I wrote a relevant article at Splice Today. Excerpt:

A book I’m currently reading, Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s, by Nicole Hemmer, makes a case that a sharp break in Republican and conservative politics and polemics took place around the end of the Reagan presidency; that the style and substance of the right were transforming fast by the early-1990s. That strikes me as plausible. Maybe I was too close to the changes to see them clearly.

historian and journalistic commentator investigates how the purportedly conservative, moralistic Republicans became the “politically incorrect” and “pitchfork” party ready to embrace Trumpism. Hemmer identifies Reagan Republicanism as less of a turning point and more of an ending, followed by an “anti liberalism” that “leaned into the coarseness of American culture.” focuses on the “partisans” of the 1990s, when they grew to prioritize political victory over any ideology.

Ms. Hemmer is a mostly thoughtless left-winger but she has produced a serviceable history of the right. If you can stomach all of her unnecessary pokes and jabs at conservative thinking you will enjoy this book. I believe that Ms. Hemmer fully intended her book for ideologues like herself.

The history of the 1990s is just beginning to be written, and I have often thought that there needed to be some light shined on those conservatives that followed in Reagan's shadow, but not necessarily his footsteps. Until Hemmer's book, I don't think Pat Buchanan has received the attention he is due. True, there have been other books looking at the rise of conservatism and Gingrich, but Hemmer does a great job looking at the impact of Buchanan and how his ideas by the 2000s became the central pillars of conservative thinking.
My only criticism is that the beginning of the book seemed to linger too much on Reagan. It's necessary to include him but it bordered on heading down a different track in my opinion.

This is a great, unique book that will definitely get other research started. I hope Hemmer continues doing some exploring of the 1990s and early 2000s in her future research