Partisans The conservative revolutionaries who remade American politics in the 1990s

This book traces the conservative movement from the 1980s to the 2016 presidential election, emphasizing the personalities of the American Right and how they harnessed the new media environment of the 1990s and early 2000s. Not quite a "prehistory of Trumpism," as Hemmer (Obama Presidency Oral History project, Columbia Univ.) contends, the study considers how American conservativism shifted from Reaganism to darker, "antiliberal politics." The author highlights Pat Buchanan throughout the book as one who paved the way for Trump's success in the 2016 election. The text covers a lot of ground in roughly 300 pages, often resorting to cynical and question-begging analysis mixed with attempts at satirical wit that will likely please only readers with similar attitudes and predetermined judgments on the subject matter. That is to say, this work aims readers' general ire at more specific targets; the author shows little interest in persuasion. If one can get past that partisan analysis, the work will refresh the memory of those who lived through these decades. Unfortunately, however, it represents a new sort of academic writing that one cannot consider serious scholarship. Summing Up: Recommended. With reservations. Advanced undergraduates through faculty. --Stephen Wolfe, Louisiana State University

The Republican Party swung a hard right away from Reaganism in the 1990s, according to this insightful political study. Hemmer (Messengers of the Right), a research scholar with the Obama Presidency Oral History project at Columbia University, follows the shift away from Ronald Reagan's relatively sunny conservatism, with its positive attitudes toward immigration, free trade, and internationalism, toward an embrace of isolationism, nativism, and untrammeled gun rights and a rejection of affirmative action, abortion rights, and other progressive social policies. She follows this process through sharply etched portraits of its architects, including presidential candidates Pat Buchanan and H. Ross Perot, who pioneered the policies and populist bluster that Donald Trump would take to the White House, and Idaho congresswoman Helen Chenoweth, who helped transfuse the extreme right's conspiracist paranoia into the Republican mainstream. At the story's center is House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who created the strategy of partisan obstructionism that now dominates Congress and was undone by it when ultraconservative firebrands pressured him into unpopular moves like impeaching President Bill Clinton. Written in stylish, entertaining prose, Hemmer's history is nicely balanced between colorful personalities, electoral dogfights, and shrewd analysis of sea changes in ideology and public attitudes. This is a stimulating take on a crucial political era. (Aug.)

A study of the political figures who "worked to develop a politics that was not just conservative but antiliberal, that leaned into the coarseness of American culture and brought it into politics." Hemmer is the founding director of the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Center for the Study of the Presidency at Vanderbilt and a researcher at the Obama Presidency Oral History project at Columbia. "In the 1980s," she writes, "Reagan embodied a conservatism that was optimistic and popular, two things the American right had not been for most of the twentieth century." Reagan was also a master of compromise, saving threatened social welfare programs and advocating new nuclear arms treaties--things not hard-line enough for true right-wingers, who had already had fits over the moderate Eisenhower presidency. For that reason, Hemmer writes, the bulk of the right abandoned Reaganism and moved "toward a more pessimistic, angrier, and even more revolutionary conservatism not long after his presidency." It had many avatars, but foremost among them was Pat Buchanan, who campaigned for the presidency in the three races between 1992 and 2000, decrying immigrants, affirmative action, civil rights for minorities, homosexuality, and other bugaboos of the radical right--precisely the stuff that Donald Trump, "a cynical demagogue," revived in 2016. Hemmer names other forerunners of Trump and Trumpism. In politics, there were Ross Perot and Pat Robertson, in the media, Roger Ailes and Fox News along with Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Dinesh D'Souza. All fueled the tea party movement, which supposed that Barack Obama hated White people, among other conspiratorial matters. "The tea party was not just about rallies and radio shows," writes Hemmer. "It was also about elections. And there, the movement's antiestablishment streak would have profound consequences for the Republican Party." Fast-forward a dozen years, and you have our present chaos, with worse likely on the way. A sobering analysis of a slowly unfolding political movement that may one day spell the end of American democracy. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.