Nicole Hemmer: When the Line between Politics and Entertainment Disappeared

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Welcome to the Bulwark podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes. Well, I really wanna give a shout out to Amanda Carpenter for filling in for me on Mondays. If you have not yet checked it out, she gave a preview of a solo podcast that I certainly hope she’s gonna make a regular feature. Here on the bowler, need to know.

For those of you who have been listening to us, you know what we generally do on this podcast. But just a quick reminder, We do this every single day and we try to have the most interesting guests in in the country. So in the last few days, we’ve had Tom Nichols, we’ve had The Washington Post columnist, Philip Bump, Jonathan Martin from The New York Times, Dana Mill Bank from the Washington Post again has a new book out. Peter Weiner. In the last couple of weeks, we’ve also talked with Edmund James DeRidus, former high commander Ed Nato, Andrew Weisman, former DOJ official, one of the top officials in the Mueller investigation.

We’ve also been joined by Adam Kinzinger by Michael Steele, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, and by the Atlantic’s Mark Lebovitch, who also has new bookout. And on today’s program, I cannot believe that this is her first appearance on the podcast because we’ve talked about her work for it feels like many years now. Nicole Hammer is a political historian at Vanderbilt University who specializes in media conservatism and the far right and she has a new book, partisans, the conservative revolutionaries who remade American politics in the nineteen 90s. So first of all, good morning, Nicole.

Good morning. I’m so glad to be here. So

I’m reading the title of this book, conservative revolutionaries. That’s an oxymoron. Isn’t it? Isn’t it supposed to be an I mean, conservatives is supposed to be the opposite of revolutionaries.

Yes. It’s supposed to be an oxymoron, but there was actually really a movement in the nineteen seventies and the nineteen eighties for conservatives to take on a more radical approach to politics. And by the nineteen nineties, that kind of radicalism, that idea that you needed to remake the government, overthrow the current order in the United States, that became a pretty key part of right wing politics in the US. And

you’ve also traced the role of conservative media, which, of course, is one of my interests as well, having been part of it and and a theme of of this podcast. You know, every once in a while people will say, you know, you guys focus too much on the media. Shouldn’t you be talking more about politics? But I would argue I think you might agree that you cannot understand the current political moment. Or the rearrangement of right wing politics without understanding the central role that right wing media has played in the past for decades and continues to play now.

That’s basically that’s basically one of the arguments you have made in several books now. Correct?

Yes. That’s absolutely right. That even outside of right wing media, because we are a democracy, our media environment is a core part of our political environment that you can’t be separated from one another. Media and politics go hand in hand. And I think sometimes people think of media as ephemeral or too cultural and not really about hard politics.

But you can’t make sense of what policies get put in place or how voters make their choices without understanding the media environment that they and politicians are sort of soaked in.

So was there a moment at which the entertainment wing of the Republican Party became dominant. When when the Republican Party basically became a creature of of its entertainment wing rather than the the other way around because I still remember when it used to be kind of a talking point on the left, the well, conservative media gets its talking points from the RNC And after I got to roll your eyes, like, no, I think it’s the other way around now. What was the the tipping point do you think?

I actually think that this it’s a longer process, but the the nineteen nineties really were an important turning point. And I point to one example from nineteen ninety two when George h w Bush was running for president, and he’s so worried about the challenge that he had faced from Pat Buchanan, the challenge that he was facing from Ross Perot, that he calls up Roger Ailes, who was the producer at the time for rush limbaugh’s television show, and Rush Limbaugh was such a huge figure in the early nineteen nineties and invites him to stay overnight in the Lincoln bedroom at the White House George H. W. Bush carries rush limbaugh’s bags. It’s a story that limbaugh tells over and over and over and over and over.

Like, weekly on his radio show. But that’s a really important moment. You know, you have advisers to Bush saying, you need to sound more like rush limbaugh. And then you have a leader of the Republicans in congress, New Gingrich. Who is really focused on rhetoric and words and media.

He throws open in nineteen ninety five when he becomes speaker of the house, the doors of the capital, to radio show hosts all across the country so that they can amplify the message. And I think that that’s still, in English, trying to manipulate these different factions, but you can already sense that something is changing. And by the end of the nineteen nineties, not only do you have magazines like the American spectator that are setting the conspiracy framework around the Clinton administration, but you have a whole new perfusion of right wing radio hosts. And that really is a moment throw in Fox News and you suddenly have an entertainment complex large enough to start dictating to the Republican party.

Yeah. Another frequently told story, of course, is that affluent Republicans shocked the world and took control of congress back in nineteen ninety four. One of the first things they did when they had their initial caucuses in in early nineteen ninety five, they brought rush Lumber in to speak to the freshman class. Right? I mean, so it was it was this acknowledgment that in many ways, they were already a creature of conservative talk radio.

Absolutely. They give a Rush Limbaugh a pin and a title calling him the majority maker, and they turned to him for advice for what they should do in this new congress. And one of the things he says is that you do not waiver. If new Cambridge wavers on his promises, if he doesn’t stay a hard line conservative, than I’m coming after him. And that threat was well understood by Gingrich and the other members.

Of the Republican caucus going into to the new congress. Well,

I’m sorry to say that I have a picture here of a much younger person with with much darker hair of me sitting with New Gingrich in nineteen ninety five where he was appearing on my conservative radio talk show host and that was a long time So but I do think that that was one of the turning points. Okay. I wanna take a quick digression. Let’s run the tape forward to where we’re at now. And It may not be a direct line here, but I was, over the weekend, was watching some videotapes of something that happened at a school board meeting down in in Texas.

This is the Grapevine ColliBuilt School District. It is then that’s between Dallas and Fort Worth. I’m not all that familiar with with the geography down there. But the school board was voting on a set of policies that would limit how teachers talk about race, gender, sexuality, it would affect, you know, which bathrooms, transgender students could use, would give trustees greater say over what books are available in the schools they would be banning. You know, certain kinds of books that would talk about gender fluidity.

It would affect the ability of transgender students to participate in athletics. So it was a whole package of things that were being pushed through by this school board. And they had a hearing the other day. And I think, you know, hundreds of people showed up, and Speaker number one hundred and twenty, I think, comes up to the podium. Big guy wearing a baseball cap.

And a red t shirt. And this is this is an excerpt from his his his comments to the school board. Let’s just play that.

Yeah. Thank you, Shannon Casey, Timmy, Kathy. Keep running, baby. Do it. And press simple truths.

There’s only two genders. And boys who go to boys rooms, girls who go to girls,

restrooms.

And guess what? Teacher should be forced to use your freaking made up fancy pronouns. Bye bye halo. Home align gets the LGBT mafia and her dankido pants. Keep waiting.

You know what? Keep waiting. Thank you. Keep the monkey pox. How’s that working?

Monkey. That keep running so much. We’ll keep coming. You know what? We’re gonna keep coming so hard.

The only thing these both hearts gotta figure out and we can tell their face back, forty five. Wow. It’s all. Thank you.

Wow. Yes. I only got about half that, but, you know, it it did strike me that these moments really are creations of a entertainment, talk radio, right wing media universe that that if you spend enough time, you you might have picked up some of those code words. You might have picked up that that whole theatrical entertainment element of just throwing stuff up against the wall. This is a guy who was marinated in this world for a very long time.

And it really affects in order to understand how all of this plays out in the real world you you can’t separate the two phenomena, can you?

None of what he just said would make sense unless you had tapped into kind of the Okay, groomer stuff that’s been talked about, the pedophile conspiracies, but also deeply anti gay squeeze, the monkeypox references. But also, Charlie, the profanity of it Like at the end there, he’s making some pretty graphic sexual references and it’s It really isn’t until you have a more robust entertainment oriented conservative media that that kind of over the top offensiveness gets rewarded and gets popularized in the way that you just hear it in in that clip. This is not what firing line with William f Buckley sounded like.

Right. See, that’s the point. But I think Tom Nichols has made this point that for a lot of Americans now they’ve become engaged these issues and it is a form of entertainment and it is a form of theater. And that again is is part of the process that we’re seeing. Okay.

So let’s go back to the nineteen eighties and the nineteen nineties because you make a very interesting point. Next, I’m reading a review of your book that says your book is an exploration of how and why Reagan is. Which in the nineteen eighties seemed to be the future, not only of the conservative movement, but of US politics more broadly, collapse so quickly. Now this may come as a counterintuitive point because a lot of people think, well, what we’re experiencing now is a direct line from Reaganism But you would argue that Reaganism collapsed under the weight of this new culture. Talk to me about that.

Sure. So one of the things that I think because Reagan loom so large, mythologically, on the right. And in American politics more broadly, we forget the real Reagan, the Reagan who was very much a product of the cold war and whose politics were fundamentally shaped by the cold war. The the sort of appeals that he makes to freedom and democracy are about combating the Soviet Union. And so he embraces things like free markets and open immigration.

He proposes something in his nineteen eighty campaign that’s very similar to the North American free trade agreement or NAFTA. And he has a kind of sunny optimism that he brings to his politics, not every corner of his politics. But he really did believe in this kind of upbeat, big tent conservatism. And by the time you get to the nineteen nineties, you’re dealing with something very different. The cold war has ended, and so you have people like Pat Buchanan who is a perennial presidential candidate coming forward and saying, actually, I’m not sure that democracy is necessarily the best way to run this country.

You have a politics that becomes almost instantaneously meaner and more media oriented. And you begin to see the rise of A Reagan critical conservatism that takes a while to really take hold. I don’t I don’t wanna suggest that Reagan isn’t in the DNA. Of contemporary conservatism. But this much more media based democracy skeptical America first conservatism is getting underway in the 90s in a way that I don’t think we’ve fully appreciated until now.

Okay. Two points. I mean, number one, you could argue at least on the surface Ronald Reagan also came from the entertainment wing of the party. He was an actor. He was a movie actor.

Mhmm. So how was that different from now seeing the influence of other entertainers in the party. Also, Pat Buchanan was a Reaganite. He worked in the Reagan White House. A lot of people see him is continuity of Reagan, but you would argue he’s a break.

So I I thrown two questions at you there.

No. They’re both great questions too. Reagan was came up through a kind of older media. He comes up through the Hollywood system, through network television, a few of his scripted radio shows in the late nineteen seventies, but he also sort of laundered his celebrity and his media background through politics. Right?

He runs for governor of California. He governs there for eight years to build up his political bona fide. Somebody like Pat Buchanan who, yes, absolutely. In the nineteen eighties, he was sometimes critical of Reagan, but he he joins the Reagan team in nineteen eighty five. But he quickly recognizes, in his words, that the greatest political vacuum in American politics is to the right of Ronald Reagan.

He initially wants to run-in the nineteen eighty eight race against George h w Bush, but he very quick figures out that Reagan still looms way too large. You can’t run against Reagan as a Republican in nineteen eighty eight. Four years later, you can because George h w Bush, who continued quite a number of Reagan’s policies, becomes the whipping boy of the right. And so Buchanan is able to run the same kind of political campaign he imagined in nineteen eighty eight, in nineteen ninety two. And he is also a media person.

He’s somebody who hasn’t necessarily laundered his his media through elected office. He’s somebody who people know because of his appearances as host of CNN’s crossfire and of PBS’s The McLaughlin Group. That’s his platform for running for president. And that is, I think, different from Reagan who had that experience as governor.

So in your introduction to your book, you write about watching Trump, accepting the nomination in twenty sixteen in Cleveland, and and you write party’s transformation, sudden though it seemed had been underway for a quarter century in the term toward nativism and moreover racism and the criticisms of conservative elites. In the weariness about free trade and democracy in the sharp elbowed, fact light, pondetry, and none of it had happened behind the scenes. None of it was was hidden It was all out there in plain sight, but as you point out too many people were too attached to the idea of the party of Reagan to notice how fundamentally conservative politics had changed. And I I’m gonna put myself in that category that I did not fully understand that transformation, how deep it ran. I mean, Look, we all saw a Pat Buchanan.

We knew those people were out there. We never thought we, me, didn’t think they would ever become dominant. But they saw something the lot of Republicans did not see. Right?

That’s right. And that’s I mean, I think that the the nativism is a good place to look in in nineteen ninety four, of course, the proposition one eighty seven in California brings a kind of nativist politics to the fore. The Republican Party moves sharply right when it comes to immigration, not across the board. There there’s still an argument being had within the Republican Party PAP Buchanan in ninety two is calling for a border wall. In ninety four, you have proposition one eighty seven in ninety five, you have the publication of Peter Brimonlo’s alien nation — Mhmm.

— which is a deeply racist anti immigrant screed that Pat Buchanan carries on the campaign trail in nineteen ninety six. And yet, you know, just four years later, you have George w Bush become president. And he is somebody who is pro immigration reform. Somebody who wants there to be this warmer pinder conservatism, especially when it comes to immigration. And, Charlie, what happens?

By two thousand six, two thousand seven, he runs straight into the wood rasher of the Republican base. There is an absolute mutiny among nativist based Republicans against George Bush’s proposed immigration reforms, and that comes up again and again. Throughout the twenty teens until Donald Trump is able to put it front and center in the presidential campaign of twenty sixteen. So it’s there. Those fights are happening, but they haven’t quite completely shaken out until the Trump presidency.

I think a lot of people find it interesting to realize that the Reagan presidency would for a long time was regarded as the as the peak moment for conservatism took place before the advent of mass and successful conservative talk radio before the repeal of the fairness doctrine or rush limbaugh. When Ronald Reagan was president, there was no Fox news. There was no bright bar. What was conservative media like in the nineteen eighties? I mean, I’m thinking back on it the editorial page of a few newspapers, American Spectator, National Review, that was pretty much it.

Right? And some kind of sketchy right wing radio shows that it had their ups and their downs. So what was it like back in the eighties?

You know, it was a little thin on the ground. So, you know, in my first book, messengers of the right. Mhmm. I write about this first generation of conservative media activists who are building conservative media outlets, but many of them are sort of on the wane by the mid to late nineteen seventies. And so these radio shows that had been really popular, a couple television shows, they disappeared before Reagan appeared on the scene.

And in a lot of ways you didn’t necessarily need robust conservative media because you had Reagan out there who had in in his own way sort of sucked all the oxygen out. You had Reagan critics for trying to pummel Reagan, so you had things like Richard Viguerries, Conservative Digest, a publication of the new Right. But it it really had to pull its punch

even events.

Human events was out there. And even then, like, conservative Digest folds by the end of the 1980s, there there’s not a robust conservative media because Reagan doesn’t need the help. And there’s not a lot of appetite for criticism of Reagan from the right. And so, you know, you have, as you mentioned, a handful of magazines, you have, you know, at that point, you have crossfires on the air, so you can hear some some conservative voices, but it’s just not very robust. It’s once Reagan wins sort of back to back land slides and media outlets begin to realize that there’s a real market for conservatism in the United States, not just in politics, but in media.

That there is a more openness to innovation, and then you get the rise of cable, which allows for a kind of narrowcasting that allows for more targeted political messaging and entertainment, and that really opens the door to something new.

So that also gave Reagan a little bit of elbow room though. Right? I mean, he he didn’t have these loud loud loud voices that would whip him when he talked about being the Chinese city on the hill, you know, if we must have walls, they have to have doors, he was not going to be lambasted in a hundred different right wing websites. So he had he had a certain freedom of movement that conservative politicians of later generation no longer enjoyed. Correct?

Yeah. And that’s something that you see, you know, Reagan raises taxes twice in his first term after his tax cuts he opens up conversations and negotiations with the Soviet Union. Something that his conservative critics hated. I mean, they threw some of their their sharpest insults at Reagan during those moments. And they want to have more power Right?

They want to be able to hold conservative presidents to the party line, but they just can’t do it with Reagan. And so Reagan’s allowed to govern. That won’t be the the case for George H. W. Bush, who when he backtracks on taxes, faces a much more punitive both media system and political opposition.

So at the same time, to be a conservative in the 1980s, though was a completely different experience, maybe not a completely different, but but it was a a qualitatively different experience because it was very, very difficult, not impossible, but very, very difficult to slip into an alternative reality silo because they didn’t exist. So to be a conservative in the nineteen eighties, you were constantly exposed to the other point of view you were constantly exposed to a mainstream legacy media which reported the news. So we were more of a unified political culture in the sense that at least you had the same rough set of facts and issues. So To be a conservative in the nineteen eighties, you knew what Liberals said and thought in contrast to now where in fact you can live, not just in a bubble, but in that hermetically sealed silo where you have a completely different reality. That was not the case in the nineteen eighties.

That’s right. In the nineteen eighties, if you saw a conservative on on television. For instance, they were often in conversation with a liberal or in debate with a liberal. That was the political entertainment of the day. It was this kind of left right sparring.

And so conservatives had to engage with liberal ideas because that was the structure of political programming at the time. You hadn’t yet crack the code for how to make conservative media profitable and all encompassing. There just wasn’t the the space for it yet. There hadn’t been proof of concept yet. And that’s why I think that Russia law is so important.

He shows that you can have conservative programming that sets the agenda and that can make hundreds of millions of dollars a year. And that is something that had never been the case when it came to conservative media. And I think that throwing in that both the entertainment incentive and the money incentive really did change conservative media and how it grew over the next few decades. This

is an important thing. And I I keep using the word the entertainment wing because and and you write about this very very effectively. Because it’s important to understand that we’re not just talking about right wing, left wing politics. We were talking about the line between entertainment and politics, which was blurred. And this has been happening for a long time.

By the nineteen nineties, that that line between entertainment and politics had all but disappeared. I’m talking about entertainment. I’m I’m talking about, you know, people who now suddenly look at politics as, hey, this is like the popular culture. This is funny. It’s fast moving.

It changed the way that we thought and behaved in political terms.

That’s right. You could see that blurring happening across the board. It wasn’t just on the right. You have Bill Clinton going on Arsenial Hall and on MTV. MTV is a station that had only been in existence for a a short while.

And that idea that you had to be kind of cool in politics. But also that politics could be the basis for entertainment. Rush limbaugh show was funny. People loved listening to it. They would set up these mushrooms in restaurants between nine and twelve where people could go in and they could just listen to Rush Limbaugh and chat with other Rush Limbaugh fans.

And that idea of a conservative media figure having fans and devotees in this way in a kind of rush could be very negative and he said extremely offensive things. But for folks who were in agreement with him and listening to him, they really enjoyed it. He brought him rock and roll music. He he had this kind of vibe that was much more entertaining. And the other example that I use in the book that I think is really important is Bill Myers politically incorrect, which was a comedy show that was sort of the predecessor in many ways to the daily show, but that was very focused and and very insistent.

Bill Mar was on mixing actors and comedians and political people, and he always wanted to have a conservative in one of the four guest chairs on his show. And it’s where a whole generation of Conservative pundits learned to do politics through comedy and outrage.

So who do you think now are the dominant conservative media figures? The ones who really make a difference? Who is who’s driving the trend right now? When you when you look at the endpoint of this evolution from the nineteen nineties, who are the most powerful influential entertaining conservative media voices.

You

know, right now no one looms larger than Tucker Carlson. He is the person, the host on Fox News, who has embodied the Trump message in a way that his audience really responds to and that has a real agenda setting power. At the same time, because this world is so big, there’s so many podcasts and social media feeds that I could name. There’s a podcast called ruthless that has a huge audience, and that really leans into entertainment. It’s modeled after Pod Save America.

Ruth was, of course, mocking the Supreme Court for not having Ruth Bader Ginsburg Right? I mean, so you also have a certain irreverence. Right? But, I mean, that part of the entertainment is to be transgressive. It’s like, oh, they’re saying that.

They’re actually mocking a dead woman.

Cool. People love that that sense of transgression, that idea of like drinking liberal tears is such a strong motivation and has a real power. And, you know, there are still people like Glenn Beck who has a fairly decent sized following, but even Beck who was a real innovator as late as the twenty teens is in a much more crowded marketplace and doesn’t have anywhere near the influence that he had during, say, the tea party years. And I would even throw in that I probably wouldn’t have ten years ago, a figure like Alex Jones who even though he’s not really a mainstream conservative, has influenced so much of the way that the right talks about politics, ideas like false flags and crisis actors and pedophile rings, like that language and those ideas that were fostered and festered on Alex Jones’ show, have become a part of mainstream conservative politics and mainstream conservative media.

So let’s connect these dots a little bit more here. So we have the entertainment wing of the party. The the the blurring of the lines between entertainment and politics what is the nexus between being entertaining and conspiracy theories? Because this seems to be to go hand in hand the belief and the secret knowledge. Is that what they’re peddling?

Is that not only with being transgressive and entertaining and funny and saying things that nobody else will but we are telling you the real story about the pedophiles and the pizza rings and all of that sort of thing. I mean, is that was that inevitable? Is that deeply ingrained? In this process, the conspiracy theory because, you know, I think a lot of people are looking at the environment going, how can tens of millions of people believe things that are just clearly flat out demonstrably bullshit? What is the persistence of of life?

So how does that work?

It is very deeply rooted. Conspiracy theories have been part of conservative media from from very early on. But without going all the way back into, like, the nineteen fifties and and fluoride and communists. But you kinda have to. Right?

You you kinda have to because it’s it’s there. The

paranoid style in American politics, which still is great, was written in nineteen sixty four. Right. And you could apply that right to what what’s happening now. So there is a long history of that sort of thing.

And it’s embedded there in the very raison d’etre of conservative media, this idea that you need to trust us. Mhmm. You tune into us because we’re right and because we’re right. We’re right wing and we’re right. And we

are Because the guy blind you and hates you.

Exactly. Okay. Exactly. So you have to trust us. And once you have that kind of loyalty and trust, it is very easy to manipulate it is very easy to turn conspiratorial, particularly when you frame your opposition as the enemy.

And gosh, you see this Charlie in the nineteen nineties in the conspiracies about the Clinton’s. Now the Clinton’s were not a clean, perfectly running ethical administration. But the conspiracy complex around the clintons, including things like the Clinton body count, and these tapes like the the Clinton Chronicles, which was this conspiracy video tape, that circulated all through congress and that was funded by Jerry Falwell. Like, that became the bread and butter of conservative media in the nineteen nineties. And once you have the Internet and social media, it really gains traction because it fits so neatly into the political idea that there is a liberal elite and then ultimately a conservative elite who are lying to you.

And you need to see through those lies in order to see the truth. And that kind of discrediting is absolutely core to the project of conservative media certainly today, but it was there in the past as well.

Howard Bauchner: And also, of course, you know, hand in hand with that is the delegitimization of any of the traditional media by pointing out the bias. But the bias was real. It was there. And it gave conservative media a foil. So I guess the question is flipping it around.

To what extent did the media not see the way that it was being perceived by many people. How were they unable to counter the accusations of bias? You follow my question there. I mean,

I

I do. I mean okay. Because because I remember back in the in the nineteen nineties when this was all shifting that The the reaction from much of the legacy mainstream media was, well, you know, none of this criticism is valid. If we’re being criticized for being biased, that must be the be we’re doing our job. And often did write or speak with disdain about, you know, forty percent of the population, And I remember this being part of the conservative media that it was as if they were giving us this massive gift by covering the news the way they did and not sitting down and going, okay, how can we counter this?

Still do our jobs? Still be affected journalists without feeding the narrative? That we are untrustworthy. Howard Bauchner:

Yes. There was such a vested belief especially, you know, in the fifties and sixties and seventies and eighties in this idea of objectivity and that journalistic practices would lead to objective reporting. And that belief in that process and in those values was so core that journalists often did not see. And still to the say, sometimes, do not see the way that they have all sorts of built in biases in in all sorts of different directions. That that are invisible to them because the people around them share the same set of beliefs.

And that could be, you know, in the nineteen fifties and sixties because it was a most white male profession. It could be in later years because there was this real suspicion of conservatism and the right It’s something that you see in the early nineteen sixties. You see all of these pieces come out about the radical right in the John Birch Society, and they were right. But that was the only story they were telling about conservatism. And so there wasn’t necessarily a kind of robust conversation happening around politics.

It does change a little bit Charlie in the early nineteen seventies because news outlets do begin to taken to account the criticisms that they’re getting, particularly from Spiro, Agnew, and Richard Nixon, and they start having conservatives on. So, like, Philip Schaffler had a regular spot on CBS News — Mhmm. — to as to as to liberal commentators to provide that kind of what they saw as balanced reporting or balanced commentary on politics. But there have been many a moment among mainstream media outlets where they felt either dismissive or embattled in relationship to the right. And that has not always led to the most accurate reporting and analysis.

So

speaking of Finnish lastly, you ever see that mini series missus America about her?

Oh, yeah.

It’s actually very good. Mhmm. And and and really captures, you know, how influential she was. Also, I think that Spiro Agnew is underappreciated in terms of his historical role as kind of the proto populist anti media figure. Because of

his

spectacular fall. But he really was one of the the the figures who began to create that language, that voice, that huge ballistic approach and the relentless attacks on the media. A lot of what we trace back to new gingrage can also be traced back to Spero agnew candidate.

Absolutely. So in many ways, those arguments that Spiro agnew brings to the attention of national media are ones that had been being worked out on the right, at the lower level throughout the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties. But in Spiro Agnaud, they found this champion and he was sort of Richard Nixon’s attack dog. And so he was throwing a lot of punches, a lot of his speeches were actually written by Pat Buchanan. Who was working for the Nixon administration.

And on the right, Richard Nixon, they were kind of suspicious of. They saw him as too moderate and not a real conservative. But they loved Despero Acne. When the watergate crisis first started to break, they were kind of like, well, you know, it’s not the worst thing in the world. I mean, it couldn’t end up that Nixon is forced to resign and we get Spiro Adino as president and that would be an amazing outcome.

Obviously history went a little differently, but she really was a champion of a cause that conservatives had been trying to promote for decades and he brings it to the the four of the conversation.

So on this question of, you know, the conspiracy theories and the disinformation and the misinformation, and I’m sort of working this out as I’m listening to you here. You know, a lot of the critiques seem to be making the category error of not fully understanding this entertainment transgressive element of the right wing media and that’s a way of backing into the question. You have millions of people that believe things that are not true. There’s a human instinct that if you’re lied to, that you resent, you push back against it. We have millions of Americans that are being lied to on a regular basis, and they don’t seem to mind what is the mentality?

Do people, like, believe what they get, you know, fed through some of these entertaining right wing media? Or is that part of the entertainment? Like, I kinda believe it or I kinda don’t believe it, but this is kinda fun stuff. Do you understand what I’m saying? I mean, that maybe when we’re we on the outside are asking the question true or false category error because that’s not the way this new media functions.

It’s like a completely different organic creature.

In my experience, one of the things people get wrong the most when it comes to conservative media is they see the audiences as kind of sponges that just soak up everything that they’re told and believe everything that they’re told. I don’t think that’s actually the case. I think it is a mix of yes, they believe some things that are not true. They say that they believe certain things that are politically advantageous to say that they believe. One person might believe that the election was stolen, another person might believe that it is better to say that the election was stolen even if there is an evidence and that there is something powerful about having someone who represents you say something that’s not true and you all go along with it and there is nothing anyone can do about it.

There is this kind of power in that Transgressive is a good word for it of being able to just lie and have there be no consequences. It’s a way of saying kind of f u to folks who are fact checkers or who care about accuracy that you’re not playing by their rules. And that idea of not gonna do it the way that you want me to do it is so powerful on the right. It’s something that Trump really gave voice to, but even before Donald Trump, that had been, you know, had been there in the tea party. It had been there in conspiracy theories about Vince Foster who who worked for the Clinton’s and committed suicide side.

You know, it’s it’s a mix

of both sides. Yeah.

Bursaries, absolutely. We

haven’t talked much about Trump, but I I think a pretty obvious point is that he understood these trends of the conservative media at a visceral level and probably grasp that more than any other presidential candidate in recent history. Donald Trump is very much a creature of this of this conservative media environment, which also means that when he passes from the scene at some point, that this environment stays, right? I mean, you described, you know, the developments have led to the triumph of this, you know, more sinister, less conciliatory, conservative politics, you know, and despite all the reverence for Reagan, you know, the Republican party is no longer the party of Reagan. It’s not going back to the party of Reagan. It may be the party of Trump now, but it it has taken on its own life.

Right? I mean, even if if Donald Trump is hit by a meteor tomorrow, all of this remains in place and there is this atmosphere, there is this style, there is this constituency that demands certain kinds of approaches, and that’s not changing anytime soon. Correct?

All of the incentives in media and in politics right now on the right are pushing not only in the direction of Donald Trump, but potentially past Donald Trump and into something even further to the right, even less interested in small d democratic governance. So unless you change those incentives, Donald Trump was a master practitioner of a craft that he had been watching for years. Right? He could watch somebody like Lou Dobbs, a spouse, urthyism on CNN and then on on Fox for years and kind of see, like, what is it that people are attuned to? What are they responding to?

Are they responding to the ground zero mosque and creeping sharia? Are they responding to the birtherism stuff? Is is it the anti immigrant screams? And all of that is something that Donald Trump picked up on, but that preexisted him and will long outlast him.

And then that’s one of the key points. If you spend time watching these things, picking up on the chirons, picking up on what the memes are, that’s what Republican politics is going to be maybe in a month, two months, three months, four months because that’s they are downstream from that. So the cold hammer, what does it take to break this, this cycle? Because as it strikes me that that everything that’s happening has gotten worse than the last few years, and it’s gonna continue to get worse in terms of the intensity, the competition, to pedal the the stronger meth out there to keep the outrage machine revved up. What does it take to break this cycle?

If anything.

I can’t be terribly optimistic on this front because like I said, the incentives are all pushing in one direction. Okay.

I

know. I know. I I could come up with something polyamish, but

— Yeah. — I

mean, the thing to keep in mind is that right now, what the right is interested in is power. And as long as the things that they are doing continue to get them power, then they’re going to continue to do them. And so they need to start losing and they need to start losing across the board and that’s going to require a couple of things. One, a robust protection of democratic processes because once those go away, it’s it’s much more difficult. And it is going to require both the Democratic Party and pro democracy conservatives to make sure that they are offering the American people help that they are are providing them with politics and policy that makes their lives better and gives them something alternative to vote for.

Because if they’re not doing that, then it is very easy to be rude away by the people who are telling you very entertaining lies. And so there is an obligation not just to protect democracy more broadly, but to do well by the American people so that they will vote for you.

Nicole Hammer is a political historian at Vanderbilt University specializing in media conservatism the far writer, New Book, is partisans, the conservative revolutionaries who remade American politics in the nineteen nineties She’s also the co founder of Made By History, the Historical Analysis section of the Washington Post, and she writes regularly for the New York Times CNN, Vox, and political. And also, as you can tell, is a veteran podcaster. She goes to Podcast Pass present and this day in esoteric political history. So you have a tidbit of esoteric political history as an exogenous? Oh,

what’s something good? Well, you know, we have been doing some Tennessee history because just moved from New York to Tennessee for this job at Vanderbilt. And so we looked a little bit at Johnny Cash hanging out with Richard Nixon. In nineteen seventy two. There were a lot of country music stars who were in support of Nixon’s reelection campaign, including Johnny Cash, who talked to Nixon before he endorsed him about the importance of prison reform.

No, that is esoteric. Nicole, thank you. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. Thank you, The Bulwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio production by Jonathan Seres. I’m Charlie Sykes.

Thank you for listening to today’s Bulwark podcast. Moving back tomorrow. Do this all over again.

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