Keeping Trump from Office Won’t Stop Threat to Democracy

SARA SIDNER (on camera): The last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, will be laid to rest on Saturday with elements of a state funeral. But President Vladimir Putin will not attend, according to a Kremlin spokesperson. Our next guest said, the dissolution on the USSR created a vacuum in American politics as it emerged as the sole global superpower. Historian, Nicole Hemmer’s latest book, “Partisans,” explores the conservatives who remade U.S. politics in the 1990s. She talks with Walter Isaacson about how the decade paved the way for Donald Trump’s presidency.

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WALTER ISAACSON, HOST: Thank you, Sara. And professor Nicole Hemmer, welcome back to the show.

NICOLE HEMMER, AUTHOR, “PARTISANS”: Thank you so much for having me back.

ISAACSON: I covered the Ronald Reagan campaign back in the 1980s, when I was young, and we thought this was the beginning of a new era of conservatism. Reading your great book, I realize that in some ways, it was the end of a certain era of conservatism. Why do you make that argument?

HEMMER: So, Ronald Reagan’s victory really was a sea change in American politics in many ways. But he was very much a cold war president. He was someone who’s rhetoric and policies had been shaped by this existential struggle with the Soviet Union. And when the Cold War ended, it created this space for a new kind of conservatism to emerge, and it’s that conservatism that over the course of the next quarter century, would become dominant in Republican Party.

ISAACSON: Yes, we see with Trump a conservatism of resentment in many ways, whereas with Reagan, I remember him as sunny, as optimistic, and even oddly enough, as pragmatic. And tell me about what Reagan really stood for. Was that a facade, that sort of happy, cheerful optimism, or was he really somebody who had a different brand of conservatism than we see today?

HEMMER: It really was a different branch. He was someone who thought that America had real promise and the way that you sold the American promise was through that happy warrior persona. It’s not to say that he was popular everywhere. His popularity was largely among white voters, not black or Latino voters. And it’s not to say that he never played into the politics of resentment. But in — overall, his campaign, his presidency, was about a kind of big tent Republicanism and mourning in America. And it’s that that the Republican Party moves away from really quickly after the 1980s. You get a harsher, more resentment driven politics with somebody like Pat Buchanan, which looks very different from Ronald Reagan’s.

ISAACSON: Reagan governed somewhat as a pragmatist, which I think surprise people. I remember when he put, for example, Jim Baker to be secretary of the treasury. Did that cause some problems on the right for him?

HEMMER: Oh, it caused huge problems. So, there were many conservatives who celebrated the election of Ronald Reagan as, now, we finally get our chance to put our policies in place. And when Reagan would do things like — you know, he passes one of the biggest tax cuts in American history, but then he follows it with two of the biggest tax hikes in American history. And he would appoint people like Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court, someone conservatives had real questions about. And so, there was a group of conservatives known as the new right, who spent the entire Reagan presidency just pummeling Reagan for those compromises, for that pragmatism. And it’s something we kind of don’t remember about Ronald Reagan, but that was a core part of how he kept his popularity so high. Whenever he started to do something unpopular, too hardline, he would back away when the public turned against it.

ISAACSON: When you talk about those sorts of partisans who took them on, whether they’d be religious ones like Pat Robertson or political fundraisers like Richard Vickery, they took him on because he didn’t really push social issues. Why did the Republican Party at that point decide that social wedge issues, which Reagan never really hammered home, were an important part for the party?

HEMMER: So, people like Richard Vickery and then Robertson and Pat Buchanan really believed that those wedge issues were where all of the excitement and the activism was for the base. That you could expand the base, that you could attract white Democrats to the Republican Party by ileaning into issues of culture, of race, of religion, and of resentment against the rising power of women and people of color. And, you know, they were starting to make that argument in the 1970s, but because Reagan wasn’t quite playing along as much as they would like, it really took that next push for Reagan to get out of office and to have the space, to begin to push that politics of resentment. But they really believed that that’s how you would win elections, by polarizing them and by really leaning into that sense of loss and resentment.

ISAACSON: But I do remember there were a lot of dog whistles that Ronald Reagan did during his presidency, things that sort of verged on stoking up racial resentment, talking about welfare queens, that sort of thing. Was that to play to the hard right or was that something that was in his nature?

HEMMER: It was definitely something to play to the hard right. It was, you know, something that he did in his campaign. He went down to Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been killed in the 1960s and gave a speech on states’ rights. There were all of these ways that he was trying to appeal to say the people who voted for George Wallace in 1968 and 1972, the segregationist governor of Alabama. But it is important that Reagan felt he had to use a dog whistle rather than a bull horn to attract those voters. And that’s what you see in the 1990s. You see politicians put down the dog whistle, pick up the bull horn, and make much more explicit racist appeals. So, some of the attempts to attract voters through racism, that was the same. It was just done in a very different way.

ISAACSON: One of the values of your book is that it shows how things change and brought us to the era of Trumpism, moving from Reagan-ism to Trumpism. And you say Reagan didn’t exactly pave the way for Trump, it was partly a reaction of Reagan that paves the way for Trump. Explain that shift from Reagan-ism to Trumpism.

HEMMER: So, it’s a big shift that’s triggered by a lot of different factors. The end of the Cold War really is important because the Cold War required you to celebrate democracy, right? Because that was the difference between the United States and the Soviet Union. Almost as soon as the Cold War ends, you have partisans like Pat Buchanan who are saying, is democracy really all that important? And raising questions about the very form of government that had been celebrated for so many years. You also have a very different media environment. And Reagan had met an actor, but he had some real political experience by the time he became president. You see a new generation of presidential candidates who have no political experience, but who have a platform and a base in media, and that’s really different too. So, I think that the pessimistic politics of anti- small D democracy politics, and that fairly strongly media driven, emotion driven resentment driven politics is a major difference between the years of Reagan-ism and the years of Trumpism.

ISAACSON: Something you just said really struck me, which is to turn away from democracy. And I guess I didn’t really catch it when I was covering politics in the ’90s, but that’s what it’s culminating now, is this sense that democracy is not some grand value in and of itself, as Ronald Reagan believed, and that you can be anti-democracy.

HEMMER: That’s right. And it feels strange to say that, because I think that — especially for Americans, you grow up believing that is the thing that everyone believes in. We might have a lot of different political disagreements, but certainly, we agree on democracy as a form of government. And what you begin to see over the course of the 1990s is a real questioning of that. The questioning not just whether democracy is the best form of government, but whether everyone in the U.S. essentially is fit for democracy. We had actually gone through this period in the 1960s, where the United States really opened up, in terms of voting rights, in terms of immigration. And by the 1990s, you have books like “The Bell Curve” that argued for genetic differences and intelligence based on race. Books like “Alien Nation” that say that only white people should be allowed to immigrate to the United States because only they are fit for democracy. So, even when you have the people who are more or less pro-democracy, they are pro-democracy for a much smaller group of people, and that’s an important shift and both rhetoric and policy going into the 1990s.

ISAACSON: So, how important was the race card in driving that?

HEMMER: Oh, it was hugely important. One of the things that Pat Buchanan says as he’s looking at the political landscape in the 1990s, is that where Reagan-ism went wrong was that it didn’t push hard enough into issues of culture and race, and he puts those issues right at the heart of his politics. He helps lead a new nativist movement in the United States, that anti- immigrant politics of the 1990s, which is very much based on the idea that the wrong kind of immigrants are coming to the United States. Immigrants are coming from Africa, they’re coming from Latin America, and those aren’t the right kinds of people to come to the U.S. And, you know, it’s an area of high white resentment. You hear about the angry white male as one of the political architypes of the 1990s. These groups that are in militias. And racial politics are absolutely underpinning those movements in the ’90s.

ISAACSON: When you talk about Pat Buchanan, of course, he is a media-based politician. He grew up on the type of screens you and I are on right now. As a TV commentator. To what extent did a new form of media, well before social media, well before Twitter and Facebook, but sort of an interactive media and its own right, which was cable TV and talk radio and people phoning in, to what extent was that driving force?

HEMMER: It was enormously important changing the politics of the 1990s. And I love that you used the word interactive because that was what was new about so much of this media, that you could call into the (INAUDIBLE) law show and actually participating in making the media you were listening to, that you could call into Larry King live and talk to somebody like Rosborough who announces his presidential run in ’92 on Larry King’s show. And that you could feel like you are part of this new media. And this new media was also, in part, because it was more segmented, it was really focused on blending entertainment and politics. And it was training both a generation of pundits and a generation of politicians to think of themselves not just as people delivering the news or delivering a form of politics, but its entertainers meant to outrage and to keep viewers and listeners engaged through anger and through emotion.

ISAACSON: Well, the primary one of those was Rush Limbaugh, who was a great entertainer but stoked up resentment, stoked up anger, stocked up that sort of populism and faux populism, almost malicious. And one of the really interesting scenes in your book is sort of the awkward relationship between him and George H. W. Bush. The elder Bush, who is such the opposite of the type of trend you are talking about.

HEMMER: They’re such different people. And so, it becomes really interesting when you see the two of them together. Rush Limbaugh, by 1992, when George H. W. Bush was struggling with his reelection campaign, was a juggernaut. He was a powerhouse. No one had ever seen a media figure like him. And Bush was very concerned that if he didn’t win over Rush Limbaugh, he was not going to win reelection. And so, he courts Rush Limbaugh, through Limbaugh’s — Limbaugh had a television show at the time, and Roger Ailes was the producer of it, who would go into found Fox News. And Ailes and Limbaugh, they go to the White House, George H. W. Bush carries Rush Limbaugh’s bag, he sleeps overnight in the Lincoln bedroom, and he tells that story again and again because it is when he’s sort of dubbed the leader of the conservative movement. And when you begin to see politicians, even presidents, turn to conservative media for help in their campaigns.

ISAACSON: Let me drill down a little bit more on the basic theme of this book, which is, to my question, why? Why did the Republican Party and the conservative movement scatter away from Ronald Reagan towards a new form of grievance and resentment? Was that because there was real grievances to be had?

HEMMER: There were real changes that were happening in the world in the 1990s. I mean, the end of the Cold War certainly changed what geopolitics looked like. But on the ground, that meant things like a deep recession in the early 1990s, it meant people who were working in manufacturing jobs we’re finding those jobs disappear as the U.S. moved to a service economy. And so, there were these real changes alongside with changing demographics. The U.S. was becoming a much less white country, there were women who are suddenly in the workforce and in high powered jobs. And all of that change and all of that uncertainty really did open up a space that if you wanted to, instead of offering sort of the happy warrior conservatism of an earlier era, you could say, you know what, things are bad and it’s somebody else’s fault, and we are going to find those people and we are going to hold them accountable. And we are going to make them pay a price for you losing power in this country. And that form of politics, especially when mixed with those new media, had real power in the U.S.

ISAACSON: Let me push back a little bit though on these grievances, which you kind of describe as sort of growing from sort of, you know, growing from sort bad resentments and other things, which is partly true. But there was a consensus, even in the era of Reagan, whether it be people like Ronald Reagan or George H. W. Bush, or for that matter, Bill Clinton, that free trade was great, that immigration was good, that the free market and open ideas and even globalization was a good thing, that sort of trade. Well, that left a lot of people behind and those people, including myself, who believe that, we turned out to be wrong in some ways and how that hollowed out a middle class in America. So, those seem like legitimate grievances against an establishment that leads you away from Reagan towards Trumpism. Is that fair?

HEMMER: I think it’s absolutely fair that there were real grievances. And sometimes when the two parties have consensus, there are a lot of people whose voices aren’t being heard. The question is, what do you do with that sense of resentment and loss, the very real pain of loss? Do you try to pass programs to ease the economic hardship caused by certain trade deals or do you point to immigrants from Mexico and say, oh, they are actually the problem? It’s them and the fact that they are not white and they are not American, they are to blame. And so, it’s a question less of where people really hurt and a question more of, how did you address that hurt? How did you approach that hurt and what type of politics did used to try to remedy it?

ISAACSON: So, Donald Trump’s ascension, according to your book, and which you just said, wasn’t really a sudden transformation. It was something a long time in the making, but it wasn’t something that stems from Reagan- ism, it was something that stemmed from the 1990s. How did it end up leading to Trump?

HEMMER: So, all the conditions where there by the time Donald Trump ran for president in 2015. So, you can think about things like birtherism (ph) and the kind of racist conspiracies that have their roots in the 1990s. The fact that he was a television star who had no political experience running for president, the fact that he was eligible as somebody who could be a presidential contender was made possible by people like Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan who had run for office without ever having held office before. And I think that the politics of nativism, which were so central to Trump’s campaign, the calling for the border wall, that was something Republicans were used to since the 1992 campaign when Pat Buchanan first called for the Buchanan Fence, this wall on the border, and really leaned in to the racist politics of nativism when it came to immigration. So, all of those things we associate with Donald Trump and his campaign in 2016 really do have echoes with this earlier era.

ISAACSON: So, what does all this mean for the future of both the Republican Party and for the ability of American democracy to work and, in some ways, have some stability to it?

HEMMER: So, I think it’s important to understand this because Trump is not an exception. Which is to say that the problem isn’t just Donald Trump, it is this much bigger change that has been happening on the right for a quarter of the century. And if you don’t address some of the root causes of that change, the media incentives, the way that populism and resentment really work in politics, if you don’t begin to address some of those larger structural issues, you are not going to solve the dangerous to democracy in the U.S. simply by ensuring that Donald Trump never becomes president again. There’s something much deeper that has to be addressed and an affirmative case for democracy that has to be made. The assumption that democracy is the best form of government is not really a shared belief in the United States anymore. And so, you have to go back to those root arguments and start their as we talk about politics.

ISAACSON: Nicole Hemmer, thank you so much for joining us.

HEMMER: Thank you so much for having me.