Nicole Hemmer is Associate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. She and I discussed her first book back in 2016. Her second book, Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s, resituates the Republican Party’s sharp rightward turn in reaction to the Reagan presidency, rather than at its beginning.

In the autumn of 2023, shortly after becoming the first Speaker of the House to be stripped of his gavel, Congressman Kevin McCarthy was asked to comment on the far-right cadre who had engineered his ouster. “They don’t get to say they’re conservative because they’re angry and they’re chaotic,” he said. “That’s not the party I belong to. The party of Reagan was if you believed in your principles, that you could govern in a conservative way. They are not conservative and they do not have the right to have the title.” Perhaps McCarthy had not read Nicole Hemmer’s Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s. Otherwise, he might have had a clearer grasp of exactly when and how the party he belongs to—the party of Reagan—became defined by anger and chaos.

If the Reagan Revolution achieved the great triumph of American conservatism in 1980, it also marked the culmination and passing of the triumphant conservative style—that sunny, smiling optimism of its Californian namesake. Indeed, though Ronald Reagan remains emblematic of 80s-era Republicanism, the balance of his political allies and admirers were even then transitioning into darker and more aggressive forms, ever more fiercely committed to the unpopular stands their popular leader was ever unwilling to take. Though they fawned on the Great Communicator in his day and invoked his name regularly for at least a decade after his death, the post-Reagan conservatives had come to view Reaganism as an opportunity missed. For all his virtues, it seems, the Gipper had one near fatal flaw in their eyes—he paid attention to public opinion.

The story of American politics in the 1990s is thus largely concerned with right-wing reaction to Reagan’s perceived moderation. The protagonists are rising right-wing politicians and media figures with radical ideas about government, who viewed election as license to enact these categorically. In temperament, these individuals—Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, and Roger Ailes, to name a few—were doctrinaire and inflexible. Stylistically, they were angry. Apparently convinced that morning in America had passed to afternoon, they radiated an irascible and sneering sort of frustration, rejecting conciliation and compromise as synonyms for weakness, and practicing politics as warfare by only slightly milder means. If Reagan proposed a political vision to the people and waited for their assent, his successors would make demands and force them through, or else.

In these years, Buchanan’s frowning growl and Gingrich’s bookish scorn came to define their own peculiar mode of persuasion. Confident that they were ideologically correct, they had no patience for caveats and no tolerance for dissent. When Buchanan challenged George H. W. Bush in the ’92 primary, he wielded his conservative purity like a cudgel, battering his more moderate rival over a heretical willingness to tax. When Gingrich launched his own revolution in ’94, he assigned an entirely new lexicon to see it secured, recasting his Democratic colleagues as sick, selfish, radical, treasonous, and worse. In step with Limbaugh’s radio bombast, alongside the rise of Fox News, sanctified by association with the Christian Right, and contemporaneous with reactionary militia movements, this ascendent political ethos drew support from across the rightward reaches, bolstered by certainties and inflected with menace. Animated by their blinding hatred of William Jefferson Clinton, conservatives struggled desperately to retake the White House and to see their agenda finally imposed without restraint.

The impeachment proceedings launched against Clinton in December of 1998 thus provide a representative anecdote for the shift underway in the Republican Party for at least a decade to that point—the moment at which Reaganite conservatism formally surrendered to the Gingrich caucus. Because Kenneth Starr’s charges were so humiliating and salacious, the case was perfectly calibrated for the right-wing media and publishing sphere, and tailor-made for the chain emails everyone’s uncle was forwarding dutifully along. And yet, for those same reasons, the impeachment was extraordinarily unpopular with the public-at-large, creating the sort of political calculus that would likely have prompted a Reagan to balk. Asked why he pressed on despite the risks, Gingrich responded curtly, “Because we can,” a quip that Hemmer flags as “an apt summation of the right’s emerging attitude toward power” (247). Once in office, the Republicans of the 1990s would do everything in their ability to satisfy all of their desires. If the effort cost them majorities, they would thrive in opposition until winning their seats again. 

Perhaps somewhat chastened by Clinton’s acquittal and their own midterm losses in ‘98, Republicans nominated George W. Bush in 2000, entrusting their prospects once again to an optimistic candidate pitching a “compassionate” conservatism. But though Bush would win the election (sort of) and serve two terms in the White House, his party was not really reverting to a softer political style. By 2008, with the nation embroiled in Iraq, devastated by a “Great Recession,” and on the verge of electing its first Black president, conservatives were angrier than ever and amplified by a media empire with nearly ubiquitous reach. That sprawling and vicious media ecosystem is central to the story Hemmer tells, cross-pollinating with the GOP and moving steadily from backdrop to center stage with the rise and coronation of the abrasive, conspiratorial, and truly singular reality television star President Donald J. Trump.

Like so many other political volumes published in the past eight years, Partisans is ultimately an account of how the Trump administration became possible, and it is more compelling than most. Though we commonly attribute Trumpism to the dynamics and fractures of our “polarized”nation, Hemmer is thorough and careful to explain that the term is not quite correct. Indeed, she writes, though the 1990s are “so often described as an era of polarization,” this was “actually an era of right-wing radicalization” (14). Here she may be understating the extremity of movement conservatism in the 1960s and 70s, while overstating Reagan’s moderation in the 80s. But whenever it began in earnest, the era of conservative radicalism was clearly underway by 1990. It continues today.