A Low, Dishonest Decade: The Right in the 1990s (w/ Nicole Hemmer)
Added 2022-08-31 19:14:17 +0000 UTCIn this episode, historian Nicole Hemmer returns to the show to discuss her new book, Partisans, about the ascendancy of an angrier, more radical strain of conservatism in the Republican Party in the 1990s—a backlash driven by the right's dissatisfaction with the genial, popularity-seeking Ronald Reagan. As the Cold War ended, many conservatives stopped genuflecting to democracy and freedom and new forms of media—talk radio and cable news especially—to spread their grievances. Topics include: Pat Buchanan's campaigns for the presidency, Ross Perot, Newt Gingrich and the GOP's takeover of the House of Representatives, Rush Limbaugh, Dinesh D'Souza, and the new breed of anti-feminist, rightwing women such as Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter.
Sources:
Nicole Hemmer, Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s (Basic, 2022)
Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics (Penn, 2016)
Kevin Phillips, The Politics of Rich and Poor (Random House, 1990)
John Ganz, "The Year the Clock Broke," The Baffler, November 2018
Know Your Enemy, "The Year the Clock Broke" (w/ John Ganz), March 16, 2020
Comments
The whole meme of "America needs a business guy to run it like a business", did that start with Ross Perot?
Martin Oswald
2022-09-22 13:48:03 +0000 UTCA few notes on Gingrich: He was a military guy, he taught military history. His shelves were full of books about war. Ds had held the House since the late 50’s and Rs had been especially submissive to Ds after Watergate. Gingrich wanted to make politics into war and take back the House for Rs. When C-SPAN became a thing he used it to make grandstanding accusatory speeches to empty rooms. Some people think this was an effective use of the new medium. He made excellent use of direct mail voter campaigns pioneered by Richard Viguerie for Rs. When the "You’re Wrong About" podcast covered this, they compared it to “the Republicans using computers to win elections while the Democrats were still using slide rules.”
Mark K
2022-09-07 14:50:33 +0000 UTCAs someone who lived through the 90s, I really would love to see KYE do a deep dive into Ross Perot and what his impact was. As the guest said, he had a tremendous impact. Difficult to easily place him in the tradition of the right but I have long felt he exercised a fundamental right-wing influence. Strange connections with "Bo" Gritz and others.
Todd
2022-09-05 20:25:22 +0000 UTCI would have liked to see more engagement (pushback, interrogation, clarification, etc.) from Matt and Sam in this episode. I understand the impulse to just hand over the microphone to Hemmer, who is a great guest, but I found her narrative so radically disjunctive from those of other interlopers on the podcast; some discussion of possible competing views on the basis of past episodes would have improved the conversation for me. The "Mothers of Conservatism" and "Where's the Rest of Him?" episodes, especially, paint a very different picture from Hemmer's. Some historiographical commentary from Matt and Sam could have really added to the discussion too. There were a few standout moments that came out of left field: the thought, for example, that politics "became unmoored" (21:40) struck me as pretty loaded (unmoored from what?). So too did I flinch at the description of Perot as an ominous-yet-ridiculous (not to mention, tastelessly, Napoleonic (20:00)) figure: surely there was something ideologically significant about Perot aside from his weirdness. Finally, I found myself hoping for some intervention from Matt and Sam concerning the proleptic nature of Hemmer's claims—the constant identification of pre-Trumpian behavior within republican ranks—without much substantive discussion of how these figures came across in their own contexts (read: coming out of the 80s and before). More to the point: were the "Buchanan Brigades" really unprecedented in how they identified themselves with their candidate? Wasn't American politics openly "coarse" far before talk radio? Think Buckley v. Vidal or, I don’t know, the caning of Sumner. Was Gingrich really the leader of the "most conservative congress that had ever been?" (27:30) I think one can provide some more reactionary alternatives. Hemmer is right—where you start the story is also where your argument, conceptually speaking, begins (7:30). In light of that statement, I think it was incumbent on the hosts to at least ask how the story might have been different if Hemmer had started earlier. As a day-one listener, I usually expect Matt and Sam to err on the side of there being “nothing new under the sun" when it comes to the conservative movement, rather than the insistence that Trump in particular represents something whose origins began "when politics broke." I understand that Hemmer tries to preempt this criticism in the introduction of the episode (8:26). I just don’t think the content of the episode itself backs up her preemption. Perhaps that's what surprised me about the ease with which that "unmoored" line whizzed by. The podcast basically left me with the following story: "after Reagan, the party system broke down and the crazies rolled in; the liberal media even gave the worst of them the keys to the castle." Sam sums that argument up around 9:10. Yet so much of the KYE ethos inheres in the long institutional critique of precisely that system. There’s one hint of this around 26:00, when Hemmer talks about Republican power shifting from the presidency to congress. This would have been a great moment for Matt and Sam to ask Hemmer about her broader institutional view of “obstructionist brinksmanship.” Wouldn't the 5-4 hosts want us to consider how the constitution itself, rather than the vacuum of the post-Reagan GOP, conditioned partisan gridlock in Congress? Shouldn’t we think more about the role of nafta and the wto? And why did Perot make such a splash on Larry King to begin with? (20:30) Surely it could have had something to do with his policy proposals rather than his oddities. I suppose I want to know more about what Hemmer and the hosts made of those proposals. We get throwaway references to his views on abortion and nafta, but Hemmer renders these an afterthought (or at most evidence of anti-establishment or populist-reformist sentiment) rather than a substantive aspect of Perot’s candidacy and appeal. This episode left me wanting more—especially because Hemmer seems to ask for too much from the listener. On the one hand, she says, she isn’t a fan of the “rupture thesis” for Trump; the Republican party would have turned Trumpian without the man himself. Yet on the other hand the narrative is so reliant on great historical personalities expressing underlying realities of the conservative movement. Reagan, Perot, Chenowith, and Trump are like history on horseback. Materialism on one side and Idealism on the other: I think Matt and Sam could have a little more academic, though not adversarial, about the details of Hemmer’s vision of historical change. Of course, we shouldn’t expect an 18th Brumaire-level class analysis of the 90s in a podcast episode. Yet some more rigorous discussion of why people like Buchanan filled Reagan's void—some explanation of the historical necessity of the turn, to which Hemmer alludes in the beginning of the episode, would have sufficed. The letdown isn't that Hemmer's worldview clashes with my own—that's for the good—but rather that Matt and Sam seemed content to sit in the back seat. No matter the quality of the guest (and Hemmer is no doubt a quality guest) the best aspect of the podcast is always the dynamic between Matt and Sam, their intuitions and interjections, and most obviously their vulnerability in the face of conservative ideas. That magic always elevates the podcast above the rest, but I think it always requires tending.
M
2022-09-03 17:10:59 +0000 UTCThey also played classic rock as intro music iirc.
DC
2022-09-02 17:23:57 +0000 UTCOne aspect of Rush's (and other hard-edged conservative 90's voices) appeal that I think is underrated is the frisson of permissiveness they gave to buttoned-up conservative evangelicals. They talked about sex, they talked about drugs, they talked about violence and conflict. All of this was kind of intoxicating if the rest of your cultural input was saccharine praise music stuff.
Seth Morgan
2022-09-02 13:53:32 +0000 UTCThis is called “audience capture” I believe. As you say, the audience (or rather the vocal fringe) demands more and more of what they want and push the host that way. The Decoding the Gurus podcast has documented this with regards to online gurus like Jordan Peterson.
Mark K
2022-09-01 22:03:55 +0000 UTCThat actually was Niki's answer
Know Your Enemy
2022-09-01 14:16:56 +0000 UTCon the is the dog wagging the tail or trail wagging the dog question, the key factor is the addition of new tech enabling a near real-time feedback loop with the audience. anyone who has gotten moderately big on YouTube in the edgelord genre can tell you that the answer is neither and it's the feedback loop. your audience will drive you to do and take more outrageous stances because that is what keeps getting you new viewers, generates more buzz. on YouTube most smart people cash out and move on with their lives because the alternative is you and your audience becoming so extreme you get deplatformed for driving away advertising. Anyway... it's neither the tail or the dog but the feedback loop reinforcement mechanism between the two.
ArhGee
2022-08-31 22:44:45 +0000 UTCOh crap, that's right. KYE did A Lost Cause. I thought they did a good job, and I'd like another one.
supremewarpig
2022-08-31 21:40:04 +0000 UTCThat was 5-4, not KYE lol
Terence
2022-08-31 20:33:00 +0000 UTCHey guys, one of my favorite episodes ever was your review of the movie Roe V. Wade. I hope you have similiar plans for My Son Hunter?
supremewarpig
2022-08-31 19:24:06 +0000 UTC
