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 BuchanansConvention 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 LikeRush 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 t