PERHAPS FRIEND PERLSTEIN SHOULD HAVE CALLED IT HISSLAND?

Nixon, Richard: Lifespan: (1913–1994) (Paul Gottfried - 05/23/08, ISI: Reference Desk)

While Nixon identified himself on most domestic issues with mainstream Republicans, he enjoyed the good will of the Republican Right from his political beginnings in Orange County, California. Seen as a hard-line anticommunist and often reviled by the liberal press, he came to embody for friends and enemies alike the politics of the Cold War era. In his two successful presidential bids in 1968 and 1972, he appealed to the “silent majority,” those who opposed the counterculture and defended, albeit inarticulately, the values of family and country. Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, meanwhile spoke out against “epicene” social protesters who mocked manly patriotism; and Nixon’s campaign advisor Kevin Phillips emphasized the need to court Southern and blue-collar constituencies in creating a new Republican majority.

Despite Nixon’s conservative instincts and patriotic oratory, his actions as president did not always please the Right. Under his administration the federal budget and federal deficit soared, the dollar was devalued, and a New Economic Policy, initiated in August 1971, imposed price and wage controls. Nixon’s major foreign policy accomplishments, the reopening of communications with communist China and the completion of a nuclear arms limitation treaty with the Soviets, further alienated many conservatives. The complaint was heard that the president had moved too far away from his earlier anticommunism. Nor were Nixon’s anticommunist critics at all reconciled when he and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger spoke of dividing spheres of power with the Soviets in a changed world.

When we consider that the only way in which Nixon wasn't "One of Us" was in his domestic anti-Communism and that the Left still reviles him, we have to ponder whether the Chambers/Hiss episode doesn't lie at the heart of their obsession with him. Add in the way the Witch Hunts exposed the divide between the intellectual elites of academia, the arts, government, etc., on the one hand, and the rest of America, on the other, along with the fact that the central crime that folks like Rick Perlstein lay at Nixon's feet is his exploitation of that divide, and it becomes apparent that the focus on his political comeback in the late 60s and the ensuing presidency are rather peripheral to the story of American populism's shift back to the Right.

The specific complaint about current politics by the Left is that American people have rejected the Socialism (even if just of the mild American sort) that their betters think is good for them. Nixon was, if anything, an architect of the New Deal/Great Society welfare state. To the extent he has any significance to conservatism it came in the McCarthy Era.

Indeed, if we engage in a bit of dime store psychoanalysis, the liberalism of the Nixon presidency -- its almost total continuity with that of LBJ -- might be seen as his attempt to be accepted by the intellectual elites. The tragedy of Richard Nixon is that he was a wannabe and what he wanted to be was part of a political cohort that the American people thought they were voting against when they elected him. All he did was to delay the salutary shift of governance back to the Right for twelve years, to the country's very great detriment.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 24, 2008 8:55 AM