" With the certainty of the tides, the media is awash with invidious comparisons between George H.W. Bush in death and Donald J. Trump in the White House. From the anti-Trump metronomes at the Washington Post there was this: “Trump’s time in office, by contrast, has been defined by a war against virtually all of the norms and institutions that Bush held dear.”
Manifestly, George Bush’s death has put in motion a nostalgia for something lost. And it is a nostalgia that appears to be bipartisan. What has been lost, however, predates the election of 2016.
Recall that the same longing for a vanished era occurred when Barbara Bush died in April. By contrast with this week’s commentary, what she stood for was discussed without political recrimination or score-settling.
Her private and public values, shared over a lifetime with her husband, were said to be rooted in New England traditions of comportment and belief originating far back in American history. Those Bush values are definable in words such as temperance, self-restraint, plain-speaking, honesty, duty, forbearance, humility, prudence, courage.
There is nothing particularly unique to New England or even white Anglo-Saxon Protestanism about those values. These traits emerged everywhere as generations of Americans turned the frontier into a civilized nation. They were necessary.
Most of the Bush values can be found on any list of what are called—or used to be called—virtues. It is telling that these same simple virtues are now being praised by a media that has done so much in the past 30 years to undermine them.
Bush entered the White House in 1989. Since then, two overlapping currents have run through American life—one cultural, the other political. The big change that was coming in the political culture hit me hard at the Republican National Convention in Houston in 1992.
The “religious right” was there, but what I recall isn’t so much Pat Robertson or Pat Buchanan but the families who showed up to listen to a speech on the culture by Vice President Dan Quayle.
By then, the religious right was used to being vilified by liberals. What I saw in the audience was mostly husbands and wives in their 30s or 40s with one or two children along. The men looked as if they might be middle managers or computer technicians. I thought they seemed pretty normal, but intensely focused on what back then had become a big issue—“family values.”
As I stood among the media, it couldn’t have been clearer that most of them were largely appalled by these very traditional people and their politics.
The novelist Norman Mailer covered the Houston convention for the New Republic and what he wrote about Barbara Bush spoke for repelled liberals everywhere:
“That was just what she did in her speech on Family Values. It was no rhetorical gem. On the page, it read like one of those decaffeinated pieces of prose that used to blanket the old Reader’s Digest, affirmative, highly simplified, and emotionally available to anyone whose I.Q. had managed to stay below 100.”
The media, or much of it, chose to conflate “family values” with “the right.” (While we’re on the subject, the right’s dismissal of “the Bushies” even now is cut from the same uselessly reductionist cloth.) That stereotyping of popular concerns about traditional values was one reason why a partisan political gulf began to open in those years.
Truth to tell, many of the values those suddenly beyond-the-pale convention-goers represented in Houston in 1992 were shared by Barbara and George Bush. One possible exception is abortion rights, the issue-of-all-issues, which became a litmus test and weapon to drive the Houston types out of acceptable political society.
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who by the time of their presidential campaigns represented the victors in the culture wars, still took time to rhetorically slam the losers, who by then really were clinging to what was left from those battles.
After Donald Trump won narrowly in 2016, a consensus formed that his support had come from “forgotten” men and women. That’s for sure. That three-decades-ago convention in Texas is as good a marker as any for when Democrats and liberal opinion started a long political and cultural distancing from much of the American middle class.
Times change. Family values have been displaced by a more media-driven agenda: racism, identity, gender, immigration, tariffs.
Taxes are a constant, but if President Trump raises taxes next year in a compromise with the Pelosi Democrats, don’t expect the Beltway press to give him the same praise 41 is getting this week for reversing his no-new-taxes pledge.Perhaps, like Bush, Donald Trump will be a one-term president, and for the same reason—a slowing U.S. economy. But if you want to discover why America lost the personal and political values of George H.W. Bush, forget Donald Trump. Look deeper. "
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