PARTISANS

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.