How Newt Gingrich Killed Reagan's GOP | Nicole Hemmer | TMR

Sam and Emma host Nicole Hemmer, professor of History at Vanderbilt University, to discuss her recent book Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s. Professor Hemmer then joins as she dives right into a quick overview of the arc of her book, beginning with the Reagan Era’s birth of neoliberalism and working through the extreme neoconservative polarization in the ’90s and 2000s, before she jumps back to the divide between Reagan’s regime and the George H.W. Bush administration, both in terms of geopolitics – with the end of the Cold War – and on the domestic side – with the emergence of conservative political activists. Diving deeper into this reactionary revolution, Sam, Emma, and Nicole look to the shift from Reagan’s oddly optimistic spin on conservatism to the party of Gingrich in the 1990s that behaved with the frenetic urgency of minoritarian rule, obstructing government in any way they could while their radicalism was bolstered by the rise of talk radio paranoia and a Democratic party that was chasing them to the right. After briefly tackling the rise of conservative talk radio and its ability to zero in on a particular brand of anger and agreement, Hemmer parses through this ‘90s reactionarianism as a response to a growing mainstream progressive movement that supported people of color and women in leadership roles and (occasionally) took sexual assault and bigotry seriously. The professor then looks to the George W. Bush regime as the end of the true Reagan republicanism, seeing it as a clear bipartisan failure by his departure from office, and leaving the party open for the new right groups (be they Tea Party or Alt-Right) to take hold. Wrapping up, they explore the future of the far-right attempts to normalize their own extremism, looking to right-wing legislatures already attempting to codify their right to the electoral votes.

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Nicole Hammer professor of history at Vanderbilt University author of partisans the conservative revolutionaries who remade American politics in the 1990s. Nicole, welcome. I'm here with Emma Vigeland. Thank you so much for having me. So the overview of your book is basically talking about that time moving from the Reagan Era into I guess what is the beginning of this era that we're in now in terms of Republican and conservative thought. Let's just go back and talk about what characterized the Reagan Era for us. and make a distinction if you will if there is one which I think there is to some extent. between sort of the ideological and the sort of I guess you would call it the I know just dispositional may be of the party at that time. era was one in which had a president press build massive majorities using conservatism. so they believed that conservatism had to be popular. it had to be optimistic. in order to build these big majorities. and of course Reagan still used negative campaigning. He still leaned into racial stereotypes. But he tried to keep that kind of optimistic pragmatic conservatism at the Forefront because he wanted to win in those big Landslide elections. which is exactly what he does and 80 and 84. is what George H.W bush did in 88. and that is replaced in the 1990s with a group of political activists who want to use conservatism to divide. to polarize the electorate.