Though Trump clearly connected with many conservatives on Thursday night, he nevertheless would have done well to study Buchanan’s haunting address to the 1992 Republican National Convention. If you recall the speech at all, it’s probably for its hard-edged call for a culture war. In his evocative conclusion, Buchanan celebrated the National Guardsmen who restored order to riot-stricken Los Angeles, then urged his fellow conservatives to follow their lead: “And 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.” Naturally, Americans of a more liberal bent couldn’t help but wonder if Buchanan meant to take the cities and the culture and the country back from them. (To be totally clear: He did.)

But there was a more elegiac aspect to Buchanan’s culture-war speech, in which he spoke movingly of the women and men he had met on the campaign trail who feared for their economic futures. He urged the Republican delegates to recognize these people as their brothers and sisters…