- [Presenter] This program was funded by the following: Joni and Joe Latimer, Lynda Johnson Robb and Family, BP America.

And also by: And by: A complete list of funders is available at APTonline.org and LiveFromLBJ.org.

(rousing music) - The greatest national security threat we have right now is how poorly we are educating our kids in pre-K through 12.

- We are reinforcing democracy.

We are the ones who get to choose our future.

- Democracy is a fragile thing.

It has to be defended and it always has to be defended.

(rousing music fades) - Welcome to the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas.

I'm Mark Updegrove.

As an author, journalist, television commentator, and CEO of the LBJ Foundation, I've had the privilege of talking to some of the biggest names and best minds of our day about our nation's rich history and the pressing issues of our times.

Now we bring those conversations straight to you.

In this series, we'll explore America in all its complexity, what our extraordinary but often tempestuous history says about who we are as a people and the formidable challenges we face today.

Our guest, Nicole Hemmer, is a professor of history at Vanderbilt University.

Tonight, she'll discuss her latest book "Partisans," which examines the modern Republican party and the marked changes the GOP has undergone since the celebrated presidency of Republican icon Ronald Reagan nearly four decades ago.

Nicole Hemmer, welcome.

- Thank you so much for having me.

- Well, so much of your work has dealt with the modern Republican party and today's Republican party, to say the least, is not your father's Republican party.

But before we go into the changes, the populist strand of the Republican Party, let me talk to you about Ronald Reagan and the movement conservatism that led him to the White House.

Where does movement conservatism begin?

- Well, movement conservatism has a few different origins.

One of the really interesting things about movement conservatism is it kind of starts in opposition to World War II, which isn't where you would expect to find it, but figures like William F. Buckley Jr. who founded the National Review and a number of the people who really get this movement started cut their teeth on kind of the America First movement.

And the reason that matters is not because they keep those views.

They're going to be much more interested in military intervention in 10 or 15 years.

But they saw their opposition to intervention in World War II as something that put them outside of the American consensus.

They didn't see their views reflected in newspapers or on networks.

They didn't see their views reflected in the two major parties.

They felt like outsiders.

And that's something that's going to continue in their sort of more real origin story, which is the Cold War.

It really is Cold War conservatism, movement conservatism that it has its origins in the outbreak of the Cold War and again, the belief that neither major party represented what they wanted to do.

Even though Dwight Eisenhower, who's elected in 1952, very popular, a Republican president, they saw him as a me too liberal.

That there wasn't anyone who was a hardcore committed conservative who was gonna take the fight to the Soviets, who was gonna roll back the New Deal and the welfare state.

They didn't see any of their people out there in either of the parties so they felt shut out and they felt like it was their mission to take over one of those two parties.

- So is there one figure that emerges in the 1950s who embodies movement conservatism?

- Absolutely.

When it comes to politics, no one looms larger than Barry Goldwater.

Barry Goldwater was a senator from Arizona.

He had served in World War II.

He was very libertarian, so he wasn't quite like movement conservatives.

There were some things that they disagreed on but he was so committed to his libertarianism that he was often the odd man out.

So he might be that lone vote that's gonna vote to try to dismantle Social Security or not renew it, or who's gonna be sort of standing out on the fringes.

And they saw him and they said, "That's someone who really believes what he says, puts his money where his mouth is."

He would end up coming out against the Civil Rights Act in 1964.

And he said it's not because I agree with segregation, it's because the federal government has no role in making people more equal.

That's just not what the government should be doing.

I believe in small government.

And so Barry Goldwater becomes this person that movement conservatives really get behind, and they do it really effectively.

They put together kind of a draft Goldwater campaign in 1960 and then again in 1964.

And in 1964, they pulled together enough support for him to become the Republican Party nominee, even though he was much more conservative than most Republicans.

- And yet after this very contentious campaign where he's competing for the nomination against Nelson Rockefeller, Goldwater becomes the nominee and Lyndon Johnson trounces him with the biggest electoral mandate in the history of the country to that point so what happened in 1964 to Barry Goldwater?

- 1964 was rough.

Barry Goldwater had wanted to run for President in 1964.

He wanted to run against John Kennedy.

And after the Kennedy assassination, some of his heart went out of it.

But it was also the case that not only was he much more rightward than the Republican party, he was much more to the right than most Americans.

Americans were not ready for a Barry Goldwater to become president.

He was opposed to the New Deal and most Americans actually really liked New Deal programs like Social Security.

He could be kind of militant.

He wanted to use the military.

He talked about using nuclear weapons in war, that frightened a lot of Americans.

So he was not a man for the moment.

And he does lose pretty significantly.

Some hardcore conservatives after his loss would say, "23 million Americans can't be wrong."

The number of people who had voted for Barry Goldwater, but it definitely wasn't enough to win that election.

And he loses in the biggest landslide in modern US history.

And yet, the dust clears from this landslide loss and conservatives look around and they see that they have a big task ahead of them.

But fast forward 16 years when Ronald Reagan wins the presidency and you have conservatives who are saying, "Barry Goldwater won in 1964.

It just took 16 years to count all the votes."

- Because one of his most vocal supporters in 1964 is a middle-aged actor by the name of Ronald Reagan, who gives the Time for Choosing speech, which launches him into the political spotlight.

Talk about the evolution, the rise politically of Ronald Reagan.

- So Ronald Reagan was an actor.

He's the only president who was ever the head of a union.

He was the president of the SAG Actors Guild or the Screen Actors Guild, he was the president of SAG.

But he was very conservative.

Over the course of the 1950s when he was working as a spokesperson for General Electric, he gave himself kind of an education in politics and read a lot of conservative writers, developed a lot of conservative policy preferences and ideas.

And by 1964, this lifelong New Deal Democrat had become a Republican.

And he'd become a conservative Republican just in time 'cause Barry Goldwater wins the nomination.

Nobody seems to like Barry Goldwater that much.

He's not particularly charismatic.

And then Reagan comes in with a speech that he had been working on for years.

It was his kind of go-to stump speech for conservatism.

And he delivers it for the Goldwater campaign, half hour televised speech.

And it's the same ideas that Barry Goldwater has been espousing, but they're just put so beautifully and relatably and in a way that really draws people in.

- Now, one side in this campaign has been telling us that the issues of this election are the maintenance of peace and prosperity.

The line has been used, "We've never had it so good."

But I have an uncomfortable feeling that this prosperity isn't something on which we can base our hopes for the future.

No nation in history has ever survived a tax burden that reached a third of its national income.

Today, 37 cents out of every dollar earned in this country is the tax collector's share.

- And it not only builds Reagan's reputation as somebody with real political gifts, but it ties him to the conservative movement, not just because of all of those ideas in the speech, although that definitely would become the backbone of Ronald Reagan's career, but the fact that he went to bat for Barry Goldwater when so much of the Republican Party had abandoned him 'cause it was pretty clear Goldwater was gonna lose this race and a lot of Republicans, prominent Republicans had come out against him.

But Ronald Reagan stood by his side and that loyalty is something that conservatives remembered along with those principles.

- So is it fair to say, Nikki, that that the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 is the culmination of movement conservatism?

- Absolutely.

It takes a while, right?

I mean, 1964 is really the height of Cold War liberalism in the United States.

Johnson wins in that huge landslide and it all starts coming apart after that.

You have the Vietnam War, Johnson ultimately doesn't even run for reelection in 1968, but it wasn't predetermined, preordained what was going to fill that gap.

And it was the work that movement conservatives had been doing, the work that Ronald Reagan was doing that would lead to the conservative ascendancy that his presidency represented.

And he tries all of this out, not just in the 1964 Goldwater campaign, but when he runs for governor in California in 1966.

So he has eight years as governor of California where he is fighting against university students, where he is making the case for a more conservative politics.

He's trotting out all of the kind of political ideas that would become ascendant in the 1980s.

Concerns about crime, concerns about overspending, the need for smaller government.

He's practicing all of those ideas in California.

And so by the time 1980 rolls around, popular two term governor of California, charismatic actor, well loved by conservatives within the movement, he was set up for success.

- As you look at the presidency of Ronald Reagan, does it embody the conservatism that he had espoused?

- In some ways, yes and no.

I mean, it definitely was a conservative administration.

Reagan brings movement conservatives into the White House, gives them federal power really for the first time.

He breaks strikes, he pushes forward on deregulation.

There are some ways in which it's a very conservative administration.

At the same time, Ronald Reagan was a big tent kind of guy.

He wins these two massive landslides.

He's very popular with the electorate and that requires compromise, it requires pursuing popular policies over unpopular policies.

So when he's in office, Reagan does advance the ball for conservatives, but he also drops the ball for conservatives in a lot of ways.

There are a lot of people on the right who are pretty mad at Reagan when he's in office because they don't feel like he's taking it to the Soviets hard enough, they don't feel like he has kept his word on things like taxes.

He puts in place the biggest tax cut in history in the first year of his presidency and then he starts raising those taxes back up.

They don't feel like he's gone hard enough on abortion and school prayer.

So there's a sense among conservatives to his right that Ronald Reagan isn't conservative enough.

- But he remains enormously popular.

To your earlier point, he leaves office with an approval rating of 63%.

10 years later, his approval rating would be 71%, 10 years out of office.

And he remains to this day a Republican icon and an emblem of conservatism.

And yet, as you write, we have drifted markedly away from the Reagan conservatism of the 1980s.

Why weren't conservatives able to sustain the Reagan revolution?

- Yeah, the right has abandoned Reagan and they didn't just do it in 2016.

It's something that was happening almost as soon as Reagan left office.

Though the Reagan mythology, as you just mentioned, would grow and grow over the course of the 1990s, the 2000s.

Still today you have Republican presidential primary debates that take place at the Reagan Library with paeans to Reagan throughout.

But Ronald Reagan was fundamentally a Cold War president.

He was shaped by that kind of geopolitical conflict.

It meant that he would promote ideas of freedom and democracy in ways that had real implications for his policies.

He supported open immigration, he believed the free movement of people was part of freedom.

He embraced free markets, not all the time, but that idea that goods should be able to flow freely.

He tied those ideas and those policies to the fight against the Soviet Union in the Cold War.

We represent freedom, democracy, and openness against these closed systems of communism.

That sort of idea begins to fall apart when the Cold War comes to an end.

There isn't that same constraint that the Cold War had put on American politics.

And almost as soon as the Cold War ends, you have a group of conservatives who we now call paleo conservatives, who are absolutely rejecting Reaganism.

They're calling for protectionism, they're calling for the US to come home.

"America first" becomes the slogan of Pat Buchanan's campaign in 1992.

Again, it's this idea that the world needs to be closed, not open.

And that if particularly white people are going to maintain their power in the United States, they need to be acting in more anti-democratic ways, they need to be shutting down immigration, that America needs to be protected from change and it needs to have a strong government to do it.

- In some ways, Ronald Reagan allows for a new kind of conservative, a new movement by striking down the fairness doctrine in 1987.

What was the fairness doctrine and how did that lead to a changing media landscape?

- So the fairness doctrine was this bit of regulation that the Federal Communications Commission had put in place, I think maybe in the early 1950s.

And the idea behind it was that if you're going to be using public airwaves, you have to cover controversial issues and you have to cover them fairly.

And what that looked like varied but it was an obligation put on broadcasters in exchange for their broadcast license.

And for a lot of conservatives, this was a problem because they felt like A, basically all the media leaned to the left so there was already this bias that no one was acknowledging.

And B, that the fairness doctrine was used unfairly against conservatives.

People didn't see someone saying Social Security is a good idea as a controversial statement.

But somebody who said we should repeal Social Security, that was pretty controversial in the 1960s.

And so this conservative voice gets a fairness doctrine challenge, whereas this more liberal idea doesn't.

So conservatives did not like the fairness doctrine.

They felt it held them back.

During the Reagan administration, this was one of Reagan's priorities, to get the fairness doctrine taken away.

And by 1987, his FCC gets rid of it.

And a year later, Rush Limbaugh, his show goes national.

He becomes this juggernaut superstar of conservative talk radio.

And certainly repealing the fairness doctrine had something to do with that.

There were also some other changes in technology and in sort of business practices that made Limbaugh possible.

So it wasn't just the fairness doctrine going away.

And in fact, in 1987, 1988, a lot of conservatives by that point were in favor of the fairness doctrine.

Newt Gingrich co-sponsors legislation to put the fairness doctrine back in place because they think that they can use it to counter liberal bias.

Now they can point to CBS and say, "Well, CBS is biased towards liberalism.

There's a Republican running the FCC."

They can make that argument and use the fairness doctrine.

But at the end of the day, the regulation goes away.

There would be more deregulation in the media space in the 1990s.

And all of that helps this conservative media of the eighties and nineties to flourish.

And you start to get a conservative media ecosystem that is powerful and popular and immensely profitable.

It's a whole new player on the political scene that have become really commonplace today.

- How does this populist movement among conservatives evolve in the new millennium?

- It really takes off in the new millennium.

In the 1990s, you kind of see the seeds of it.

You see the seeds of it in some fringe spaces, like in the patriot movement and the rise of the militia movement.

You see it in some office holders, some Republicans in Congress who after the government shuts down, say, "Actually, we don't wanna open it back up."

Or who say, "Newt Gingrich, this right wing speaker who's the most conservative speaker we've ever had up to that point, no, we wanna overthrow him for someone more conservative."

That whole thing starts then too.

But as you get into the new millennium, that part of the party gets even stronger.

George W. Bush becomes president and he really models his presidency, not after his father, but after Ronald Reagan.

He goes back to a lot of those Reaganite policies.

And his party isn't with him.

I mean, they kind of stay together because of the September 11th attacks and the move to war in Bush's first term, but by Bush's second term, he is being constantly attacked by these populists on the right, particularly over the issue of immigration.

And George W. Bush had set out as one of his policy priorities to go forward on immigration reform.

But the populist right in his party had long since turned against immigration for a number of different reasons.

Some of them economic, some of them racist, and had gotten to the point where they would not brook any sort of negotiation when it came to immigration, no sort of reform when it came to immigration.

And so when Bush pushes forward on this priority in 2006, 2007, he's stopped by his own party.

And you begin to get a sense in that moment that there has been this war brewing in the party for some time, and that this populist right that would become the Tea Party, that would become the MAGA movement, that it is starting to take over.

As Bush becomes more and more popular, there's more and more space for this new right to emerge.

- And then you get another Republican candidate in Mitt Romney, who is not so much the populist conservative, but a throwback to an earlier era and then you get the rise of Donald Trump.

How do you explain the political ascendance of Donald Trump, Nikki?

- This could be a whole conversation for hours and hours because there's a lot to talk about when it comes to the rise of Donald Trump.

But I think one of the things to really zero in on is the anti-establishment mood that had settled across voters in the United States and it had been there for a while.

It was there during the Bush administration.

Americans abandoned Bush pretty heavily in his second term.

It was part of why Barack Obama got nominated and elected.

Right?

He beats a Clinton.

He's this new fresh face saying, "Well, I didn't vote for the Iraq war."

Like, "I'm different from what came before.

I'm something new, I'm something fresh."

And that was kind of the positive vibe of anti-establishment.

But that mood only deepened during the Obama administration.

And the rise of Trump, he really takes advantage of the discontent and the fractures in the Republican party.

And then of course, there's one other big elephant in the room, and that is the growth of conservative media in the intervening years.

When you're talking about the Reagan years, you have some conservative magazines, you have some conservative publishing houses, but you don't have Fox News, you don't have Rush Limbaugh, you certainly don't have right-wing blogs and websites and social media and podcasts.

Over the course of the Bush years, 2000-2008, the conservative media ecosystem explodes.

Rush Limbaugh who had dominated in the 1990s, suddenly there are dozens of right wing talk radio shows.

They're on for three hours at a time.

You have a wall-to-wall right wing radio, and starting in 1996 you have Fox News.

Which takes a while to take off but by the 2000s, Fox News is up and running.

It's the most popular cable news network in the nation.

And now you have a kind of right wing messaging system that is separate from the Republican party.

And so an insurgent wanting to take over the Republican party and who has access to this right wing megaphone really has an opportunity, certainly even before 2016 but definitely by 2016 and even at that point, right?

Fox News has been around for 20 years.

Fox is a little cool on Donald Trump but again, at that point you have all of these radio shows, you have all of these websites.

You don't even need Fox News if you have a big enough audience that you can turn into a political base.

- Donald Trump is good business.

We have seen that, hence this media ecosystem that has sprung up around him and keeping him in the public eye.

If Donald Trump or the Republicans fail to gain momentum in 2024 and to win the election, what is the future of the Republican Party?

- It's an excellent question.

I mean, try not to predict the future anymore after the past 10 years or so, when everything has been so unpredictable.

But we can say something about the trajectory of the Republican party.

You know, Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.

He did not agree that he lost and he got his party to agree that he lost.

Even after a violent insurrection at the Capitol, 147-48 Republicans went to the floor and voted to overturn the 2020 election.

The Republicans recently elected a new speaker who was at the forefront of the attempts to overturn the 2020 election.

That's the trajectory of the party.

It is moving further and further to the right.

And in moments of defeat, it does not moderate, it radicalizes.

And I think that if we are looking into the near or even medium future, if Donald Trump doesn't win, I don't think we're gonna suddenly see a sunny faced Mitt Romney-led Republican party.

I think we're going to see a party again that continues to radicalize, continues to reject the instruments of democracy and the institutions of democracy, and continues to push through both nonviolent and violent means to hold onto power.

- Why?

- I think because of a lot of the things we've been talking about, that this is a party that has been radicalizing over the past 30 years, in part due to the media that it has created, that have allowed the party and its members to cut themselves off from the feedback of reality, and in part because it's worked.

Republicans have a tremendous amount of power in a country in which they are supported by a minority of voters.

Donald Trump did not win election with a majority of voters.

Republican policies tend to be pretty unpopular.

And yet for a variety of reasons, the Supreme Court, gerrymandering, the electoral college, Republicans have been able to maintain power without maintaining a majority.

And as long as it works, I think they'll keep doing it.

- So much remains to be seen as we go into what I'm certain will be a very eventful election season.

Nicole Hemmer, thanks so much for being with us.

- It was great to be with you, Mark.

(rousing music) (rousing music continues) - [Presenter] This program was funded by the following: Joni and Joe Latimer, Lynda Johnson Robb and Family, BP America.

And also by: And by: A complete list of funders is available at APTonline.org and LiveFromLBJ.org.

(upbeat flute jingle plays) (bright chime)