Transcripts For CSPAN2 Nicole Hemmer Partisans - The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade... 20221013

Be hosting niki hemmer whos here to talk about her new book partisans the conservative revolutionaries who remade american politics in the 1990s. Shes a political historian and founding director of the new center for the study of the presidency at vanderbilt university. She is cofounder of made by history, the historical Analysis Section of the Washington Post and she writes regularly for a number of other publications. In a book six years ago, messengers of all right she traced the emergence of conservative media institutions in the 20th century. Her new work, she examines why the Republican Party in 1990s shifted from the kind of conservatism that Ronald Reagan represented in the previous decade that was optimistic and popular to a more pessimistic, angrier, even revolutionary conservativism. With a period of intensifying partisan conflict and a new fury took hold on the right when republicans grew less tolerant of dissension in the ranks and began viewing democrats not as opponents but as enemies. What accounted for this shift . Nicole cites a number of factors she will get into in a minute, but understanding why it happened is important because it remains very relevant today. Nicole explains what set republicans on a course that led eventually to the election of donald trump and the radicalization of the right. We are in for a very informative discussion with nicole in conversation with one of the most astute political analysts in washington today, journalist and author Eugene Joseph dionne jr. In addition to writing and always interesting column for the Washington Post, ej is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and teaches at georgetown and is the author or coauthor of a number of books about politics. s latest, 100 democracy, cowritten with myles rappaport and published last march makes a very persuasive case for universal voting. Please join me in welcoming niki hemmer and Eugene Joseph dionne jr. Thanks to our friends at cspan. I love doing events at this bookstore. As Everybody Knows this bookstore is a community organization, i wrote the people who work here inherited a tradition, they kept it alive and built on it and to keep the tradition alive theyve got to build on it and theyve done great things with of this bookstore and i am pleased and honored to be with nicole. I love this book. Probably the highest compliment i can give it is that you dont realize how much you are learning because the book is so engaging as you race through it and i also like it for particular, even selfish reason because in 1992, i was assigned to cover Pat Buchanans president ial campaign by the Washington Post and spent a lot of time on that campaign and i now learn from nicole how historically important that campaign is. Journalists like a first draft of history so i made a couple footnotes i discovered in the book, but she makes a very compelling case that basically reagans influence ended almost as soon as he left office which is not something we usually assume. The case she makes is really powerful and so why dont you just start there by explaining how you came to that view, how you make the case here because as you know, people kept making references to reagan and how much they were reaganites even as they were moving away and doing so quite quickly. Guest thank you for doing this tonight, you are an inspiration as a writer so those kind words mean quite a lot to me. This book in many ways began with the puzzle ej was talking about that the mythology of reagan grew exponentially in the 1990s and the 2,000s and yet a particular set of politics that reagan embraced were under challenge almost immediately after he left office and this is something i started thinking about as i was finishing my first book, i was writing about reagans election and i wrote in the book that it was both a victory and a valedictory, the triumph of this cold war conservative movement but also felt like the curtain call like something was coming to a end. What was coming to a end was the cold war. What i realized as i was working on the argument of this book was Ronald Reagan was fundamentally a cold war president. The cold war provided a kind of logic, a kind of language for his conservatism and what that meant wasnt just that he spoke the language of democracy and freedom, something he didnt always live out in reality but really appealed to but that language and argument about democracy and freedom affected certain parts of his policies. He truly believed that the 3 movement of people and goods was part of democratic capitalism. You read him on immigration and sounds a lot like her democrat compared to todays Republican Party. So these things that record the conservative movement and during the cold war because reagan is so popular even though he had real critics on the right, there was a subset of conservatives who lunged at reagan every day of his presidency, they found it difficult to land those punches but as soon as he leaves office in the cold war ends opens up this space for what was at least in part antidemocratic conservatism that pat buchanan represented. Host one of the things is the psychology of reaganism was quite different from the psychology of the later right whose rise you describe and even though he forgot all the ideas he never stopped being an optimistic new dealer. He kept roosevelts optimism and shelved most of the policies, tell me about the psychological difference and he did have support from some of the same far right, the Burke Society and others but he didnt convey that in the way the right afterward did. Guest that optimism, the emotion at the heart of reagan is important and this is an important caveat. It was an optimism that was heard by white voters, he was not popular. Popular as he was he left office as one of the most popular president s in modern us history, he was never popular with black voters or hispanic voters, talking about a particular subset of voters but his appeals were deeply optimistic, to fear and resentment, the morning in America Sentiment and the right that would come after him was not interested in that. They were not interested in pragmatism or popularity and optimism. They were focused on a much darker version of the United States and much darker version of conservatism on the right. Someone who doesnt remember the 1992 campaign was very present in Pat Buchanans Convention Speech in 1992. There were liberals in the audience who would say arent you being awfully nice to reagan in this account. I was really struck by a phrase in your book, youll see i read this very carefully, it is full of notes and that the top of this page i wrote provocative. You refer to the colorblind racism of the reagan era and one thing i was thinking about as it went along, when you think of the roots of trumpism, you make a persuasive case that it was quite different and there were also continuities. I wonder if you could talk about the continuities as well. Absolutely and sometimes the differences are differences of degree and sometimes differences of kind. The colorblind racism idea is important. Its the difference between the dog whistle and the bullhorn. You can argue they are the same ideas that are presented in different ways but it does matter if you feel you have to appeal to universalism, have to put an optimistic spin on opportunities, have to appeal to equality versus say for instance that iq is genetically determined and depends on your race. An idea that became popular in the 1990s but it is also important to emphasize reagan is still in the dna of the conservative movement. Ideas like deep tax cuts remain although they get more dogmatic after reagan, reagan famously cut taxes and raised them a couple times and didnt face the same kind of backlash somebody like George H W Bush did. Because there are some continuities but in the things that made reaganism reaganism distinct from cold war conservatism, the emotion you are talking about, the willingness to compromise and the idea of the big tent, the idea that there are reagan democrats as opposed to the 1990s when you have republicans in name only, those shrinking boundaries of conservatism, those differences dont seem important despite continuities. A lot of things you get to and i want to mention a couple as we might not, you should read the book, you will be reminded of things you forgot or you will learn things you never knew. For example did you know the Tucker Carlson and laura and graham got the starts on msnbc, and theres great stuff on changes in the media which i want to get to and theres also something you explore that weve forgotten, there was a real turn on the right on immigration a long time ago which we can talk about, in National Review which is longheld the reagan view when it published Peter Brimelow and that very rightly controversial thats a nice thing to say about a book that he wrote, some great things but i want to go to two immediately political things. We like when a smart historian confirms something so im grateful for your insight that what conservatives had against reagan they held against george w. Bush, George H W Bush rather and later in some ways george w. Bush who you describe as the last reaganit emacs. The knox on george w. Bush, you could have made of reagan, he was such a hero it was impossible to land those punches and they went to h w. Talk to h w. Talk about the transition and Pat Buchanans campaign. It so fascinating because once you realize what is happening it is impossible not to see. So you have these hardcore conservatives who call themselves the new right who are constantly complaining about reagan and the start of his presidency. They are not able to make any headway because hes popular. When George Hw Bush comes into office they are like this is our guy because this is our punching bag because he didnt have the conservative credentials. He was always suspect. He was somebody who had been part of the ford administration, they didnt like the ford administration, somebody who was seen as the moderate alternative to reagan in 1980 and they never trusted his conservative that forced him into a corner to make promises like read my lips no new taxes and as i mentioned earlier reagan raised taxes, two of the biggest tax hikes in American History in 1982, and 1984 but it is when George Hw Bush raised taxes that they not only lose it but their complaints gain traction. Same thing happens with debates over affirmative action, when george w. Bush doesnt sign what was called or ends up signing what the right derided as protobill in 1991, something Ronald Reagan had reluctantly advanced affirmative action policies during his presidency but it is George Hw Bush who really takes it on the chin for advancing those policies or compromising. Any pragmatism for reagan was part of his appeal, pragmatism and George Hw Bush was heresy and those ideas that George H W Bush was a heretic made it easier for pat buchanan to run in 1992. You may have forgotten in 1988 pat buchanan wanted to run. He floats a trial balloon for a campaign in spring of 1987 when still part of the Reagan Administration and realizes very quickly he is going to be a sacrificial lamb for the new right and he lets Pat Robertson take that role and waits four more years and once he is running against bush instead of reagan, then the same politics take hold and gain more traction than they would having 88. Host something i had forgotten, President Biden gave his speech about crime calling for the assault weapons ban, forgot how strongly Ronald Reagan supported the assault weapons ban when it was passed and was quite elegant eloquent on the topic. Guest this is where you see particular policy issues, immigration is one of them but guns are another. You can understand, one of the bills he supported dragon after leaving office was the brady bill named after somebody was shot in an assassination attempt against Ronald Reagan but even after that, when it came to the assault weapons ban reagan was strongly opposed with other former president s or supportive of it, comes out with other president s and says we should have this assault weapons ban and runs against the opposition. Host i think pat buchanan could sue donald trump for plagiarism, go to the 1992 campaign and something, i covered that campaign, at the end of that campaign pat buchanan went to the border with mexico and called for building a wall. That was back in 1992, talk about the buchanan campaign where it really was this mixture of a certain kind of populism on economics because of trade with these very right wing positions on culture, race and immigration, that was almost a perfect template, hard to figure out where Donald Trumps campaign was different from pat buchanan which is why he is on the cover. Guest which is why he makes the cover and not from. Not trump. Pat buchanan changes dramatically in a short time. In 1984 when he was talking about immigration he was talking about undocumented immigrants and how they paid payroll taxes and they paid the sales taxes, they were good taxpaying citizens who werent on the welfare rolls, better than black people, he was saying things that were very reagan like and sounded like a democrat when talking about immigration which that was not the case a few years later when he latches onto the idea that those issues of culture and race were the ones that Ronald Reagan had failed to exploit, that was the vein you got to tap into and so he starts to talk about the border wall. He calls it the buchanan fence, starts to tie what he now calls illegal aliens to crime, accusations from both him and attorney general william barr it made that response over the riots in los angeles and this criminalization, trying to stoke outrage and emotion around the border was something that took real work. In california in 199192, 2 or 3 of voters put immigration at the top of their list of concerns. In 1994 it looks very different, with proposition 187 and it took a Political Movement to turn immigration into a culture and race issue that could be exploited. Or discussion of proposition one hundred 87 is really good and central to this. A couple other characters who play a very big role in your book. One is Rush Limbaugh. Lets stick with rush for second because i think, you talk about two interrelated developments that are so important, one is the rise of conservative talk radio which Rush Limbaugh was the pioneer of, and he supported pat buchanan so theres an interesting synergy between the 2 of them and 92 but the rise of rush and the spread of right wing radio across the am dial as music migrated to fm but then you also talk about the rise of fox news and the great discussion because it is not just about the rise of fox news. Important piece of history, turning Rush Limbaugh into a tv show. Then he did a whole network instead. You talk about how other kinds of cable, not just fox, helped change the nature of the political dialogue. Dialogue is an interesting word. This is a newly Interactive Media landscape, that ability, what made Rush Limbaugh so important wasnt just that he was a conservative entertainer but that his show was interactive, you could call and talk to him, this is the era god help you if you just agreed with him. He had caller abortions, incredibly offensive thing he did early in his career when he would abort callers he disagreed with but larry king live where again you could call and be part of the new cable television, where ross perot launches his campaign in 1992 and that interactivity is so important in so many of the experiments in the 1990s were about trying to essentially take talk radio and put it on television so you have a network that is the precursor to msnbc called america is talking, you have National Empowerment television, a precursor to fox news in many ways. I see a head shake, somebody was probably on it. Nice to see you. So you have these real experiments in cable, in talk radio and it is diversifying what is available on television but also creating this new conservative punditry that was not necessarily just happening on Something Like Rush Limbaughs show or fox news, it was more intensively happening pat buchanan comes up on cnns crossfire and pbss Mclaughlin Group, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham start on msnbc and on entertainment shows like politically incorrect which in 1993 spends a few years on comedy central, and in the years before the daily show and moves to abc and that is where people like kelly and fitzpatrick who later becomes kelly and conway and ann coulter start to become more familiar household names because they are also experimenting with this idea of politics as outrage entertainment and they are perfecting that style not on fox news but on politically incorrect and msnbc. The other person, a lot of people in the book need to be mentioned but Newt Gingrich. He is a complicated figure in all this, he began as a radical fellow republican, way back when and you have an interesting treatment of gingrich. Why dont you talk about him . Gingrich is so interesting because hes kind of on both sides of the story. He is somebody who is deeply interested in language, you might have seen a memo from his Political Action committee or the Republican Partys Political Action committee that focused on language as a weapon, trying to find the most delightful words to attach to your friends and the most disgusting words to attach to your enemies, that rhetoric and training up a more conservative set of republicans to bring the republican revolution in 1994 but he also quickly finds himself outflanked by those more radical than he is, a group called the true believers who see gingrich is too willing to compromise, too willing to work with bill clinton. During the Government Shutdown, and innovation in congressional brinksmanship, the longest Government Shutdown in us history and when gingrich decides we are not winning this, the true believers come forward, why would you reopen government, we shut it down, he is constantly under attack, trying to unseat gingrich as speaker of the house in a preview to what is happening with john boehner in the obama years. Even further to the right. Host impeachment its important treatment in your book partly as a new method of the new post reagan right, i didnt know the role George Conway played. The index of this book is very valuable. Where are they now . Gingrich was reluctant initially to go for the clinton impeachment even though he got associated with it later. Guest he didnt want to be part of the impeachment because he was making headway with bill clinton. They are starting off after the 96 election, sitting down to think about how they can rollback Social Security and when clinton comes under fire in the investigation, clinton has to shore up his support among democrats those talks go away. Gingrich sees real opportunity in working with clinton that is foreclosed by the impeachment and you have a lot of republicans, conservatives, including Laura Ingraham, everyone is talking about impeachment, not a great idea in part because what clinton was going to be impeached over wasnt that big a deal so there is this battle over whether impeachment is going to happen, gingrich is reluctant to get into. His own marital record was not as clear so he gets dragged into it but when he decides to do it, he does it so there is it really does tap into his desire for a political fight and he goes all in when impeachment gets underway. I see a veteran of the Mclaughlin Group in the audience, hello. At its peak it had 4. 4 million viewers. So much bigger than anyone else. An interesting treatment of that. So lets go from clinton to w who you see as the last reaganite. Theres a lot of sunny nests there. He was willing, tried to sell compassionate conservatism for a while before the war came along and by the end he was as hated on the right by many parts of the right as he was by not the entire right but significant parts of the right as the left and his Immigration Reform failed which i have always taken as the first sign of what was coming. I would like to go from there to the tea party to trump and open it up. George w. Bush even at the time was being compared to reagan. Everyone was saying he was the heir to reagan which is a blow to George Hw Bush, so mean but it was because he had that idea of compassionate conservatism, wanted to do Immigration Reform, after 9 11, than talking about democracy and Foreign Policy, he passes before 9 11 the largest tax cut in American History so hes doing stuff that feels very reaganite in his presidency and one by one by one he disproves every part of the philosophy, with financial deregulation, the tax cuts you have the collapse of the global economy, you take that idea of reagans 9 worst words in english lang which are i am from the government and im here to help and superimpose that over the Hurricane Katrina response, obviously the debacles in iraq and afghanistan so by the end of his presidency, so much of what looks reagan next about his policy platform and his approach not looking so great in terms of outcomes and so there is this sense that he put the final nail in reaganisand because he empowered more paly a conservative, paleolithic to write and write to surge, the opposition to Immigration Reform continues to solidify in the aftermath of his presidency so there are a number of different ways he helps along the right that im talking about, these partisans. Host i will end with the tea party. In the tea party was seen by some as mainly libertarian, it wasnt, it was much more, there is an antigovernment element of it but not against Social Security or medicare since a lot of people were over 65 with strong antiimmigration sentiment and the tea party is almost a bridge between the buchanan campaign and the Trump Campaign is how i read the book. Exactly right. There was this sign during the tea party that was marked on the left that said keep your government hands off my medicare but at the same time they are the kind of right wing populism, almost like George Wallace like populism that is contained in that ironic, contradictory claim. The government should be helping me, a white person. It is those other welfare programs folks should oppose and i think that was missed in a lot of ways because it was read as a libertarian movement. Host weve got a microphone here, speaking into the mic would be good for a tv audience. Always a crowd that has good questions. Do you talk about the fact getting back to reagan that he was actually a practiced professional actor and he played and optimistic president in Reagan America . I was attorney in the epa and the Reagan Administration and my late husband was at the emc, all that optimism, reagan said government is not the solution to a problem, government is the problem. The American Public has turned against government in the new deal government was representative of the people going after the corporations, the russians, financial stuff, that is a contradiction. I think all of that morning in america was nonsense. You should have seen what was going on behind the scenes. Guest i write about some of the chicanery, the moves that are happening in the administration and how reagan distances himself from those moves when they are unpopular. He wanted to continue to shore up that public image and the fact that hes an actor is really important. I make a distinction between reagan and the actor who is part of the old media system, the studio system in hollywood and the Network Television system of the 1950s versus the new hotter and more Interactive Media that would come later and reagan also laundered through his time as governor of california so he comes in with some political bona fides that people like Pat Robertson, pat buchanan, hope to run for president instead of anything else bring to the table. But those similarities are important and the idea of discrediting government is absolutely a through line, something that wasnt just part of reagans politics but one of the big goals of the cold war conservative movement. Thank you for the question. In defense of your argument you are not denying there is a long through line of the american right but a particular break and those two things can be true at the same time. Host theres a rupture. Guest contemporary politics places that rupture in 2016 when it starts earlier. Great book, a quick thanks for putting richard in there, my first interview when i was 16 years old, we talked about abortion and i will never forget that. The question is about religion, Pat Robertson game in the second place in the ohio caucuses. Behind goal and above bush, amazing. I completely forgot that. You were covering it. Was religion on the whole, white evangelical christianity and more specifically otoole that was used on the politicians of the time or was it more for Ronald Reagan saying you cant endorse me but i endorse you or was it both . Where they hammered a buyer they pick up and use it . Guest that is important because you have these incredibly significant religious figures and religious politics, evangelical politics and people who are important, Pat Robertson, robert reed who is leading the coalition in the 1990s and doing a lot of compromising and interesting ways in 1990s around those politics which in part goes to the tool that you use to attract certain voters and get rid of it when it is no longer useful, you pledge to get rid of abortion, it looks like you are pledging it and not actually doing it, different in the wake of jobs but it is too easy an answer to say religion is a tool used by politician but it is fueling the conservative movement in the 70s, 80s into the 90s. In 1992, the white evangelical Christian Coalition members made the majority of delegates to the Republican National convention. These were the foot soldiers of the right and it was something the new rights and were trying to harness this movement. Somebody i write about in the book, Helen Chenoweth, representative from idaho who would be a pretty radical figure in the 1990s, focused on the family in idaho, she is supported not just by militias and libertarians in idaho but also by the mormons and evangelicals who again are the foot soldiers of the campaign. Its more complicated answer. When we talk about religion in politics, like we talk about media, fox news is manipulating every one, sometimes people want to be manipulated, they have these views they are helping to circulate in the media and thats more complicated. Im a big fan of your work, cant rate to read your book. Question for you. In the period you wrote about the democrats are moving to the right as well, you started with the bork confirmation. I was wondering if you could talk about how the Democrat Movement impacted what the republicans did because bill clinton, clinton is moderate new democrat, he was no the liberals distrusted clinton as much as the far right types distrusted reagan. Talk about that. Of course. This is so interesting and what sort of confounds one argument some people make about the 1990s, that it was an era of polarization. When you look at it, the democrats were moving to the right, they were not moving to the left so house a decade of polarization . Polarization is not a political process being described in the 1990s. Its a Political Tool being used by people like Newt Gingrich to make it look like the democrats are our enemies ended existential threat while at the same time he he is having these macro negotiations with bill clinton and if you wanted to apply a causal explanation to the democrats moving to the right you could say the democrats are moving to the rights or republicans have to move even further right to heighten the contradictions between the two. I think that is part of the process at play and you especially see this around immigration, proposition one hundred 87 was not just about republicans, democrats opposed it but they courted everything up to proposition 187, janet reno is expanding Border Patrol in san diego at the time, Diane Feinstein saying nasty things about immigrants at the time so there is this rightward shift in politics. What you see on the right is a much broader swing and a different kind of right then you see in an earlier era. Talk a bit about women on the right which i read this and thought that is your next book because women play an important role, you focus on a fascinating figure and revealing figure, you talk about Lara Ingraham and phyllis shapley. Talk about this element of this right. Guest if you think of phyllis shapley is a second wave antifeminist, somebody who is opposed to the Second Wave Feminist Movement of the 1960s and 70s, who is appealing to a kind of housewife conservative in which her role as a housewife as a political activist, chose to present herself as a housewife and oppose the equal rights amendment, the feminist movement, that is kind of the antifeminism of the 70s and 80s. By the 1990s you see third wave, consolidated the gain of the feminist movement, people like laura and Laura Ingraham and the independent womens forum are all in highpowered professions, many are not married, many dont want to have children and they dont talk about abortion, they talk about guns instead. They wear miniskirts instead of the shirt dresses like phyllis shapley would wear and they really leaned into provocation both in political provocation since and the sexual sense so they are crafting this new, edgier, sexier more provocative, more interesting because it is newer antifeminism that becomes powerful, becomes a model for later women activists like sarah palin or Michelle Bachmann and somebody like Helen Chenoweth, theres a lineage between her and somebody like Marjorie Taylor green. I want to go back in light of the violence we are talking about now, your work on the militias is really important that we forget how a lot of people dont forget but in the 19 on thes the Oklahoma City event was enormous, the deaths were chilling. But i wonder again what is the parallel of the rise of the Militia Movement then to some of the violence we are seeing it in your defense this is not a person just book, it just happens that so much of this history leads to the present. Guest the rise of the Militia Movement is important, had its origins with the rise of white power groups that begin to go to war with the federal government. Kathleen talks about this in her wonderful book bring the war home if you want more background on it. But after the events of ruby rich, those become martyrdom moments for the new Militia Movement and it brings so many more people into the Militia Movement at as the Militia Movement becomes bigger and more active politicians like Helen Chenoweth who was a representative from idaho in her district begin to see as militia members and their politics as part of their base and she is out there talking about black helicopters and conspiracy theories about the un, her tapes are being sold, and the sales book next to bombmaking manuals. Theres a real interplay between her politics and this Militia Movement because she sees them as part of who she is appealing to and particularly a couple of other members from texas and the west you start to get a real thinning of the line between the violence of the militias and the mainstream of Republican Office holders and this comes to the fore with the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 because 10 which doesnt defend the bombing but does she say people are mad for a reason and if you dont deal with the reasons they are mad may be more things like this are going to happen and so there is a kind of defensiveness around militias and unwillingness to cut ties with militia members. That is really important and resident today. Thanks for your patience. I once ran into Newt Gingrich at the Easter Service at the National Shrine and told him i thought he would get better when he became a catholic and he had nothing to say about that. My question is there is so little foreignpolicy content on the right these days. My brother is was a conservative who has forgotten he was anticommunist. Can you talk about why you think it happened . Because the cold war was such a central organizing factor of the conservative movement during the cold war, easy to know what your Foreign Policy was going to be. It took a while in the 40s and 50s, there were battles on the right about what foreignpolicy should be, should it be more isolationist . Should be more aggressive and militaristic . With the end of the cold war all of that dropped, theres a new conversation happening around foreignpolicy and not necessarily a very clear foreignpolicy content to the right today but there are still some pretty vicious battles and foreignpolicy does still play a central role to how the right talks about politics. Just that there isnt a clear ideology around foreignpolicy right now on the right and that means theres a lot of heterogeneity on the right when it comes to foreignpolicy. You see some of the split you are describing in the book in the splits in the Republican Party over ukraine which is sort of a perfect measure of that old argument. We have one more person. Am i correct . A veteran. Good to see you. I am bruce bartlett, theres one thing im thinking about. I didnt get any footnotes. Something im thinking about lately is the 88 campaign. You had jack kemp run. Jack was clearly the air to reagan. He was defeated but more importantly, he retired from congress which opened up a huge vacuum filled by Newt Gingrich. If jack had stayed in congress he would have been speaker of the house in 1995 and so that sometimes we think too much about things that did happen rather than things that didnt happen and also there was an important article bob woodward wrote a few years ago about how gingrich was actively engaged in the defeat of George Hw Bush and this i think he saw the way the wind was blowing he may have had some knowledge that bob michael was going to retire, he could see all these southern democrats were on the brink of all becoming republicans and this would create the possibility of a republican majority and so i dont know somehow i see these events as being interrelated and i was sort of right in the middle of it because i was working the Reagan White House and than the Treasury Department where we were involved in raising taxes and things of that sort. I was one of the few reagan people who survived the bush transition. He fired everybody just as if he was a democrat and a lot of people didnt forget that and it came back to haunt him and 92 so anyway that is all i have to say. Guest theres a little of the counterfactual i point to in the book. There was this policy entrepreneur with policies, a guy with a few too many ideas and filled the vacuum but also jack kemp comes out against opposition one hundred 87, this is not the direction the Republican Party should go and that moment in 1996 when people start floating the idea that colin powell could be the republican nominee and what a Different Party would be if colin powell had won the republican nomination in 1996. We have no idea how that would have worked out or how he might have changed had it happened. No answers to any of those things but it is a really interesting thing to think about. As a historian who focuses on things that didnt happen that would be an interesting path for a historian. Do we have one more . You mentioned the tea partys message sounding like George Wallace and that got me wondering, the extreme right of earlier decades, George Wallace and other people, edwards, on the fringes but still important, is there any connection between them and sort of later sort of conservative partisans in the 90s . Id like to piggyback on your question. One thing you treat seriously is ross perot. It is an odd relationship of ross perot to this movement because he was not an ideological conservative. Of wallace and perrault as key figures in this book is worth closing on and i will read the last paragraph because it tells us where this all ends up. Guest wallace is a figure in the book, this new right figure is looking at wallace and saying how do we get that wallace vote, we want that wallace vote as want to lean into the politics of resentment, lenient issues of culture and issues of race and that is how we are going to win the wallace vote and wallace voters who in 1968 represented a pretty big threat to the Republican Partys future or a big opportunity. Ross perot is the same in a different way, because so much of the politics of 199394 are democrats and republicans being like how did we get perrault voters . He is all over the place. How do we attract his voters, what are they attracted to . 20 of the vote in 1992, he was a political bomb going off in the middle of the 2party system and you wouldnt think hyperpartisanship would grow out of that but you see Something Like Newt Gingrich who developed a contract with america not to appeal to the right but to appeal to perrault voters, thats what that was about. It doesnt mention republicans, democrats or bill clinton, trying to attract perrault voters. The other person i will throw in quickly because he is attached to the wallace question is david dukes. In 19901990 one as he becomes a more known figure it is not Richard Vickery but pat buchanan who is looking over and saying why are Ronald Reagan and George Hw Bush denouncing this guy . We need to figure out why he is so appealing and win his voters so part of Pat Buchanans campaign in 1992 is about the duke vote. The book does not focus on donald trump but he makes an appearance at the end and a wonderful passage because it pools the book together. There was a debate at the Reagan Library and seamy valley in 2015 and every candidate on the stage basically appealed to the reagan legacy except for donald trump and as you write, trump understood something though debate moderators and other candidates did not. The age of reagan was over. It had been over for a long time and you conclude the book with the following two paragraphs and i will close on this and you get the whole book to Read Everything you can before. Few people in the Reagan Library in the fall of 2015 including donald trump believed trump would be president two years later. He had risen to the top of the polls and stayed there but just as 2012 and seen the rise and fall of a string of improbable candidates, the trump bubble would soon surely burst. They didnt realize the ground had already shifted, had been shifting for a quartercentury, and they were only now beginning to catch up. A trip to seamy valley was the final stop in a long goodbye. Chandler wrote a book carrying that name, you solve a lot of mysteries in this book, thank you so much and thank you all. Watch booktv every sunday on cspan2 and fight a full schedule on your Program Guide or watch online anytime at booktv. Org. Weekends on cspan2 are an intellectual feast. Every saturday American History tv documents americas stories, and on sundays booktv brings u the latest in nonfiction books and authors. Funding for cspan2 comes from these Television Companies and more