In her book Partisans. The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s, historian Nicole Hemmer argues that even though conservatives celebrated Reaganism and built an elaborate myth around the actor-turned-president, by the 1990s, they developed their politics into a different direction. The partisans, Hemmer elaborates, ditched Reagan’s “sunny-side conservatism” for the politics of resentment (p. 47). By laying out the path that many conservatives chose – away from conservatism towards an increasingly nativist right-wing populism – Hemmer offers an engaging history of the present.

In twelve captivating chapters, Hemmer takes the reader from the Reagan Revolution and its discontents on the right to the last Reaganite, George W. Bush. Hemmer structures her book around national politics and media personas, two roles that became hard to differentiate. By combining stories about well-known political hopefuls like Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson, and Ross Perot and their presidential ambitions with lesser-known characters like Helen Chenoweth, Hemmer weaves a compelling narrative. She pays special attention to the close collaboration between these hopefuls and an increasingly fiery brand of media pundit that Rush Limbaugh embodied. The latter established, what Hemmer calls, “pitchfork politics”, a raucous populism-infused politics that did not shy away from racist policies and rhetoric, at the heart of the Republican Party.

Whereas Hemmer often sticks to presidential history or campaigns for the highest office in the United States, two chapters on white rage and the resurgence of IQ-based racism present a welcome departure. Readers interested in women’s roles in conservative politics and activism get a convincing argument out of Hemmer’s sixth chapter titled “Angry White Men and Women.” Hemmer bridges the gap between conservative organizers like Phyllis Schlafly and Beverly LaHaye and a new brand of anti-feminists “who had reaped all the opportunities second-wave feminism afforded while denouncing the politics of the movement” (p. 188). By putting pundits like Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, and Kellyann Fitzpatrick and politicians like Helen Chenoweth center stage, Hemmer manages to explain Sarah Palin’s appeal as the nation’s hockey mom. While much of the public concern and scholarly attention has centered on angry white men1, Hemmer highlights Ingraham and Coulter’s contribution to pitchfork politics. They relished in the news media’s attention, trolled their liberal opponents, and forged a modern role for women in conservative politics. Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene carry their mantle today.

In “Race Sells,” Hemmer’s seventh chapter, she details conservatives’ departure from Reaganite colorblind racism towards a reemerging biological framing of racial difference based in questionable IQ-research. Notorious provocateur Dinesh D’Souza and writers Charles Murray and Richard Herrenstein reside at the heart of this chapter. They presented their racist ideas about people of color’s mental capacities or ostensible lack thereof “with all the trappings of intellectual respectability” (p. 165). The neo-nativism that they embraced had seemed unspeakable under Reagan. In fact, Hemmer shows, that the ideas that Murray and others dressed up in scientific garb had already been the talk of the town way earlier. Yet Richard Nixon, rarely shying away from incisive comments, felt these arguments too contagious (pp. 173–175). This is one of the many short episodes that make Hemmer’s arguments stick.

True to her previous scholarship on radio’s importance in shaping conservative politics2, Hemmer emphasizes radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh’s role. The latter had famously been christened the leader of the opposition by Reagan, and wielded tremendous influence over the Republican Party. Before conservative TV could come into its own with Fox News’ rise in 1996, radio men like Limbaugh set the gold standard for engaging and enraging conservatives.3 Hemmer demonstrates how Limbaugh and, emulating him, Buchanan “modeled an exclusionary right-wing populism” that “built on white racial anxieties, disdain for feminism, and disgust for gay rights” (p. 69). Championing new forms of communication like fax trees and the nascent internet4, Buchanan and other partisans spoke to “Middle American Radicals” who rallied around conservative policy views and a deeply held disdain for the political establishment (pp. 90–91).

The partisans not only attracted voters and mobilized activists they pushed both public discourse and politics to the right. Rather than an overall polarization of US society, it was the GOP that underwent right-wing radicalization during the 1990s.5 Hemmer makes clear that the partisans’ success did not rest on their ingenuity alone. With Bill Clinton in the White House, a Democrat who had a “decidedly conservative bent” (p. 10) and eagerly “lurched to the right” (p. 210), and a media environment that valued confrontation over substance, what the partisans sold found eager buyers. They constructed and fed, in Hemmer’s words, “a political media environment dominated by opinion, personality, and outrage” (p. 205). By emphasizing the role that new channels like Comedy Central and shows like Politically Incorrect played in normalizing right-wing politics, Hemmer taps into questions of journalistic ethics and the responsibility of the fourth estate. Whereas some scholars focus on conservatives’ closed off media environments and echo chambers6, Hemmer highlights how successfully the partisans mainstreamed their ideas and how easily many in the media fell for them.

In the 1990s, after the Cold War had ended, the partisans merged old resentments and hate with populism into ever-angry politics that relied on constant outrage and shrill denouncing of the political opponents as the enemy. Hemmer likens this development to a tectonic shift in US-politics (p. 69) that would usher in a new era and definition of what it means to be conservative. Hemmer’s pitchfork politics appear ubiquitous and familiar especially after the 2016 election. Yet she insists that her book is not “a prehistory of Trumpism” (p. 13). Rather she traces the surprising and rapid collapse of Reaganism and the birth of a politics that the partisans envisioned as explicitly antiliberal (ibid.). Hemmer clearly establishes that the 1990s a “decade, so often described as an era of polarization, was actually an era of right-wing radicalization” (p. 14). Hemmer’s book elucidates how the GOP became so susceptible to and a hotbed of conspiracy theories. The party of Reagan grew endeared to militias and tied itself to right-wing media personas and/or billionaires-turned-presidential candidates. Hemmer’s book speaks to scholars of conservatism and a broader public interested in how we got to this partisan present.

Notes:
1 Michael Kimmel, Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era, New York: Nation Books, 2013.
2 Nicole Hemmer, Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
3 Reece Peck, Fox Populism: Branding Conservatism as Working Class, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
4 Takahito Moriyama, Empire of Direct Mail: How Conservative Marketing Persuaded Voters and Transformed the Grassroots, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2022.
5 Natascha Strobl, Radikalisierter Konservatismus: Eine Analyse, Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2021.
6 Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph N. Cappella, Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment, New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.