I was born in 1998 and really only came of political age in the Trump era, so it’s always striking to read political punditry from the 1990s and early 2000s, if only because it gives a glimpse into a radically different America — and world — from the one we live in today. Occasionally, I come across something prescient. A 1999 David Brooks column in the Los Angeles Times that I read today fits that category, although the author’s foresight was largely unwitting.
The column, titled “Buchanan Feeds Class War in the Information Age,” focuses on Pat Buchanan’s campaign for the presidential nomination of the Reform Party (for which he had left the Republican Party despite having run for its nomination twice and having served in two Republican administrations). It’s hilariously dated at times — the objects of Pat Buchanan’s ire, Brooks writes, are “all the high-tech impresarios who go to work in jeans and hiking boots with their cell phones dangling from their belt loops on mountain-climbing carabiners” — but one paragraph in particular stands out:
Buchanan crowds don’t look like Republican crowds, they don’t clap like Republican crowds and they don’t eat like Republican crowds. There are none of those Chamber of Commerce officers in golf shirts and tasseled loafers. Instead, Buchanan draws the beefy, 300-pound guys with tattoos up their arms and sleeveless T-shirts. He draws the guys with shaggy biker beards, and the Teamsters who park their rigs in the lot and get hoarse chanting, “Go, Pat, go!” It may be hard to classify exactly which political category these people belong to, but they are certainly not Republicans.
Those Reform Party crowds look a lot like Republican crowds today. And at the same time, the Chamber of Commerce — while still filling the coffers of pro-business Republicans — is more estranged from the GOP than at any time in recent memory, both because of the GOP’s populist turn and because of corporate America’s lurch to the left on cultural issues. Perhaps Brooks was right that the “beefy, 300-pound guys with tattoos up their arms and sleeveless T-shirts” would have been out of place at a Republican rally in 1999. But Buchanan, in pushing the Right to reconnect with disaffected Middle-American voters — “these people are our people,” he declared in his famous “culture war speech” at the 1992 Republican National Convention; “they don’t read Adam Smith or Edmund Burke, but 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” — might have been on to something.
Brooks, on the other hand, was too taken with the headiness and hubris of the 1990s to see anything of worth in Buchanan’s message — or in the crowd that it resonated with. “Some people who thrived in the machine age — the people who know how to fix engines — are not going to thrive in the new economy,” he acknowledged in the column. “So they are going to be in a bad mood. Us Palm Pilot types needn’t apologize for the glorious new world that is aborning — it really is glorious — but we shouldn’t dismiss the rump strength of the dissidents, whether they are voting for Buchanan or anyone else.” The overtures to the “glorious new world” may have been premature, but he was right about that last part: It was foolish to dismiss the political strength of what Buchanan called his “peasant army” — “the people,” Brooks sniffed, “who eat big breakfasts at Denny’s and like to go hunting and power-boating.” Blessed are the guys with shaggy biker beards, for they shall inherit the GOP.