Reagan was an end, not a beginning

But there’s another story to be told about the Reagan Revolution — one in which Reagan’s election, rather than marking the start of a new chapter in the history of American conservatism, marks the end of a previous one. In this story, the Reagan era was not a placid period of conservative domination, but rather a time of intensifying ideological conflict over the future of the Republican Party.

This is the story that Nicole Hemmer, an associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University, tells in her new book Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s, which hits the shelves on Aug. 30. Hemmer, who has written extensively about the rise of right-wing media, begins her story by noting an apparent contradiction at the heart of the Reagan era: “Nearly as soon as Reagan left office, the conservative movement he represented began to rapidly evolve, skittering away from the policies, rhetoric and even ideology that Reagan had brought into office.” As Hemmer writes in the introduction to Partisans, “With each passing year, conservatives looked less and less like Reagan, even as they invoked his name more and more.”

What replaced Reaganism, Hemmer argues, was a “more pessimistic, angrier and even more revolutionary conservatism” that shared none of Reagan’s optimism about the future of the country. This new style of reactionary politics found its mouthpiece in the “partisans” of Hemmer’s book: figures like Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh, Ross Perot, Newt Gingrich, Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D’Souza. Although they tapped into older strains of reactionary politics, their project was essentially forward-looking, more ideologically radical and politically ruthless than the Party of Reagan.