Washington Monthly - September/October 2022 - 125

Trumpism
Before Trump
How a small group of reactionaries
hijacked the Republican Party-
decades before the 2016 election.
By Jacob Heilbrunn
O
ver the past decade, Nicole Hemmer, an associate professor at Vanderbilt and founding
director of the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Center for the Study of the Presidency,
has been a prolific commentator about the political right. In her excellent 2017
study, Messengers of the Right, she traced the emergence after World War II of a right-wing
media ecosphere, focusing on publications such as Human Events and National Review,
not to mention pioneering figures like the radio broadcaster Clarence Manion. Now, in
Partisans, Hemmer brings the story closer to the present, zooming in on the efforts of
movement conservatives, ranging from Patrick Buchanan to Rush Limbaugh, to begin reshaping
the Republican Party in their own image during the 1990s.
At the outset, Hemmer stipulates that her intent is not to illuminate the origins of
Trumpism. Rather, she indicates that her aspiration is to explore why Reaganism lost its
mojo in the 1990s to a radical new right. She goes on to contend that during the Clinton
era the rise of white aggrievement and a newly powerful political-entertainment-industrial
complex played a key role in creating an advance guard whose raison d'être was owning the
libs. Though Hemmer doesn't devote much attention to Donald Trump, her forensic examination
of the populist right of the 1990s suggests that he was no aberration-and that the
groundwork in the GOP had been laid for him well before the 2016 presidential campaign.
In Hemmer's view, Ronald Reagan successfully created a kind of optical illusion around
the conservative movement, with his sunny optimism substituting for the hatreds that
were at its core. Indeed, Reagan ended up disappointing more than a few on the right with
his penchant for political compromise. The backroom operators who began mobilizing social
conservatives in the 1970s-Heritage Foundation cofounder Paul Weyrich and the
direct-mail guru Richard Viguerie among them-were wont to complain about insufficient
zeal for the cause from the Gipper. As it happens, Reagan himself never personally
attended an anti-abortion rally on the National Mall as president, preferring to address
its foes remotely via loudspeaker. Nor did he turn out to be an altogether reliable anticommunist.
In 1985, for example, the House Republican star Newt Gingrich gave voice to
simmering anger on the right when he declared that Reagan's first summit meeting with
the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was the " most dangerous summit for the West since
Adolf Hitler met with Chamberlain in 1938 at Munich. " Buchanan summed up the overall
disaffection by grousing that Reagan should have " consulted his convictions more and his
pollsters less " as president. According to Hemmer, " for many on the right, he was the God
that failed. "
T
his may be putting it too starkly. The truth is that the right reserved its real venom
for George H. W. Bush, who was never able to earn the kind of conservative street
cred that Reagan enjoyed. A staunch anticommunist as head of the Screen Actors Guild in
Hollywood, Reagan had solidified his conservative bona fides during the 1950s, when he
traveled around America for General Electric and delivered anti-union speeches to its workWashington
Monthly 125
Partisans: The Conservative
Revolutionaries Who Remade
American Politics in the 1990s
by Nicole Hemmer
Basic Books, 341 pp.

Washington Monthly - September/October 2022

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