Transcripts For CSPAN2 Nicole Hemmer Partisans - The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade... 20221017

Powered by cable. Welcome to politics and prose. Im brad graham, the coowner of the bookstore along with my wife and were very delighted this evening to be hosting nicole hemmer, who is here to talk about her new book the partisans, the conservative revolutionaries who remade american politics. Nicole is the new center of the study of the presidency at Vanderbilt University and also a cofounder of made by history, the historic Analysis Section in the Washington Post, and she writes regularly for a number of other publications. In a book six years ago, messengers of the right, nicole traced emergence of conservative media institutions in the mid 20th century. And in her new work, she exams why the Republican Party in the 1990s, shifted from the kind of conservativism that Ronald Reagan had represented in the previous decade, conservativism that was optimistic and popular, to a more pessimistic, angrier, even revolutionary conservativism. Theres a period, nicole writes, of partisan conflict when a new fury took hold on the right and when republicans grew less toll rent of dissension in the ranks and began viewing democrats not as opponents, but as enemies. What accounted for this shift . Well, nicole cites a number of factors which shell get into in a minute, but understanding why it happened is important because it remains very relevant today. As nicole explains, its set republicans on a course that led eventually to the election of donald trump and to the radicalization of the right. Now, were in for a very informative discussion with nicole who will be in conversation this evening with one of the most astute political analysts in washington today journalist and author ej, a long time friend of p and p and in addition to writing an always interesting column for the Washington Post, hes in the institution and teacher at georgetown, an author or coauthor about a number of books about politics and latest,100 democracy, cowritten with miles rah rappaport makes a case for universal voting. Join me in welcoming nicole and ej. Thanks to our friends at cspan and those out there. I love doing events in the bookstore, as everybody in the room, this big store is also a community organization, a community builder, i love the people who work here, and they inherited a tradition and kept it alive and built on it and to keep a tradition alive. Youve got to build on it, and im pleased and honored to be with nicole. Ive got to say i love this book. Its probably the highest compliment i can give it is that you dont realize how much youre learning because the book is so engaging as you race through it. And i also would like it for a very particular, maybe even selfish reasons, because in 1992, i was assigned to cover Pat Buchanans president ial campaign by the Washington Post and spent a lot of time on that campaign and i now learn from nicole how historically important that campaign is. The journalist writing the first draft of history and i made a couple of footnotes i discovered in the book, but she makes a very, very compelling case that basically reaganism and its influence ended almost as soon as he left office, which is not something we usually assume and the case she makes is really powerful. So nicole, why dont you just start there by explaining how you came to that view. How you make the case here because as you know, people kept making references to reagan and how much they were reaganized even as they were moving away and quickly. Thank you so much for doing this tonight. You are an inspiration as a writer so all of those kind words mean quite a lot to me. So, you know, this book in many ways began with just the puzzle that ej was talking about, that the mythology of reagan grew exponentially in the 1990s and the 2000s and yet, a particular set of politics that reagan embraced were under challenge almost immediately after he left office. And this was something that i started thinking about as i was finishing my first book. I was writing about reagans election and i wrote in the book a little too preciously, that it was a victory and a valdictory. Like a curtain call, come to go an end. What ultimately was coming to an end was the cold war. And i realized i was working through the argument of the book was Ronald Reagan was fundamentally a cold war president. That the cold war provide add kind of logic, a kind of language for his conservativism and what that meant wasnt just that he spoke the language of democracy and freedom, something that he didnt always live out in reality, but that he really appealed to throughout, that that language and argument about democracy and freedom affected certain parts of his policies. He truly believed that the Free Movement of people and goods was part of democratic capitalism. So you lead him on immigration and he sounds quite a lot like a democrat sometimes especially compared to todays Republican Party and these kind of things that were core the conservative movement and during the cold war and because reagan was so popular, even though he had real critics on the right. I mean, there was a subset of conservatives who just punched at reagan every day of his presidency. But they found it difficult to land those punches. But as soon as he leaves office, as soon as the cold war ends, it opens up this space for what was at least in part an antimultidemocratic conservativism that pat buchanan represents. One of the fascinating things is the psychology of reaganism more than anything was quite different from the psychology of the later right whose rise you describe and i always talk to the power reagan came partly because even though he forgot the ideas, he never really stopped being an optimistic newdealer. He kept roosevelts optimism and sheffield most of policies. Can you talk about that psychological difference . And he did have support from some of that same far right in his rise, you know, including the Birch Society and others. He didnt convey that in a way, the right that came afterward did. The emotion at the heart of reaganism is important. This is an important caveat. It was an optimism that was heard by white voters, you know, he was not popular as he was, he left office as one. Most popular president s in modern u. S. History. He was never popular with black voters or with historic voters, so were talking about a tick subset of voters, but to them, his appeals were deeply optimistic and he afield sometimes to fear and resentment, but often times, to that morning in america sentiment. The right that would come after him was not interested in that. They werent interested in praguetism or popularity. They certainly werent interested in optimism. They were focused on a much darker version of the United States and a much darker version of conservativism and the right. Something that for those of you who remember the 1992 campaign, was very present in Pat Buchanans Convention Speech in 1992. For the liberals in the audience who would say, arent you being awfully nice to reagan in this account . And i was really struck by a phrase in your book, i have if you look, youll see, i read this very carefully, its full of notes and at the top of this page i wrote provocative sentence. You referred to the color blind racism of the reagan era. And one thing as it went on, when we try to think of the roots, trumpism, on the one hand you make a case of what power that was different and also, continuities. I wonder if you could talk about the continuities as well. Absolutely. Sometimes the continuities, the differences are differences of degree and sometimes theyre differences of kind. But that color blind racism idea is important, the difference between the dog whistle and the bull horn and you can argue that theyre the same ideas that are just packaged or presented in different ways, but it does matter if you feel like you have to appeal to universalism. If you have to put an optimistic spin on opportunity. If you have to appeal to equality versus saying, for instance, that he was genetically determined and depends on your race, an idea that becomes popular in the mid 1990s, but i think its also important to emphasize that reagan is still in the dna of the conservative movement and ideas, particularly like deep tax cuts certainly remained. Although they get more dog mat dogmatic and didnt face the same that george w. Bush did. There are continuities, but in the thing that made reaganism, reaganism, the emotion that youre talking about, the willingness to compromise and the idea of the big tent, the idea that there are reagan democrats as opposed to the 1990s when youve got rinos, republicans in name only, shrinking boundaries of conservativism. Those themes seem important despite the continuities. There are a lot of things to get to and i want to mention a couple and we might not, but youll be reminded of things you forgot or learn things you never knew. For example, did you know that Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham got their starts on msnbc . And theres some great stuff on the changes in the media which i want to get to, and there is also, i think, something you explore that weve forgotten is there was a real turn on the right on immigration a long time ago, which we can talk about, and national review, which had long held the reagan view when it published peter brimwell and that controversy, a nicely thing to say about a book that he wrote, and there are some great things there, but i want to go to two immediately political things. And smart history and confirmed something you thought, and so im grateful for your insight that what the conservatives had against reagan, they actually held against george w. Bush george h. W. Bush rather, and later in some ways george w. Bush and you describe as the last reaganite. A lot of the knocks on george h. W. Bush were really knocks you could have made of reagan, but he was sort of such a hero that it was impossible to land those punches and then it all went to hw. Can you talk about that transition . And then i want to talk a bit about Pat Buchanans campaign. Its fascinating. Once you realize whats happening, its impossible not to see. So you have these hard core conservatives, they call themselves the new right, who are constantly complaining about reagan, complain about him from the start of his presidency. Theyre not able to make any headway because hes popular as i mentioned before. When george h. W. Bush comes into office theyre like, all right, this is our guy because this is our punching bag because he didnt have the conservative credentials. He was always suspect. He was somebody who had been part of the ford administration, they didnt like the ford administration, he was somebody who was seen as the moderate alternative to reagan in 1980 and they never trusted his conservative bona fides. And that forced him into a corner, making promises, read my lips, no new taxes. As i mentioned earlier, reagan raised taxes, two of the biggest 1982 and 1984, but when its george h. W. Bush raises taxes they not only lose it, but their complaints gained traction. The same thing happened with debates over affirmative action. When george w. Bush doesnt sign what was called or ends up signing what the right as a bill in 1991, something that Ronald Reagan had reluctantly advanced affirmative action policies, but george h. W. Bush takes it on the chin for those policies and any partisanism for reagan was prague matism and for george h. W. Bush was heresy. The idea that he was a heratic that made it easier for pat buchanan to run. And he floated the trial balloon for a campaign in the spring of 1987 still part of the Reagan Administration and he realizes quickly that hes just going to be sacraficial lamb for pt new right and he lets pat robinson take that instead and waits a year. Once hes running against bush instead of reagan, the same politics taking hode and gaining much more traction than in 1988. Parenthetically, another thing that i had early forgotten and thinking about it particularly today because joe biden gave his speech about crime calling for a restoration on the assault weapons ban. I forgotten how strongly Ronald Reagan supported the assault weapons ban when it was first passed and eloquent on the topic. This is where you see particular policy issues, immigration is one of them, but guns are absolutely another. And in part, you can understand, right . One of the bills he supported reagan after leaving office was the brady bill. Named after somebody who was shot in an assassination attempt against Ronald Reagan, but even after that, when it came to the assault weapons ban, reagan comes out with other he was strongly supportive and he comes out with other president s and says we should have this, and he was in opposition of the n. R. A. Now, i think that pat buchanan could sue donald trump for plagiarism. You go to the 1992 campaign and something i even covered that campaign and had forgotten that at the end of that campaign pat buchanan went to the border with mexico and called for building a wall. That was back in 1992. Talk about the buchanan campaign where, you know, it really was this mixture of a certain kind of popularism on economics because the trade with these very, very right wing positions on culture, race, and immigration, that was almost a perfect template. Its hard to figure out where Donald Trumps campaign was actually different from Pat Buchanans. I think thats right. Which is why hes on the cover. Which is why he makes the cover. And yes, so, pat buchanan even changes quite dramatically on immigration in a short amount of time. In 1984 when he was talking about immigration, he was talking about undocumented immigrants and how they paid payroll taxes and they paid they paid sales taxes and they were good citizens who werent on the payroll, and saying things that were reaganesque and today sounded like a democrat talking about immigration. That was not the case a few years later when he latches onto the idea when issues of culture and race were the ones that Ronald Reagan failed to exploit. That was the vein you got to tap into. So he starts to talk about the border wall. He called it the buchanan fence. He starts to tie what he now calls illegal aliens to crime, accusations from him and attorney general bill barr, that it was illegal aliens who made up most of the people, or a good chunk of the people responsible for the riots in los angeles in 1992. And this criminalization and this trying to stoke outrage and emotion around the border was something that took real work. In california in 1991 and 92, there were like 2 or 3 of voters put immigration at the top of their list of concerns. In 1994 that looks very different with proposition 187 and it took a Political Movement to turn immigration into a culture and race issue that could be exploited. You know, your decision of prop 187 is good and central to this. And a couple of other characters who play a very big role in your book, correctly so, i think, one is Rush Limbaugh. Lets just stick with rush for a second. Because i think you talk about two interrelated developments that are so important, one is the rise of conservative talk radio which limbaugh was the pioneer of. Between the two of them. In 92, but the rise of rush and then the spread of of right wing radio across the am dial as music migrated to fm. But then you also talk about the rise cable leading to talk about the rise of cable leading to fox news and its great discussion because is not just fox news, who by the way of an important piece of history rocket else tried to turn Rush Limbaugh into a tv show. When that guy didnt give up. He just did a whole network instead. But you talk about how other kinds of cable not just fox really helped change the nature of the political dialogue. Absolutely. Dialogue is a polite word. Dialog is an interesting word because this is age of a newly Interactive Media landscape. The ability what made Rush Limbaugh so important wasnt just that he was a conservative entertainer but that his show was interactive. You could call and talk to them. This was the era where you have god help you if you disagree with them. Yet. He had called abortions which was incredibly offensive thing he did early in his career where he would abort colors he disagreed with. He was like larry king live where again you could call and be part of this new cable television. Its where ross perot launches his campaign in 1992. That interactivity is so important and so many of the experiments in cable news in the 1990s were about trying to take a sense of talk radio and put on television. You have network thats a precursor to msnbc called america is talking. Something called National Empowerment television which is a precursor to fox news in many ways. This is headshaking. You have these real experiments in cable, in talk radio and it is against this diversifying whats available on television but it is also creating this new conservative punditry that as e. G. Indicator earlier was not necessarily just happening on Something Like Rush Limbaugh show or fox news. It was much more intensively happening, pat buchanan comes up on crossfire, the Mclaughlin Group as you mentioned ann coulter and Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham ill get their start on msnbc. And on entertainment shows like politically incorrect which debuts in 1993. Spent a few years on comedy central, defined set channel in the years before the daily show and then moved to abc and thats where people like Kellyanne Fitzpatrick who would later become kellyanne conway, and ann coulter and Dinesh Dsouza start to become more familiar household names, and also experimenting with this idea of politics as outrage and entertainment and they are perfecting that style not on fox news but on politically incorrect and on msnbc. The other person that needs to be, a lot of people in the book you need to be mentioned but Newt Gingrich. He is a complicated figure in all this. He began as a rockefeller republican way back when, and you have a really interesting treatment of gingrich in this one. Talk about him. Gingrich is so interesting because he is kind of on both sides of the strait. Somebody who is deeply interested in language. You might have seen a memo from his Political Action committee, the Republican Party Political Action committee that focus on languages as a weapon and trying to find like a most delightful words to attach to your friends and most disgusting words to attach to your enemies. Very interesting rhetoric and a more pugilistic and conservative set of republicans as he brings in republican revolution in 1994. But also very quickly finds himself outflanked by far more radical conservatives than he is. Theres a group called the true believers who come into office in that 94 election who see gingrich as somebody who was too willing to compromise come to willing to work with bill clinton. For instance, during the Government Shutdown which again innovation and congrats aggression of brinkmanship. The time is Government Shutdown in u. S. History. And when gingrich decides okay when at winning this we have to reopen the government, the true believers come for and the like know, why would you reopen the government . We shut it down. He is constant had attacked and constantly trying to come sort of in a preview to what would happen constantly with john boehner in the obama years. All of that playing out in much the same way, just that would be even further to the right. The clinton impeachment gets important treatment in your book partly as a kind of new method of this new postreagan right. I did know for example, the road George Conway played. This book is very valuable for people to go through, where are they now . Talk about how, gingrich was reluctant initially to go for the clinton impeachment even though he got associate with it later. Gingrich did want to be part of the impeachment at first because he was making a lot of headway with bill clinton. They are starting off after the 96 election, sitting down to start to think about how they can roll back Social Security, and then when clinton comes under fire when the investigation heats up and clinton has to show up his support among democrats, those talks go away. So gingrich sees real opportunity in working with clinton but it is foreclosed by the impeachment. You have a lot of republicans or conservatives including lower anchor whos like evelyn is talk about impeachment. This is not a great idea. In part because what clinton was going to be impeached over wasnt that big of a deal. So there is this battle over whether impeachment is going to happen. In fact, gingrich is reluctant to get into. Hes probably also elected because it owned marital record was not as clear as it could be. He gets dragged into it but when he decides to do it, he doesnt. So there is a very sort it really does tap into his desire for political fight and he goes all in when impeachment finally gets underway. I want to open it up to the audience. I just want to jump ahead, by the way on your media treatment i think i see a veteran of the Mclaughlin Group in the audience at its peak, hello. At its peak it at 4. 4 million viewers. Yeah, its so much bigger than just about anyone else. Anyway, its an interesting treatment of that. So lets go from clinton to w whom you see as the last reaganite in a way. Theres a lot of signing as they are. He was willing to, he tried to sell compassionate conservatism for a while before the war came along. And by the end he was hated on the right by many parts of the right as he was by, not the entire right but significant part of the right as he was by the left. And, of course, his Immigration Reform failed which i have always taken as the first sign of what was coming. Yeah, yeah. And if i i could i would le to link, well yeah, well go from there to the tea party to trump and they will open it up. All right. So george w. Bush even at the time was being compared to reagan. Everyone was talking about how you was the heir to reagan which is a real blow to george h. W. G. Bush, so mean. But it was because he had that adf compassionate conservatism that he wanted to do Immigration Reform after 9 11, that he was talking a lot about democracy and Foreign Policy. He passes before 9 11 the largest i think at the time the largest tax cut in american history. Hes doing stuff that feels very reaganite in his presidency. One by one he disproves every part of the philosophy. So you have with financial deregulation with the tax cuts that you also have the collapse of the global economy. You take that idea of reagan, the nine worse words in english language are im from the government and adhere to help, and you superimpose that over the Hurricane Katrina response. Obviously the debacles in iraq and afghanistan, and so by the end of his presidency so much of what looked great in terms of its outcomes and his approach, not looking so great in terms of its outcomes. There is the sense that in some ways he puts the final nail in reagan is and because it empowers them or have you conservative, apparently libertarian right to search. Obviously the opposition to Immigration Reform continues to solidify in aftermath of his presidency. There are a number of different ways he helps along the right that im talking about, these partisans, through his failures. I will just end with the tea party because the tea party was seen by some as many libertarian. Actually it wasnt. It was much more, there was an antigovernment element of it but not against Social Security or medicare since a lot of people in the tea party were over 65 and was a very strong antiimmigration sentiment. And again the tea party is almost a bridge between the Begin Campaign and the trump campaign, is how i read the book. I think thats exactly right. Ill tell one little anecdote. There was the site or the tea party that was mocked mercilessly on the left. Said keep your government hands off my medicare. Thats funny but at the same time like theres a kind of rightwing populism and almost like George Wallace like populism that is contained in that ironic contradictory claim, right . The government should be helping me, a white person. Its those other welfare programs that folks should oppose. I think that was missed in a lot of ways because it was read as a libertarian movement. I want to invite people weve got a microphone here, and speak into the mic would be good for the tv audience. So lets thank you. Theres always a crowd that has good questions. Do you talk about the fact, getting back to reagan, do you talk about the fact he was actually a practiced professional actor and he played an optimistic president and mourning in america . I was an attorney, staff attorney in the epa in the Reagan Administration, and my late husband was at the eeoc. All that optimism, reaganism when is it government is not the solution to a problem. Government is the problem. The American Public has turned against government in the new deal. Government was representative of the people going after the corporations and corruption and the financial stuff. Thats a contradiction, and i think all of that, mourning in america, was nonsense. You shouldve seen what what was going on behind the scenes. Yeah, i do, i do write about some of the chicanery thats happening, chicanery. Some of the most that happening within the administration and have reagan distances himself from those moments when theyre unpopular for precisely the reason you are talk about because he wanted to shore up that public image. The fact he was an actor is really important. Now we do make the distinction between reagan the actor whos kind of part of the old media system, the studio system in hollywood and that sort of Network Television system of the 1950s versus this new harder, more Interactive Media that would come later. Reagan also laundered his passes and actors through his time as governor of california. He comes in with some political bona fides that people like Pat Robertson, pat buchanan, later folks who run for president us that are running for anything else bring to the table. But though some letters are very important and that idea of discrediting government is absolutely a through line. Something that wasnt as part of reagans politics that have been one of the big goals of the cold war conservative movement. Just in defense thank you for the question, in defense of your argument, you are not denying the was a long through line of the american right but there was also a particular break, and those two things can be true at the same time . Right but theres a rupture in that so much of the content free commentary about politics places a rupture in 2016. I think it starts a little earlier than that. Right. Rob wilson. Great book, loved it. First a quick thanks and then a question. Thanks for putting richard vagary in there, very important. He was my first interview when i was 16. We talked about abortion and ill never forget that. The question of religion i forgot Pat Robertson came in second place in Iowa Caucuses in front of i guess george h. W. Bush. Behind all. Behind dole and above bush, amazing. I completely forgot that. You recover and get im sure. By question, was religion on whole or white evangelical christianity and specific morley told him issues on the the politicians of the time, republicans at the time, or was it more a tool they use for instance, Ronald Reagan say i know you can endorse me but i endorse you . Or was that both . Where they hammered by it or did they pick it up and use . This is one of those questions the truly important because you do have these incredible significant religious figures and religious politics, white evangelical politics and people who are important to this book. To Pat Robertson, ralph reed who is leading the Christian Coalition in the 1990s and is doing a lot of compromise in an really interesting ways in the 1990s around those politics, which in part goes to the answer of its the a tool, right . Used to track certain voters and you get rid of it when its no longer useful for you. You pledged to get rid of abortion at the time it look like you are just pledging it and not actually doing it. Looks little different in the wake of dobbs but i think that is too easy of an answer to just say that like religion is just this tool being used by politicians. What was fueling the conservative movement in the 70s, the 80s and into the 90s, in 1992 i think white evangelicals, Christian Coalition members actually made up the majority of delegates to the Republican National convention. These were the foot soldiers of the right and it was something that he saw, the new right saw an really try to harness this moment, some as i write about in the book Helen Chenoweth, the representative from idaho to be pretty radical figure in the 1990s, she sounds kind of a version a focus on the family in idaho. She is supported not just by militias and libertarians in idaho but also supported by women mormons and evangelicals who again on the foot soldiers of the campaign. I think it is a more competent answer. When we talk about religion and politics solely any utilitarian way fox news just manipulating everyone come sometimes people want to be manipulated or sometimes people have theyre helping to circulate in this meeting and thats the more collocated answer. Please. On a big fan of your, cant wait to read your book. Question for you, and in the time that you read about the democrats are moving, are moving to the right as well. Although weirdly starting with the bork confirmation in excuse me as one if you talk a little bit about what come how the Democrats Movement impactedf what the republicans did . Because bill clinton, i mean, litton governed kind of moderate new democrat. He was no, i mean, the liberals district sued clinton as much as the far right distrusted reagan. Talk about that some. Yes, of course. This is like so interesting and what sort of confounds one argument that some people make about the 1990s that it was an error of polarization. Look at it and youre like the democrats are moving to the right. They were not moving to the left. How is it a decade of polarization . Polarization is not a political process that is being described in the 1990s. Its a Political Tool being used by people like Newt Gingrich to make it look like the democrats are enemies and they are an exessential threat while at the same time hes having these backroom negotiations with bill clinton. If you wanted to apply a causal explanation to the democrats moving to the right, the bigger story of telling them you could say the democrats are moving to the right so the republicans have to move even further right in order to lighten the contradictions between the two. I dont think its a democrats fault but that is part of the process at play. You especially see the surround immigration here proposition 187 was not just about republicans. Democrats opposed it but they supported pretty much everything up to proposition 187. Janet reno is expanding Border Patrol in san diego at the time and Dianne Feinstein saying some really nasty things about immigrants at the time. So yeah, there is this right would shift in politics and the culture more broadly. What you see on the right is a much broader swing, and a different kind of right then you had seen an earlier era. Thank you. Could you talk a bit about women on the right . Which is, i read this and i felt that your next book. Because women play a very Important Role in your account. You focus on chenoweth, correctly i think as a facet figure and a revealing figure at the time but you talk a lot about lower income. You obviously talk about Phyllis Schlafly. Talk about this element of this right. If we think about Phyllis Schlafly as kind of a second wave antifeminist, somebody whos opposed to the Second Wave Feminist Movement of the 1960s and 1970s who is appealing to a kind of housewife conservatism in which her role as a housewife even though she was a political activist, so she was well studied in the law and Foreign Policy but that she chose to present herself as a housewife and opposed the equal rights amendment, opposed the feminist movement. That is kind of the antifeminism of the 1960s, 70s, 80s. I do 1990s you see kind of this third wave at the feminism that has consolidated the gains of the feminist movement. People like Laura Ingraham and ann coulter are lawyers. The women of the international, the independent womens forum are all and highpowered professions, many of them are not married. Many of them dont want to have children. That doesnt matter. Thats fine, we are professional women. They dont talk about things like abortion. They talk about guns instead. They wear mini skirts instead of kind of the short dresses the summer like Phyllis Schlafly would wear and he really leaned into provocation both in the political provocation since an provocation in like the sexual sense. So they are crafting this new edgier, sexier, more provocative, more interesting because its a newer antifeminism that becomes really powerful. It becomes a model i think for later women activists like sarah palin, Michelle Bachmann and somebody like Helen Chenoweth. There is a lineage of their between her and somebody like Marjorie Taylor green. If you could hold one second because i want to go back to chenoweth especially in light of the violence were talking about now. Your work on the militias is really important and we forget how come i love, not people dont forget, but in the 1990s the Oklahoma City event was enormous and the deaths is sort of chilling. But i wonder again whats the parallel of the rights of the Militia Movement and then to some of the violence we are seeing . And by the way in your defense this is not a present test book. It just happens that so much of this history leads to the present. Or the rise of the Militia Movement in the 1990s is really important. It has its origins in the 70s and 80s with the rise of posse comitatus and some white power groups that gain steam and begin to go to war with the federal government. All the way back which i didnt realize. Cathleen ballou talks about this in a wonderful book, bring the war home if you want more background on it, but after the events of waco and ruby ridge, those the common kind of martyrdom moments for this demolition movement and it brings so many more people into the Militia Movement. And as the Militia Movement becomes bigger and more active, politicians like Helen Chenoweth who is a representative from idaho, ruby bridges in her district, begin to see these militia members and their politics as part of their base. And so she at the talking about black helicopters and conspiracy theories about the u. N. Her tapes are being sold in the militia of montanas sales book next to bomb making manuals. Theres a real interplay between our politics and this Militia Movement because she sees them as part of who she is appealing to, and particularly with chenoweth and a couple of other members from texas and from the west. You start to get a real thinning of the lines between the violence of the militias and the mainstream of republican officeholders. This really comes to a four with the city bombing in 1995 because chenoweth doesnt defend the bombing but she does say you know, people are met for a reason and if you dont like deal with the reasons they are mad, maybe more things like this are going to happen. So theres a kind of defensiveness about militias and an unwillingness to cut ties with militia members. That is really important and is probably fairly resident for people today. Thanks for your patience. I once ran into Newt Gingrich at the Easter Service at the National Shrine and told him i thought hed get better when he became a catholic and yet nothing to say about that. My question is there is so little Foreign Policy content on right these days. My brother is in, was a conservative who has forgotten he was anticommunist. Can you talk about that at all and why you think it happened . Because the cold war was such a central organizing factor of the conservative movement during the cold war, very easy to know what youre Foreign Policy was going to be. It took a while. In the 1940s and 1950s there were vicious battles on the right of what their foreign policies should be. Should be more isolationist . Should be more aggressive and militaristic . Day decide on the second one. With the end of the cold war all bets are off. Theres a new conversation happening around Foreign Policy, and well, i agree theres not necessarily always very clear Foreign Policy content to the right today. There are still some pretty vicious battles and Foreign Policy does to play a very central role to how the right talks about politics. Its just that there isnt a clear ideology around Foreign Policy. I think right now on the right, that just means theres a lot of heterodoxy and have roger nady on the right when it comes to Foreign Policy. I think you see some of the split your describing indie book in the split in the Republican Party over ukraine which i think is a perfect measure of that old argument. I think we have one more person in line, am i correct . Yes. A veteran. Thank you its nice to see. Im Bruce Bartlett and i was intimately involved in almost all history in your book. But this 11 thing ive been thinking come up. I didnt get any footnotes like you. [laughing] one of the things i been thinking about for some reason lately is the 88 campaign and the fact that you jack kemp running, and now jack was clearly the air to reaganism and he was defeated but more importantly he retired from congress, which opened up a huge vacuum that was filled by Newt Gingrich. I mean, if jacket stayed in congress he wouldve been speaker of the house in 1995, theres no question about that. So i think sometimes we think too much about things that did happen rather than things that didnt happen. And also there was an important article that bob woodward wrote a few years ago about hiking coach was actively engaged in the defeat of george h. W. Bush in 1992. And this is, i think you saw the way the wind was blowing he may have had some knowledge that bob michael is going to retire. He could see that all these southern democrats were just on the brink of all becoming republicans and that this would create the possibility of a republican majority. And so i dont know, somehow i see these events as being interrelated and i was sort of right in the middle of it because i worked in the Reagan White House and the knives over at the Treasury Department where we were involved in raising taxes and things of that sort. I was one of the very few reagan people who survived the bush transition here i mean, he fired everybody just as it he was the democrat, and a lot of people didnt forget that and he came back to haunt him in 92. In 92. So anyway, that was all had to say. Ruse, this is great because there is a look that of a counterfactual point to in a book. Partly like jack cant really was his policy entrepreneur and gingrich was a policy entrepreneur. I. T. Was a guy with a few too many ideas and so he feels that vacuum, but also remember causa jack kemp also comes out against proposition 187. Hes like this is not the direction the Republican Party should go. And remember their settlement in 1996 when people start floating the idea that colin powell could become the republican nominee, and what a Different Party it would be if colin powell had won the republican nomination in 1996. Now, we have no idea how that would work out. We have no idea how he might have changed. We have no answers to any of those things but its a really interesting thing to think about. I just love the idea, bruce, of a historian who focus on the things that didnt happen. That would be an interesting path for for a historian. Do we have one more . So you mentioned some of the Tea Party Message kind of sounding a bit like George Wallace and i come wondering sort of a extreme right of earlier decades, George Wallace and other people and groups who are kind of on the fringes but still sort of importance. Is there any kind of connection between them and sort of later, sort of conservative partisans in the 90s . Can i just piggyback on your question because thats a good question. One figure you treat very seriously an interesting way also is ross perot. I think its an odd relationship of the road to this movement because not an ideological conservative. So if wallace and ross perot as key figures in his book i think is worth closing on and going to read the last paragraph because it really tells us where this all ends up. So wallace is figure in the book because richard vagary this new figures looking at wallace and sing how do we get that wallace vote . We want that wallace book. We know we need to lean into the politics of resentment, lean into issues of culture and issues of race and thats how were going to win that wallace vote and those wallace voters who in 1968 represented a pretty big threat to the Republican Party potential future, or a really big opportunity. Perot is the same in a different way. Because so much of the politics of 1983 and 1994 are both democrats and republicans being like how do we get perot voters. Perot is all over the place. How do we attract his voters . What is it that theyre attracted to . Remember he won like 20 of the vote in 1992. He was a political bomb going off in the middle of the twoparty system, and you would think that hyper partisanship would go out of that but you see Something Like come somebody like Newt Gingrich who developed the contract with america not to appeal to the right but to appeal to perot voters. Thats with a document was about. Thats why doesnt mention republicans or democrats or bill clinton. Its trying to attract those perot voters. The other person out so quickly because i think he attaches to the wallace question is david duke. In 1990 and 1991 as a duke is becoming a more known figure, its now not richard vagary pat buchanan is looking over he sang why i want to reagan and h. W. Bush denouncing this guy . We need to be figure out why he so appealing. Not a hard puzzle. And when his voters, and so part of pat buchanan scampi 1992 is about the duke about come just as previous candidates had looked at the wallace vote. So the book does not focus on donald trump. However, he makes an appearance at the end and its a wonderful passage because it really pulls the book together. There was a debate at the Reagan Library in simi valley in 2015, and every candidate on the stage basically appealed to the reagan legacy except for donald trump. As you write, trump understood something that debate moderators and other candidates did not, the age of reagan was over. It had been over for a long time. And you conclude the book with the following two paragraphs, and ill just close on this and that you should get the whole book to Read Everything that came before. A few people in the Reagan Library in the fall of 2015, including donald trump, believed trump would be president two years later. Yes, he had risen quickly to the top of the pulse and stayed there, but just as 2012 had seen the rise and fall of a string of improbable candidates, the trump bobble which soon would surely burst. They didnt realize the ground at always shifted, had been shifting for a quarter century, and as, and they were only now beginning to catch up. The trip to simi valley was just a final stop in in a long go. And like Raymond Chandler who wrote a book during that name, you solve a lot of mysteries about the right in this book. I thank you so much, i thank you all for such thoughtful questions. 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