Even
for those of us who remember them all too well, the 1990s were something of a
muddle. The decade was like a long transitional moment between the casually
rapacious spirit that preceded it and the War on Terror that came after.
اضافة اعلان
The
Clinton administration may have shown that the American political center of gravity had
shifted to the right, with a Democratic president signing a punitive crime bill
in 1994 and making good on his pledge to “end welfare as we know it.” But part
of the confusion over the ’90s seems to lie in the discrepancy between what was
actually happening and the soothing language that was used to describe it —
bland clichés about a post-Cold War consensus, with establishment politicians
coalescing around “the end of history” and “the third way”.
So much for all
that. As the historian Nicole Hemmer writes in “Partisans,” her lively and
clarifying new book, the conservative movement of the ’90s was doing much more
than biding its time. Unlike Dana Milbank’s “The Destructionists,” which also
looks closely at the Republican Party during the ’90s, “Partisans” is less a
prehistory of the Trump presidency than an autopsy of the short-lived Reagan
era.
Reagan’s victory
was supposed to mark a turning point for Republicans, toward a conservatism
that was “optimistic and popular,” Hemmer writes. Sure enough, Republicans
still like to invoke Reagan’s name. But Hemmer shows that Reaganism as an
ideology and an attitude collapsed almost as soon as he left office; his name
became a mantra without actual meaning. What happened, and why did it happen so
quickly?
When Reagan
first ascended to the White House in 1981, what made his approach distinct was
not his conservatism, with its hodgepodge of small-government libertarianism
(less money for education) and big-government anti-communism (more money for
the military). Hemmer locates Reaganism’s core in his particular style:
flexible, pragmatic, relentlessly cheerful.
Reagan hated to
be associated with any policy that was unpopular, retroactively trying to pin
the blame for slashing the funding for school lunches on a bureaucracy that was
out to get him (“none of this was true,” Hemmer writes). He was open to
immigration reforms and liked free trade. His faith in the revenue-generating
magic of tax cuts was a reflection of his sunny outlook — tides would rise,
boats would lift (only they did not, and after cutting taxes inflated a
ballooning deficit, he raised them again).
While some
Republicans found the Reagan presidency winning, others found it infuriating.
Hemmer reminds us that despite the mythology that has flourished since, Reagan
got castigated by plenty of conservatives. In 1984, Rep.
Newt Gingrich of Georgia railed against the president for being too focused on “governing” and
too enamored of unity, when he should have been “forcing a polarization of the
country.” A decade later, as the House minority whip, Gingrich would engineer a
landslide victory for Republicans that would elevate him to speaker of the
House.
made controversy funny
Gingrich is just
one of the figures in this book who contributed to Reaganism’s demise by
fueling a populist right. Not that Gingrich himself was much of a populist in
any real sense, spouting incendiary rhetoric to fire up the base while quietly
compromising on legislation behind the scenes. Among conservatives, Gingrich
was considered enough of a sellout that he was widely distrusted, even by the
likes of his fellow showboat Rush Limbaugh.
Hemmer, whose
previous book traces the history of conservative media, devotes a substantial
swath of “Partisans” to the way that the media ecosystem changed in the ’90s.
Limbaugh’s radio show was nationally syndicated, propagating his mix of
clowning and rage. Fox News fixtures like Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson had
their careers nurtured by
MSNBC. Bill Maher’s talk show “Politically
Incorrect,” though brimming with ridicule for both Democrats and Republicans,
was especially welcoming of guests like Ingraham, because saying offensive
things was apparently entertaining — at least according to Maher, who had
declared he wanted a show that “made controversy funny”.
Maher was not so
much a partisan as a contrarian; but like Ross Perot, another contrarian in
Hemmer’s book, Maher turned out to be an inadvertent enabler, helping to shake
things loose, opening enough space so that the real partisans — previously
relegated to the margins — could get their share of the spotlight.
The main
partisan in Hemmer’s narrative is Pat Buchanan. Despite serving as the
communications director in the Reagan White House, Buchanan was not a buoyant
Reaganite but a grievance politician — an anti-immigration isolationist who
attracted Klan support (which he did little to rebuff) and, as Hemmer puts it,
“dabbled in Holocaust denial.” He declared his admiration for Franco, the
Spanish dictator, and
South Africa’s apartheid regime.
Buchanan tried
and failed to get the Republican nomination twice, and ran as a third-party
candidate in 2000. But just because he did not succeed in the immediate sense
does not mean that he hadn’t planted a seed. “His politics were already taking
root in the institutional structure of the Republican Party,” Hemmer writes,
describing how the party’s platform was amended in 1992 to include one of
Buchanan’s demands — “structures” on the southern border.
But the finer
points of policy seemed to have little to do with the conservative
transformation that was taking place. The overall sense you get from Hemmer’s
book is that none of Bill Clinton’s maneuvering during the ’90s, including his
frequent tacks to the right, made conservatives feel heard; if anything,
Republicans just “lurched further to the right themselves,” Hemmer writes,
“rejecting compromise in favor of perpetual warfare.”
Reading about how the
performance of grievance can harden, I was reminded of that old warning given
to children (1990 was probably the last time it was given to me): Keep making
that face and it will freeze that way.
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