Be hosting niki hemmer whos here to talk about her new book partisans the conservative revolutionaries who remade american politics in the 1990s. Shes a political historian and founding director of the new center for the study of the presidency at vanderbilt university. She is cofounder of made by history, the historical Analysis Section of the Washington Post and she writes regularly for a number of other publications. In a book six years ago, messengers of all right she traced the emergence of conservative media institutions in the 20th century. Her new work, she examines why the Republican Party in 1990s shifted from the kind of conservatism that Ronald Reagan represented in the previous decade that was optimistic and popular to a more pessimistic, angrier, even revolutionary conservativism. With a period of intensifying partisan conflict and a new fury took hold on the right when republicans grew less tolerant of dissension in the ranks and began viewing democrats not as opponents