Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s
Book by Nicole Hemmer
DETAILS
Publisher : Basic Books (August 30, 2022) Language : English Hardcover : 368 pages ISBN-10 : 1541646886 ISBN-13 : 978-1541646889 Item Weight : 1.31 pounds Dimensions : 6.35 x 1.55 x 9.7 inches Best Sellers Rank: #45,770 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #13 in Media & Internet in Politics (Books) #121 in Political Conservatism & Liberalism #179 in Political Leader Biographies , A bold new history of modern conservatism that finds its origins in the populist right-wing politics of the 1990s Ronald Reagan has long been lionized for building a conservative coalition sustained by an optimistic vision of American exceptionalism, small government, and free markets. But as historian Nicole Hemmer reveals, the Reagan coalition was short-lived; it fell apart as soon as its charismatic leader left office. In the 1990s — a decade that has yet to be recognized as the breeding ground for today’s polarizing politics — changing demographics and the emergence of a new political-entertainment media fueled the rise of combative far-right politicians and pundits. These partisans, from Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich to Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham, forged a new American right that emphasized anti-globalism, appeals to white resentment, and skepticism about democracy itself. Partisans is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the crisis of American politics today. Read more
REVIEW
There is no shortage of "Republicans are bad and extreme" books on the market. Journalists, political scientists, and historians have all made a lot of hay chronicling and attempting to explain this. It's quite a cottage industry even if we set aside the "Donald Trump is bad and extreme" sub-genre. Like other books in the genre, this one yields interesting factoids, anecdotes, parallels, precursors, and mini-narratives. On this score, "The Partisans" punches above its weight, with an impressive number of factoids and insights per page. The book also does a good job showing you you how specific political figures, wedge issues, and journalistic trends in the 1990s foreshadowed later developments, like the rise of Trump. Like Darth Vader and the Star Wars prequels, Trump is the off-screen villain-in-waiting that animates this story -- the constant subtext of the plot, even if he doesn't make an actual appearance until the end of this prequel of sorts. We see in Trump an amalgam of Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh, and maybe Bill O'Reilly. Nevertheless, I have several problems with this book. First, while not a frothing screed, the author has very little positive to say about any Republican or conservative, so much so that the working title could have been "Bad Republicans and Their Bad and Nasty Ideas." Second, the author gives the distinct impression that she regards the party as hopelessly and pervasively racist since at least the Reagan era and seems to imply that opposition to affirmative action is evidence of racism. Until recently, most lay people regarded racism as a personal behavior, and opposition to affirmative action remains the majority position in polling. Third, as the author herself acknowledges, many of these ideas have roots well before the 1990s -- McCarthyism, Father Coughlin, the John Birch Society, the Dixiecrats, Jim Crow, Barry Goldwater, the "Southern Strategy," "welfare queens," and "states rights" dog whistles, the evangelical re-alignment of the 1980s. I was simply unconvinced by the author's thesis that the 1990s were a unique, disruptive era. I see more continuity than discontinuity from the mid-1960s through to the present, whereas the author seems to view Pat Buchanan and conservative media development as ushering in some sort of revolution. Fourth and finally, I find that the book is fairly week in terms of substantive argument. It is a collection of interesting facts and mini-deep-dives into individual political figures at their respective peaks (Buchanan, Perot, Pat Robertson, Newt Gingrich), but the connections among them tend to be thin. My primary take-away from this book is that a substantial portion of the GOP coalition is susceptible to rhetoric that touches on themes of economic and cultural nationalism and traditionalism, with more extreme or paranoid strains of this worldview sometimes being expressed in conspiracy theories, culture warring, affective polarization, and xenophobia. The idea that this happened because of the overwhelming power of any particular personality or because of the rise of horse race / infotainment journalism strikes me as a case of explaining the "disease" by simply naming the "symptoms." In that respect, the book reminds of Peters's recent book "Insurgency." Like that book, the laser focus on a narrative of specific conservative activists, groups, and media personalities results in a skewed picture -- one that reduces history to "great men" (and a few women) and the all-powerful political news media. The Democratic party and the general voting public or the less radical elements of each party's voting base are all out of view in this book, contributing to the sense that they are passive or irrelevant , while the likes of Pat Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh (and Bill Maher?) direct the arc of recent American political history. Therefore, as a survey of interesting figures and developments in modern (mostly 1990s) American conservatism, the book succeeds. As a convincing argument for why, how, or even whether the Republican party become more extreme, radical, or unhinged *starting in the 1990s*, the book fails. The pervasive problem with all of these gloomy books (and the MSNBC-, NYT-, WaPo-verse media ecosystem) is that it imagines a world in which sinister Republican operatives run roughshod over a landscape, while the Democratic party and the American public serve as inert, passive objects. These key players are Neo in the Matrix, while everything else ostensibly is frozen in bullet time, watching helplessly and non-complicitly. It's a conveniently self-serving narrative that allows us to pop the popcorn and doom-scroll / doom-read while reassuring ourselves that our nation and world's problems are those bad people's fault. Given the target audience, who is likely to be challenged or empowered by such a narrative and perspective?
DOWNLOAD PAGE
留言列表
