The Soul of America: Nostalgia and Demonology in Pat Buchanan’s Political Appeal

• In Event: Politics of Intimacy: Race, Family and the Neoliberal State

Abstract

In August 1992, Pat Buchanan infamously addressed the Republican National Convention in Houston, Texas in a demonological appeal that sutured together feminists, environmentalists, “homosexuals,” and Black people as collectively endangering the moral fiber of America. In the second half of the speech, Buchanan pivots from an air of mockery, bravado, and titanic battle towards themes of nostalgia and loss, recounting tales of white precarity and the specter of failed white masculinity in the context of a growing recession. Buchanan primes and then summons his listeners through an origin story in which white working class people and white GOP elites “come from the same schoolyards and the same playgrounds and towns”—in a thinly-veiled longing for pre-Brown racial segregation, small town isolationism, and a time of 1950’s heteropatriarchal households “unbroken” by feminists and queers. Buchanan concludes his speech by invoking the specter of the Los Angeles uprising and calling for a war to save the soul of America. This paper turns to Buchanan’s speech to examine the gendered and racialized alchemy of demonological and intimate appeals to white kinship. Invoking war and vulnerability, Buchanan reconsolidates whiteness through party identification and a narrative of white kinship premised on white patriarchal masculinity and a hollow empathy devoid of any mandate of distributive justice. Drawing on Stuart Hall’s reflections on the trouble of theorizing articulation in the context of Thatcherism, the paper also explores the relationship between the form and visions of different political appeals and examines Buchanan’s acceptance of electoral failure to ask how struggles over identification defy formal measures of political “victory” or “loss.”

Author

• Lisa Beard, Western Washington University