If the ’90s culture war had its opening battle, it was played out over four hot nights in Houston the week of August 17, 1992.

That year’s Republican National Convention, held in the Astrodome, featured a cast of 45,000—all intent on diverting attention from the youthful, vigorous duo of Bill Clinton and Al Gore.

President George H.W. Bush was pleased to be back in the state where he’d made his political hay. But the Astrodome, to be candid, hardly projected a 21st-century vibe. By the early ’90s, the facility was already a relic. Erected in 1965 as the world’s first domed stadium, it conveyed (as did the GOP itself, said the Democrats) an antiquated vision of what a Jetsons-esque future was supposed to look like. And outside and inside the hall, the signage set the trash-the-bastards theme. T-shirts advised: Blame the Media. Stickers urged: Smile if you have had an affair with Bill Clinton. One placard bore a cannabis logo: Bill Clinton’s smoking gun. Another: Woody Allen is Clinton’s family values advisor.

Meanwhile, a rearguard challenge had been mounted by the ultraconservative commentator Patrick Buchanan, who had secured nearly a quarter of all Republican support in the primaries. Bush, who was considered far too moderate for those on his right flank, had had to appease Buchanan’s forces (religious conservatives would make up some 40 percent of the delegates) or have his convention implode.

So to shore up their base, Bush and the GOP mandarins gave over large swaths of the party platform—and prime-time airtime—to the hard-liners. The platform would be packed with a slate of provisos related to sexual mores, cultural kashrut, and the supremacy of the nuclear family. Entire passages read like war whoops: “Elements within the media, the entertainment industry, academia, and the Democratic Party are waging a guerrilla war against American values. They deny personal responsibility, disparage traditional morality, denigrate religion, and promote hostility toward the family’s way of life.”

Pro-choice Republican Tanya Melich was on hand as they hammered out the fine print. In her book The Republican War Against Women, she remembers a hush falling over the room as the committee took up the “individual rights section, the prelude to the abortion plank.” Representative Henry Hyde of Illinois at one session offered a stunning argument when discussing the need to protect the life of the fetus—at all costs. “I can’t imagine a more egregious crime than rape,” said Mr. Hyde. Even so, he added, “There is honor in having to carry to term, not exterminating the child.” And still he went on, “From a great tragedy, goodness can come.” A new concept: honor birthing.

Meanwhile, the platform, in essence, identified the deviant who was hiding under every bed. It sought to ban gay marriage, adoption by gay couples (LGBTQ wasn’t yet in public parlance), the sale of porn, and public funding that might be used to “subsidize obscenity and blasphemy masquerading as art.” It called for “a human life amendment to the Constitution”; judicial appointments for those “who respect traditional family values and the sanctity of innocent human life”; and state laws that would make it a criminal act to knowingly pass along AIDS. There was even a call to overhaul the entire welfare system, which itself was phrased in sexual terms. (The current system, according to the platform, constituted an “anti-work and anti-marriage” pact with the poor that “taxes families to subsidize illegitimacy.”) Instead of allowing public schools to provide birth control or abortion service referrals, the GOP pushed “abstinence education.” To combat the spread of AIDS, the platform rejected “the distribution of clean needles and condoms” in favor of education programs that would “stress marital fidelity, abstinence, and a drug-free lifestyle.”

Extreme forces had managed to commandeer the party’s blueprint at the most critical, self-defining phase in the quadrennial election cycle. According to David Brock, then a far-right muckraker (and, come the 2000s, a leftist/progressive advocate and media watchdog), in his memoir Blinded By the Right: “The holy war broke out after four years of conservative disunity, frustration, and disappointment during the Bush presidency, in the midst of an economic downturn, a backlash against the gains of women and minorities, and a resurgent religious revival in what became known as the year of the ‘angry white male.’...Through organization and sheer force of numbers, the religious right had won control of the conservative movement, and the movement, in turn, now was dictating Republican Party policy.”

From hour one on night one, things got nasty. “We are America,” Rich Bond, the head of the RNC, proclaimed on NBC. “These other people are not America.” The invocation, by Reverend D. James Kennedy, warned of a “godless trail to destruction” that might await the party faithful should they follow “atheists and secularists here in our midst.” Addressing the Almighty, Kennedy drew an apocalyptic picture: “We have turned our back upon Thy laws by every imaginable immorality, perversion, vice, and crime; and even now a hideous plague stalks our land.”

That was just an appetizer. The main course was offered up by Pat Buchanan, the conservative standard-bearer. Having roughed up (and then made his peace with) George Bush, Buchanan—a onetime blusterkind speechwriter in the Nixon White House—had earned enough delegate support and platform muscle to secure the evening’s prize time slot: coming on just in front of the headliner, Ronald Reagan. When Buchanan took the stage, he was the party’s martinet. He wore a somber black suit, gestured with karate-style chops, and spoke with a preacher’s cadence as he laid out a declaration of war. “There is a religious war going on in this country,” he warned. “It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.” This was new terminology. These were fighting words. And they would set the pugilistic tone for the far right for the next three decades.

Buchanan clearly defined the enemy. They were the Democrats—a collection of “malcontents,” “prophets of doom,” and “carping critics [who were hawking the] discredited liberalism of the 1960s...no matter how slick the package in 1992.” They were Clinton and Gore, “the most pro-lesbian and pro-gay ticket in history.” They were “Prince Albert” Gore and “Teddy” Kennedy. (“How many other sixty-year-olds do you know,” Buchanan asked, “who still go to Florida for spring break?”) They were “Clinton & Clinton,” the designation meant to connote a family law firm, whom he accused of promoting an agenda that “would impose on America abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units—that’s change, all right....And it is not the kind of change we can abide in a nation that we still call God’s country.”

In closing, Buchanan moved the fight to the streets, metaphorically, by juxtaposing his description of a “cultural war” with his depiction of National Guard units with “M-16s at the ready [who] had come to save the city of Los Angeles” during the riots that had convulsed the city and claimed more than 60 lives the previous spring. Just “as those boys took back the streets of Los Angeles, block by block, my friends, we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country.”

Buchanan’s words played well in the Astrodome. “They walked out of here tonight enthusiastic,” ABC’s Ted Koppel told viewers at home. “They walked out of here with something that Republicans have not had for quite a few months: a sense of optimism.” Buchanan, to many of the conservative faithful, had effectively deflected discussion of the tanking economy and focused instead on Clinton’s Achilles’ heel: public morals. But at what price? Even many Republicans recognized the language of race-baiting. Buchanan had stirred up images of urban riots and then pretended that lib forces—the Democratic ticket, in particular—were fomenting “a religious war,” “a cultural war,” “a guerrilla war.” But he was the one spoiling for a face-off.

His brimstone conjured tent-show revivalists, brought to mind Huey Long and George Wallace, and foreshadowed the slurry of slurs issued in our current era. (Buchanan, with his hair slicked slightly back and to the side, actually looked like a taller, trimmer version of Old Joe McCarthy.) Columnist Molly Ivins, the humorist and avowed liberal, went so far as to compare Buchanan’s rattled saber to those of the brownshirts: “It probably sounded better in the original German.”

Rachel Maddow, now MSNBC’s star political commentator, had tuned in that night from Philadelphia. She was 19 at the time, having publicly identified herself as lesbian two years earlier, in her first year at Stanford. She would later note that Buchanan’s appearance “hit her right between the eyes. He was, without euphemism, declaring that my own country was at war with me. I get it intellectually and strategically now, but at [that stage in my life] I only got it emotionally.”

Buchanan’s inflated hostility would become a trusty Republican default position over the next generation. Unable to bully the Democrats? Gingrich shut down the government. Unable to retaliate against Osama bin Laden? George W. Bush attacked Iraq. Unable to articulate a coherent message? Donald J. Trump, donning the cloak of Buchanan and Steve Bannon, struck out at everyone: women and the media, Mexicans and Muslims, POWs (“I like people who weren’t captured”), and the Pope. The disconnect was jarring, David Brock recalled: “I could see the [Republican] party was making a tectonic shift, preaching hatred of government on the one hand, and calling for government enforcement of religiously ordained standards of personal conduct on the other…The proverbial scales were starting to fall from my eyes.”

That week, essayist Lance Morrow would file a column for Time insisting that the speech’s thesis, as well as Buchanan’s “bully mode—an appeal to visceral prejudices, not to American ideals”—had been stewing in the Republican cauldron for some 20 years. Buchanan, as a young Nixon speechwriter in the early ’70s, had drafted a memo to the president urging him to slice the nation in half “and pick off ‘far the larger half.’” Nixon indeed went after the Republican base and the sizable “silent majority” (a term the president himself had effectively used in the late ’60s) and was handily reelected, trouncing George McGovern. That long-brewing culture war—dating back to Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley Jr., and their peers—had finally come of age.

President Bush, on the convention’s final night, restored some decorum to the proceedings. In contrasting his version of change with the young Arkansas governor’s, the president implored, “Sure, we must change, but some values are timeless. I believe in families that stick together, fathers who stick around. I happen to believe very deeply in the worth of each individual human being, born or unborn…Maybe that’s why I’ve always believed that patriotism is not just another point of view.” And indeed, the ticket left Houston with a bit of a bounce in the polls, slightly narrowing the gap with Clinton-Gore, to a slim nine points in some polls.

But the damage had been done. Bush and his vice president, Dan Quayle, would never recover from what Newsweek would call “a four-day festival of fear and social antagonism.” To the television audience, the Bush “coalition” had come across as exclusionary, extremist, and fractured. Buchanan’s cavalry had hijacked the convention—and the Republican Party.

“Houston,” David Frum, the Atlantic’s political sage (and former Bush speechwriter) would observe, “is now indelibly engraved in America’s political memory as a disaster on the order of the Democrats’ Chicago convention in 1968 or the Republicans’ San Francisco convention of 1964”—not to mention Trump’s ragtag rage-fest of 2016.

In the end, much of the viewing public felt that the GOP leadership (who seemed out of step with society) and the party’s functionaries (which seemed unwilling to accept people of color or of the nonheterosexual persuasion) were either politicized versions of their battier aunts and uncles or exiles from the Planet Wack. The “Bush men,” to use Frum’s anthro-lingo, had only themselves to blame. It was not the far-right fringe, he believed, but the moderates— running the RNC, the campaign, and the convention—who had dictated the flow of the game in the Astrodome.

“The convention reflected the Bush men’s own conception of smart politics,” Frum would surmise in his book Dead Right, two years after the fiasco. “Like tourists in Paris, they compensated for their lack of a conservative vocabulary and grammar by absurdly and exaggeratedly mimicking the accents and gestures of the people to whom they were trying to communicate.”

Bush Men vs. Cultural Savages. The culture war had gone into high gear.

Excerpted from THE NAUGHTY NINETIES: The Decade that Unleashed Sex, Lies, and the World Wide Web © 2024 David Friend and reprinted by permission from Grand Central Publishing/Hachette Book Group.