The Moment the Republican Party Lost Control – The New Republic

In Partisans, Hemmer picks up that story where she left off in Messengers of the Right, but with a fresh insight: that Reagans triumph was the end of an old regime, not the beginning of a new one. As Hemmer argues, the opening for populists to make their case was the strategic vacuum created by the end of the Cold War in 1989: Republicans no longer had the fight against communism to unify conservatives of many different tendencies. Reagan had also laid the groundwork for a new kind of presidency, one that promised disruption. Yet, although he attended to traditional conservative valuesdefunding the welfare state and spending lavishly on the militaryReagan largely avoided divisive cultural issues. Right-wing anger festered as it became clear in the 1980s that eliminating abortion and affirmative action, and restoring school prayer, were nowhere on the Republican Partys agenda. A young congressman named Newt Gingrich complained that Reagan had not polarized the country enough. He should have been running against liberals and radicals, Gingrich wrote in a journal published by the conservative Heritage Foundation after the 1984 election.

Although Reagans sunny, optimistic style contrasts sharply with Trumps lament of American carnage, he, too, successfully distracted voters from his lack of policy achievements by blowing the smoke that his voters wanted to inhale. As economic journalist William Greider wrote in December 1984, a few weeks after Reagan thumped Democrat Walter Mondale by 18 points, the president cruised to victory on a gauzy cloud of lies and obfuscation. Even journalists had yielded to the techniques of mass propaganda, Greider wrote, large lies told through the calculated repetition of soothing imagery and potent symbolism. The harsh facts of contradictory realities were no match for it. If the recent election describes the future, he continued, then Americans are being reduced to a nation of befogged sheep, beguiled by false images and manipulated ruthlessly.

Well, hello. And while that new voting public would not emerge full-blown until 2016, populisms capacity to disrupt old arrangements became clear by 1992. In Hemmers telling, the possibility of a populist president in the Trump mold emerged when mainstream GOP strategists understood that Pat Buchanans bid for the Republican nomination, and the independent candidacy of Texas tech billionaire Ross Perot, generated a fervor that Reaganismwith its focus on abstract economic theories and weak response to culture wars issues like feminism, immigration, and gay rightslacked. Buchanans nativist, isolationist, racist, and homophobic appeal to old-style Cold War conservatives resonated with a younger generation of aggrieved white candidates and voters who were coming out of the shadows. Its no accident, Hemmer points out, that only one week before Buchanan entered the race, David Dukean active Nazi, and former Klansmanannounced his own campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.

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The Moment the Republican Party Lost Control - The New Republic