Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s

The Republican Party swung a hard right away from Reaganism in the 1990s, according to this insightful political study. Hemmer (Messengers of the Right), a research scholar with the Obama Presidency Oral History project at Columbia University, follows the shift away from Ronald Reagan’s relatively sunny conservatism, with its positive attitudes toward immigration, free trade, and internationalism, toward an embrace of isolationism, nativism, and untrammeled gun rights and a rejection of affirmative action, abortion rights, and other progressive social policies. She follows this process through sharply etched portraits of its architects, including presidential candidates Pat Buchanan and H. Ross Perot, who pioneered the policies and populist bluster that Donald Trump would take to the White House, and Idaho congresswoman Helen Chenoweth, who helped transfuse the extreme right’s conspiracist paranoia into the Republican mainstream. At the story’s center is House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who created the strategy of partisan obstructionism that now dominates Congress and was undone by it when ultraconservative firebrands pressured him into unpopular moves like impeaching President Bill Clinton. Written in stylish, entertaining prose, Hemmer’s history is nicely balanced between colorful personalities, electoral dogfights, and shrewd analysis of sea changes in ideology and public attitudes. This is a stimulating take on a crucial political era. (Aug.)