Resentful, Media-Savvy and Paving the Way for Trump
In “Partisans,” Nicole Hemmer zeros in on ’90s figures like Pat Buchanan as guiding forces behind the Republican Party’s hard-right, conspiracy-minded turn.
Pat Buchanan at a Florida rally during his 1992 run for the Republican presidential nomination.
He told the gathering that his candidacy was forcing President George H.W. Bush
to become more conservative.
Credit...Peter Cosgrove/Associated Press
By Gabriel Debenedetti
Sept. 2, 2022
PARTISANS: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s, by Nicole Hemmer
American political history is not always terribly complicated, but even its simplest lessons can be little match for our collective amnesia. How surprised should we be, really, to learn that “America First,” one of Donald Trump’s favored campaign slogans, was used by a pair of also-ran presidential candidates in 1992 — the hard-core right-wing commentator Pat Buchanan and the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke?
“How, exactly, did we get here?” is an urgent question. But if the inquiry is one of the defining nonfiction genres of the last half-decade, some of its more common iterations now risk feeling stale. There are the narrowly reported rise-of-Trump tales, the sprawling warping-of-conservatism narratives, and the academic tracts on consequential demographic and economic transformations.
Many have been valuable. Still, it now takes an especially creative exploration to break new interpretive ground. By reconsidering a rogues’ gallery of figures whose media-fueled rise through the 1990s coincided with the explosive debut of a combative, nativist and populist right — and by unpacking how that movement split off from Reaganism — Nicole Hemmer accomplishes just that.
Hemmer, a Vanderbilt University historian and frequent commentator on conservatism and conservative media, is well matched to the task she set for herself. She is publishing just as the right-wing media convulses, but also as the masters of the broader press infrastructure reckon only uncomfortably with their part in building today’s political landscape, when they consider it at all. In “Partisans,” she focuses on how the Rush Limbaughs of the world interacted with the Newt Gingriches to steer the contemporary right toward where she found it in 2016.
“The party’s transformation, sudden though it seemed, had been underway for a quarter century,” she writes. “In the turn toward nativism and a more overt racism, in the criticisms of conservative elites, in the wariness about free trade and democracy, in the sharp-elbowed, fact-lite punditry.”
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This is partially accomplished through carefully chosen anecdotes. Take Hemmer’s reconstruction of the time George H.W. Bush, recognizing at Roger Ailes’s urging that he needed to woo Limbaugh, invited the radio polemicist to the White House and carried his bag to the Lincoln Bedroom. The Buchanan moments, especially, leap off the page. (The “America First” slogan originated not with him or with Duke but with 1930s-era Nazi sympathizers.) After Buchanan’s 1992 presidential campaign, the G.O.P. platform for the first time endorsed building “structures” on the border with Mexico. You see where this is going.
Still, Hemmer does not pretend to find novelty in the simple conclusion that Trumpism is the product of a decades-long right-wing drift. She is more specific. She illuminates the consequences of mainstreaming provocative conservative opinions as the radio and television landscapes modernized.
Her history argues persuasively that the swift ends of the Cold War and Republicans’ hold on the White House dramatically changed the context and incentives for right-wing strategizing — opposition to Soviet communism was no longer a useful organizing principle, and Bill Clinton was a tempting target. She demonstrates too how easily forgotten figures — like the author Dinesh D’Souza and the militia-friendly Representative Helen Chenoweth — hastened and radicalized the pessimistic ideological revolution, all while “too many people were too attached to the idea of the party of Reagan to notice.”
Buchanan may be an afterthought for today’s right, but Hemmer considers him central to its development. He is the man who simultaneously exposed the political shakiness of the post-Reagan mainstream conservative coalition and the possibility of shaping modern policy discussions around white racial anxieties. Though Reagan, a former actor and radio host, was a media figure himself, Buchanan’s rise through the pundit class was unique. After years in the columnist, radio and White House press room trenches, he prepared for the electoral stage with fame-solidifying roles at CNN and PBS just as the networks were eager to elevate combative conservative voices.
Hemmer argues that the conspiracist Buchanan, seeing room for a Bush alternative, used his knowledge of the national media’s motivations to catch outsize attention. He set in motion a narrative about his emergence as a force in national politics when he got in front of cameras before Bush on New Hampshire primary night in 1992, for example, and avoided being called “extreme” for so long because reporters were so used to him.
Limbaugh is only barely secondary, announcing himself as a player in electoral politics by backing Buchanan in 1992 and then developing into a cultural phenomenon with his zeal for racist and sexist provocation just as cable news programming found its footing and modern talk radio blossomed — granting him significant wealth and incentive to push the envelope as far as it would go.
By sending Limbaugh a letter calling him the leading voice of conservatism after Clinton was elected, Reagan codified what was already clear, in Hemmer’s telling: He “legitimated a new source of power in the conservative movement, one the Republican Party would have to compete with, or try to co-opt, in the coming years.” And as networks pushed more inflammatory programming, a new generation of partisan pundits like Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter stepped in, gaining celebrity along the way.
“Partisans” is told mostly chronologically; it can at times feel dauntingly expansive. It covers the familiar rise of Gingrich and Washington Republicans’ belligerent political style. But it also demonstrates how Gingrich, recognizing the populist power of Ross Perot, carefully sought to woo his voters and change the G.O.P.’s appeal, and how Gingrich and Limbaugh taught elected officials the power of the new grass roots inflamed by conservative media.
The narrative then swerves to the emergence of militias and white nationalists obsessed with gun rights and opposed to civil- and gay-rights movements, before addressing how conspiratorial conservatives pushed the establishment G.O.P. into an investigate-first stance with Clinton in office. By late in his term, Hemmer writes, Republicans could no longer deny that their base had forced them to decouple “from public opinion at the national level” and to become “more reliant on partisan punditry and political entertainment.”
The second Bush era is treated as less formative, though it saw partisans reorient their scorn toward liberals more broadly with the Clintons gone. By the time we reach Barack Obama’s first term in 2009, readers are unsurprised to learn that a Gallup poll in May that year found Limbaugh to be the G.O.P.’s voice, according to voters. (Hemmer covers the Tea Party’s rise, too, in a treatment that feels swift but not insufficient; her focus is clearly on the preceding decades.)
Hemmer deftly avoids making it all about Trump. She doesn’t need to. The foreshadowing is painfully obvious, as when Bob Dole, in order to swing the 1996 election, baselessly charged that Democrats were flooding the country with criminal immigrants, or when, 16 years later, Steve Bannon pushed the xenophobic TV host Lou Dobbs toward a run for president on an outsider’s platform. When Trump does arrive, the stage has already been set by a 1992 Buchanan visit to the border, where he served up incendiary rhetoric about criminals and immigrants, as an actual violent fringe group literally waited in the wings.
The arrival of Hemmer’s vigorous book suggests that serious scrutiny of the 1990s, and its responsibility for today’s politics, has finally arrived. We may soon know if it’s come too late.
Gabriel Debenedetti’s book, “The Long Alliance: The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama,” will be published this month. He is the national correspondent for New York magazine.
PARTISANS: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s | By Nicole Hemmer | 368 pp. | Basic Books | $30
