How The '90s Shaped Today's GOP
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Hey there, listeners. Galen here. We recorded the interview you're about to hear with historian Nicole Hemmer back in September before the election. But since we're off this week, we thought this would be a good time to

to air it. The interview is about the post-Reagan GOP, and Hammer's assessment of how the party changed in the 90s can help us to assess the dynamics of the party now, as Republicans take control of the House and begin the 2024 primaries. In any case, I hope everyone's having a nice Thanksgiving week. We will be back next week. Here it is.

Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. In the popular understanding of American history, Ronald Reagan marks the beginning of a new era for the Republican Party and American politics. His presidency and his coalition served as a blueprint for subsequent Republican politicians and even helped inspire attack to the center amongst Democrats like Bill Clinton and the New Democrats.

But in her new book, historian Nicole Hammer argues that Reagan's presidency is better understood as the end of something. According to Hammer, Reagan's optimism and flexibility, rooted in Cold War politics, faded along with the Cold War, and that the post-Reagan GOP is better understood through figures like Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich, and Rush Limbaugh.

The book is called Partisans, the Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s. And Nicole Hemmer is here with me today to talk about it. She is a history professor at Vanderbilt University, where she's also the director of the Center for the Study of the Presidency. Welcome to the podcast, Nicole. Thank you so much for having me, Galen. So first of all, did I do a fair job of describing the argument of your book? How would you flesh it out in your own words?

Now, that was an excellent description of it. You know, the big misconception, I think, around Reagan is that he really was fundamentally a Cold War president. And he does move American politics firmly to the right.

But where the right goes after Reagan is something that looks very different. And it can be confusing because the mythology of Reagan just grows larger and larger over the course of the 1990s and the 2000s. But his particular type of mythology

for all the people who don't like Ronald Reagan, really popular politics. He wins in two landslide elections. George H.W. Bush, who follows him, also wins in a landslide. He was able to build these big coalitions to expand the Republican Party. That style of politics

is not the style of politics that the party would pursue in the 1990s. And so the book really is about charting how the party leaves Reaganism behind and moves in a more hard right direction and in a direction that looks a lot more like the old right of the 1930s and 1940s than the Reagan right of the 1980s.

So how would you define the partisans that you say take root in the 1990s? What does partisan mean in this context and how does it differ from other political actors? So one of the big things that defines the partisans that I write about is that first and

They're very devoted to a politics of resentment and outrage. And this is a very deliberate strategy. It's something that a figure from the 1970s and 1980s, Richard Vigery, who was a leader of a group that called itself the New Right, that he really pushed. He was like, our goal is to organize discontent.

And that is what these partisans in the 1990s wanted to do. But I would also say that what defined them was a kind of media savvy. They really understood new, interactive, entertainment-driven media, and they were able to

pitch more partisan messages and appeal to those emotions of resentment and really division in ways that felt new and exciting because they were taking place in an entirely new media atmosphere.

There's a lot to dig into here, both from the perspective of what's going on in the media, what's going on in the broader public. And so we'll take our time and piece it all together. But I'll admit, starting off, that I was a little bit surprised by the argument in your book, because, you know, when you read political commentary at the end of the 1990s, it describes an era of, you know, ascendant moderate politics.

politics with Democrats and Republicans fighting over the center. And I mean, I think you might even be able to call Clinton a Democrat who tried to emulate Reagan. And then on the Republican side, you have figures winning the Republican nomination for president like George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole. Then you have Bush Jr. coming into the 2000s with his message of compassionate conservatism. McCain, the maverick.

ends up winning the nomination after Bush. Then you have Romney. And so it's hard for me to see sort of the end of the message of Reagan in, you know, 1988 or 1990, when you have such powerful figures like that seemingly carrying his torch.

So that's absolutely the case that it is not like a flip switches in 1989 when he leaves office and Reaganism goes away and this new era of right wing partisanship becomes the order of the day. But what you see is the emergence of this strain in a new and powerful way and that the Reagan strain of the party starts to capitulate.

capitulate to it pretty early on. And so I think about something like George H.W. Bush when he survives the challenge from Pat Buchanan in 1992. He's really spooked by that. He's spooked by the fact that Rush Limbaugh, who was a new figure on the national scene, was somebody who had backed Buchanan and who

played hardball and was meaner and crasser and didn't really fit the George H.W. Bush model of how conservatives should act. And that George Bush invites Rush Limbaugh to the White House because he realizes he needs to win Rush Limbaugh and the base that he represents in order to have a shot at winning the presidency. And then just two years later, Rush Limbaugh has made an honorary member of the new freshman class that is led by Newt Gingrich.

And again, like this is very much a period in flux. In 1992, you also have Ross Perot, who represents a much more heterodox anti-establishment politics. And you could imagine the discontent on the right side.

affixing to somebody like Perot, or even in 1996, somebody like Colin Powell, who had this little boomlet before he decided not to run for president, but who represented a very different vision of the Republican Party. He was someone, for instance, who was pro-abortion rights, which is not something that you would have thought somebody could get away with in 1996.

But the party is now at that point contains these two different strains. And what you see over time is that this new strain of partisan politics is going to overwhelm the Reagan side of the party.

There are a couple more things that this makes me think of, which is one, when one party takes power, the activists on the other side of the aisle get really invigorated. Right. And so, of course, with Bill Clinton coming into office after Republicans having the presidency for three terms,

the activists got really motivated and perhaps really partisan in a way. But ultimately, you know, Pat Buchanan loses pretty decisively twice. You know, those primaries were never really close. And the 2000 primary ultimately isn't particularly close either. And of course, Bush is running against McCain in 2000, who isn't making a sort of Pat Buchanan challenge from the far right.

And so it's hard for me to see, I guess, that as the turning point. I think the popular sort of end of the Reagan era in people's imagination is 2015 or the beginning of the Trump presidency. Why is that wrong in your view?

So first, I do think that the presidency is a lagging indicator of the direction the party is going. So the movement that I'm talking about in the 1990s, it's vying for the presidency, but it's not winning the nomination. It really has the locus of its power both in media and in Congress. It's in Congress where you see these pitched battles much more fiercely. Newt Gingrich comes into office and he is very clear that he believes that

politics is about polarization. He thinks that that's what the responsibility of the Republicans in Congress is. So even as Bill Clinton is moving closer and closer to his position, his objective is to move further and further away from Clinton so that he can open up this space and define the two parties as very distinct from one another. So you have a party that I think is increasingly based or driven by

out of Congress and the particular style of politics that Newt Gingrich puts forward. But even Newt Gingrich in that era is constantly being challenged from the right. When that new Congress comes in in 1995 on the back of this Republican revolution, it comes

in with a group that calls itself the True Believers, who are constantly pushing and trying to get Gingrich to go even further to the right. So trying to extend the government shutdown, even after Gingrich is like, oh, I need to stop this, pushing him toward impeachment, even though Gingrich at first was pretty resistant to pursuing the impeachment of Bill Clinton. And so I think that getting a little bit deeper into the dynamics that are happening within the party help explain

There's so many ways you could see 2016 go.

going differently, right? I mean, Trump didn't even win a majority of the votes in the Republican primary, and he was winning nowhere close to a majority of the votes really early in the Republican primary. Of course, the Republican primary system is set up in a way that early leaders end up having a relatively easy path

to the nomination. If Trump doesn't win in 2016, the nomination and then the presidency, is this still a story that we can tell that the 90s are this turning point that leads us to Trump? Were there clear pivot points or off ramps, decision making opportunities that could have gotten us somewhere else?

I mean, there certainly were points in time where the party could have gone in a different direction, which is why I'm kind of obsessed right now with the case of Perot in 1992, because there really is a drive in the party, including in 1994, to attract those Perot voters and have a kind of more heterodox...

less openly partisan style of politics. And the contract with America is actually a proof point of that, because that was a document that was designed to attract Perot voters. And when Frank Luntz was helping Newt Gingrich pull that together, he was like, you can't use the word Democrat. You can't use the word Republican. You can't talk about Bill Clinton. It has to be this more neutral form of politics.

When Gingrich becomes speaker, he governs very differently from that. He really does double down on the polarization angle. But there are lots of different moments that the party could have gone in a different direction. Again, the Colin Powell vision could have looked very different. George W. Bush, who I think really did practice the politics of Reaganism in a lot of ways.

If he had been a successful president, instead of disproving most of the political theories of Reaganism over the course of his presidency, from the financial collapse that comes after tax cuts and deregulation to obviously the war on terror and how badly that's gone by the end of his presidency. But you can also see during the Bush presidency that there's a real distance between.

between him and the party's activist base. And you see that when George W. Bush attempts to pass immigration reform, and he's simply unable to do it because there's so much opposition from the base that, frankly, the Bush administration never saw coming. And then I think at that moment, by 2008, McCain picks Sarah Palin. They're two very different visions of where the party is going to go. And with the Tea Party, the party really does start to go in a more Sarah Palin direction. And I think

By the time of the Obama presidency, I think that the cake is baked. Yes, Mitt Romney wins in 2012. But remember what the 2012 Republican presidential primary was like. There was so much discontent with Mitt Romney. He was constantly struggling to firm up.

his hold on the nomination. And then in 2016, you know, Donald Trump doesn't lock it down right away, but he was leading in polls within a month of when he announced and he never lost his lead in the polls. And so it doesn't necessarily mean that you run this scenario 100 times that Donald Trump's always going to win the nomination, certainly not always going to win the presidency. But I do think that if you take a step back and look at

where the energy in the party has been. It has been pushing more and more in this direction towards more media-based candidates and more anti-establishment candidates.

So I guess what I would ask is, does this sort of description of how American politics proceeded away from the Reagan era, does it still hold if Marco Rubio becomes president in 2016? So it would depend on what forces Marco Rubio faced when he was president. Certainly, I think you still have to pay attention to what's happening in Congress. The

Politics of obstruction and destruction in Congress were well underway before the 2016 election. So that's one force that's underway. The role of conservative media in shaping Republican politics would be a force that Rubio had to contend with.

And so would the party have changed as quickly, as dramatically if somebody like Rubio had won? No, I think it would look different. I think he would have had real difficulty governing, though. And this is something that, again, you see going back to the 1990s with Newt Gingrich. It's very difficult to govern because there's something fundamentally incompatible about these two strains of power.

conservatism and Republican Party politics. And it's why you see so many figures defaulting to politics like obstruction, because in some ways, as long as the base is divided between these two groups, the party is sort of ungovernable.

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All right. So let's take it all back to where this history begins, which is the end of Reagan's second term as president and the end of the Cold War. What is it about the end of the Cold War that started the change that you describe in your book? The Cold War was the single most important defining fact of politics.

in the United States between the 1950s and the 1980s. For conservatives, it was the geopolitical reality that held the coalition together. Anti-communism was what helped to bring together some pretty disparate threads of conservatism, how libertarians who were against a big state and traditional conservatives who were for enforcing morality, how they come together in the same movement is through their shared antipathy and antagonism toward communism.

Communism provides kind of the glue that holds the coalition together. And then you have somebody like Ronald Reagan, who is able to take the Cold War and appeal to ideas of

democracy and this positive vision of the United States, which not all Americans bought into, but which Reagan fervently believed and which didn't just shape his rhetoric, which was very much about defining the United States against the Soviet Union.

but which shaped his policies as well. Like, why does he believe that there should be open immigration in the U.S.? Because he believes the free movement of people is a fundamental component of democracy. He believes that free trade is a fundamental component of democracy. He believes in celebrating diversity because he sees that as a positive attribute of the United States in opposition to the Soviet Union. And when the Cold War ends, all of that sort of

And you see that most clearly in somebody like Pat Buchanan, because he was somebody who was selling the Reagan message. I mean, listen to Pat Buchanan talking about immigration in 1984. He's talking about how wonderful a group he calls undocumented immigrants are.

are and how hard they work and they pay payroll taxes and they're not dependent on the state. Aren't they a wonderful group of workers? And six or seven years later, he sounds like the most hardcore nativist in the United States. And he's somebody who is now saying, look, the Cold War is over. It's time to put up barriers to trade. It's time to put up barriers on the southern border. It is time for America to come home.

to put America first, and to rethink some fundamental principles, including, he's talking as early as 1990, that maybe democracy isn't the best form of government. And now that the Cold War is over, we don't have to pretend that it is. And so there is this real unleashing that happens in the wake of the Cold War that gives space for some alternative types of conservative politics.

Did the Cold War have the ability to unite the left in the same way that it had the ability to unite the right? What effect ultimately did it have on how Democrats were doing politics during this time?

So it's interesting. I think that it actually divides liberals from the left in pretty clear ways during the Cold War because the left becomes suspect because they seem a little too close to communism or a little too uncritical of the Soviet Union. And remember, liberals in the United States in Russia,

particularly the 1950s and 1960s, were also hardcore devoted anti-communists. And they catch a lot of leftists in their dragnet when they're trying to round up reds in the 1950s and 1960s. So I do think that it functions, or at least it did function, as in many ways a more

divisive or splintering force. And you see that really come home around the Vietnam War and around the movement of the 1960s. Now, I will say something like black civil rights in

in the 1960s, were in some ways aided by the Cold War. So even though you had investigations by the FBI and all these accusations that civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. was a communist agent and that communism and the Cold War were used as a weapon against the civil rights movement, the belief that the United States needed to

prove its moral superiority helped push a lot of white liberals into the Black civil rights camp and to help pass the reforms of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. So even though it does splinter the liberal left in a lot of different ways, it also helps secure part of the coalition because it makes Democrats in particular more progressive on issues like race and feminism.

You know, while reading your description of what the Cold War did to politics, it makes me think of our relationship to China today. And essentially, if you want to look in the polling for an area where voters overwhelmingly agree and where politicians are largely behaving in similar ways across party lines, it's basically toughness on China.

Is it this broader global dynamic that ultimately determines how discordant our own politics are at home? And is the sort of like common enemy the thing that fixes discord? I don't know that it necessarily fixes discord, but it can provide a kind of force that tamps it down. I mean, think about the United States politics in the early 2000s.

How the attacks on 9-11 helped to pull the two parties together and helped to, I don't think it drained political culture of divisiveness at all. I think that in many ways that divisiveness heated up, but the space for alternatives was much smaller. And I do think that when there is a sense of a common enemy, right?

It shrinks the space for opposition. And sometimes we think of that as a good thing, and sometimes we think of that as a bad thing. But you can also understand why that can provoke a kind of anti-establishment politics. When the two major parties agree on something, then some voices are being left out. Some political perspectives are being left out. And that really is breeding ground for opposition.

for anti-establishment movements. And yes, foreign policy is a very powerful one because it often feels existential and it goes to the core of national identity. And it may even, people might even feel that it goes to safety and the ability of the country to be prosperous. But I do think that there are domestic policies that the two parties agree on that can also generate both a sense of a narrow space for opposition and then a real discontentment over politics and not having people feeling like they don't have a voice in it.

That anti-establishment nature or cycle that you describe where when the two parties converge on a conventional wisdom or a common policy, that there can be a market underneath for a different kind of politics that goes unserved until someone decides to serve it. And that is exactly what I was thinking when I was reading about characters like Rush Limbaugh in your book, which

which is to what extent are these partisans of the 90s creating a market versus serving an unserved market? Because with issues like free trade, foreign interventionism, there isn't that much dissent between Republicans and Democrats in the late 80s and early 90s and kind of throughout Clinton's presidency.

And you really see folks starting to make a case for isolationism in the 90s, like you described through Pat Buchanan, but also Trump being the Republican who makes a case for isolationism maybe strongest in at least the 21st century.

So it's a combination. And that is to say that there certainly was an untapped market. You mentioned around trade in the early 1990s. There's a reason why Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot are doing so well in 1992. And that is because both George H.W. Bush and then eventually Bill Clinton agree on the North American Free Trade Agreement. And they have slightly different visions of what that agreement should look like.

But there isn't an anti-NAFTA voice until you have somebody like Pat Buchanan in the primaries, but then Ross Perot. Ross Perot makes his opposition to NAFTA a huge part of his campaign. And so he's an alternative. And it helps to burnish his anti-establishment credentials because he's saying the thing that nobody else will say. And that makes him a very attractive and authentic seeming figure. But I do want to say that it's not just that a market is perfect.

tapped into, but that it is also created and shaped. So the policy response or the policy solution that a politician offers helps to shape

What that market looks like and what that market responds to. And this is where immigration is actually really interesting, because in the early 1990s, in a place like California, there certainly had been a major uptick in people crossing the border into the United States, many of them undocumented. There was a major recession that was particularly hard hitting in California.

But if you took polls into 1992 and even early 1993, immigration just wasn't near the top of the list of concerns for California voters. It really does take

a movement to create a politics of, look, your economic problems, the problems of crime in this state, those are problems of immigration. Immigrants are responsible for that. And here are some policy options for what to do. And both Democrats and Republicans start serving up those policy options that are focused on immigration. But that is it's tapping into real issues.

discontent and real concerns, but it's shaping those concerns and directing them in particular ways. So the market is there, but the market is also being shaped by the policy options and the personalities and the activism that's being presented by political actors.

You know, it's interesting because the topic of immigration, I think, is super complicated to talk about. And the polling sometimes fluctuates. But today, The New York Times released polling that it conducted over the previous two weeks or so, showing that there is actually a majority of Americans in support of the border wall. There was not when Trump was running for president the first time. And that Americans trust Republicans more on immigration by 14 points.

And the story you tell in your book is largely sort of an asymmetrical polarization, which is that Republicans are going further and further right. While in the beginning, at least with Clinton, Democrats are tacking more towards the center and then they liberalize a bit. But ultimately, there's increased polarization amongst Republicans for this super hot button issue, immigration, which.

all the time ranks amongst the most important issues for Republicans. You actually see that the most movement over this time comes from Democrats. I mean, 538 looked at this, and I think from 2004 to 2018, Democrats who favor increased immigration increased by 25 points over that time. And you see basically that Republicans and Democrats start from a really common position, generally skeptical of immigration, and that the two parties just diverge, but it's all movement on the left.

How does that play into this story where Republicans are the agitators in the kind of partisanship and the polarization when it seems like most of the movement on this issue in particular is happening amongst Democrats?

So it's happening amongst Democrats at a later period, I think is important. You mentioned the period 2004 and beyond. And there's a real change in Republican politics on immigration in the period right before that and leading up to that. Like there's a real tension that's happening within the Republican Party where there are fights happening over immigration. I'm thinking of 2003 in particular because that's when...

John McCain and some of his allies in the Senate and the House from Arizona are trying to put together immigration reform. And they're constantly being beaten back first by voters in Arizona. And then ultimately, when it becomes a national conversation, then by the Republican base more broadly. So there's a real fight that's also happening in the Republican Party. It's just happening in an earlier period.

But if you look in the 1990s at the issue of immigration, like you were saying, it's not even just that left, right and center can be confusing, complicated terms. But both parties are moving very hard toward more restrictionist immigration policy, which

And it's less unusual for the Democrats because the Democratic Party had been, I think it's fair to say, the more restrictionist party in the 1960s and 70s and 80s. And so the parties are reshuffling in some ways, but also the Republican Party is just taking a much harder line. And as Democrats take a harder line, then Republicans move even further. And you see that with something like Proposition 187, which is the immigration initiative that's happening in

California that voters end up voting overwhelmingly for in 1994 is something that contains an illegal provision. Like this room court says you have to give everyone public education. You can't deny it to undocumented immigrants. And yet Proposition 187 says to do that. And so Democrats go right up to that line. They're like, everything else about this is fine. You can't do the education thing. Like that's too far. And so, of course, Republicans keep going a little further. Bob Dole complains about this during the 1996 campaign that he's constantly being pushed to the right.

But I also think that it's helpful to think about what we mean when we talk about polarization in the 1990s versus some of the shifts that you're talking about in the 2000s. Polarization was a political strategy of the Republican Party in the 1990s, not necessarily just a description of how politics

were changing. And I think that when it comes to immigration for Democrats, I think a lot of the movement has been about a changing coalition in many ways, particularly as the Democratic Party loses more and more of the white working class, which had been the

the base of a lot of the opposition to immigration in the party from an earlier era, particularly within the labor movement. So there's a bigger shift that's happening as well that I think is driving some of that in the Democratic Party. But I don't want to suggest that Democrats don't move on issues. They've moved on a lot of issues. I think they've just moved in a later time period than what the Republicans did.

Which sort of brings me to the role that media plays in this. We talked about it a little bit, but you're a scholar of the media, particularly conservative media. Your previous book is called Messengers of the Right. And

we talked a little bit about how whether people like Rush Limbaugh are tapping into a market that already exists or creating a new one. What role did these types of figures, particularly Rush Limbaugh, because he loomed so large in the 90s, play in the politics of the time? Hugely important. Somebody like Rush Limbaugh is so important because he becomes a

certainly in the 1990s, first of all, one of the most visible conservatives, one of the most visible people on the right, and really becomes an agenda setter in many ways on the right because he is both so popular and so unprecedented. Conservative politicians don't know what to do with Rush Limbaugh because they've never seen anybody like him. He's somebody who, within a few years of starting his national radio show, he has made

millions of dedicated listeners, people who identify with him, who define themselves as ditto heads, who go to like rush rooms at restaurants, which are these rooms that are set up so people can listen together as a community to the Rush Limbaugh show. He's writing bestselling books. He has his own television show. He's just a phenomenon that nobody knows how much power he has, but they really feel like

They got to they got to fall in line with Rush Limbaugh. And Limbaugh himself on the radio is constantly trying to discipline the Republican Party. He's telling Newt Gingrich not to get out of line. He's drawing a line in the sand on particular issues. And if you cross them, then he's going to say it on his radio show and there's going to be this big backlash. He can get his listeners to like flood congressional phone lines. And so there's the sense that he commands a lot of power, whether he actually did or not. He was treated as though he did.

Which de facto kind of gives him that power. But he also introduces a new style to conservatism. Because the thing about Rush Limbaugh is that he was an entertainer first. He was somebody who got his start in sports radio and in kind of a more entertainment space before he turned to politics. And in that way, he really in some ways preempted.

prefigures this bigger change that's happening in not just conservative media, but in political news and political media more broadly. That in the 1990s, the wall between political news and political entertainment all but vanishes. You have MTV, the new cable station that is out there doing rock the vote conversations.

Comedy Central, which is supposed to be a comedy channel and its tentpole program is Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect. They're going to the conventions that politics and entertainment are blending in really important ways. And out of that, you get not just figures like Rush Limbaugh, but a whole new generation of right wing pundits.

who are making space for themselves, not in conservative niches like talk radio or eventually Fox News, but on Comedy Central, CNN, MSNBC, ultimately ABC when Bill Maher's show moves there. So it's a changing media environment that is fundamentally changing punditry and politics in the United States. How would you compare what happens on the left during Bush to what happens on the right?

during Clinton in the sense of some of the most popular political but also entertainment shows become The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. And people are in some ways getting their news from that, but also their entertainment. And it is super partisan. There's no mistaking that these people do not like anything about Republicans or what Bush has done during his presidency. Because I think oftentimes people on the left will say, we don't have what they have on the right when it comes to conservative media, talk radio, cable news, whatever. Right.

Is there a real difference between what the left has and what the right has?

So there is a real difference between what the left and the right has. The right has a conservative media infrastructure that they, as I talk about in my first book, have been building since the 1950s. A conservative media infrastructure that is warp and woof of politics. You have magazine editors and radio show hosts who are part of Republican and conservative presidential campaigns from the 1950s on. So it is much more institutionally embedded in

when it comes to the Republican Party and conservative politics. That said, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are the direct descendants of Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect. When his show goes to ABC in 1997, Comedy Central is looking around and they're like, that's our brand. We do politics and comedy and we need

need a replacement for Bill Maher. And that's how The Daily Show gets the space and the oxygen and the support that it needs to become this major show in the 2000s. And Democrats and liberals and people on the left are not cut off from the massive changes that are happening in media and in culture in the 1990s and 2000s, more interactive media, a more segmented

media environment, this thinning of the walls between politics and entertainment. It's not like liberals are just listening to NPR and like reading, you know, books about formal politics, right? They're part of the culture and they're watching MTV and they're rocking the vote on MTV. And so I think that it's happening. It's sometimes happening in separate spaces. And in some ways it happens a little bit later and without the same kind of institutional support, but it's part of the same phenomenon.

And this all in many ways is possible because of the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine under Reagan. And from what I understand, the idea with that is that the Fairness Doctrine ensured that broadcasters would give equal air to opposing views

But conservatives felt that that basically ended up with a situation where the mainstream media was the liberal media and conservatives didn't have a real voice in the town square when it came to mainstream media.

To what extent was that critique true? And ultimately, is repealing the Fairness Doctrine really what changed all of this? Because obviously there are digital changes and cable news changes, all kinds of other things going on at the same time. Can we trace this fracturing to the Fairness Doctrine? Or is that misunderstanding what the Fairness Doctrine ever did? It's giving way too much credit to the Fairness Doctrine, although the Fairness Doctrine is important. I mean, in the 1950s and 1960s, conservatives are going nuts

nuts, because they see the Fairness Doctrine as something the federal government is imposing on them. So you have conservative radio programs. People won't know this one, but like Clarence Mannion had this nationwide conservative radio program, and he would sometimes have to give free time or the stations would have to give free time to liberals who counter his message because he had an explicitly conservative message. And it just it drove conservatives crazy. They thought that it was a form of censorship.

And it is true that particularly like movement conservative ideas like opposition to the New Deal or opposition to the Great Society that we're not getting the same kind of airtime. The idea that labor unions were good was something that you could find more prominently on the networks than conservatives would prefer.

So there was a kind of imbalance there. There weren't necessarily like a ton of leftist voices either in the media sphere in the 1950s and 60s, but conservatives really saw the Fairness Doctrine as a cudgel. But by the 1970s, things were changing pretty rapidly. Not only had networks begun to respond to all of the media bashing of the Nixon administration and started really leaning into left-right programming.

And so you have things like point counterpoint, which is part of 60 Minutes, where it's a liberal versus a conservative fighting one another. You have Spectrum on CBS, which is a commentary that allows for conservative commentary. So not only is that changing, but conservatives figure out how to use the Fairness Doctrine to get more conservative voices on air. And so what ultimately happens is in 1987, when the Fairness Doctrine is repealed, you have people like Trent Lott and Newt Gingrich and Phyllis Schlafly saying, nobody

We need the Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine is great because it's how we get conservative voices on air. It's not until 1993 in Rush Limbaugh that the Republican Party really unites against the Fairness Doctrine, because they're like, oh, we don't need this. We have the most popular man in media on our side. And then to your question about regulation,

It matters at the margins that the fairness doctrine is gone, but what really is changing is technology. That you have a different use of the FM space, that you have satellites and toll-free long distance that allows for these nationwide call-in shows, and that you ultimately have the internet and cable and all of these new technologies that create so much more space for a divergent range of voices and so much more incentive to narrow cast to particular ideologies.

You made an aside comment earlier along the lines of it's unclear how much actual political power Rush Limbaugh had, but because people believe that he had that power, it kind of didn't matter because then he has that power. I think in the left's imagination, so much of the story of the right gets told through conservative media. But of course, we should be paying attention to the fact that

The people that Rush Limbaugh wanted to win the Republican nomination basically never won the Republican nomination. You know, if you look at the wins and losses and try to add them up, there are many ways in which conservative media is not driving Republican voters like sheep or whatever it may be. Which brings me to Tucker Carlson, of course, the most popular cable news show.

in the country today, ultimately 3.5 million people are watching that show in a nation with what, like 260 million adults and 160 million voters or whatever, roughly in that range. So how much of the story of conservatism can we actually tell through these figures when you put it in that kind of perspective?

So I still think that conservative media figures like Tucker Carlson are hugely important. He is the most watched cable news program out there. Although, as you point out, like not that many people actually watch cable news. But his message is not limited just to the people who watch him on Fox, right, clip

circulate all over the internet. He's a pretty popular figure on the right more broadly. But I think that the bigger question about the role of conservative media, conservative media is part of the infrastructure on the right. That makes it a very important political institution. But the way that particularly liberals conceive of

how conservative media acts is often just completely wrong. This idea that the conservative base are these sponges who just like soak up all the content and then squeeze it out afterwards without any kind of processing or interaction or rejection of some ideas and acceptance of others, that just strikes me as wrong. And we see that in particular moments. We've talked about how difficult issue immigration is.

But you had this moment in 2013 where Marco Rubio was trying to go around and get right wing media to at least not attack him while he worked on immigration reform. And then you have people like Sean Hannity at Fox News being like, OK. And so if you turn on Fox News in those months, OK.

Sean Hannity was like, this is this is a good idea. Let's let's give them the space to do this. This isn't amnesty. This is something else. This is a serious effort to secure the border. And he heard from his listeners and his listeners rejected it entirely. And so within just a few weeks time of going down this messaging front,

You hear Sean Hannity back on air, amnesty and big letters right behind him as he's talking about how bad immigration reform is. And so there is a more dynamic relationship between audiences, media outlets and politics than I think we normally credit. Oh, yeah. I think people totally underestimate how much.

a lot of these commentators, journalists, even however you want to describe the array of people who work in broadcast news and even newspapers, how much they can get captured by the audience. Rachel Maddow can't all of a sudden say something completely out of line with the worldview of the audience that's watching or have a guest on that's completely out of line with the worldview of the people who are watching and like get away with it, right? We hear about this all the time with people being upset about what

runs in the New York Times and the list goes on and on and on. Like a lot of these institutions are somewhat captured by their audience and maybe even more so today when you have the opportunity to give your feedback on Twitter and calling in and sending emails and what have you. I think that's absolutely right. And I think you're very right about the idea that it's more captured today than it was in the past. You look at Rush Limbaugh in the early 1990s and he's the only game in town. Like

There are other conservative talk radio hosts, but none have his power. And it's not even just that he doesn't have any competition, but he is such a juggernaut. His team is so powerful and he is responding to his audience. He is kind of feeling out the temperature of his audience. But as you get more competition and more interactivity and more ability to push back,

then people pay attention to it. Fox News pays attention to it. When all of a sudden, like a quarter to a third of their audience goes to OAN or to Newsmax after the 2020 election, like they hear those signals and they might not change overnight. They might not end up saying something that is going to get them sued for billions of dollars by Dominion, but they are going to pivot, I think, in the direction of where they see their audience going. And so, yes, it's absolutely a much more complex relationship.

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I do want to bring it all back to polling here. You know, we are 538. So in the decade that we're talking about, we're mostly talking about the 1990s. Of course, Republicans win control of the House for the first time in 42 years. In 1994, there's a lot of reason that happens. Backlash to the incumbent. You can paint a whole picture, but...

The policy agenda that they pitched to the country is famously contract with America, which Newt Gingrich and Republican pollster Frank Luntz work on. Frank Luntz had worked for Ross Perot. And Frank Luntz's claim, which it's debated whether or not he can back this up, is that all of these policy issues have been poll tested and are popular with the majority of Americans. And that's sort of

the basis for Newt Gingrich's new majority. What is the contract with America? What does that look like? And to what extent is it truly popular?

This is a great question. And on the subject of a lot of debate among historians and political scientists, because the contract with America, which was this document that put forward a number of what you were talking about, these so-called 60 percent issues. So things that people claim 60 percent of Americans agreed with. There were often reform focused. So things like term limits.

and ethics systems in order to mirror the Perot agenda, which had been more of a reform-based agenda. It also had things like balanced budgets, which were borrowed from part of the Republican Party and also from Perot. They included things like a larger military budget, which is one of those items where you're like, that definitely did not pull at 60%. But the idea here was that they were creating a framework for

for what they could put forward as popular policy and non-polarizing policy, right? It's not just that we're like attacking the Democrats. We really want a more functional reformed government. And that's what the document was. And it gets trotted out a few months before the election. It's Newt Gingrich's way of trying to nationalize the election, but also to tie Republicans to popular policies. But it was also meant

as a brush off of folks who wanted the party to throw its weight behind what we're seeing as more divisive social issues around school prayer, contraception, abortion. And this was Newt Gingrich's way of saying, well, those don't pull at 60 percent, so we can't include those. So it was a strategic approach both to message to the base and

and then also to message to the country. Now, it's just not clear to what extent people had even heard of the contract with America. The polling suggests that it didn't really move the needle one way or the other. But it's interesting that...

Newt Gingrich felt that this was the message that he had to put forward in advance of the 94 election. He wasn't committed to avoiding divisive politics. In fact, he'd made an agreement with Ralph Reed, who was the leader of the Christian coalition, that he could put forward his own agenda a few years later, which was called the Contract with the American Family. And there you get all of your divisive social issues. So those are still very much on the table. But

And that was the idea behind it, that it was supposed to be popular, nonpartisan policy to suggest that Republicans would move the country in a different direction if they had power.

One thing that I think we sort of have to bring up about this time in American life is how the country is changing. So in 1900, America was 87% non-Hispanic white. And in 1970, it was 84% non-Hispanic white. So very relatively little change over 70% of the 20th century.

However, when you get to 1990, it's 76% white. By 2000, it's 69% white. And today, 58% white. So in the latter quarter of the 20th century, you get rapid demographic change, which, of course, people notice and politicians talk about and becomes something of a political issue. There are different ways of looking at American politics. You can, or any politics for that matter, you can look at individuals, you can look at self-contained systems like assemblies,

a state or a country, or you can look at a more global view, forces that cross national lines and, you know, like international finance or whatever it may be, the economy. You know, we've talked a lot about the individuals. We've talked about the ideas. How much does this play a role in the changing politics of the nation and the Republican Party?

It plays a huge role in it, in part because in the 1980s and the 1990s, all of the legislation and the social programming of the 1960s, which conservatives had been pretty against for 20 years at that point, suddenly you're seeing the visible results of it. You're seeing many more women in the workplace. You're seeing somebody like Jesse Jackson run for president in the 1980s. You're seeing a woman on a

presidential ticket in the 1980s, you're starting to see many more immigrants from non-white countries coming to the United States. And so there is a visible shift that's happening in the U.S. that politicians and activists are happy to exploit. You see it in books like Peter Brimlow's Alien Nation in 1995, where he argues that it's gone too far, that America needs to maintain its white ethnic core. And so policies need to change to make that happen. But it also means that

The sunny side, optimistic and appealing to white people politics of the Reagan era are much more difficult for Republicans to sustain in the years that come. Somebody like Reagan could talk about diversity in this very pleasing and non-triggering way because he was still appealing to a mostly white country.

And this idea that you could kind of sprinkle in a little diversity without fundamentally changing the country was something that you could argue in the 1980s and the politicians in the 1990s are pushing back against. And so you do have just a fundamental shift in what the country looks like, how much immigration there is in the country and politics shift around that. Now, the thing that I would say is they don't necessarily have to shift in

in an exclusionary or racist direction. There are ways to build populist politics that are multiracial and that are not premised on a narrative of decline. But it is also true that those other narratives work very, very well. So the country is changing in fundamental ways. Politics was going to have to change in fundamental ways. It's very possible that Reaganism not just falls apart because of the end of the Cold War, but because the electorate is not going to look like that.

anymore after the 1980s. And so a different set of appeals would have to be made. And those changes are vitally important for understanding the last 30 years of American politics. So looking at it from all of these different perspectives brings me to the

this final question. You know, at FiveThirtyEight, we spend a lot of time looking at polling and data sets to try to make sense of what's going on in the world. But oftentimes, data alone won't let you sort of pull it all of the strands and piece together a picture of what's actually happened. You know, like the data can only tell you so much. And oftentimes it's what and not necessarily why. And it's historians job to

piece it all together in the way you have to make an argument about, you know, this is the beginning of the era. This is the end of the era. We'll debate this till the end of time. But, you know, how do you do it as a historian? What role does data play, but also what strands do you pull at beyond data?

So data certainly has a role to play as one form of evidence that historians look at. But historians are interested in a wide range of quantitative and qualitative evidence. And so that means looking at rhetoric, watching television shows. I mean, sitting down and watching Larry King Live to see what Americans were seeing when they turned on their televisions. It means reading

reading the kind of behind the scenes conversations that are happening between politicians and activists, between activists and one another, the way that people who listen to Rush Limbaugh, what they would write about what their experience was like. I mean, in a sense, historians can use just about anything as evidence. And so part of the challenge is really narrowing down what your evidence base is going to look like. And in part because the argument that I make in my book is about changes that I argue were happening in plain sight.

I was looking a lot at the public record to say, OK, what was it that Americans saw? What is it that they actually knew at the time and how were they responding to a variety of different changes? And looking at that through television, looking at that through radio, looking at that through books that were published and magazines and all of the different both ephemera, but then metaphysical.

you know, the hardcore political speeches and policy decisions that were being made in Congress. And so one of the great things about being a historian is that the world is your oyster in many ways. As long as it was in the past, you can use it as a building block for your argument.

I said that would be the last question. But as a child of the 90s, hearing the history of the 90s is a little triggering. When does history begin? I think there's like a saying that 50 years and later is history. Anything in the most recent 50 years is politics. Is history as soon as yesterday? Like when? What counts as history? So historians argue about this a lot, as you can imagine, and it's less about a fixed date.

And it's more about a historical method and the kinds of questions that historians ask. Like historians can talk about things that are happening in the news today, but they bring a different set of questions to it about how we arrived at this moment and what are some of the things in the past we can pick apart to understand how the country has changed over time, whether it's in terms of politics or media or what have you. And so it's less about a particular topic.

date that's a starting point and more about a particular mindset that historians bring when they're asking questions. Very political answer. I've got a whole lot of historians out there who are going to be weighing it. All right, let's leave it there. Thank you so much, Nicole. Thank you so much, Galen. This is great. Nicole Hemmer is the author of the new book, Partisans, the Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s.

My name is Galen Druk. Sophia Leibovitz is in the control room. Chadwick Matlin is our editorial director and Emily Vanesky is our intern. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple podcast store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening and we will see you soon.