In Partisans, Hemmer picks up that story where she left off in Messengers of the Right, but with a fresh insight: that Reagan’s triumph was the tip of an old regime, not the start of a recent one. As Hemmer argues, the opening for populists to make their case was the strategic vacuum created by the tip of the Cold War in 1989: Republicans not had the fight against communism to unify conservatives of many alternative tendencies. Reagan had also laid the groundwork for a recent type of presidency, one which promised disruption. Yet, although he attended to traditional conservative values—defunding the welfare state and spending lavishly on the military—Reagan largely avoided divisive cultural issues. Right-wing anger festered because it became clear within the Nineteen Eighties that eliminating abortion and affirmative motion, and restoring school prayer, were nowhere on the Republican Party’s agenda. A young congressman named Newt Gingrich complained that Reagan had not polarized the country enough. “He must have been running against liberals and radicals,” Gingrich wrote in a journal published by the conservative Heritage Foundation after the 1984 election.
Although Reagan’s sunny, optimistic style contrasts sharply with Trump’s lament of “American carnage,” he, too, successfully distracted voters from his lack of policy achievements by blowing the smoke that his voters desired to inhale. As economic journalist William Greider wrote in December 1984, just a few weeks after Reagan thumped Democrat Walter Mondale by 18 points, the president cruised to victory on a gauzy cloud of lies and obfuscation. Even journalists had “yielded to the techniques of mass propaganda,” Greider wrote, “large lies told through the calculated repetition of soothing imagery and potent symbolism. The cruel facts of contradictory realities were no match for it.” If the recent election “describes the longer term,” he continued, “then Americans are being reduced to a nation of befogged sheep, beguiled by false images and manipulated ruthlessly.”
Well, hello. And while that recent voting public wouldn’t emerge full-blown until 2016, populism’s capability to disrupt old arrangements became clear by 1992. In Hemmer’s telling, the potential for a populist president within the Trump mold emerged when mainstream GOP strategists understood that Pat Buchanan’s bid for the Republican nomination, and the independent candidacy of Texas tech billionaire Ross Perot, generated a fervor that Reaganism—with its give attention to abstract economic theories and weak response to culture wars issues like feminism, immigration, and gay rights—lacked. Buchanan’s nativist, isolationist, racist, and homophobic appeal to old-style Cold War conservatives resonated with a younger generation of aggrieved white candidates and voters who were coming out of the shadows. It’s no accident, Hemmer points out, that just one week before Buchanan entered the race, David Duke—an lively Nazi, and former Klansman—announced his own campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.
