Trumpism Was Born in the ’90s

In popular memory, the 1990s were another supposedly nonpolitical decade. The very fact that the major domestic political crisis of Clinton’s presidency was an impeachment over extramarital fellatio speaks to the fundamentally trivial politics of the decade. (There’s no need to credit the transparent GOP talking point that Clinton was impeached over a violation of the rule of law.) If Seinfeld, the quintessential 1990s TV program, was “about nothing,” then the Clinton era offered a politics about nothing much.

In his book The Nineties, the culture critic Chuck Klosterman neatly articulates this view of the era. “It was perhaps the last period in American history when personal and political engagement was still viewed as optional,” he argues. “Many of the polarizing issues that dominate contemporary discourse were already in play, but ensconced as thought experiments in academic circles.”

But it was on the right that perhaps the most lasting political legacy of the 1990s would be felt. As the Vanderbilt University historian Nicole Hemmer demonstrates in her incisive and convention-challenging Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics, the decade of Bill Clinton was also the era of Patrick Buchanan. Buchanan ran for president three times in that period, twice competing for the Republican nomination (1992 and 1996) and once as the Reform Party candidate (2000). Although he never came close to winning, Buchanan belongs to the great American tradition of political losers who cast a longer shadow than many winners because they popularized ideas that were taken up later by more successful candidates—a pantheon that includes William Jennings Bryan, Barry Goldwater, and Jesse Jackson.

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