Nicole Hemmer

 Nicole Hemmer’s new book, Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s, is about the moment the Republican Party lost its ability—or desire—to keep its fringe at bay. At the end of the twentieth century, right-wing partisans came roaring onto the main stage, disgusted by the failure of their agenda in Ronald Reagan’s and George H.W. Bush’s White Houses. With appeals that grabbed and consolidated voters’ resentment about cultural and social issues, they successfully advanced extreme positions on domestic and foreign policy. By the end of the ’00s, right-wing partisans were crossing back and forth between formal politics and a range of proliferating, highly personal media platforms. The political culture they built was infused with a “more pessimistic, angrier, and even more revolutionary conservatism” than Barry Goldwater

Though the shadow of Donald Trump hangs over Partisans, Hemmer does not focus on the last president. Instead, she shifts the lens to a set of much bigger questions. How did one of America’s two major parties become dominated, not just by vicious, public attacks that used to be the province of undercover dirty-tricks specialists, but by a proud rejection of democracy itself? How did virulent nativism, homophobia, and racism spread from the far-right, where the Republican Party successfully contained it for decades, to take over a whole political party? When did culture wars, promoted between both right-wing pundits acting like politicians and right-wing politicians acting like pundits, stop simply motivating voters and shift the center of gravity in the GOP to conspiracism and illiberalism?

Partisans is a story about politicians who learn to be media figures, and media figures who learn to be politicians. It’s about a Republican Party that came to believe so little in policy and governance that in 2020, for the first time in its history, amid a crumbling economy caused by the worst pandemic in a century, the GOP failed even to produce a party platform. “Rather than deal with these issues,” Tom Wheeler of the Brookings Institution wrote in August of that year, “rather than tell the American people and foreign governments what it stands for, it appears as though the Republican Party has codified that it is for whatever Donald Trump wants to do.”

Nicole Potter in The New Republic