Washington Monthly - September/October 2022 - 126

force. Bush, by contrast, was a New England
patrician who had supported Planned Parenthood
as a representative from Texas
and an ambassador to the United Nations.
His embrace of a tax deal with congressional
Democrats in 1990-after announcing,
" Read my lips, no new taxes " during the 1988
campaign against Michael Dukakis-sent
Gingrich and his cohort into paroxysms of
rage. Bush's other transgressions included
signing civil rights legislation in November
1991 that expanded the right of employees
to sue for discrimination. Buchanan was
livid. " Every minority malcontent is going
to be suing, " he complained. To Bush, he explained,
" I just said goodbye: the final infidelity. "
Even Bush's intervention against
Saddam Hussein in 1991, Hemmer observes,
aroused apprehensions on the outer
fringes of the right, prompting them to
suspect a diabolical new program for global,
one-world governance. The evangelical
leader Pat Robertson, for instance, warned
that Bush was " unknowingly and unwittingly
carrying out the mission and mouthing
the phrases of a tightly knit cabal whose
goal is nothing less than a new order for the
human race under the domination of Lucifer
and his followers. " (Retired General Michael
Flynn could hardly have put it better.)
Still, Robertson was a kook. Buchanan,
by contrast, was a shrewd militant
who wielded some real clout. Hemmer
views the pugnacious former Nixon speechwriter
turned TV pundit as a key figure in
the restoration of the right to its original
anti-democratic impulses. No one was a
noisier proponent of the so-called silent majority
than Buchanan, who failed to muster
significant support in three runs for the
presidency, the last in 2000 as a candidate
of the Reform Party. An admirer of the old
isolationist right-his authoritarian father
was an ardent admirer of the fascist leader
Francisco Franco-Buchanan initially
ran for the Republican nomination against
Bush in 1992 on the slogan " America First. "
Buchanan first won the backing of the radio
talk show host Rush Limbaugh and put
a scare into Bush in the New Hampshire primary.
Bush felt compelled to give Buchanan
a prime-time speaking spot at the Republican
convention in August in Houston.
It was a disastrous move. Buchanan called
for a " religious war " and announced, " Block
126 September/October 2022
by block, my friends, we must take back our
cities, and take back our culture, and take
back our country. "
Two years later, however, the GOP rebounded
in the midterm elections. Gingrich
proposed the Contract With America and
Republicans won the House and Senate for
the first time since 1952. Hemmer usefully
reminds us that one of the new members
of the class of 1994 was Helen Chenoweth,
the first female representative from Idaho.
She championed gun rights, warned about
" black helicopters " flown by the federal government,
and intervened on behalf of militias,
including the " constitutional sheriffs "
movement, which claimed that local sheriffs
outranked state and federal officials.
" The idea, " Hemmer writes,
had its origins in the Posse Comitatus
movement of the 1970s, a white-supremacist
organization that believed
the federal government was part of an
illegitimate Jewish plot and that power
thus devolved to the county level and
sheriff.
Chenoweth contended that civil rights laws
protected " everyone but the white AngloSaxon
male. " Hemmer also stresses that
older pseudo-scientific theories about race
were being refurbished by conservative
writers such as Charles Murray in his tract
The Bell Curve, which was excerpted in The
New Republic.
Throughout, the right kept its eye
on wielding power as punitively as possible
against Democrats. When queried
about why Republicans pursued impeachment
against Bill Clinton over his dalliance
with Monica Lewinsky, for example, Gingrich
gave the game away: " Because we can. "
The hypocrisy soon became patent. Gingrich
turned out to be involved in an extramarital
affair himself. His successor Bob
Livingston, the speaker-designate, resigned
abruptly after his own affair became public.
His replacement was the child molester
Dennis Hastert. Other Republicans who
admitted to infidelities included Chenoweth,
Henry Hyde, Bob Barr, and Dan Burton.
No matter. Conservative media-
" impeachment chic, " as the pundit Laura
Ingraham put it-was a financial bonanza.
Limbaugh and Matt Drudge, not to
mention Fox News, targeted Hillary and
Bill. David Brock, who has since recanted,
depicted Hillary as a Lady Macbeth figure.
" It's been a sad moment for America, " the
network vice president John Moody said, " a
fine moment for Fox News. " By 2012, Hemmer
reports, the Fox host Lou Dobbs, at the
behest of Steve Bannon, eyed running as a
Tea Party candidate. Today, Tucker Carlson,
who recently addressed the Family Leadership
Summit in Des Moines, Iowa, is often
touted as presidential timber.
A
ny account of the right in recent decades
is bound to find it difficult to
grapple with the sheer febrility of the movement.
Hemmer has produced an absorbing
and fast-paced narrative. But there are two
big topics that she scants. One is the devastating
effect the Iraq War had on the Republican
Party. While it's true that rightwing
radicalism was percolating during
the 1990s, the party's path to power was
smoothed by the manifest bankruptcy of
the Republican elite that was spotlighted
by the calamitous conduct of the war by
Bush and his malodorous vice president,
Dick Cheney. Returning to the older traditions
of the GOP seemed more plausible to
the restive base in the face of the establishment
Republican Mitt Romney's failure to
defeat Barack Obama in 2012 and the stubborn
refusal of the party leadership to own
up to its failures in the Middle East. The second
issue is the significance of the machinations
of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell
and the Federalist Society, who exploited
Trump for their long-standing goal
of capturing control of the Supreme Court.
It was the coldly calculating McConnell, not
Gingrich, who ultimately seized the day.
Still, Hemmer makes an important contribution
to the understanding of modern
conservatism. She offers a valuable reminder
that-decade after decade, generation
after generation-a fresh cast of characters
on the revanchist right has appeared to
castigate liberals for their radicalism even
as they themselves display an increasingly
dark mastery of it. Now that our very democracy
is under assault, the stakes could
scarcely be higher.
Jacob Heilbrunn is the editor of The National
Interest.

Washington Monthly - September/October 2022

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Contents
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