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.)