Nixon’s Failed Vision
Rick Perlstein’s book on the divisive politics of Nixon’s era reveals a lot about America, including that the left’s vision has largely prevailed today.By Ethan Porter
October 20, 2008
In the spring of 1968, self-styled student revolutionaries took over Columbia University. The students seized several buildings, scrawled pro-Mao graffiti on the walls, and even took a dean hostage. One of the student leaders, Students for a Democratic Society’s secretary Mark Rudd, distributed a letter to the school’s president. “If we win, we will take control of your world, your corporation, your university, and attempt to mold a world in which we and other people can live as human beings,” he wrote. “We will destroy at times, even violently, in order to end your power, and your system,” he added before ending with a flourish: “Up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stick-up. Yours for freedom, Mark.”
Rick Perlstein explores the late ’60s and early ’70s in his sprawling 800-page Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. Perlstein brings all of this to life with an energetic, sometimes frenetic writing style. Nixonland isn’t a biography, at least not in the classical sense; it’s a landscape portrait. Today, the era Perlstein writes about seems deeply unknowable and yet strikingly familiar. When described in detail, the student strikes, George Wallace’s campaigns for the presidency, and the riots that engulfed American cities every summer like clockwork read like ornaments of a time wholly unlike our own. But there is one constant that connects today to yesterday: the political strategy of Richard Nixon. Perlstein asserts that Nixon laid the groundwork for the red- and blue-state divide in which we seem so endlessly gridlocked, yet despite the endurance of Nixon’s political strategy, whether or not we are still living in Nixonland, as Perlstein claims, is more debatable.
Perlstein’s chief accomplishment is to map out the dark places of the American subconscious. While the period he profiles is well-known for its tumult, a casual student of history will likely be surprised by the sheer quantity of violence that is described. In Perlstein’s telling, every day was another occasion for the American consensus to come undone in the form of blood and bodies. In addition to the highly visible moments, like the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and President John F. Kennedy, or the murders orchestrated by Charles Manson, Pearlstein finds smaller incidents that make the big picture bleaker. There were, for instance, the college students who, in 1971, were charged with plotting to poison the city of Chicago’s drinking water. In that year alone, 35 bombs exploded in federal buildings. Perlstein dedicates Nixonland to “the memory of dozens of Americans who lost their lives at the hands of other Americans, for ideological reason, between the years of 1965 and 1972.”
Even though the book ends with Nixon’s resignation, Nixonland, Perlstein writes, “has not ended yet.” The level of activist-initiated political violence has plummeted, but ideological warfare continues unabated. The sense of fundamental national division that Nixon cultivated and rode to the White House is certainly still with us. Perlstein credits Nixon with realizing that mobilizing one’s supporters by trumping the apocalyptic stakes of an election can be a vehicle to political victory. This strategy has been used and abused by many a national politician since. It’s why each side argues—passionately and sincerely—that every election is “the most important election of our lifetime.” In a Nixonland election, more than political winners and losers are at stake. The fate of the nation hangs in the balance.
The rise of right-leaning media like Fox News and far-right radio hosts like Hugh Hewitt and Rush Limbaugh are testament to Nixonland’s endurance. Such extremists bet that exciting the culture war, though it would raises the level of partisanship, motivates the right. Even some of the players are still the same: Pat Buchanan is a major character in Nixonland, cropping up repeatedly as one of the schemers who led the White House afoul of the law in its efforts to bedevil progressives. And now, in 2008, he’s on the national scene again, stoking the culture war he’s dedicated his life to fighting. At times Nixonland is a demonstration of that familiar axiom: The more things change, the more they stay the same.
This is tried and true territory for Perlstein. In 2001, he published the highly acclaimed Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, which argued that Goldwater’s defeat in 1964 actually paved the way for the national lurch to the right that culminated in the Reagan and second Bush presidencies. The “consensus” referred to in Before the Storm is pivotal in Nixonland as well. This consensus held that liberalism, especially the kind espoused by John F. Kennedy, was not merely one of many ideologies, but the natural American ideology. The early days of the Johnson administration were marked by optimism that liberalism would continue to dominate our politics. Huge federal antipoverty and civil rights program passed by large margins in the House. “These are the most hopeful times since Christ was born in Bethlehem,” Johnson said in Christmas 1964, a month after handing Goldwater his landslide defeat.
Of course, it was not to be. The hope of 1964 gave way to the chaos of Vietnam, numerous inner-city riots, the anarchical 1968 Democratic convention, and the assassination of political leader after political leader. Johnson refused to run for re-election in 1968. Instead, if there ever was a liberal consensus it collapsed, and Hubert Humphrey lost to Richard Nixon. But Perlstein’s take on Nixon’s character is important nonetheless. He argues that Nixon’s political views were formed in reaction to the many slights he suffered as a young man. Nixon was—or at least he felt he was—simply too poor and too unsophisticated to ever be accepted into the upper echelons of polite society.
And just as Nixon felt driven by a sense of rejection and resentment, so did many Americans. Those who felt that the pictures they were seeing on the news every night represented a nation gone haywire and dangerously splintered from tradition made up the “silent majority” that catapulted Nixon to victory twice. The leftist radicals of Nixon’s day had a saying: “heighten the contradictions.” They wanted to tempt the establishment into brutalizing them, so as to expose the police, the politicians and the bourgeois into exposing themselves for the “fascists” they really were. In a way, this was Nixon’s strategy, too. During campaign stops in 1972, he would order his stage crafters to drape the floodlights on the raging protestors who had assembled against him. The result was that, in the eyes of the public, all of Nixon’s opponents were red-faced radicals. The activists thought the other side fascist, the more conservative people considered the the protestors deranged: we were left with what Pearlstein calls Nixonland.
While his electoral strategy remains popular, the success of Nixon’s ideology remains an open question. The burning issues of the 1960’s—civil rights, women’s rights, and the political agency of young people—have resulted perhaps not in complete triumph for the left, but the left’s vision has prevailed. It is no longer legal to discriminate explicitly on the basis of race and gender. The voting age has been lowered from 21 to 18. Indeed, in the face of broad opposition from conservatives, there has been a gradual expansion of rights to more Americans. Progress has often been tragically slow, and so much work remains to be done, but it would be hard to argue that there has not been progress. For instance, gay marriage wasn’t even on the table 40 years ago. In the face of right-wing outrage, it’s been enacted in three states, mostly thanks to judicial decisions. It has also been banned in 26 state constitutions, largely through ballot initiatives, making it a perfect example of the all-too gradual progress that has defined the American struggle since Nixon. The notion of a liberal American consensus was always a myth. But we should be grateful that Richard Nixon’s vision of America was just as illusory.
Ethan Porter is an associate editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. He graduated from Bard College in 2007.
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Comments
nice review, on the last chapter of the book myself
— lee fang - Oct 24, 01:37 PM - #Hey everyone! So i found a couple surveys on the internet — they’re asking about some really prevalent issues as far as the election goes (race and economics) and what we students think. Do you think these are important issues or questions, im curious as to what you think. I’m not so worried about racism anymore but apparently these guys are…
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— Bobby Bluefield - Oct 24, 03:46 PM - #