Are we still living in Nixonland? Or are the decades after
Watergate better thought of as what I’ve called it, The Age of Reagan? And whether it’s Nixon or Reagan, are we still entrapped by
the politics that emerged out of the ’60s, or are those politics dying?
There certainly have been continuities from Nixon’s
presidency to later years, down to our own time--including, above all, the
figures of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Through their service with Ford,
these men carried forward the Nixonian theory and practice of the imperial
presidency--and with it the Nixonian penchant for secrecy and the resentment of
liberals, the press, and political adversaries of all kinds as potential
killers. America
owes William Safire, Patrick J. Buchanan, William Rehnquist, Robert Bork, and
even Karl Rove mainly to RMN. Much of the phenomenon now glibly called the rise
of the “Reagan Democrats” started off with Democrats for Nixon (although, as
you show in your
earlier book, some of it goes back even further, to the appearance in 1964
of what Walter Lippmann called the “Goldwater Democrats.”) So Nixonism, and
particularly the vengeful divisiveness and culture war politics which you
emphasize, has long outlived Nixon.
Except for Watergate, I’ve written somewhere, I might have
called my new book “The Age of Nixon.” But Watergate happened, and here’s where
you and I begin to part ways. Watergate badly battered the Republican
establishment and deluded the Democrats into thinking that “new politics”
liberalism was the wave of the future. Neither party could fill the gap where
the center of American politics used to be, but that had been blown out as a
result of Vietnam,
black power, and Watergate. Enter the once-humiliated but tenacious Republican
right, under the leadership of Ronald Reagan.
Reagan, of course, actually accomplished a great deal of
what Nixon gets the credit (or discredit) for accomplishing. Take the so-called
Southern strategy, which originated with the Dixiecrat revolt in 1948, became a
large part of Goldwater’s “duck hunting” strategy, and then fell into the hands
of George Wallace. It’s usually asserted--with ritual citations to Kevin
Phillips--that Nixon (who had been fairly liberal on civil rights) invented
or at least perfected the new Republican solid South. But, at least in
presidential politics, the phenomenon only became real in 1980. People tend to
forget that although Nixon swept the South (as he did the rest of the nation)
in 1972, Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale snatched it back almost entirely in
1976. (Carter won every state in the old Confederacy except Virginia, which he lost by less than two
percent of the vote. Carter even beat Gerald Ford in Alabama--by a whopping margin of 55.7% to 42.6%.)
Reagan also diverged greatly from Nixon in all kinds of
ways. There are the obvious profound political differences--détente vs.
rollback; “We are all Keynesians now” vs. supply-side (and monetarism);
affirmative action vs. Edwin Meese and William Bradford Reynolds; and I could
go on and on. These are important matters, and I gather that some reviewers
have pointed them out. But they are also beside the point of your book, which
is, as I see it, that Nixon introduced the political polarization which Reagan
and others exploited down the line.
But I’m not persuaded of the latter point, either. Nixon may
have refined the dark arts of political polarization and adapted them to the
circumstances of the late 1960s, but he hardly invented those arts (see above
on the Southern strategy). And Reagan’s coalition formed, unsteadily, in 1980,
not as a reaction against Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society but as a
reaction against the failures of Jimmy Carter and the haplessness of the
deluded Democratic Congress, amid stagflation and the crisis in Iran.
Of course, Reagan was happy enough to enlarge his coalition
by taking on, and paying lip service to, the culture warriors, right-wing
evangelicals, and neo-conservatives (who were only dimly in evidence as of
1972, or not in evidence at all). He was also happy to consolidate the
Republican white South. So to that limited extent, we can say that Reagan
enlarged on Nixon’s example. But Reagan built a coalition of his own, and
succeeded in 1980 chiefly because of economic and post-Vietnam national
security issues, not the cultural resentments of Nixon’s “silent majority.”
Moreover, in political style as well as ideology, Reaganism
was entirely different from Nixonism. Reagan could be callous and demagogic on
the stump, but nowhere near to the extent Nixon was. Nixon, unlike Reagan,
played political hardball in a paranoid way that turned into lawlessness.
(There was no Donald Segretti or G. Gordon Liddy in Reagan’s entourage; and
while Reagan had his Oliver North--certainly a polarizing figure--North did not
emerge out of Reagan’s quest for the presidency, or for re-election.)