George HW Bush, the 41st president, is gone. The US stands divided, immersed in a cold civil war.

Thirty years ago, the country was perched on the precipice of change. Those of us who worked on the Bush ’88 campaign didn’t get all of it, at least not in that moment. Victory obscured what would come next. Race, culture and educational attainment would emerge as the fault lines of our politics.

The aftermath of Vietnam and the rights movements of the 1960s helped supplant the old divisions of north v south, Protestant v Catholic. Religious “nones” became an electoral counterweight to white evangelicals. Whether or not a voter possessed a four-year degree and how frequently one worshipped were the new predictors of politics. But back then, the tableau had yet to be completed.

Down 17 points on Memorial Day 1988, five months before the election, the Bush campaign seized on crime and credibility as its defining themes. The opposition research shop hammered away on Governor Michael Dukakis’s weekend furloughs for convicted felons. Attack ads showing Dukakis looking like Snoopy in a tank filled America’s TV screens.

After you’ve been shot out of the skies, politics is a relatively risk-free endeavor. Vice-President Bush won 53-46 and carried 40 states. We claimed a mandate even though we were uncertain as to what it was about – other than no new taxes.

For the first time since FDR and the New Deal, the in-party had scored a three-peat in the White House, a feat not accomplished by Republicans since before the Great Depression. In that moment, Bush became Ronald Reagan’s successor. But he was never his heir.

We don’t want an America that is closed to the world. What we want is a world that is open to America George HW Bush

Looking back, 1988 was a turning point. It would be the last time any presidential candidate broke 400 votes in the electoral college, the last time California, New Jersey and Illinois went red. What was up until then viewed as the Republican lock would give way in four short years.

After that night, no non-incumbent Republican would again lead the popular vote. The Democratic party would capture a plurality in six of the next seven presidential elections. Flyover country would emerge as a contiguous Republican bastion, Democrats relegated mostly to the coasts. Another realignment was under way.

In office, Bush prosecuted the Gulf war, rescued the savings and loan industry, protected Americans with disabilities, extended civil rights laws. He also denounced David Duke and nary was an eyebrow raised. As for trade, Bush announced: “We don’t want an America that is closed to the world. What we want is a world that is open to America.” The GOP could still be called the party of Lincoln.

The Soviet Union collapsed, the Berlin Wall fell. Yet the glue of anti-communism would come undone and the president would be the last of the greatest generation to sit in the Oval Office. No president since has served in combat. The collective grip of military service, the second world war and the cold war has loosened.

Nor would American success in the Gulf war carry much weight at re-election time. The US had finally emerged from the shadows of Vietnam but it was the home front that needed tending. The president had failed to keep his tax pledge. “It’s the economy, stupid” became the election tagline.

The base never forgave us, and ideological conformity took greater root within the party. Bush was challenged in the primaries by paleo-conservative Pat Buchanan, a Nixon and Reagan speechwriter. Then he lost to Bill Clinton in the general election. Neither Buchanan nor Clinton had donned a uniform. It didn’t matter. In the age of the volunteer army, service did not excite, not even on the right.

Pat Buchanan, paleo-conservative, seen in 1999. Photograph: Rick Mcfarland/AP

At the 1992 convention, Buchanan called for a culture war. Clinton was letting us know that he didn’t inhale. The three-way contest between Bush, Clinton and Ross Perot ushered in a new era.

Four years later, in the primaries, Buchanan and his pitchfork brigade mounted an unsuccessful populist revolt against Senator Bob Dole, another hero of the second world war. In retrospect Buchanan, not Bush, was the harbinger of the GOP’s future.

Culture and demographics would dictate our national trajectory as much as anything else. The 1960s and its aftermath would leave their footprint. The torch had not been passed. It had been grabbed, by a generation less steady than its predecessors.

Republican opposition to tax increases became an article of faith, but so did unvarnished social conservatism. The right had embraced its own version of intersectionality.

Like the left, the GOP core would place a premium on ideological consistency. When Bush said back in the mid-1980s, “I am a conservative, but I’m not a nut about it”, his sentiment was heartfelt. The disdain would be reciprocated. Over time, the soul of the party would move from the sun belt to the Bible belt, from the suburbs to rural America, from a message suffused with upward arc to one laden with resentment.

Back in the day, the president’s father was a senator from Connecticut and a golf partner to President Eisenhower. Now, the Nutmeg state’s entire congressional delegation is Democratic. Ned Lamont, governor-elect, played golf at the country club where George met Barbara Bush.

Our political sorting continues. What constitutes putting America first is a running battle.