47. Season IV, Episode I: Partisans

It’s finally here: the first episode of Conversations, Season 4 of The Past, The Promise, The Presidency! As you may have learned from previous seasons, when we at the Center for Presidential History talk about “presidential history,” we’re thinking deep and wide. And our conversations this season will be no different. The postal system, Mormons, the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, Charlie Brown: you’ll hear about all of them as presidential history this season!

But this week, we’re diving straight into a topic that obviously intersects with the presidency: partisan politics. Since independence, the U.S. has seen a host of political parties. Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans, Whigs, Democrats, Anti-Masons, Populists, and more. Throughout those same decades, intra-party politics have undergone their own changes, and the Republican Party of the last three decades is no exception.

This episode, we are exploring the rise of the new Republican conservatism beginning in the 1990s and tracing its evolution through the Trump presidency to today. And we’re doing that with one of the premier historians of the era: Dr. Nicole Hemmer. Hemmer is a historian and Director of the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Center for the Study of the Presidency at Vanderbilt University. She specializes in the history of American media, conservatism, and the presidency, and explores all of these topics and more in her book Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s.

Guest:

Nicole Hemmer is an author, historian, director, and professor. Along with her work for CNN, she has contributed frequently to the Washington Post, New York Times, US News & World Report, Vox, and The Age in Melbourne, Australia.

Nicole Hemmer is associate professor of history and director of the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Center for the Study of the Presidency at Vanderbilt University. She is a columnist at CNN, and hosts the podcasts Past Present and This Day in Esoteric Political History. In 2017, she co-founded Made by History, the historical analysis section of the Washington Post, where she was an editor until 2020.

She is the author of books Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics and Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s. She also hosts podcasts Past Present and This Day in Esoteric Political History, and contributed to Barry Goldwater and the Remaking of the American Political Landscape, Media Nation: The Political History of News in Modern America, A Field Guide to White Supremacy, and The Presidency of Donald Trump: A First Historical Assessment.

Follow her on Twitter @pastpunditry and check out her website pastpundit.