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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now we conclude our six-part series, The Year Of Bill and Rudy — How 1993 Helped Give Us The World of 2023. We began this series last Friday the 30th anniversary of Bill Clinton's inauguration as president in 1993. Later that same year, Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor. We've been asking this week, why did America move left and the city move right at the same time and how did those choices help give us the world and the issues we're living with today for better and for worse? Today, we'll end the series with an addendum because truth be told, it wasn't just the year of Bill and Rudy, it was the year of Bill, Rudy, and Newt.

Many people trace to about that same time, the rise of what we now consider the radical right, the MAGA right, the Donald Trump culture war, and authoritarian right, choose your name for it. In fact, after Clinton ran on being the centrist moderate new Democrat, he wasn't even in office one month when Gingrich said this about Clinton in his speech to the CPAC, Conservative Political Action Conference.

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Newt Gingrich: Essentially, what you have is a Dukakis/McGovern administration with an Arkansas accent but the programs are, in fact, those of Dukakis/McGovern.

[end of audio playback]

Brian Lehrer: Today, they say Joe Biden is really a captive of Bernie Sanders and AOC. Back then the scary liberal boogeymen were George McGovern and Michael Dukakis. In that speech, not even a month into Clinton's presidency, Gingrich attacked Clinton's health and human services secretary Dr. Donna Shalala with a culture war premise that sounded like this as he hailed the superiority of American culture as he defined it.

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Newt Gingrich: It is, in fact, the most powerful civilization in history if you measure by human opportunity, human choice, and human achievement. I look forward to the day that Dr. Shalala is prepared to debate me in Tehran on whether Iranian or American civilization is better for women. It will be an exciting moment for the multiculturalism.

[applause]

[end of audio playback]

Brian Lehrer: With a big cheer, it was game on between Gingrich, who was the number 2 Republican House member at the time, he'd later go on to be speaker and the new Democratic president. Let's discuss. We have two very special guests who have written books on exactly this topic. Nicole Hemmer, Vanderbilt University historian and author of a new book called Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries who Remade American Politics in the 1990s.

We also have Steve Kornacki, who you may know best is MSNBC's election season numbers geek showing us all the moving parts on electoral maps, votes, and congressional districts and precincts reporting their votes early and later from neighborhoods within those electoral districts, it gets that granular. Steve Kornacki released a book in 2018, called The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism. How exciting we get to hear Nicole Hemmer and Steve Kornacki compare notes. Nicole and Steve, great to have both of you on the show. Again, welcome back to WNYC.

Nicole Hemmer: Wonderful.

Steve Kornacki: Glad to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Nicole, let me interrogate the premise a little first, did the Republican Party really lurch to the right all of a sudden in the 1990s, or were Gingrich and Pat Buchanan, who we'll also talk about and all of them just continuing on a curve established by President Ronald Reagan in the '80s, who we could argue was a primary race and culture war figure his whole time in office?

Nicole Hemmer: If we take a longer view, it is true that the Republican Party had been moving to the right for decades but there had been a particular strain in the conservative movement, particularly in the 1970s. This new right that identified with divisive cultural issues, opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, opposition to feminism, opposition to affirmative action, and to immigration, and they are emerging in the 1970s, actually in opposition to Ronald Reagan.

They thought that Ronald Reagan was too willing to compromise, that he was too willing to put his popularity ahead of conservative politics. They're really emerging in the 1990s coming out from under the shadow of the Reagan years with the intention to move the party significantly more to the right than it had been in the 1980s.

Brian Lehrer: Steve, same question, how much of a break from Ronald Reagan how much of just the next phase?

Steve Kornacki: I think that the next phase that you see coming to the focus in the 1990s is the nationalization of politics. I think that's the thing that Gingrich anticipated that he saw coming, that he saw an opportunity in the 1990s. He found the fulfillment of his mission in 1994. What Gingrich basically saw in the American political landscape when he started out, which is back in the 1970s was two parties that each lacked clear ideological definition. If you think back to those days, we're going back 40, 50 years now. You had genuinely conservative Southern Democrats who would have been to the right of many of the Republicans in Congress.

You had general genuinely liberal, northern Republicans who would have been to the left of many Democratic members of Congress. What Gingrich basically believed was that as a conservative, small government, anti-tax, individual freedom, these sorts of things define the Republican Party around those themes, define the Democratic Party as the party of as he would call it liberal welfare state collectivism. It's the themes you were touching on there and the clips that you played. What Gingrich saw was that media was changing and media was nationalizing and the rise of cable television was a big part of this. The rise of talk radio was a big part of this.

Essentially, what he envisioned was people voting in each of these 435 congressional districts around the country, not based on the local concerns, and whether the Congressman brought home the bacon or the money for the bridge or whatever, but voting on those big national themes, clear distinctions between the two parties. He spent 15 years trying to drive and create those distinctions and I think in the 1990s, with Clinton coming in in '93, he had the class you've been waiting for.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Nicole, a phrase we associate with Trump, America first, was used by isolationists who didn't want us to get into World War II long ago but you also point out in your book that the culture warrior Pat Buchanan used it, he primary President Bush from the right in the 1992 elections that contributed to Bush losing to Clinton. Here's Buchanan's most iconic moment along those lines from the 1992 Republican convention.

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Pat Buchanan: There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself but this war is for the soul of America. In that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton and Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side.

[cheering]

[end of audio playback]

Brian Lehrer: That was after he lost the primary battle, and was trying to make sure George Bush did get elected, which he didn't. There's the one everybody knows that clip, you've probably heard that before almost no matter what age you are. As another direct link to politics today, Buchanan also said this starting with a reference to the Democratic convention that same summer.

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Pat Buchanan: Like many of you last month, I watched that giant masquerade ball up at Madison Square Garden where 20,000, liberals and radicals came dressed up as moderates and centrists in the greatest single exhibition of cross-dressing in American political history. Militant leader of the homosexual rights movement could rise at that same convention and say, Bill Clinton and Algore represent the most pro-lesbian and pro-gay ticket in history and so they do.

[end of audio playback]

Brian Lehrer: A little hate speech from the podium with arousing affirmation from the crowd. Nicole, why don't you talk about Pat Buchanan's influence, or maybe more accurately what part of the American people he represented? I think you put this in the context of a political void that was left on the right when the Cold War ended just before then in your book.

Nicole Hemmer: That's right. You can't imagine somebody like Pat Buchanan sounding like he does in 1992 during the Cold War. In fact, during the Cold War, you have Pat Buchanan, who is talking about the value of undocumented immigrants and how hard they work, and how important it is for the United States to be engaged in the world for the Cold War. When the Cold War ends, Pat Buchanan is unleashed. He starts to talk about how now that we've defeated communism, we now need to look at home and talk about the real flaws in democracy as a political system. He is somebody who is playing around on the edges of the liberal right.

He's also somebody who understands that, in some ways, the two parties are in agreement on certain issues that the American public or at least parts of the right disagree with. In 1992, one of the big issues was the North America Free Trade Agreement. This was something that Republicans had worked on under Bush that Bill Clinton would signed into law, and so he was an anti-NAFTA candidate.

As you heard in his speech, he was also someone who believed that the way that you won elections was not with a kind of sunny, optimistic morning in America kind of message, but through very divisive, polarizing politics. You put on the front burner, the kinds of political issues that got people angry, got people fearful, and you put those at the heart of your politics, and then you point it to the other party and you said, "By the way, they're to blame."

Even if they sound moderate, even if they sound like they're connecting with you if they're empathetic, something that Clinton was very good at. They are, in fact, the source of all of these dangers in our culture, and so don't just need to be defeated in elections but need to be defeated as a force in American life.

Brian Lehrer: Is there any evidence that Donald Trump was listening to and studying Pat Buchanan at that time, because everything you just described applies in spades to Donald Trump today, right?

Nicole Hemmer: Oh, it absolutely does. Now, he wasn't necessarily-- He's never been a student of politics in that sense. He was somebody who was paying attention to the emergence of independent politics in the 1990s. Many listeners may know that, in 2000, he runs against Pat Buchanan or considers running against Pat Buchanan for the nomination of the Reform Party, which was Ross Perot's party that comes out of the 1992 and 1996 campaigns. He is involved. He's aware. He's watching politics.

I don't know that he was consciously modeling himself after Pat Buchanan. In 2000, he was out there pointing out Pat Buchanan's racism, and the hatefulness of the Buchanan campaigns. By the time you see Donald Trump in 2015, he has enough people around him who are working in that Buchanan mold. That's very much where Trump ends up.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. One more follow-up on this before we bring in some callers and bring Steve back into it and play some more clips. There was no Fox News yet, then. Steve referred a few minutes ago to the rise of cable television as a factor in Gingrich's strategy of nationalizing politics. You in your book, blame mainstream media networks, particularly CNN and PBS, for elevating Pat Buchanan and his culture war mobilization. How so?

Nicole Hemmer: Oh, so there was this real switch in news coverage and news commentary starting in the 1970s, where there was an emphasis on having a balance between left and right, that you would have somebody from the left and somebody from the right fighting it out. This became particularly true in the 1980s. In 1982, CNN launches Crossfire with Pat Buchanan representing the right, and PBS launches the McLaughlin Group, which is a roundtable that featured Pat Buchanan, for much of its early history.

There is this way that Pat Buchanan is being elevated as an avatar of the right, as a voice of the right, through media that aren't ostensibly or overtly conservative. This is something that would continue into the 1990s. In 1996, both MSNBC and Fox News launch. One of the things that they're focused on is developing the talent of conservative pundits. People like Laura Ingraham who gets her start on MSNBC, or Ann Coulter. There really is a way that outlets that we don't think of as conservative, were responsible for shaping conservative punditry in the 1980s and 1990s.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, your questions are welcome, as our one last shot at some oral history recollections as we talk about the rise of the radical right in today's political tribalism with Nicole Hemmer and Steve Kornacki, who've written books about the subject, in this final installment of our series, The Year Of Bill and Rudy — How 1993 Helped Give Us The World of 2023. Who wants to remember something from back then, or ask our guests the question?

Their books are called The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism, that's Steve Kornacki's book, and Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries who Remade American Politics in the 1990s. That's the new book by Nicole Hemmer. 212-433-WNYC, or tweet @BrianLehrer, and we'll continue with them and you and more clips right after this.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC with the sixth and final part of our series, The Year Of Bill and Rudy — How 1993 Helped Give Us The World of 2023. 212-433-WNYC, if you want to get in, 212-433-969692 with MSNBC Steve Kornacki, who wrote the book, The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism, and Vanderbilt University's Nicole Hemmer author of p Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries who Remade American Politics in the 1990s.

Steve, just as America loves watching you in front of your election night maps on TV, you address the geography of the political tribalism that solidified in the 90s in your book. Here's another Gingrich example of that, from that same February 1993, CPAC speech. You'll hear the subtext for sure, as he's criticizing a Clinton spending package.

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Newt Gingrich: In that package as part of his thoughtful reinventing government stimulus is a $28 million check to the government of the District of Columbia, a government peculiarly unworthy of that check, even by the standards of big cities, [unintelligible 00:15:58], Detroit, and Philadelphia, these places that you really shouldn't send more money to because it just tempts them.

[end of audio playback]

Brian Lehrer: Don't give money to DC, Philadelphia, and Detroit it just tempts them. Anti-urbanism with a thinly veiled anti-Blackness, I think it's fair to say, reminiscent of Trump's big lie, claiming with no evidence at all the fraud was in Detroit and Philadelphia, those same cities in states that he wanted to claim. Steve?

Steve Kornacki: Yes, I think the context there, 30 years ago, one thing you have to remember is the centrality of violent crime in American politics. You can find polls from 1993 and 1994. This, obviously, in your series here is true in New York City with the Dinkins/Giuliani race, or for that matter, Mario Cuomo losing the governorship in 1994 when George Pataki ran on the death penalty. The potency of crime as a political issue in the early 1990s, I think really reached its peak. Then that's when the crime rate suddenly started dropping, and then the politics evolved over the next generation.

What was happening in the early 1990s was there was an appeal there in that Gingrich speech and just more broadly in the Republican messaging in the 1994 elections, around crime around theaters, particularly among suburbanites about rising crime in and around cities. Republicans, one of the key reasons for their success in the '94 midterms was strength in the suburbs. Republicans at that point had traditionally done well in the suburbs. They did extremely well in the suburbs in 1994. There was also a theme, again, this is a bit lost history, but I mean, it's part of what you've talked about in the series of even some urban areas moving to the right in '93 and '94.

Not only did you have Giuliani winning in New York City, you had Richard Riordan, the Republican winning the mayoralty in Los Angeles, you had just across the Hudson River here in New York, you had Bret Schundler, a conservative Republican, who had won glowing praise from William F. Buckley winning the mayoralty in Jersey City. You had Republicans having some success in urban areas as well. Again, they were stressing heavily the issue of crime at that point.

What ended up happening long term in big picture was that when Republicans got power, when Gingrich and the Republicans got power in the house in 1984, first time in 40 years, it presented to America, a new face of the Republican Party, much more southern, much more evangelical infused, much more culture where you're getting into this. Gingrich himself was obviously the face of it, and it created a reaction in those suburbs I'm talking about, and you start to see that reaction against the Republican Party on cultural grounds, you start to see it as early as the 1996 election when Bill Clinton gets reelected.

Clinton's margin over dole in '96 is not much different than his margin over Bush senior in '92. The contours of the Clinton coalition changed between '92 and '96. He makes his biggest gains in places like New Jersey, places like the Chicago suburbs, places like Fairfield County, Connecticut suburbs, and it starts this trend that I think has reached its peak, maybe a generation later, where the suburbs all across the country, have just been on this journey from where they were once on pocketbook issues, Republican core areas to now on cultural grounds. They are overwhelmingly and often, in many cases, Democratic. I think it's on cultural grounds. I think that was the start of it, was the rise of the Gingrich style Republican in the mid-'90s.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, though, we certainly saw the New York suburbs head back Republican in this last election over the issue of crime. It's almost like a pendulum is swinging as you're describing it, that Gingrich went after the suburbs by playing on fear of urban crime and won them for a while. The culture, war radicalism of the Republicans alienated a lot of white suburbanites. They've gradually swung back Democratic. They're in play a little more now, again, because of crime these days. When we talk about white suburban swing voters that's part of the way that the politics of 1993 have given us the politics of 2023. Yes?

Steve Kornacki: Yes. You're giving the example of New York. New York in some ways was an outlier nationally. What you're describing, especially on Long Island, and especially up in the Hudson Valley, was very reminiscent of the 1990s. It didn't translate to a lot of other suburban areas around the country. One of the reasons the Democrats came so close to defying history and hanging onto the house was they did maintain that strength in so many other suburban areas across the country.

I would attribute that strength that the Democrats had in those other suburban areas to the lingering presence of Donald Trump to January 6th to this summer's January 6th, or I think that played a big role in it, but it is interesting to me, the reason the Democrats ultimately fell short of holding onto the house. New York had a huge role in that. The other place that had a significant role in that, I think not coincidentally was California.

In fact, the 218th seat that we called, that officially gave Republicans the majority in the house in 2022, was a district based entirely in Los Angeles County, California. It's the far reaches of Los Angeles County. It's basically the suburbs in the excerpts of the city of Los Angeles. I think it's a similar story to what you talk about in New York where crime, quality of life, issues in Los Angeles and the immediate Los Angeles area had a backlash effect on Democrats in the outlying areas of Los Angeles County. It was a district Democrats believed they could win and Republicans held it easily, and I think on crime quality of life issues.

Brian Lehrer: In the sixth and final part of our series, The Year Of Bill and Rudy — How 1993 Helped Give Us The World of 2023 with Steve Kornacki and Nicole Hemmer, who've written books on The Rise of the Radical Right and of political tribalism from that era. Edson in Manhattan is calling in with a little oral history, I think. Hi, Edson. You're on WNYC.

Edson: Hey, Brian, thanks for taking my call. I'm from Brazil and I remember the time, the lessons that I learned over a year, and during the conversation that you guys had yesterday, I think you guys forgot to mention that. I think my view, one of the reasons that Dinkins lost the mayoral to Giuliani was the Crown Heights riots. I know that you're familiar. Remember the Jewish motorcade accidentally killed the little kid, and then the Jewish community blame Mayor Dinkins for the riots that I think went on for three or four days in also--

Brian Lehrer: I'm sorry, we did touch on that. Go ahead.

Edson: Yes. Okay, cool. Also, was interesting during the '90s the radicalization of the right, remember the Oklahoma bombing also that happened over there. McVeigh, I think he set up the bomb over there, so was very interesting moment during the '90s.

Brian Lehrer: Edson, thank you very much. Sure enough, Nicole, by 1995, we have the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building by Timothy McVeigh. The caller is absolutely right. 168 people killed including 19 children. I was looking at FBI stats on that bombing just this morning. In preparation for this 300 buildings in Downtown Oklahoma City, Oklahoma City were damaged. Can you draw a line from Gingrich/Buchanan rhetoric to that act of domestic terrorism? From that to the Proud Boys and Oath keepers of today.

Nicole Hemmer: Certainly, there has been an interrelationship between a radicalization in politics and a radicalization in extremist violence. We saw the growth of extremist violence in the US starting in the late 1980s and into the 1990s. There was a moment around the federal government actions in Ruby Ridge and Waco in the early 1990s that led to even more organizing among militias and the connection with elected politicians and the Gingrich Coalition comes in the form of representatives like Helen Chenoweth who was a representative from Idaho.

Ruby Ridge was in her district, and there were some representatives who saw militia members as a key component of their base and were running a politics that fed into the fears and the politics of those militias, whether it was around absolute access to weapons war and to guns. Whether it was about spreading conspiracy theories about the UN and the federal government taking over national parks or invading land out west, this was something that politicians played into.

It wouldn't necessarily be a direct line between say, Newt Gingrich and Timothy McVeigh but they were part of a kind of radicalization that was happening in both politics and culture at the time that the Republican Party, frankly, wasn't careful enough about helping to tamp down as the Republican Party is growing closer, for instance, to the National Rifle Association. You see the head of the NRA at that time talking about federal agents as Jack booted government thugs right before the Oklahoma City bombing. Playing into the same language, the same paranoia, the same fears that would, ultimately, lead to the Oklahoma City bombing.

Brian Lehrer: Now we have some members of the New House Republican Majority talking about abolishing the alcohol, tobacco, and Firearms Bureau of the federal government altogether. Maybe another straight line from the '90s to today. Lou in Staten Island, you're on WNYC. Hi, Lou.

Lou: Good morning, Brian. Thanks for taking my call and continue on our [unintelligible 00:26:34]. The radicalization of the party also started with both Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Buchanan, I thought, in my view, because I listened to their speeches in the '90s, these men were very unsophisticated hustlers. What they were doing was just playing on emotional poor white people in this country who thought they had lost something.

Starting with the Reagan years when manufacturing jobs were taken out of this country and people lost their job because they didn't have the [unintelligible 00:27:05]. Mr. Gingrich, [unintelligible 00:27:08] this guy was a insignificant community college instructor who failed twice in Georgia to win that seat. For the third time, he decided what to do was to pick Americans against Americans. If a Democrat was speaking, you turn your back to them.

If it says something to you, you spit on them and don't cooperate with them. Don't stay in the room with them. Don't do anything with them. The problem with that is that in a democracy, you need to talk to one another from the opposition so that you can come to a compromise and move forward with education, with healthcare, with infrastructure, but this man made it his business to make sure that the people of this country went against one another. This is what happened to these kind of people, they fall back into insignificance because their agendas doesn't last, it doesn't amount too much. They just benefit themselves. This is what I think is leading to this.

The whole thing, we can bring it back to the Reagan year when his administration made it possible for manufacturers to take their businesses overseas, thereby they don't have to pay for healthcare, no minimum wage, no environmental laws, but the poor people who didn't understand the whole dynamics were the one who were the victim and who were easy prey to this rhetoric.

This is what we're seeing. Look at what happened recently in Long Island. They voted for a person that they didn't even know his existence. How was that possible? This is supposed to be intelligent white people in a little white community. They vote for somewhere they don't know. This is what happened when you play on the emotional people.

Brian Lehrer: Lou, thank you. I'm going to leave it there as we're starting to run out of time in the segment. Let me follow up on two things that Lou brought up and then we're going to run out of time. He reminds us that Newt Gingrich was a community college professor before he got elected to Congress and Gingrich while portraying himself as a populist, was also portraying himself as an intellectual.

He would talk about how he had a PhD in European history and really presented himself as a policy intellectual. Yet, here's one last Gingrich clip from that speech in February '93, and again, less than one month into the Clinton administration. As he punched down status-wise, if we can call it that, in the clip where he knocked the cities, he punches up here as he criticizes an automated message that you would get when calling a White House comments line.

[start of audio playback]

Newt Gingrich: When you punch one, that the Harvard and Yale academics that they've hired have predetermined for you what your series of optional choices are about what you want to tell the president.

[end of audio playback]

Brian Lehrer: Steve, here's the guy who is a community college professor who portrays himself as an intellectual, a policy intellectual, and yet, part of the ways that I guess he's building a populist base is to criticize the Clinton administration for having Harvard and Yale policy advisors.

Steve Kornacki: Well, yes, I think that was always core to Gingrich's vision of politics. I think the idea of, he'll call himself a populist and he always had this vision of, well, Nixon called it the silent majority, that there was a majority of Americans that existed who felt looked down upon by folks who ran major government agencies who had Harvard degrees, Yale degrees and he felt that there was a disconnect between the values of that elite.

He would talk about the elite media all the time. He would always describe the media, not as the media but as the elite media. He always thought that there was a vast disconnect between the values of the elite media, the elites in general, and what, again, that Nixon term, the silent majority and I think a foundational election for Gingrich was the 1972 presidential election and that's when Nixon beat George McGovern, remember the left mobilized in the 72 Democratic primaries and got certainly the most liberal candidate of modern history nominated in 1972 and McGovern lost every state but Massachusetts.

What Gingrich really believed was that you could create that contrast in voters' minds of a silent majority versus a McGovern left. If you could create that contrast in voters' minds, that's the difference between Democrats and Republicans and he believed that would be the foundation for a long-term permanent Republican majority. I think that's what animated all of his tactical decisions through his political career. What it ended up doing, I think, was creating essentially a 50/50 nation. I think he miscalculated, he was right. If you nationalized politics, people would separate into what we now call red and blue tribes. He thought it would break 60/40. It actually broke 50/50, I would say.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, we just have a minute left. Last question, later in '93, Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor of New York. He was not seen as MAGA insane then as he is now by many people, though he was very racially polarizing by design and belief. Nicole, does Rudy Giuliani's election during Clinton's first year or anything about Rudy as mayor come up in your book?

Nicole Hemmer: The one thing that comes up about Rudy Giuliani in my book is actually the role that he played in helping to advance the conservative media ecosystem which is he pulled strings behind the scenes in order to get Fox News to air in New York City which was a vast audience that it needed in order to succeed and then that was the launching pad for Fox News to succeed in later years. That's his one Cameo.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Steve, 20 seconds. Is there a Rudy Cameo in your book?

Steve Kornacki: Yes, well, the Rudy in my book is the one who 1994 turns around and endorses Mario Cuomo for reelection as governor of New York. Remember, he had a big feud with Al D'Amato and Al D'Amato was Pataki's guy and they're the Rudy of the mid-'90s, certainly, had that image of tough on crime but he also played up social liberalism and was not seen nationally by Republicans as certainly what he would be in the Trump years.

Brian Lehrer: That concludes our series, The Year Of Bill and Rudy — How 1993 Helped Give Us The World of 2023. Hope you enjoyed and learned things from it, everybody. We thank all of you who called all week, with oral histories and we thank our final guests, Nicole Hemmer, author of Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries who Remade American Politics in the 1990s, that's her new book, and Steve Kornacki, author of 2018's The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism. Thanks so much to both of you.

Nicole Hemmer: Thanks, Brian.

Steve Kornacki: Thank you.

 

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