Twenty years ago this month, Republicans convened at the Astrodome, in Houston, to nominate George H. W. Bush for reëlection to the Presidency. His acceptance speech was interrupted by spirited chants of “Viva Bush!,” but few remember what he said. Bush, the last of his breed to head a Presidential ticket, was a patrician product of the pre-Reaganite Republican establishment: business-friendly, foreign-policy-minded, more secular than not, anti-Communist but otherwise minimally ideological. This was held against him by Party insurgents, such as the Louisiana state legislator and former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke and the pundit and former Nixon aide Patrick Buchanan, both of whom had challenged the incumbent in the primaries. Buchanan was granted a prime-time slot on the first night of the Houston Convention, and although he came with just eighteen delegates, he stole the show.

Illustration by Tom Bachtell

“Friends,” Buchanan said, “there is a religious war going on in this country. 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.” The fight, he explained, was over such issues as abortion, equal rights for homosexuals, and the inclusion of women in combat units. Buchanan was against these things—“It’s not the kind of change we can abide in a nation we still call ‘God’s country.’ ” Of course, he said, he stood for unity and had come to rally the Buchanan Brigades to Bush’s cause, but nobody was fooled.

Today, solid majorities of Americans support gay rights, legal abortion, and women in combat. Yet the G.O.P. platform opposes them; the culture war that Buchanan trumpeted is no longer an insurgent cause but a permanent condition of the Republican Party, and, increasingly, it is being fought within the Party. Mitt Romney was reminded of this on the eve of this year’s Republican Convention, in Tampa, when Representative Todd Akin, of Missouri, who is running for the Senate, told a television interviewer that abortion should be criminalized, without allowing an exception for victims of rape; “legitimate rape,” he said, rarely results in pregnancy, since “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” Akin later explained that when he said “legitimate rape” he really meant “forcible rape,” which wasn’t exactly reassuring.

Akin’s woeful semantics posed an immediate problem for Romney, because his running mate, the Tea Party hero Paul Ryan, had worked with Akin in the House, co-sponsoring anti-abortion legislation that included several draft bills employing the term “forcible rape.” Now, however, Ryan was privately urging Akin to do the Party a favor and drop out of the Senate race, a call that Romney echoed on the stump, though neither demanded that Akin quit the House, where, after all, he is firmly in the Republican mainstream. Actually, Ryan, in sharing Akin’s hard line on abortion, is at odds with Romney, who has repudiated the pro-choice policy he espoused as governor of Massachusetts but would allow exceptions in cases of rape or incest, or if a pregnancy endangered the woman’s life. Still, Ryan subordinated his beliefs, saying, “Mitt Romney is going to be the President. The President sets policy.”

Maybe Ryan felt that he had visited enough headaches on his new boss for one week, but he hardly represented a newfound Party discipline. When word got out that the Republican platform called for the criminalization of abortion without reference to exceptions, the Republican National Committee chairman, Reince Priebus, declined to bow to the candidate. “This is the platform of the Republican Party,” he told MSNBC. “It is not the platform of Mitt Romney.”

Akin, too, held his ground. Instead of abandoning his campaign, he boasted that he was raising lots of money for it, depicting himself as the scapegoat of an ideologically spineless Party establishment. “Why couldn’t he run his race and I run mine?” Akin said of Romney. No doubt Romney was asking the same question. He was plainly blindsided by the speed with which Akin came to dominate the Presidential campaign, and he seemed baffled that he couldn’t contain the damage. He shouldn’t have been surprised—not after the humiliations he endured in a long primary season, waiting out the Tea-Partying, God-galvanized, government-reviling voters, who seemed willing to line up behind anyone but him. In the end, to become their leader, he followed them; tacking ever rightward, he emerged victorious, though it was anybody’s guess what he really stood for.

Perhaps there is a scaffold of conviction undergirding Romney’s opportunism; perhaps he did believe that he could team up with a hard-right favorite like Ryan, then swing back to the center, at Tampa, and rally a broader popular desire to give President Obama the boot. But to get caught up in a mess like the Akin affair comes from thinking that you’re in control of forces that, in truth, control you.

Even before last week, Romney was lagging far behind Obama in polls of women voters. He also found little support among Latinos, blacks, and the young. Rather than competing for these voters, however, Republican culture warriors have been competing against them, by making it harder for them to vote. Before Akin got going on abortion in his interview, he spoke of the need to impose stricter voter-identification requirements, in the name of ferreting out voter fraud. Charles Jaco, the interviewer, pointed out that the only instance of fraud ever documented in Missouri had occurred in 1936. Akin didn’t care. Stricter requirements were “really common sense,” he said.

In fact, such requirements, which have become a priority among Republican legislators across the country, stand to effectively disenfranchise millions of eligible voters, the vast majority of them in demographic groups that tend to support Democrats. In the past year and a half, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, states have passed twenty-three laws limiting access to the polls. In the swing state of Pennsylvania—which Obama won in 2008, and where there has been no evidence of voter fraud—a new law could disenfranchise nine per cent of voters; in Philadelphia, the number could be twice as high. And in Ohio, another swing state that went for Obama, a top adviser to John Kasich, the Republican governor, defended a decree that curtailed early voting, telling the Columbus Dispatch, “We shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban—read African-American—voter-turnout machine.”

After the 1992 Convention, the columnist Molly Ivins wrote that Pat Buchanan’s speech “probably sounded better in the original German.” And many observers later blamed Buchanan for scaring off centrist and swing voters, and contributing to Bush’s defeat. In Todd Akin, Romney clearly feared a similar risk. He had better get used to it. If he lets the Party’s culture war define him, and goes down as its casualty, he will have nobody to blame but himself. He always says that he would rather be talking about how he would fix the beleaguered economy, but so far he has scarcely been more forthcoming on that subject than he has on his income taxes. If he knows what to do, he should tell us. Or is he waiting, betting that things will get worse? Bad news for America remains Romney’s best hope. ♦