"When the Cold War Ends, It Loosens Not Just the Motivation for Conservatives to Get Involved Internationally, but Also the Motivation for Them to Champion Democracy"

"We think of the end of the Cold War as reshaping the geopolitical landscape, but it also really changed economics and politics in the United States. There is a major recession in the U.S. at the time of the '92 election, and parts of California that have been propped up by government spending and the aerospace industry had collapsed almost overnight. There was this sense of uncertainty about what the world is going to look like going forward and who is going to prosper and who is going to fail. It's also at a pivot point in decades of deindustrialization and shifting toward a knowledge economy and a service economy. So things really were in flux, and I think the politics of the day reflect that."

Ian Ward at Politico interviews Nicole Hemmer, author of Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s.