else I used to proudly emphasize in my history classes. But thanks to Buchanan’s strong showing in New Hampshire’s primary, during which he put forth his white nationalist and anti-immigrant positions, the Republican Party has been promoting a border wall to separate us from Mexico ever since their 1992 convention. The desire for others to enter our country says a lot about what we have to offer. A wall says nothing about why those people want to leave their own. The wall proponents refuse to accept the fact that we are a nation of immigrants. But don’t you forget: A future demagogue and authoritarian president may need a wall to prevent our best minds and democracy-loving consumers, workers, and taxpayers from leaving.
Also, campaigning in 1991, Mr. Buchanan expanded Reagan’s anti-government message into an anti-democracy and pro-autocracy one. He compared corporations like IBM to the federal government: “Only the last is run on democratic, not autocratic, principles. Yet who would choose the last as the superior institution?”
Following Kevin Phillips’ goal of one-party rule, Buchanan preceded Karl Rove (A.K.A. George W. “Bush’s Brain”) and his quest for a permanent Republican majority in our three branches of government. The goal was/is to divide the American people and then rule them while representing only a minority of voters. This requires several strategies. Among them are (1) taking advantage of the undemocratic Electoral College so that the candidate with the most votes doesn’t necessarily win the presidency; (2) getting control of as many state governments as possible so that congressional districts can be gerrymandered to their party’s advantage; and (3) limiting, denying, or suppressing the right to vote of those segments of society who are perceived to lean toward the other party.
While Patrick Buchanan failed to ever win his party’s nomination to be president, he made it possible for a Donald Trump to make it perfectly clear that “I hate who you hate, so vote for me.” He set the example. “Dog whistles” and winks and nods are no longer necessary.
Note: A version of this essay was published in south Arkansas’s El Dorado News-Times, October 22, 2023.
High Noon 
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