Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who
Remade American Politics in the 1990s
Nicole
Hemmer. Basic, $30 (368p) ISBN 978-1-5416-4688-9
The Republican Party swung a hard right away from
Reaganism in the 1990s, according to this insightful political study. Hemmer
(Messengers of the Right), a research scholar with the Obama Presidency Oral
History project at Columbia University, follows the shift away from Ronald
Reagan’s relatively sunny conservatism, with its positive attitudes toward
immigration, free trade, and internationalism, toward an embrace of
isolationism, nativism, and untrammeled gun rights and a rejection of
affirmative action, abortion rights, and other progressive social policies. She
follows this process through sharply etched portraits of its architects,
including presidential candidates Pat Buchanan and H. Ross Perot, who pioneered
the policies and populist bluster that Donald Trump would take to the White
House, and Idaho congresswoman Helen Chenoweth, who helped transfuse the
extreme right’s conspiracist paranoia into the Republican mainstream. At the
story’s center is House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who created the strategy of
partisan obstructionism that now dominates Congress and was undone by it when
ultraconservative firebrands pressured him into unpopular moves like impeaching
President Bill Clinton. Written in stylish, entertaining prose, Hemmer’s
history is nicely balanced between colorful personalities, electoral dogfights,
and shrewd analysis of sea changes in ideology and public attitudes. This is a
stimulating take on a crucial political era. (Aug.)
Trump Didn’t Kill Reaganism. These Guys Did.
A new book argues that Ronald Reagan’s election
actually marked the end of an era of conservatism — and opened the door to the
angrier politics that took Reaganism’s place.
By IAN WARD
08/26/2022 08:56 AM EDT
Updated: 08/26/2022 12:47 PM EDT
Ian Ward is a contributing editor for POLITICO
Magazine.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/08/26/reagan-conservatism-nicole-hemmer-q-and-a-00053858
In most sweeping histories of the 20th century, Ronald
Reagan’s election in 1980 marks the dawning of a new era of American politics,
the moment when conservatives finally completed their take-over of the
Republican Party and began to remake the country in their own image. According
to this narrative, the 30-year period that followed Reagan’s election — often
dubbed the “Reagan era” — was defined first and foremost by the Gipper’s
relatively sunny brand of conservatism grounded in anticommunism, social
conservatism and small-government libertarianism.
But there’s another story to be told about the Reagan
Revolution — one in which Reagan’s election, rather than marking the start of a
new chapter in the history of American conservatism, marks the end of a
previous one. In this story, the Reagan era was not a placid period of
conservative domination, but rather a time of intensifying ideological conflict
over the future of the Republican Party.
This is the story that Nicole Hemmer, an associate
professor of history at Vanderbilt University, tells in her new book Partisans:
The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s,
which hits the shelves on Aug. 30. Hemmer, who has written extensively about
the rise of right-wing media, begins her story by noting an apparent
contradiction at the heart of the Reagan era: “Nearly as soon as Reagan left
office, the conservative movement he represented began to rapidly evolve,
skittering away from the policies, rhetoric and even ideology that Reagan had
brought into office.” As Hemmer writes in the introduction to Partisans, “With
each passing year, conservatives looked less and less like Reagan, even as they
invoked his name more and more.”
What replaced Reaganism, Hemmer argues, was a “more
pessimistic, angrier and even more revolutionary conservatism” that shared none
of Reagan’s optimism about the future of the country. This new style of
reactionary politics found its mouthpiece in the “partisans” of Hemmer’s book:
figures like Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh, Ross Perot, Newt Gingrich, Laura
Ingraham and Dinesh D’Souza. Although they tapped into older strains of
reactionary politics, their project was essentially forward-looking, more
ideologically radical and politically ruthless than the Party of Reagan.
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Figures like Buchanan have received more attention in
recent years as historians and journalists have riffled the pages of
conservative history for antecedents to Donald Trump. In Partisans, Hemmer
casts aside this Trump-centric analysis: “This book is not a prehistory of
Trumpism,” she writes in the introduction. Instead, she explores the rise of
the GOP’s radical partisans by looking backward at what they rejected — namely,
Reaganism — rather than ahead to what they anticipated.
But this more scholarly approach doesn’t mean that her
argument is totally devoid of contemporary significance, Hemmer told me when we
spoke last week.
“Even if Donald Trump hadn’t won the presidency in
2016 — even if he hadn’t won the Republican nomination in 2016 — the changes in
the Republican Party had still taken place,” said Hemmer. “Something was in the
air, something had been changing, something was visible, even without Donald
Trump to shine a light on it.”
The following transcript has been edited for clarity
and length.
Ian Ward: You open the book with the line, “This book
began with a puzzle.” What was that puzzle?
Nicole Hemmer: The puzzle at the heart of the book has
to do with President Reagan and his legacy. He looms so large in the Republican
Party and in the conservative movement, and yet it seemed to me as I was
studying the conservative movement that he was really the capstone of a
movement that had been in motion since the 1950s, and that he really had
started to lose his hold over the party pretty quickly [after being elected].
So even as he became more mythologically grand within the conservative
movement, the tenets of Reaganism — the idea of American engagement in the
world and the idea of an optimistic, upbeat conservatism and big tent
Republican Party — all seem to be on the wane.
Ward: What were the early signs that Reaganism was
being challenged from the right?
Hemmer: Even while Reagan was in office, there were
some real trigger points. Social conservatism was a really big one. There was a
group called the New Right, which was a group of social conservatives who
tapped into the [Republican] grassroots and into an essentially fear-based
style of politics. They just did not gel with Reagan. They attacked him
relentlessly for his appointments, for nominating Sandra Day O’Connor to the
Supreme Court, for not going hard enough on abortion or guns.
And then ultimately, U.S foreign policy was a trigger
point as well. You will not see more brutal attacks on Ronald Reagan from any
part of the political spectrum than the attacks from the New Right over his
negotiations with the Soviet Union in 1987 and 1988.
Ward: Despite their name, the figures from New Right
were drawing on older reactionary traditions in the United States, too. What
were those traditions?
Hemmer: The biggest antecedent is segregation and
anti-Black politics. A lot of the energy and the political style of the New
Right comes out of the opposition not just to Lyndon Johnson and the Great
Society, but specifically to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to the Voting Rights
Act of 1965 and ultimately to affirmative action. There’s a real sharpness and
meanness to the politics that come up through that.
They’re also very tapped into conservative Christian
traditions. This is the group that is behind the rise of the Moral Majority and
ultimately behind the Christian Coalition, and they are drawing from the older
model of prescriptive anti-politics of conservative religious figures in the
United States. That tradition goes all the way back to Father Coughlin, but
also to Protestants in the 1920s who were trying to prevent people from being
able to drink alcohol.
Ward: There’s a real sense of Confederate nostalgia
within this movement as well — and that’s a point where the New Right comes
into contact with Reagan, too. In the book, you cite Reagan calling the Civil
Rights Act of 1964 “humiliating for the South.”
Hemmer: Confederate nostalgia is core to this
politics, and it often gets coded as states’ rights. I think that’s the way
that most people who follow modern politics think about it now — that you have
the Civil War and this Lost Cause nostalgia, but that gets cleaned up into the
language of states’ rights. But that really overlooks how close to the surface
it was. That Reagan quote is a great line, but also think of the candidacy of
George Wallace [in 1968] and how much he was calling on that Lost Cause
ideology and blending it into a sense of decline among white Americans across
the board. It had as much appeal in places like Wisconsin as it did in places
like Mississippi.
And then, of course, there’s Pat Buchanan, who is not
just going to someplace like Philadelphia, Mississippi, where Ronald Reagan
went to start his presidential campaign and which was near the site where three
civil rights workers were killed [in 1964]. But Pat Buchanan goes to Stone
Mountain, Georgia, which is the Mount Rushmore of the Confederacy. He talks
about his Confederate ancestors, and it’s not just the Lost Cause — it’s [the
sense] that these are our people, and our work is to defend and protect their
memory and to advance their causes.
Ward: In historical terms, how do you explain the
dissolution of the Reagan consensus and the rise of this even more radical
style of conservatism?
Hemmer: One of the biggest factors contributing to the
fragility of Reaganism was the end of the Cold War. I think in some ways we’ve
forgotten how much Reagan was a Cold War president and that the conditions of
the Cold War shaped his rhetoric, shaped the policies that he preferred, and
really were necessary for the kind of conservatism that he championed. When the
Cold War ends, it loosens not just the motivation for conservatives to get
involved internationally, but also the motivation for them to champion
democracy, which they hold on to a little more lightly after Reagan leaves
office.
There’s also a massive shift in terms of domestic
politics. It had been a goal of conservatives for so long to capture the
presidency, and then they had captured it [in 1980], and they didn’t get
everything they wanted. They knew that was partly because they hadn’t won
control of Congress at that point for something like 40 years. So there is a
real refocusing on congressional politics, not just in opposition to Bill
Clinton but in opposition to George H.W. Bush as well.
And then, importantly, the media environment is
changing so rapidly in the 1990s. You have the rise of cable news, you have the
rise of new forms of political entertainment in shows like Bill Maher’s
“Politically Incorrect,” and you even have the nascent internet. At the start
of the ’90s, it wasn’t really possible to have a web browser and to just hop
online, but by the mid- to late-1990s, the internet is a huge political player,
and it leads to a very different type of politics.
Ward: The moment when divisions within the Republican
Party become really apparent is the 1992 presidential election, which was
pretty unbelievable, even by today’s standards. In the Republican Primary, you
had an incumbent Republican in George H.W. Bush facing a serious primary
challenge not only from Buchanan but from David Duke, the former Grand Wizard
of the Ku Klux Klan. And then in the general election, there was Ross Perot,
who won a larger share of the third-party vote than any candidate since Teddy
Roosevelt in 1912. What was going on in 1992?
Hemmer: I think it speaks to how fractured everything
was in the context of massive global and economic change. We think of the end
of the Cold War as reshaping the geopolitical landscape, but it also really
changed economics and politics in the United States. There is a major recession
in the U.S. at the time of the ’92 election, and parts of California that have
been propped up by government spending and the aerospace industry had collapsed
almost overnight. There was this sense of uncertainty about what the world is
going to look like going forward and who is going to prosper and who is going
to fail. It’s also at a pivot point in decades of deindustrialization and
shifting toward a knowledge economy and a service economy. So things really
were in flux, and I think the politics of the day reflect that.
Ward: The intensity of the Buchanan challenge and the
success of the Perot campaign underscored the political importance of a
demographic that social scientists had begun calling “Middle American
Radicals.” Who are these Middle American Radicals, and what did the 1990s
reveal about their place in the Republican coalition?
Hemmer: “Middle American radicals” is a term that was
popularized by Sam Francis, who — spoiler alert — becomes a pretty out-and-out
white nationalist by the 1990s, and who was an adviser to the Buchanan
campaign. The idea was that there were these people in middle America — today,
we often call it “the flyover states” — who were generally white, generally
Christian of some stripe, and who had been radicalized by the politics of the
second half of the 20th century. There was a sense that they were under threat,
that they were no longer the dominant demographic, that they were losing power
and losing control of politics. But now they were finally rearing up and
fighting back.
It’s a lot like the Silent Majority that Richard Nixon
talks about, but Richard Nixon’s Silent Majority was supposed to be the
opposite of radical. They were supposed to be the reactionaries who were
holding the center during a period of change and upheaval in the United States.
The idea behind these Middle American Radicals was that no, actually, these are
the people who want to radically remake American politics. Sam Francis, and later
Pat Buchanan, really tapped into those folks.
Ward: One of the starkest transformations within the
Republican Party that you trace in the book is the GOP’s evolving position on
immigration. Reagan, for instance, had fairly liberal, Cold War-era ideas about
the free movement of people, but then by the mid-1990s, the GOP has become an
avowedly anti-immigrant party. Why did immigration become such a lightning rod
for the tensions that were swirling on the right?
Hemmer: It was one of those issues that had to be
activated. The United States is not a place where there has never been
anti-immigrant sentiment, but in the 1980s and early 1990s, it just didn’t
register for most people as a primary concern.
So we have to think about why politicians were able to
put it at the top of the agenda, and a big part of it was linking immigration
to criminality and linking it to economic threats and economic competition. Pat
Buchanan himself in the mid-1980s was talking about immigration as something
that’s amazing for the United States and saying that immigrants were hard
workers who pay their taxes, so who cares that they’re not necessarily
documented? But that all changed by 1992, when he was connecting immigration to
all kinds of lawlessness — including the riots in Los Angeles in 1992, which
then-Attorney General Bill Barr was also doing — and suggesting that basically
anything wrong with your life is being caused by undocumented immigration,
particularly if you’re in Arizona or California.
For Buchanan, he increasingly leaned on the
non-whiteness of these immigrants as a particular threat. They’re not just a
threat to your pocketbook, they’re a threat to the continued majority status of
white people in the United States. That really becomes the big driver of
anti-immigrant sentiment in California and then in the rest of the U.S.
Ward: And this was all taking place at the same time
that conservative intellectuals like Charles Murray and D’Souza were embracing
new pseudo-scholarly varieties of race science.
Hemmer: That’s exactly right. These more fixed and
pseudo-scientific ideas about race — and in particular about the inferiority of
Black people in the United States — became really important to conservatives in
the mid-1990s. It sometimes overlapped with immigration, as in the case of
Peter Brimelow, who wrote a pretty shockingly racist anti-immigrant tract
called Alien Nation in 1995. But when you look at somebody like D’Souza or
Murray, what they were adding to their arguments is an older idea about race,
which is that Black Americans can’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps
[because] they’re in a fixed inferior position — and policy needs to recognize
that. That’s different from Ronald Reagan, who wanted to roll back Great
Society policies and affirmative action and all those kinds of things, but who
didn’t profess this idea of a fixed, innate Black inferiority.
Ward: In addition to changes in the substance of
Republican politics, the style of Republican politics changed quite a bit
during the ’90s as well. You quote D’Souza, for instance, arguing that
conservatives needed to be “philosophically conservative, but temperamentally
radical.” What drove these stylistic changes?
Hemmer: The stylistic changes were driven a lot by
particular figures. They were spearheaded by people like Newt Gingrich, who
really believed that Republicans needed a rhetorical style that made it clear
that Republicans were the good guys and Democrats were the bad guys. And it’s
not just “good” versus “bad.” It is “moral” versus “degenerate.” Gingrich would
pick the worst possible words — “treason,” “degeneracy” — to attach to
Democrats, and he felt like that was important.
It also has to do with things like the rise of talk
radio. It was in the early 1990s that Rush Limbaugh became not just a national
radio host, but a national political leader. That medium of talk radio did
drive a lot of that provocative language, [because] it showed that you wouldn’t
necessarily pay the price for saying something really over the top and
offensive.
Ward: That darker style of politics was sometimes
described in the 1990s as “angry white men politics,” but you point out that
these new conservative partisans weren’t exclusively men. What role did women
play in pushing the Republican Party to the right?
Hemmer: Women do play a leading role, in part because
they are members of a new class of pundits that was coming up in the world of
cable news and who were learning this more pugilistic style of politics.
[Figures like Ingraham and Ann Coulter] were very prominent, thanks in part to
an organization called the Independent Women’s Forum, which did a lot to take
professional women and move them into a political class and a punditry class
where they could become the face of the new American right.
People like Helen Chenoweth, on the other hand,
represented a different kind of threat. She was a representative from Idaho who
was grandmotherly and soft-spoken, but her real extremism was in her ties to
militia groups. Part of her district in Idaho was Ruby Ridge, where there was a
strong militia presence, and she helped spread all sorts of conspiracy theories
about government officials, the Bureau of Land Management, black helicopters,
the United Nations and the like. And it was important that she was a woman and
that she looked like a grandmother, because she was much less threatening than
30-year-old white male militia members surrounding a government building or
yelling at a government official.
Ward: How does George W. Bush fit into the story of
conservative radicalization that you’re telling? In many ways, he represented
the heir to orthodox Reaganism, and it would be easy to point to his presidency
and say, “Oh, look, those radical partisans of the ’90s were just a blip on the
radar, and the saner, more mainstream conservatism ultimately prevailed.” Why
is that the wrong way to think about it?
Hemmer: If history had stopped in 2004, that would be
a very credible thesis, because Bush really was put forward as the second coming
of Reagan. He had that same kind of sunny-sighted conservatism, he was
interested in more open immigration, and he was very interested, certainly by
the end of his first year in office, in America becoming more involved in the
world and promoting democracy.
But so much of the Reaganism that he embraced failed
so miserably during his second term. The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the
failure to commit to environmental plans were some of the first signs of this
failure. But then, by the end of his presidency, the failures in Iraq and
Afghanistan and U.S. adventurism abroad were also becoming clear. And then, of
course, the financial crisis, financial deregulation and the giant tax cuts —
all of that [added to this impression of failure]. By the end of his two terms
in office, he had kind of disproven Reaganism and put the final nail in
Reaganism’s coffin. He was the testing ground to see if Reaganism was still
viable, and by the end of his presidency, he had shown that it was not.
Ward: How did the Democratic Party respond to these
changes within the Republican Party?
Hemmer: Certainly, liberals during the 1990s were
pretty open to the ideas of this new Republican right. One of the things that
you see over the course of the 1990s is that the Democratic Party moved
steadily to the right. Democratic politicians didn’t back something like
Proposition 187 in California, which would have stripped all government
services from people in the country without documentation, but they did move pretty
far right on immigration, on border security and on the language of
demonization around immigration.
That’s one of the reasons why I think of the 1990s not
as a time of polarization but as a time of right-wing radicalization, because
the Democratic Party isn’t running away from the Republican Party. Liberals are
finding common cause in a lot of ways. In 1995, Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich
are sitting down and starting to talk about overhauling Social Security. So
yes, liberals at least are on board with a lot of what’s happening.
Ward: They certainly weren’t erecting the barricades.
Hemmer: No, they were not.
Ward: A drawback to other, more Trump-centric
approaches to conservative history is that they lend a sense of inevitability
to Trump’s rise, and in the process, then they overlook the moments when
Republicans consciously chose to invite the more radical members of the
conservative coalition into the fold. For instance, you mention the episode in
1992 when George H.W. Bush invited Rush Limbaugh to the White House for dinner,
and Bush even ended up carrying Limbaugh’s luggage for him.
Hemmer: I think that particular moment where Bush
sides with Rush Limbaugh is an important one, as is the omnipresence of Roger
Ailes in Republican politics in the 1980s and 1990s.
There were alternatives. Colin Powell is such a
fascinating case study, because he comes out of a lineage that included people
like Jack Kemp, the representative from New York who was often seen as the heir
to Reagan. There were moments where Kemp was like, “What are you doing,
Republicans? Stop paddling around with radicals and look at this other legacy
that we could be following.” Imagine if in 1996, Colin Powell had won the
Republican nomination and the presidency, not just as a Black man, but as
somebody who was pro-abortion rights. It is a very different party in that
case.
Today, that seems so impossible. But this is why the
Perot campaign was so important. It seems like in the early 1990s, American
voters were open to a lot of different possibilities. The country may have
ended the decade as being an increasingly partisan and polarized country, but
it didn’t start the decade that way, and that sense of possibility is important
for making sense of the ’90s.
Ward: Trading your historian’s hat for your pundit’s
hat for a minute, there’s an analogy to be drawn here with Trumpism. In some
senses, Trump has captured the Republican Party today in a similar way to how
Reagan captured it back in the ’80s. But as you point out, historians have a
tendency to exaggerate the extent of the ideological homogeneity that follows
these watershed elections. Are there any fault lines in the Republican Party
today that are akin to the fault lines that emerged between Reagan and these
partisans in the ’80s and ’90s?
Hemmer: There is this “national conservatism” that’s
arisen today that occasionally has advocates of a stronger social safety net.
[But] at the moment, it’s hard to talk about in terms of fault lines, because
it’s such an ideologically unsettled moment. It really does seem like on the
policy front, a lot of things are up for grabs. You could imagine a heterodox
Republican candidate getting away with quite a lot [in the same way that]
Donald Trump got away with quite a lot.
The thing that makes it hard to see the fault lines
right now is this over-arching loyalty to Donald Trump. We’re talking the day
after Liz Cheney lost her primary campaign, and that has nothing to do with her
politics outside of her relationship to Trump. I do think we’re going to
continue to see a kind of moderate-radical divide in the party, but it’s just
that the center of that divide keeps shifting over further and further and
further to the right.
I think that in general, most Republicans really do
agree on the direction of policy, but the question is, how hardline and how
attached to democracy are they going to be. More than anything, that question
of “Are we pro-democratic governance or anti-democratic governance” is the real
fault line.
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