https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/18/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-nicole-hemmer.html
On May 12, House Republicans voted to remove Representative Liz Cheney, the third-ranking Republican in the House, from her leadership post. Her transgression? Vocally rebuking the claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump.
But, Cheney’s ouster is just the latest plot development in a story about the contemporary G.O.P., that goes back farther than Nov. 3, 2020, and even Nov. 8, 2016. Over the past decade, the party has decimated its former leadership class. John Boehner and Paul Ryan were pushed out. Eric Cantor lost in the primaries. George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush and John McCain were viciously attacked by Donald Trump and his supporters. Cheney is just the latest victim of this ongoing party purge, and she certainly won’t be the last.
So how did the Republican Party get here? And what does that tell us about its future — and the future of American democracy?
Nicole Hemmer, is the author of “Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics,” an associate research scholar with the Obama Presidency Oral History Project and a host of the podcasts “Past/Present” and “This Day in Esoteric Political History.” A political historian by training, she has followed the development of the contemporary Republican Party as closely as anyone, with specific attention to the role right-wing media has played in the party’s development.
We discuss how Republican Party loyalty has morphed into unwavering fealty to Donald Trump; whether the G.O.P. is a post-policy party; the vicious feedback loop between the G.O.P. base, right-wing media and Republican politicians; how the party of Lincoln became a party committed to minority rule; Hemmer’s grim outlook on what the current G.O.P.’s behavior will mean for the future of American democracy; and much more.
Thinking about how to cover the Liz Cheney ouster with the House Republicans? On the one hand, of course, she lost her leadership position. The Republican Party has been telling us for years over and over and over again what it is. It is a, first and foremost, cult of personality around Donald Trump. You can say almost anything except anything that hurts Donald Trump’s feelings. If you say anything that hurts Donald Trump’s feelings, you will be removed from any position of power in the party. You will likely lose a primary. It has told us what it is over and over again.
How many times does the GQP have to repeat itself before we listen?
On the other hand, to treat all this as a fait accompli, to simply allow the Republican Party to become this thing, and that is just, well, that’s how American politics works, is to, in a way, become complicit in the crumbling of America’s party system and maybe American democracy.
Because, it is not true, as many liberals have said, that the Cheney episode shows you cannot be a House Republican or elected Republican and believe Joe Biden won the election, but it is true that you cannot be a Republican in House leadership and believe it is important to make the point that Joe Biden won the election. You don’t have to believe the big lie yourself, but you have to enable and treat with kid gloves those who do.
For a party that says it does not believe in cancel culture and safe spaces and wants free speech and robust argument, quite a performance. Trying to understand where the Republican Party is now, I think, requires a little bit of a broader view. And so I asked Nicole Hemmer to join me on the show.  |
| Nicole Hemmer |
Hemmer is an associate research scholar at Columbia University with the Obama Presidency Oral History Project.
She’s the author of the great book on the rise of conservative media, “Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics.” She co-hosts the history podcasts “Past Present” and “This Day in Esoteric Political History.” She’s a co-producer of the podcast “Welcome to Your Fantasy.” She’s a CNN Opinion contributor.
She’s all over the place, but she’s somebody who has a real beat on how the Republican Party has changed over time and how its media ecosystem has both driven and reflected and absorbed those changes. So I think it’s a very specific way of understanding what has happened here, but probably the most useful.
As always, email is ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
Here’s Nicole Hemmer:
So, back in February, there was an effort to oust Liz Cheney from her leadership position. This vote has already happened. It failed big time. It lost 145 to 61. Kevin McCarthy, the top House Republican, brags the GOP is a big tent party that includes both people who believe, I guess, the election was stolen and those who don’t. So then what changed? How did Cheney lose support since February as we get further from the election and Donald Trump’s presidency?
NICOLE HEMMER: I think it’s actually a really good indication of what the Republican Party’s strategy is when it comes to the insurrection and the Trump presidency, especially how it ended. And that is to just memory hole the whole thing.
So, the problem with Liz Cheney wasn’t that she voted to impeach Donald Trump. It wasn’t that she was outspoken immediately after the insurrection, but that she kept bringing it up. And their strategy was to stop talking about January 6, altogether, but they couldn’t get away from it because she just kept poking at it and kept pointing to it and saying, this is a bad thing that happened, and we have to stop this from happening again. And that’s what ultimately got her the axe.
EZRA KLEIN: I do want to emphasize that because this is a mistake I think I’ve seen in a lot of liberal reporting on this, that there’s a view that you can’t be a House Republican in good standing now if you believe the election was correctly decided. And that’s not quite it. I mean, as you were saying, Kevin McCarthy, right after the vote that ousted Cheney, says, I don’t think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election. I think that is all over with.
But I do want to twist it, because what it does, seems to me, that what you have to do to be a House Republican in good standing is not to believe the big lie, but to be an enabler of it. You have to be willing to be on good terms with the people who continue pushing it. You have to be willing to indulge it, right? So the idea is you are going to be a big tent coalition of people who believe the election was stolen and people who don’t. You can’t try to fight that out in the party and have one side win.
NICOLE HEMMER: Yeah, I mean, I do want to challenge the notion that this tent is all that big. I’m not sure that those who believe the election was legitimate should not be seen as an indication that they’re suddenly a broad-based party, but I do think that’s right. I think that we shouldn’t even be that surprised that this is the strategy. I mean, remember how many times reporters would ask, have you seen Donald Trump’s tweet? And it’s just heads down, avert your gaze. And this is the same kind of strategy. You don’t necessarily have to embrace it. You don’t have to agree with everything. But you can’t talk about it. And that was Liz Cheney’s big sin. She just kept talking about it.
EZRA KLEIN: But you’re a historian. Isn’t that a little bit weird? I mean, I’ve covered many parties after losing a presidential election. And they cannot stop talking about why they lost. [HEMMER LAUGHS] I mean, you think about Democrats after 2016. It’s just years of arguments between the Clinton and Sanders wing of the parties then with a couple people like my friend Matt Iglesias, out in the wilderness, saying, O’Malley would have won. And you think of the Republican Party in 2012, right? There’s a whole autopsy.
You think of Democrats, after the Reagan and Bush years and the Democratic Leadership Council and Bill Clinton. It’s a pretty normal thing in political history that parties go through a wrenching internal debate after losses. My sense is the Republican Party right now is really trying to suppress that debate, to learn no lessons and to allow for no infighting. Does that feel historically unusual to you?
NICOLE HEMMER: It does seem really odd because parties generally are coalitions. And so they are factions that fight one another for power. And so much of the time, the story we tell after elections is exactly about that fight. So think about 1964 when Barry Goldwater was just annihilated in that election versus Lyndon Johnson. There is a real fight between moderate and liberal Republicans and conservative Republicans.
And even though the conservatives ultimately win out, there was a period of time in which there is a legitimate debate happening about what direction the party is going to go. And that kind of cyclical analysis has been part of what the modern party system looks like. And so, the fact that that is breaking down in the Republican Party right now, I think suggests to us that something fundamental is changing about how at least one of the political parties operates.
EZRA KLEIN: I want to express a conflict I’m having as I think about where to go in the questioning right now. Because there’s a way of talking about what is happening in the Republican Party in let’s call it, like, political analyst voice, right? You just take it all as a given and, like, OK, where’s the party going? What do you think about Elise Stefanik? And that’s important because it is still the Republican Party. And it will probably win back the House in 2022 if midterm election dynamics hold. And so understanding is important.
And on the other hand, I feel like to analyze it that way is to buy into a kind of lunacy. That a party is doing something really profound and dangerous that Cheney, who is not somebody I have a lot of agreement with, is trying to point out, and that they are repeating a pattern that has driven them into a very dangerous place over the past couple of decades, where it’s like the party elites feel something bubbling up from the base, they indulge it, they think they can control it, and then it becomes the new baseline next time. Barack Obama was born in Kenya, America’s becoming a socialist tyranny, all the way up to the election has been stolen.
I’m curious how you keep these dynamics together in your head. The Republican Party is like an institution that is almost normal by virtue of its size and role in American politics. And the Republican Party is an institution that seems to be going off the rails and possibly threatening the very foundations of American politics.
NICOLE HEMMER: I think the most helpful way to think about that is to think about the intersection between those two things, that the Republican Party has become so dangerous and so radicalized in part because it is one of two parties. So it’s not just a small faction that has become radicalized, but because of partisan pressures, that radicalization, because it was embodied so much by Donald Trump, because it’s been picked up by members of Congress, because it’s seen as a reflection of the base, has manifested throughout the party.
So, it’s been empowered so much more than if it were just limited to a small faction or to a smaller party. To be a Republican right now, as the Liz Cheney scenario shows, it is almost a requirement that you buy into the big lie, that you buy into the Trumpening of the party, that you consume conservative media and distrust all other media outlets. And this isn’t just a process of the past five years. It’s a process of decades, as you were pointing out, but that the lunacy is located in an institution and has overtaken that institution gives it so much more power.
EZRA KLEIN: Is this part of the argument for a multi-party system? That in a multi-party system, you might have 20 percent of the country be in agreement with, let’s call it the anti-system Republican Party that we see, the Trumpist-Republican Party. But here, that was enough to take over the Republican Party. And so by virtue of the kinds of partisan and polarizing pressures and media pressures that you point out, that 20 percent is now functionally 45 percent.
NICOLE HEMMER: It’s a good question because my initial response is, yes, wouldn’t it be great if this was a minor party that was working within a coalition? But the warning note that I would add is that the United States and its bi-party system is not the only place where these kinds of growing il-liberalisms are taking root, right? A parliamentary system has not necessarily proven to be totally able to ward off nativist politics, to ward off illiberal politics. I mean, we’re seeing this in a lot of different places in Europe and the UK.
And so, I don’t want to posit the parliamentary system as a cure-all. I think that it can help keep some of these politics at bay. But a minor party can very quickly become the pivot point, right? It can become the place where you need to build a coalition. And that suddenly empowers a small group of people as well.
EZRA KLEIN: There’s a way in which we talk about movements in the parties on this single dimensional left-right axis.
But, the replacement of Liz Cheney with Elise Stefanik is a little bit more complicated than that. Because on the one hand, Cheney believes the election was correctly decided. And Stefanik has really indulged the worst fantasies of Trumpism.
On the other hand, Stefanik, by normal ideological measures, is much more moderate than Cheney is. She voted against the Trump tax cuts. She voted against funding Trump’s border wall. She voted to condemn President Trump for trying to overturn the Affordable Care Act in the courts. So how do you read this? Is the party becoming more moderate, but more anti-system? Is it just about Trumpism? What is the direction the party is going?
NICOLE HEMMER: So you’re right to challenge the idea of a left-right axis because I even feel that in the question or the description of Stefanik, right? To describe her as more moderate — I mean, she was a Paul Ryan acolyte. And I don’t think we would describe Paul Ryan’s economic policies as moderate. So the left-right axis and the moderate-extreme axis, I think, both end up confusing things. I think one way I might begin to talk about it is in the ’90s, we talked about the Republican Party as growing much more ideological, as it was shifting very strongly toward the right. And indeed, it did.
But the Republican Party that we see today, there are ideological factions within it. But Republican identity and loyalty to, in this case, Donald Trump — he’s a manifestation of this change — that has become, I think, more important than ideological policy issues. I mean, certainly, it is the case that Donald Trump was for cutting taxes. He helped put people in the courts who would be pretty hard line on things like abortion and reproductive rights. So I don’t want to suggest that he did not have conservative positions. But if you look at the way the party changed on issues like trade, that’s a pretty significant change that it does feel has at least something to do with loyalty and partisanship than it does necessarily ideology.
EZRA KLEIN: I want to hold on that idea of positions for a minute because there was always this idea that maybe you could have Trumpism without Trump. And Trumpism was taken to be these rhetorical stances, Donald Trump took, mostly just rhetorical stances, that he said he’d give everybody healthcare, or he tweeted that we should have $2,000 stimulus checks, or he said he would raise taxes on people like him. As you point out, he did not govern that way. But partially, he didn’t govern that way also because he just left that up to congressional Republicans who have, more or less, Paul Ryan’s economic views.
But, in the aftermath of Trump, it seems to me that what we’re getting is Trump without Trumpism, weirdly, that the party is in no way united around any kind of populist agenda. They have no big movement within the House Republican Conference towards a big infrastructure bill, towards an expansion of the social safety net, even towards, quote unquote, “their people.” But there is a lockstep behind the figure of Donald Trump. So is that right that there actually is no such thing as Trumpism? There’s only Donald Trump, and Donald Trump, in some ways, is becoming not more powerful, but maintaining his power?
NICOLE HEMMER: Yeah, I mean, Trumpism is such a slippery term that even if we can kind of set that aside, I think that you’re right that there is no cohesion around a populist agenda. In fact, there’s a greater rejection of that in large part because the Biden administration has moved so much more in the direction of providing more of a social safety net and infrastructure spending and all of those things. And so, that natural anti-Biden politics on the Republican side is pulling them back from any sort of generosity on that front. So you have that dynamic going on.
But I think a lot of politicians took from the Trump experience that it wasn’t his policies, it was his style that won him the presidency, that it’s that red meat, anti-liberalism, insult-driven, media-oriented style of politics that won him the presidency and that allowed him to govern the way that he did. And they’re not wrong. I mean, I think the two things work together: that Trump’s style and his politics were of a piece, or at least, that they reflected off of one another, that they were bound together.
And so, his policy positions were part of his anti-establishment stance, right, that he was going to reject the things that the Bush administration did, that he was going to reject the things that Paul Ryan had done in Congress. So they’re connected. But I think that the lesson that Republicans have drawn is that it’s all about the style. And so, they’re trying to replicate Trump’s style. And where they land on policy is a little more ambiguous at the moment.
EZRA KLEIN: I’ve made the argument before in columns that one of the interesting things about Joe Biden’s approach to politics is that he is using a more moderate stylistic presentation. He’s quieter. He’s more conciliatory. He’s gentler. That can, in some ways, obscure, actually, a much more ambitious progressive agenda. He’s managed to look pretty moderate, even as he’s governing to the left of any Democratic president in certainly recent American history. Donald Trump maybe is like the inverse of that.
And, I think you see this with Stefanik, too, that if you can, in some ways, hide a slightly more, I do not want to say moderate agenda for Trump certainly, but Stefanik, compared to some others in the party, actually has even disagreed with Trump on things like the border wall. But if you have the correct level of fight in your politics, if you are sufficiently against your enemies — you hate the media, you hate the Democrats, cancel culture is everywhere — that you actually create more ideological space for yourself because people intuit what your policies are from your political positioning. But, if you just get the political positioning into a place where you look very, very pro your side, then they don’t look as closely at your policy.
So, there have been a bunch of House Republican conservatives saying they don’t want to vote for Stefanik. And they’re upset that she’s the likely successor because they think she’s functionally a liberal. But she’s going to win anyway because she’s managed to build this identity-based affinity with the Trumpist forces.
And, it strikes me as actually a kind of interesting hack for both sides to have discovered at this moment in history.
NICOLE HEMMER: Yeah, and I think that the difference between the two suggests that they’re talking to two very different audiences and that there’s a very different underlying theory of politics underwriting it, which I think is true. And that is that Republicans are speaking to a very loyal, committed base that responds strongly to that kind of rhetorical red meat, that responds strongly to the fight, that wants to see their representatives take it to the left, whatever that looks like.
And, on the other hand, you have Democrats who are trying to build a majoritian coalition that includes a much broader base of politics, that has a lot of variation in it, that relies a lot on independent and moderate voters. And in order to build that coalition, what Biden has learned is that it is really productive to present yourself as somebody who is reasonable, as somebody who is just doing the common sense kind of things. There’s a populism in that, too, right, that it’s just common sense that it’s Joe from Pennsylvania. You know him. He’s not a radical. And it speaks to the difference between a party that has decided that it is going to pursue minoritian politics and a party that is reliant on majoritarian politics.
EZRA KLEIN: But, why did Republicans make that decision? I mean, if you step back, this is really quite weird. Donald Trump, he lost the popular vote in 2016, but he won the election fine. Then he loses in 2020 by — see, I think it’s worse than that, even, to be honest, which is, one, I don’t think the re-evaluation of values has happened at all. More moderate suburban voters, exactly the kind of voters Republicans need in many places, and yet, the party is moving more and more into his theory of politics.
And, what strikes me as strange about that is that you would anticipate — and it’s been true in the Democratic Party — that when politics is very polarized, and the stakes feel very high, parties become more desperate to win. And that includes sometimes making the compromises, like for many Democrats, nominating and voting for and working for Joe Biden, that get you that big coalition. Strategically, the Republican Party seems to have settled into this much narrower approach. But most parties don’t. Do you have a view on why they have?
NICOLE HEMMER: It’s a great question, and I think a complicated question because it is a road that they have been on for quite some time. I mean, part of it is rooted in that “it’s a republic, not a democracy” idea that Barry Goldwater espoused back in the 1960s, and a resistance to the new majoritarian politics, not just of the civil rights movement, but of the one person, one vote ruling that comes out of the Supreme Court in the 1960s, that there was a resistance to majoritarianism, at least in a strain of the Republican Party in the 1960s that would continue to grow. I mean, in the 1990s, you see this, too — beginning to question in a post-Cold War America how much they want to embrace egalitarianism, how much they want to embrace what some folks would call rank democracy, and a desire to restrict who exactly gets to vote. I mean, you begin to see some more voter restriction laws coming to the fore, although that really picks up in the 2010s.
And, why they opt for that is a difficult question. I mean, you could say that they see the writing on the wall demographically. But I actually think that it’s that they can’t figure out how to square it. They’ve become more and more reliant on their base. They’ve become reliant on conservative media as the messaging arm of the party, that all of the energy in the party comes from a base that wants to brook no compromise.
And, so, they don’t know how to build a majoritian coalition on that base. They were able to do it under Reagan. And they were able to do it a little bit in the early 1990s with the victories in Congress. But since then, two out of the last three Republican presidential victories have been through the electoral college and not through the popular vote. And so minoritarian politics, in a way, have not worked beautifully for them, but have worked for them.
EZRA KLEIN: I think that’s a really important point. And I agree that it’s central to understanding the Republican Party: that if it actually had to face normal democracy, where you need to win more votes to win the election, it couldn’t survive in this way. And so, it would make new decisions. At the same time, there is something just still quite weird here. And maybe I’ll place it here. You used to have this line that Democrats fall in love and Republicans fall in line, that the Democrats don’t make strategic decisions in deciding who to support, while Republicans do. In recent years, Democrats just nominate whoever is next in line, Hillary Clinton and then Joe Biden.
And, Republicans are basically engaged in a continuing process of regicide. They knock their top players out in primaries. John Boehner got pushed out. Paul Ryan got pushed out. Eric Cantor got primaried out. I mean, Donald Trump came in and said, you know that John McCain and George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush were trash and terrible presidents. And they made endless mistakes. And it is a party that has disconnected itself from virtually all of its recent history.
And, that strikes me as like one part of it, that it is like, it is developing a very narrow set of people it listens to as well. You’ve studied it historically. So what is that change? Was it never true that Democrats fell in love and Republicans fell in line? Or, has something actually transformed structurally that has let the party begin adopting this, every year is a whole new fresh start strategy?
NICOLE HEMMER: Well, we definitely always want to add an asterisk to any sort of political adage because it’s not always entirely true. But it is a really important point that you’re landing on because what we are seeing now is a Republican base that’s falling in love and a Republican establishment that’s falling in line.
EZRA KLEIN: Oh, that’s very well said.
NICOLE HEMMER: Right after they oust Eric Cantor in that primary in Virginia in 2014, the party gives up on immigration reform because they see a signal coming from the base that says you will not survive if you continue to move in the direction of immigration reform. We’re going to withhold our support from you. So then the question is, how does this base become so empowered? And that’s where I think that the story of conservative media becomes really important. I think the 1990s was a really pivotal moment in this.
Because, one of the things that you see, just to give you a sense of how things are changing in the ’90s, in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan really did talk about a big tent, one that included Reagan Democrats. So, folks who had been traditionally Democratic Party voters who come over and they vote for Reagan, and there’s the sense that the Republican Party is growing into this majoritarian party. And the way that it does that is it brings in people from outside. And it gives them a seat at the table. And it includes them in its vision of where the country is going.
And by the 1990s, you’re not talking about Reagan Democrats, you’re talking about RINOs — “Republicans in name only.” So this idea that there is now a litmus test for being a Republican, and that litmus test becomes tighter and tighter and tighter during the 1990s. And so, there is this sense that how the party is conceiving of its power is changing and how the base is conceiving of the party is changing. And I think that if we’re thinking about why that’s happening, there are probably a lot of reasons.
NICOLE HEMMER: Well, we definitely always want to add an asterisk to any sort of political adage because it’s not always entirely true. But it is a really important point that you’re landing on because what we are seeing now is a Republican base that’s falling in love and a Republican establishment that’s falling in line.
EZRA KLEIN: Oh, that’s very well said.
NICOLE HEMMER: Right after they oust Eric Cantor in that primary in Virginia in 2014, the party gives up on immigration reform because they see a signal coming from the base that says you will not survive if you continue to move in the direction of immigration reform. We’re going to withhold our support from you. So then the question is, how does this base become so empowered? And that’s where I think that the story of conservative media becomes really important. I think the 1990s was a really pivotal moment in this.
Because, one of the things that you see, just to give you a sense of how things are changing in the ’90s, in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan really did talk about a big tent, one that included Reagan Democrats. So, folks who had been traditionally Democratic Party voters who come over and they vote for Reagan, and there’s the sense that the Republican Party is growing into this majoritarian party. And the way that it does that is it brings in people from outside. And it gives them a seat at the table. And it includes them in its vision of where the country is going.
And, by the 1990s, you’re not talking about Reagan Democrats, you’re talking about RINOs — “Republicans in name only.” So this idea that there is now a litmus test for being a Republican, and that litmus test becomes tighter and tighter and tighter during the 1990s. And so, there is this sense that how the party is conceiving of its power is changing and how the base is conceiving of the party is changing. And I think, that if we’re thinking about why that’s happening, there are probably a lot of reasons.
NICOLE HEMMER: Well, we definitely always want to add an asterisk to any sort of political adage because it’s not always entirely true. But it is a really important point that you’re landing on because what we are seeing now is a Republican base that’s falling in love and a Republican establishment that’s falling in line.
EZRA KLEIN: Oh, that’s very well said.
NICOLE HEMMER: Right after they oust Eric Cantor in that primary in Virginia in 2014, the party gives up on immigration reform because they see a signal coming from the base that says you will not survive if you continue to move in the direction of immigration reform.
We’re going to withhold our support from you. So then the question is, how does this base become so empowered? And that’s where I think that the story of conservative media becomes really important. I think the 1990s was a really pivotal moment in this.
Because, one of the things that you see, just to give you a sense of how things are changing in the ’90s, in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan really did talk about a big tent, one that included Reagan Democrats. So, folks who had been traditionally Democratic Party voters who come over and they vote for Reagan, and there’s the sense that the Republican Party is growing into this majoritarian party. And the way that it does that is it brings in people from outside. And it gives them a seat at the table. And it includes them in its vision of where the country is going.
And, by the 1990s, you’re not talking about Reagan Democrats, you’re talking about RINOs — “Republicans in name only.” So this idea that there is now a litmus test for being a Republican, and that litmus test becomes tighter and tighter and tighter during the 1990s. And so, there is this sense that how the party is conceiving of its power is changing and how the base is conceiving of the party is changing. And I think that if we’re thinking about why that’s happening, there are probably a lot of reasons.
EZRA KLEIN: Does conservative media drive the base and, through driving the base, drive the party? Or does the base drive conservative media and, through driving conservative media, drive the party?
NICOLE HEMMER: I think it’s a more complicated question than that.
EZRA KLEIN: Damn it. [LAUGHTER]
NICOLE HEMMER: I know. I know. I wanted to give you a nice little adage to take away from this. But the reason that I say that is — well, take the issue of immigration. In 2013, you had Marco Rubio and others going around talking to people like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, saying, you got to give us cover on this immigration reform. And Sean Hannity goes all in on Fox News. He’s like, this isn’t amnesty. This is something that we need just to get past and move forward. And so we are going to support this gang of eight in the Senate.
And, he heard from his viewers that that was not going to fly.
And, he gets such a backlash that within a month of backing this new immigration reform bill, he’s calling it amnesty on air. And he’s completely turned on it. And he’s saying behind the scenes, this is a political killer. You’ve got to let this one go. So that’s an instance where you can see the base very clearly switching around the policies that conservative hosts are embracing.
At the same time, they might push back on something like immigration. But conservative hosts do a really good job of defining conservatism to the base. So you might feel very strongly on immigration, but you might not have really strong thoughts on the export-import bank. But you hear from Fox News hosts and from talk radio hosts where conservatives stand on that issue, and so, in a way that they’re able to shape the broader political sensibility of the base.
EZRA KLEIN: But let me push on that a little bit because your point on the export-import bank is very well taken. But I think people really don’t have positions on that at all still, right? You get told, and maybe you sign on, but you don’t really. It’s not a really held position. That is just like — it becomes part of the portfolio. There is a very dominant view among liberals that what has happened to the Republican Party is Fox News and maybe behind Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and Breitbart and others.
And, over time, watching it, I’ve come down more on the side of the base drives conservative media. The conservative media, because it’s talk radio, because of analytics and other things it does, because it also has a very narrow audience, as opposed to mainstream, but maybe liberal-ish publications that are trying to win over a lot of people, it has a very good sense of where the base is. And then it ends up channeling them. And conservative media is where the base is able to translate its views into power. And through doing that, it then moves politicians around.
And, the reason I ask this is that Fox News strikes me over the past decade as having lost a lot of fights. They did not want Donald Trump initially, right? They had this big debate where they tried to kind of cut him down at the knees with Megyn Kelly and Chris Wallace and Bret Baier. Eventually, then, Trump says, I’m not even going to come back on. And the late Roger Ailes now brokers a peace.
More recently, they then basically remake their entire primetime lineup to be more Trumpist.
Now, they’re facing all this pressure from OANN and other sort of weirder, conservative outlets because Fox News didn’t fully get on board with the big election lie. So it just seems to me there’s a situation here where the conservative base wants something very different than Republican elites have wanted over the past couple of decades and that it is the media where they’ve been able to get more power, and they are slowly turning the Republican Party into the thing they wanted to be, as opposed to the thing that Paul Ryan and John Boehner and the head of the Chamber of Commerce want it to be. Do you think that’s fair?
NICOLE HEMMER: I do, and I think that you’re getting at a change over time. So my historian brain was thinking about the ’90s and the early 2000s and thinking about the power that conservative media had in sort of shaping the sensibility of its audience. But that has changed, as you’re pointing out, that there has been a shift in the locus of power. And I think that you’re right that conservative media, rather than — back in the William F. Buckley “National Review” days, they were trying to translate politics to their readers. And now you have the pressure coming up from below.
And, #FormerGuy's Donald Trump’s campaign in 2015 and 2016 was certainly one really important place where that became clear. Because in a way, it’s kind of a pincher maneuver around conservative media. Because they don’t want to break from this very big source of power, Donald Trump, and on the other side, they can’t break from their base, which is Trump supporting.
And so, they’re wedged in a lot of ways between the president and their base. And they almost all, including Glenn Beck, who was a standout for a while for not embracing Donald Trump, they all eventually wind up, with very few exceptions, where the base is.
And, ultimately, the base was where Trump was.
So, I do think it has shifted over time: that conservative media, which was once a tool for sort of an elite level of conservative activist, has become more powerful to a broader range of the base. And so that makes sense, given the rise of social media, given the rise of the internet versus the early days of radio and television.
EZRA KLEIN: That’s where I get nervous. Because, if you look at what the base really believes, there is a level of almost civilizational conflict and stakes that can justify almost any maneuver. There was an Echelon Insights poll from this year that asked respondents whether they believe politics is about enacting good public policy or ensuring the country’s survival as we know it. Only 25 percent of Republicans said policy, almost 50 percent said survival.
If you really believe the election was stolen from you, that is a tremendous theft, right? That is a tremendous political crime inflicted upon you and upon the country, right? That’s the kind of thing that creates civil war, civil unrest, right? I’ve always said this, that if you believed what a lot of the January 6 insurrectionists believed, then what they did was not crazy, it was the believing of it. And by the way, the Republican politicians who indulged that belief are who bear the responsibility. But if I believed the election was stolen, I might go into the streets, too. And so, I don’t know that there’s a bottom here.
NICOLE HEMMER: Yes, and I’m not going to be the voice of optimism here because it does seem that all of the political incentives within the party are stacked toward continuing down the road that they’re on. There is no break at this moment. And if the break before that we used to think about was, well, eventually, they’ll just lose so many elections that they’ll have to change, right? What you were talking about earlier is that you lose so many elections, it conditions you to want to change so that you can win.
But, if winning elections is no longer necessary, if you’re willing to manipulate what’s happening in state governments and on election boards in order to render an election null and void, then there is simply no incentive to stop. And, the ultimate consequence of that is that you destroy our system of government. And, that sounds really dramatic, but remember, we just are four months away from a presidential transition that was not peaceful. And, that is a landmark moment in U.S. history that requires a much bigger response than it’s been given so far. And, seeing the Republican Party double down on that type of politics is something that should be genuinely alarming. Because, it doesn’t end well, this path they’re going down.
EZRA KLEIN: If you were a historian from another country, looking at American history and present right now, would you say this just looks like a society headed for schism?
NICOLE HEMMER: Yes, I think you would say that it’s a society headed for some kind of break. And you wouldn’t just look at it through the last five years of wrestling with Donald Trump and the turn the country has taken in that sense. But, you would go back further. You would go back to the decision to invade Iraq. You would go back to the 2000 election and flash scenes of the so-called Brooks Brothers riot and the unrest over that election. You would probably flashback even further to the 1970s and the economic decline that the US was going through in that period and has not responded to in a way that has been economically satisfying for all but a small percentage of Americans.
And so, there’s a story not just from the viewpoint of another country, but just put into the perspective of the last 50 years or so, where you look at the path that the United States has been on. And it is some form of decline. Whether that decline ends in a political schism, whether it ends in sort of a rotting husk of an empire — I mean, it’s hard to say what exactly it looks like. But you would not say that the U.S. is on a glide path toward another golden age.
EZRA KLEIN: I want to talk about that idea of continuity. Because there is certainly one narrative that gets told, I think often self-servingly, where there is the good Republican Party, even if you disagree with it, of 15 years ago, 10 years ago, and the bad Donald Trump Republican Party. And Liz Cheney is very much saying this, right? She’s a scion of the Cheney family. Dick Cheney is George W. Bush’s vice president.
You recently wrote a great piece on George W. Bush, where you said that while he did many things that were inclusive from the perspective of the Donald Trump Republican Party — outreach to Latinos, trying to calm anti-Islamic sentiment, embracing more immigration— he was also — and I’m quoting you here — “he also played a leading role in the party’s shift toward minoritian politics that enable it to remain a party of exclusion.” So can you tell me a bit about how that sets up this modern era?
NICOLE HEMMER: Sure, I think you’re hitting on a really important point because the idea of Trump exceptionalism, that Donald Trump just rode in and blew up the whole system, I think ignores some really important continuities. And so, when I was writing about George W. Bush, on the basis of some comments he made after his recent book came out, again, the 2000 election and the fight to declare victory, to stop the count in Florida, to stop the count in Florida not just through the courts, but, again, through localized disruption, that was pretty anti-democratic. That was a really troubling moment.
And the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision is a really challenging one for people who want to embrace this idea of democracy and liberalism. But also, the 2004 election and the decision to lean into the anti-marriage equality initiatives and referenda across the country as part of a campaign strategy to win that election. It modeled, I think, the way that you could mobilize resentments and mobilize exclusionary politics in order to win an election, which is something that we should say, in 2004, George W. Bush did.
And so, when he talks now about this idea that the Republican Party won’t win elections if it plays the politics of exclusion, well, he played the politics of exclusion, and he won an election that way.
In fact, he played the politics of minoritian politics, and he gained the presidency that way. And so, there have certainly been massive shifts in the Republican Party since the days of George W. Bush. But he is not exempt from the story that we’re telling about where the Republican Party is today.
EZRA KLEIN: He also played the politics of relentlessly raising the stakes, right? There was the, you’re with us or against us period. The politics and the structure of post- 9/11 politics was very much like a clash of civilizations. It was very common for conservatives to talk about a fifth column inside the United States. And Cheney was very front and center in that. And then, Liz Cheney has kind of held that politics together, too.
And in 2019, she said — 2019, right, not 100 years ago. She said of the Democratic Party, quote, “They’ve become the party of anti-Semitism. They’ve become the party of infanticide. They’ve become the party of socialism.” And then a couple years later, here she is saying, well, I mean, I don’t know why Republicans aren’t accepting they’ve been defeated by the party of infanticide, socialism, and anti-Semitism. That there has to be some reckoning with the fact that if you tell people everything is on the line, they’re going to act like it.
NICOLE HEMMER: Yeah, that rhetoric does have to be dealt with. And there has to be some sort of internal reflection, right? The politics of the 2000s set up the politics of the 2010s. And so the choices that the Republican Party made in that period — in a period, by the way, in which that’s really the era in which Republican punditry and conservative media began to genuinely go off the rails. I mean, this is the era of Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin writing in defense of internment camps and Dinesh D’Souza writing about how liberals are responsible for 9/11.
So, you have signals coming from the presidency, right, saying that the stakes have never been higher, that you’re with us or against us. And that then gets translated in a much coarser way in the media. And there is a real response from the base to that, right? They love it. And that then feeds back into the politics of the party. So that kind of reckoning has to happen. And that doesn’t mean that we throw the baby out with the bathwater, right? We can celebrate that there is a member of the Republican Party that is willing to say, this is a lie.
This is a lie that the party needs to move away from, while also recognizing that one of the things that helped lift Donald Trump to victory, both in the Republican primary and ultimately in the 2016 election, was that he was defining himself against the Bush-Cheney years, right? He has a legitimate critique of how badly run the government was, how bad the decision to go to war in Iraq was. And so, it’s interesting to have Liz Cheney as the person who’s out there as the avatar of the Republican resistance to Donald Trump. Because she’s probably the worst possible person that it could be. But, she’s the only option at this point, if you want to point to a voice of conscience on this issue in the Republican Party.
EZRA KLEIN: I want to speak to an objection that I think a listener more on the right might have right here, which is that if you listen to Democratic rhetoric now, it’s very civilizational, too. If you listen to our conversation, even just a couple of minutes ago, about the way the Republican Party is becoming anti-democracy and how America might be headed for a schism, that’s pretty profound rhetoric. And what’s tricky is that it feels like we’re in a self-fulfilling cycle. As people believe the stakes are more profound, they actually do get more profound, right?
This is a key theme of my book on polarization, but it is true that as the Republican Party has reacted to its view of how America is changing by believing that anything is acceptable in its quest to win, that then if you care about, say, American democracy, it is more dangerous if Republicans win. I remember Mitt Romney running in 2012. I disagree with Mitt Romney on all kinds of political questions. And I was very concerned he would repeal the Affordable Care Act. And that would really, really, really harm people. But I didn’t think it was the end of the American political system if he won.
Whereas if Donald Trump runs and wins in 2024, I think it’s a very, very unclear question whether or not America’s political system has a future. And that’s a tricky thing. On the one hand, indulging the language of high stakes creates self-fulfilling prophecies and what people are willing to do to win. And on the other hand, the stakes do legitimately seem to me to be getting higher. And I’m curious, as a historian, how you parse that.
NICOLE HEMMER: Yeah, I mean, being unwilling to name the stakes is also a problem, right? So you’re caught in a bind because as the Republican Party becomes more dangerous, if calling it out as dangerous is considered raising the stakes and raising the temperature and making politics more dangerous, it’s like, where do you land ultimately?
And, from a historical perspective — and this is just going to feed into the apocalyptic rhetoric — but you have to go back to the antebellum period and look at all of the attempts to bring down the temperature in the 1850s, right, to put gag rules in Congress so you can’t talk about slavery. And that will keep people from fighting. And that will help keep the union together because we’re not actually having the conversations that we need to have about this core issue in American politics — in this case, the enslavement of four million people.
And, it didn’t work, right? If you don’t deal with the problem, if you don’t talk about the problem, if you don’t name the problem, and name the stakes, right, that slavery fundamentally undermined any sort of small- d democratic commitment that the United States had, if you can’t say that, then you’re nowhere, and you end up where the U.S. ultimately ended up, which was in a civil war. And so, this is a really challenging problem because it speaks to — or it lands on — one of the core problems that you’ve written about and I’ve written about, which is this idea of an epistemological divide. Because I hear your question.
And, I say, well, yeah, when I looked at Mitt Romney’s run, I thought, this could be very bad for the Democratic Party, because it would make Barack Obama a one-term president. He would not be able to seal his legacy. But, it did not seem like a make or break for the country kind of election. There’s a very evidence-based case to make for why Donald Trump running and winning in 2024 would be catastrophic. And, you only need to look back at January 6 in order to understand why that is. But, if we can’t have evidence-based arguments and make evidence-based points about what the stakes are, where do we go from there?
EZRA KLEIN: I want to talk about the role of the media in this because we’ve been discussing the way there’s a magnetic attraction, particularly in the Republican Party, to the most extreme voices. And part of that reflects, I think, the actual views of the base. But part of it also reflects the media’s. And here, I don’t mean the conservative media, I mean the mainstream media, The New York Times and others, the attraction to conflict, to crazier ideas.
I would say if you look at the members of the House, in both the Democratic and Republican Parties, who get the most coverage, they’re not the ones with most institutional power inside the House of Representatives. That is not how that lines up. What do you think the responsibility is, or, in some ways, the optimal strategy is, of the media in deciding what is newsworthy? Because that is a decision we’re making all the time in this era when the stakes are continuously going up. And so, many political entrepreneurs have recognized the way to get coverage is to say the craziest possible thing you can think of at any given moment.
NICOLE HEMMER: Well, first, I would say that it is not a new problem. I mean, this idea of leveraging journalistic values against journalism has been something in the works for quite some time. So, just a couple of examples, in 1980, during the Mariel boatlift, which was bringing refugees from Cuba to the United States, there were debates about immigration in the U.S. And news organizations had such a difficult time finding somebody to argue the anti side that they brought on this group known as FAIR that was a pretty extreme anti-immigration group, but it got presented alongside pro-immigration groups. And, it was presented as, this is a debate in the country, for or against this.
We’ve seen this with climate as well, the idea that you bring on an anti-climate change person, and a pro-climate change person, and you present it as an open debate, and the sides as equivalent and having kind of equivalent backing. That kind of both sides journalism is something that activists have found a way to use to advance their cause. And that idea that conflict attracts press is also something that politicians have used very capably over the years.
I mean, Pat Buchanan in 1987, was talking about this. He said at the time that he was thinking about running for president. And he was like, the bias in the media is not liberal bias. It’s bias towards conflict. You’ve got to give them a line. You’ve got to give them a fight. And he won inordinate amounts of media coverage in the 1990s, in part because he understood what the motivations of journalism were because he himself had been a journalist.
And so, I think that the, where do we go from here, in journalism terms, is thinking very clearly about what the values underlying media are. And by that, I mean, there is a set of values behind giving what is now sort of derisively called both sides journalism: that you present a voice from the left and you present a voice from the right, and you give your audience the information they need in order to make a decision. That doesn’t always help your audience get to what is real and what is true. And so, what is the value behind the value? What is it that you’re actually trying to do?
What is the journalistic function?
I think that kind of first- principles reflection has been taking place over the last five years. I think that it will continue to take place. But there’s, obviously, a shiny object problem in the media. And this was very clear during the Trump years. And what we found through studies of media ecosystems is that by spending so much attention talking about Donald Trump’s lies, that tended to amplify them, right? Tended to present them to more people.
And so, one of the things that I recommended is just going back to a very deeply contextual kind of journalism, which is problematic, right? Because there is an economic system that tends to thrive on controversy and clicks. And, your deeply contextualized article about how lies function within the current Republican Party, are not necessarily the ones that drive the most revenue towards a journalistic outlet.
EZRA KLEIN: See, I think it’s worse than that even, to be honest, which is, one, I don’t think the reevaluation of values has happened at all. The most fundamental choice we make in journalism is what to cover. And that is, we have no framework for how we make it. We have nothing published that we allow ourselves to be held to. On any given day, we can cover a vast range of stories. And we choose a very small number of them. And in part because we know that choice is one that is very powerful to make and that we don’t have great frameworks for making, we like to outsource it.
So, one way we outsource it right now, I think, is social media.
What is already generating attention on social media, well, obviously, that’s newsworthy, or else, everybody wouldn’t be talking about it. But social media trends towards the most extreme voices. And then journalism reifies it by covering those controversies. And so it’s like this closed loop of bad engagement incentives.
At the same time, let’s say you try to break it. So, I try to do this on the show. And I don’t have the same mandates on my specific podcast — it has my face on the title — that a whole newspaper has. But I want there to be a diversity of voices here. But I also want them to be good voices. So I’ve said to myself, OK, I’m going to cover and elevate conservative voices that I think are good faith, that have good points to make, that are arguing, more or less, from the facts, that are rigorous.
But, I get the criticism — and I think it’s a correct one — that I’m giving people, in many ways, an untrue look at the Republican Party. The Republican Party is not the people I have on the show. It’s people I wouldn’t have on the show, in many cases, because I don’t think they’re honest. I don’t think they’re arguing — or arguing in a way that makes the system better. I don’t think there’s a good answer to this problem. I’m not sure there’s a way to solve it, particularly in the Republican Party that looks the way it does right now.
NICOLE HEMMER: Well, I think that’s why conversations like this are so important. Something that I ran into as somebody who also works on white nationalism and white power movements, writing about incidents like Charlottesville, there was a very clear decision in the work that I did that I wasn’t going to elevate the voices of people like Richard Spencer or Jason Kessler, one of the organizers of the Unite the Right rally, but rather, to talk to experts on white power, to go through the things that had already been published by those people and talk about where their ideas come from, but not give them a platform to lie to people. And that, I think, is one way that you begin to address it. It’s not a sexy answer, but it is one step in the right direction.
EZRA KLEIN: Basically, I think the implicit idea in this whole conversation is the institutional Republican Party is being driven or driving itself further and further off a cliff, right, into being something really quite dangerous. And so, one version of that is like, you look at that trend. You try to get ahead of it. So, OK, like Madison Cawthorn, right? I think he’s, frankly, more representative of a lot of the Republican Party, even though he’s a relatively new House member who I don’t think commands a lot of respect from his colleagues even. But he’s functionally like a meme lord. And, that’s how he got into the House.
And, I think that’s sort of the nature of the true face of the Republican Party right now. But he’s one of its worst voices. And so, the choice to cover him is a choice not to give him more oxygen and not to cover people who, on the one hand, may not represent where it’s going, but might be better voices for it. And, that’s a part of this that strikes me as really difficult. And, I think that the problem is, we in the media, we’re an actor in all this.
And, I think this very deeply about Donald Trump. We let him dominate coverage before he was a tremendous frontrunner in 2016. And I think we at least partially created his victory. Because, we sort of thought that as long as we were covering lies as lies or covering bad things as bad things, that would be enough. But, it turned out that the act of coverage, the act of attention was more powerful than the sentiment of that attention. I think that the media has always believed that its power is whether its coverage is good or bad. But, I don’t think that’s true. Power really just is something covered or not, particularly on the right, where negative media coverage is like a badge of honor. It’s like then there becomes this question of, are we just getting played? And I think the answer is yes.
NICOLE HEMMER: If you’re right, and that reckoning hasn’t even really begun in non-conservative media, in journalism, about this question of exposure and complicity, man, that has to be the first step. Like, forget about reforming the Republican Party. Reform U.S. journalism, and then maybe we can talk about the Republican Party.
EZRA KLEIN: Before we end here, let me ask you a little bit about the Democratic Party. So you have a Republican Party that’s becoming more explicitly anti small- d democratic that just ousted Cheney because she believes and kept saying the election was correctly decided. Meanwhile, across the country, in the states, Republicans are putting the sort of big lie idea into practice. They’re putting people who would have ruled for Trump on election boards. They are trying to change state election laws. There’s real activity happening here.
What Democrats have is national power. They have a bill, HR 1, the For the People Act, the HR 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, that try to deal with a lot of these election integrity issues, voting rights issues. But, in the Senate, it’s going to get blocked by the filibuster. I mean, and you have Democrats who — your Joe Manchins, you Kyrsten Sinemas — who keep saying they want bipartisanship so they don’t want to do anything with the filibuster. And, meanwhile, it seems like, behind the desire for bipartisanship, Republicans are going to smuggle in not even partisanship, but a complete anti small- d democratic agenda that could leave Democrats without much of a political system in which to act. I’m curious if you think elected Democrats appreciate the gravity of what is happening on the Republican side and the kinds of responses it might merit.
NICOLE HEMMER: I mean, clearly not all Democrats do, because the least that the Democratic Party needs to do at this moment is pass election reform legislation. Because as you were saying, I mean, we saw this happen after the 2010 election. We’re seeing it happen after the 2020 election, that when they have the opportunity, Republicans will move at the state and local level into some pretty fiercely anti-democratic directions. And, we saw in places like Georgia some local and state level pushback that made the bill somewhat less draconian than it would have been in an ideal Republican world.
But until the Democratic Party — and here, Manchin, Sinema, the people who are resisting this — come to terms with the idea that, first of all, that bipartisanship that they’re glorifying was, in many ways, the product of an earlier era, which is not to say that there is no bipartisan legislation, but bipartisanship, in and of itself, is a valueless kind of thing. And so, they need to realize that super quick. And if the Democratic Party doesn’t do something on election reform, we are headed into a pretty dark period in which the push towards minoritianism is going to be rooted even more deeply structurally in the states, as well as in the federal government.
And, it’s not entirely clear to me why they don’t understand that. I think that there’s so much evidence thick on the ground not just of what has happened in the past, but what is happening right now. And we have seen, in the United States, it took significant, powerful federal legislation in order to secure voting rights in the United States. You needed to keep that pressure in place. That had to happen after the Civil War. It had to happen in the 1960s. And we’re going to need it again, right? We’re bereft of tools for safeguarding voting rights in the United States.
And, that’s the core thing, right? We don’t have that. Even if the Democrats pass wildly popular legislation and have the support of a majority of Americans, they are not going to be able to hold majoritarian power in the United States. I’m going to try not to use the biggest word because I take your point about the ratcheting up of the stakes, but it is, if not an existential question for the Democratic Party, it is an existential question for our conception of democracy, right? I mean, it hasn’t always been the case that Americans embrace the idea that every person should be able to vote.
But, over the past 60 years or so, that’s kind of where we landed, that we wanted to have a democracy with the participation of as many people as possible. And we should make that possible by making the rules such that people have access to the ballot box. And if that isn’t a core Democratic Party principle, the one that underlies every other one, then have a real problem on our hands.
EZRA KLEIN: I think that is a good sobering place to end. So I’m going to ask you always our final question. What are three books you would recommend to the audience?
NICOLE HEMMER: OK, well, I’m going to recommend three that have been heavy on my mind lately. One of them is one that I just have to promote everywhere I go. And that is Kathleen Belew’s “Bring the War Home,” which is a history of the white power movement. It is bracing, but it is an absolute must read for understanding white extremism in the U.S.
The other two I want to recommend are — I had the chance to lead a discussion at the Anti-Racist Book Festival last month, and it gave me the opportunity to read two really good books that I think people should pick up. One is Charles King’s “Gods of the Upper Air,” which is a history of anthropology and relativism. And that might sound kind of boring, but it’s actually really fascinating. It’s populated with all these amazing characters. It’s about kind of core values in society. It’s about the development of an anti-racist idea, in opposition to the kind of racial hierarchies that had dominated in science before the early 20th century.
And, the third book is “The Fire Is Upon Us” by Nick Buccola, which is a story about the debate between William F. Buckley Jr. and James Baldwin, two characters that you don’t often think about in the same breath. But, he weaves together the stories of their lives leading up to that debate over race and racism in the United States. It’s such a good book. I really highly recommend it. It’s so smart. And it puts together two people and two sets of ideas that I don’t think we put together enough. So those are my three.
EZRA KLEIN: And, I’ll add to that. If you’ve not gone on YouTube and searched and watched that Buckley-Baldwin debate, I don’t know what you’re doing. That is the only thing the internet is actually good for, is to get to watch it. It’s a remarkable historic document. Nicole Hemmer, thank you very much.
NICOLE HEMMER: Thanks, Ezra.
