Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who transformed the use of television to drive partisanship, speaks to reporters in Washington, D.C. after a 1995 appearance on ABC’s “This Week.” Photo credit: Mark Reinstein/Shutterstock
Back in 2016, like about a million other fans, I was listening obsessively to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway show, “Hamilton: The Musical.” Unlike a lot of stage door Johnnies, I am a historian of the United States. So, when my friend and colleague Renee Romano called to suggest we edit a collection of articles that would help teachers, students, and Hamilton fanatics think critically about the show, I jumped at the chance.
The result of Renee’s brainstorm was Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past (Rutgers University press, 2018). The Hamilton story was compelling, at least in part because it spoke to the optimism of Barack Obama’s presidency. For example, Hamilton and his pal, the Marquis de Lafayette, were portrayed as ambitious immigrants—even though neither really was an immigrant.
Never mind. After an openly racist Republican, Donald Trump, was elected president in November 2016, the line “Immigrants—we get things done!” would incite a cheerfully partisan New York audience to leap to its feet in show-stopping applause.
But that moment was also a symptom of a deeply divided country. Trump and his allies excoriated liberals, women, foreign nationals, people of color, and even Republicans who balked at extremism. We see the distant origins of that partisanship in “Cabinet Battle #1,” when Hamilton, now President George Washington’s Secretary of the Treasury, has to learn to make deals rather than force others to his will. At the end of the song, Hamilton explodes, while Thomas Jefferson and James Madison taunt him with his inability to move legislation without their help.
“Figure it out, Alexander,” Washington snaps.
Miranda portrays, however imperfectly in some historians’ minds, an important transition. The Founding Fathers, having originally seen political parties as a source of dangerous factionalism, changed their minds. Governing required that partisanship be disciplined and contained in political parties willing to negotiate with each other.
This isn’t a progress narrative, listeners. Those negotiations bargained away the rights of many Americans for centuries, and they have also worked to restore those rights. But a funny thing happened on the way to the 21st century. One party, the GOP, began to toy with breaking the norms that had emerged over two centuries. In 1964, Arizona Senator and presidential candidate Barry Goldwater openly mused about using nuclear weapons in Southeast Asia. In 1974, President Richard Nixon was found to have used the tools of government to cover up his own crimes and punish his political opponents.
And in 1995, Newton Leroy Gingrich, a Congressman from Georgia, steered House Republicans to a majority and seized the Speaker’s gavel. For three hair-raising years, Gingrich spoke about liberal policies in extreme, and often inaccurate, terms; used government shutdowns to force spending and tax cuts; and presided over an impeachment inquiry against President Bill Clinton for lying about a sexual relationship with then-White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
In one exchange between Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank and Republican committee chair Henry Hyde, Frank accused Hyde of masking a partisan attack on Clinton by pretending the committee’s work was merely procedural. Hyde responded that, because only a bipartisan Senate could convict, an impeachment could never be partisan.
After reading Princeton historian Julian Zelizer’s new book, In Defense of Partisanship (Columbia Global Reports, 2025), I would say: both men were right. Yes, the attack on Clinton was partisan, and the impeachment was one chapter in the GOP’s strategy to accelerate and harness hyper-partisanship. But also, yes to Hyde’s insistence that effective partisanship ultimately required bipartisanship to succeed.
It is, perhaps, that last truth that explains the MAGA-fied Republican party’s determination to govern from the White House in Trump’s second term. After the 1990s, a partisanship that no longer brooks compromise, and narrow margins regardless of which party is in the majority produced an increasingly frozen, not to mention uncivil, Congress. Does it have to be this way? No, Julian argues; not if Americans understand that partisanship—responsible partisanship—is integral to democratic governance, not a path to domination.
Show notes:
Claire and Julian discuss hyperpartisanship in the early national period: interested listeners should consult Joanne Freeman, Affairs of Honor:
National Politics in the New Republic (Yale University Press, 2002.)
Claire mentions Lyndon Johnson’s rise in the Democratic Party, partly through his distribution of campaign funds: Robert Caro writes about this in The Path to Power (Alfred A. Knopf, 1982.)
Claire mentions Phyllis Schlafly’s iconic conservative crie de coeur, A Choice, Not an Echo (Pére Marquette Press, 1964.)
Claire mentions Julian’s earlier book about Newt Gingrich, Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich and the Rise of the New Republican Party (Penguin Books, 2020.)
Listeners interested in the transformed media environment, and how it benefitted the late 20th century conservative project, may wish to read Nicole Hemmer, Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s (Basic Books, 2022.)
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If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:
Episode 65, Baby Trump: Political scientist Dan Drezner talks about his 2020 book, "The Toddler in Chief: What Donald Trump Teaches Us about the Modern Presidency."
Episode 60, When We Lose, We Win: Talking with historian Brenda Wineapple about civil rights, culture wars, the 1925 Scopes "Monkey" Trial and her new book, "Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted A Nation."
Episode 55, The Ten-Dollar Founding Father: Chatting with historian William Hogeland about Alexander Hamilton, debt, taxes, visionaries, and his new book, "The Hamilton Scheme: An Epic Tale of Money and Power in the American Founding.”
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