Partisans

April 25, 2022
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.

August 1, 2022
A study of the political figures who "worked to develop a politics that was not just conservative but antiliberal, that leaned into the coarseness of American culture and brought it into politics." Hemmer is the founding director of the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Center for the Study of the Presidency at Vanderbilt and a researcher at the Obama Presidency Oral History project at Columbia. "In the 1980s," she writes, "Reagan embodied a conservatism that was optimistic and popular, two things the American right had not been for most of the twentieth century." Reagan was also a master of compromise, saving threatened social welfare programs and advocating new nuclear arms treaties--things not hard-line enough for true right-wingers, who had already had fits over the moderate Eisenhower presidency. For that reason, Hemmer writes, the bulk of the right abandoned Reaganism and moved "toward a more pessimistic, angrier, and even more revolutionary conservatism not long after his presidency." It had many avatars, but foremost among them was Pat Buchanan, who campaigned for the presidency in the three races between 1992 and 2000, decrying immigrants, affirmative action, civil rights for minorities, homosexuality, and other bugaboos of the radical right--precisely the stuff that Donald Trump, "a cynical demagogue," revived in 2016. Hemmer names other forerunners of Trump and Trumpism. In politics, there were Ross Perot and Pat Robertson, in the media, Roger Ailes and Fox News along with Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Dinesh D'Souza. All fueled the tea party movement, which supposed that Barack Obama hated White people, among other conspiratorial matters. "The tea party was not just about rallies and radio shows," writes Hemmer. "It was also about elections. And there, the movement's antiestablishment streak would have profound consequences for the Republican Party." Fast-forward a dozen years, and you have our present chaos, with worse likely on the way. A sobering analysis of a slowly unfolding political movement that may one day spell the end of American democracy.

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