"Proto-Trumpian Themes"

"The left dissented from Obama's optimistic analysis, seeing American history as a long and bloody reprise of racism and exploitation with no clearly defined trajectory. Buchanan adopts a similar analysis, except that he presents the qualities derided by the left as necessary, even praiseworthy. America is 'the product of ethnonationalism,' he asserts without judgment. 'No American war was fought for egalitarian ends, postwar propaganda notwithstanding.' Likewise, 'no one would suggest the Indian wars were about equality. They were about racism and subjugation.' Lincoln, he reminds the reader, was a white supremacist. As a descriptive account, Buchanan's history hardly differs from what you'd encounter in a text such as the 1619 Project or Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, only with the moral valence of the events flipped."

Jonathan Chait at The Atlantic calls Pat Buchanan "The Godfather of the Woke Right."

"When 'America Felt Itself to Be Losing Out'"

"In Ganz's account, the 1992 election was a transition point, announcing the first major rumblings of discontent with the post-1970s policy consensus: Challengers to the established order questioned welfare restraint, deregulation, and deference to the private sector on foundational questions of economic management and resource distribution. As the national mood soured, the two-party system received its strongest challenge in nearly a century; civil unrest exploded across the country's biggest cities; and radical voices, especially on the right, grew in popularity."

At The New Republic, Aaron Timms reviews John Ganz's When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s.

"When the Cold War Ends, It Loosens Not Just the Motivation for Conservatives to Get Involved Internationally, but Also the Motivation for Them to Champion Democracy"

"We think of the end of the Cold War as reshaping the geopolitical landscape, but it also really changed economics and politics in the United States. There is a major recession in the U.S. at the time of the '92 election, and parts of California that have been propped up by government spending and the aerospace industry had collapsed almost overnight. There was this sense of uncertainty about what the world is going to look like going forward and who is going to prosper and who is going to fail. It's also at a pivot point in decades of deindustrialization and shifting toward a knowledge economy and a service economy. So things really were in flux, and I think the politics of the day reflect that."

Ian Ward at Politico interviews Nicole Hemmer, author of Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s.

"Surging Below the Surface For Years Before They Ultimately Broke Onto the Shore"

"While these white working-class voters soon claimed a respected place in the Republican coalition, they did not immediately supplant the established cohort of upper-middle-class managers and upwardly mobile professionals that formed the conservative spine of the Republican party. In 1992, it was this old guard that ensured that in the GOP primary Bush triumphed handily over Buchanan's 'pitchfork brigade.' Yet the Jacksonian revolt that Buchanan (and, in the same year, the madcap candidacy of Ross Perot) called forth had wounded Bush politically, contributing to his defeat that November. Although the pitchfork hadn't quite prevailed, it had been fashioned for future use."

At The Bulwark, Brian Stewart reviews Gerald Seib's We Should Have Seen It Coming.

"What the Republican Party Has Done Over the Last Two Months Is Akin to Having Dropped Polonium Into America's Political Groundwater"

"Nothing can get better in American politics until this lie is repudiated by the main body of the Republican party in the public square, with enough force and repetition that the majority of Republican voters cease to believe it." 

At The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last writes that "[t]he root of the entire conflict we are seeing is a single lie: That Donald Trump won the election."

Jeff Greenfield offers the Republican Party "the opportunity to becalm the troubled waters."

And Thomas J. Balcerski writes that "Trump, like Buchanan and to an extent Nixon before him, can and should be made persona non grata in Washington."

Transitioning

"In a parliamentary system such as Great Britain’s, the new prime minister can move into 10 Downing Street the day after the election and the new cabinet can show up ready for work. The American system of separation of powers, however, makes no provision for a shadow cabinet in waiting. The president-elect needs time to select cabinet members and a host of other executive branch nominees who will be confirmed by the Senate. It may not do the new president any favor to shorten the interregnum further, although when times are tough the inauguration still looks awfully far away."

Donald Ritchie on the Oxford University Press blog discusses why the transition between presidents takes as long as it does.