Recent Reading: Partisans

I enjoyed reading Nicole Hemmer's book Partisans. The book is a history of how the GOP changed from the end of Ronald Reagan's second term until 2016. Goodreads provides the following summary:

A bold new history of modern conservatism that finds its origins in the populist right-wing politics of the 1990s
 
Ronald Reagan has long been lionized for building a conservative coalition sustained by an optimistic vision of American exceptionalism, small government, and free markets. But as historian Nicole Hemmer reveals, the Reagan coalition was short-lived; it fell apart as soon as its charismatic leader left office. In the 1990s — a decade that has yet to be recognized as the breeding ground for today’s polarizing politics — changing demographics and the emergence of a new political-entertainment media fueled the rise of combative far-right politicians and pundits. These partisans, from Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich to Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham, forged a new American right that emphasized anti-globalism, appeals to white resentment, and skepticism about democracy itself.  

In Hemmer's book, we see a wide cast of characters from the 1990s in America including Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Kellyanne Fitzgerald, Peter Brimelow, Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, as well as a host of other figures, including Newt Gingrich. Gingrich was one of the people who realized that media attention is essential to political power. However, Gingrich was quite the bomb thrower:

When it came to foreign policy, the New Right threw even harder punches, especially when it came to Reagan’s approach to the Soviet Union. Newt Gingrich, a young history professor turned Georgia representative who in the 1980s was steadily working his way up the Republican leadership ladder in the House, came out swinging when Reagan announced his first summit with new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985. Never one for rhetorical restraint, Gingrich called it “the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with Chamberlain in 1938 at Munich.”

Hemmer also manages to capture the strange amalgamation that the Republican base has become:

... attributing deeply negative emotions to Obama was critical to a movement that fed off its own deeply negative emotions: fear, anger, revulsion, and loathing. It is no coincidence that the leading voice of the tea party was Glenn Beck or that right-wing pundits like Mark Levin and Michael Savage, with their hostile, biting personas, thrived during the Obama years. Though journalist Dave Weigel rightly noted that the radio and television personalities most linked to the tea party were those who stressed the Constitution and founding documents, they were also the most pessimistic and emotional voices as well, an odd combination of lawyerly exegesis and teary catharsis.

Perhaps the strongest aspect of Partisans is how Hemmer is able to articulate how much the GOP has changed since Ronald Reagan left office. George W. Bush came into office determined to emulate Reagan; by the time he left the presidency, things had changed dramatically:

The financial collapse crippled what remained of the Bush presidency. By late September, the administration and congressional leaders had hammered out a deal for the government to buy up the faulty mortgage-backed securities (rightly called “toxic assets”) in an effort to pull the economy out of free fall and prevent the collapse of the rest of the banking system. But it turned out the right-wing rebellion against the Bush administration was still underway. When the rescue legislation went to the House, two-thirds of the Republican caucus voted against it. The next day, the stock market plunged 777 points, the largest one-day drop in history. A few days later, a number of spooked representatives switched their votes, passing the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act. By October 2008, Bush’s approval ratings were hovering in the mid-twenties, a little lower than his father’s lowest point. 44 And that is how the reign of Reagan’s disciple ended: with him regarded as far more like his father than his idol. And what did this mean for Reaganism? Bush embraced free markets and deep tax cuts and left office in the midst of a financial collapse and the worst recession in nearly a century. He embraced a good-versus-evil foreign policy and left the country mired in what would be the two longest wars in its history. He embraced open immigration and left his party sliced in two, more restrictionist than it had been in decades. He talked about conservatism with a heart, compassionate and optimistic, and oversaw a regime of torture abroad and neglect at home, with images from Abu Ghraib and a flooded New Orleans the most indelible of his presidency. If this was Reaganism, the country, and the conservative movement, were ready to move on.