In this book, I’ll examine one of the least known Nixon paradoxes: it was Nixon, a nonideological thinker, for the most part, who more than anyone else pushed the two parties further out to their ideological poles, but it was also Nixon who devised ingenious political strategies for navigating between them. The man who continues to stir up so much passion today was a consummate centrist, a pragmatic politician who nevertheless understood how to play on ideological loyalties with the skill of a maestro. Where major ideological realignments developed all around him—and often as a result of, or in response to, him—Nixon himself was nimble and adaptable. Smarter than his adversaries and supporters, he managed to confound both.
Nixon did all of this despite the fact that not just Democrats but also Republicans rejected, or claimed to reject, his political approach. In addition to being hated by liberals and Democrats, Nixon was also distrusted by Republican conservatives for his moderate domestic policies and realpolitik foreign policy. At the same time, the Right emulated his approach to cultural issues and New Democrats like President Bill Clinton explicitly built on his “triangulation” approach. He was the most successful politician of his era and unquestionably the smartest political operator the Republican Party ever had. In the end, Watergate gave both parties license to disown him—but neither party would be able to escape him.
Shaping Party Ideology and Identity
More than any other politician, Richard Nixon has shaped the ideological identities of the two parties today.
He has done this on the Republican side in two ways: first, by providing the party with conceptual formulations and concrete political strategies that have shaped its positioning ever since, and second by inadvertently prompting a conservative upheaval in the Republican Party through his centrist, even liberal, policies.
Nixon’s impact on the ideological positioning of the GOP cannot be understood without understanding the context of the 1964 election, when President Lyndon Johnson crushed the Republican contender, Barry Goldwater, by what was then the largest margin in history and the Democrats won their largest majority in Congress since Roosevelt. At that time, Republicans held only seventeen of the nation’s fifteen governorships. The Goldwater campaign was regarded as an historic presidential debacle, causing some to wonder about the future of the Republican Party. Yet the Democratic Party was also deeply in flux, mostly due to the Vietnam War. In spite of Johnson’s powerful 1964 victory, his popularity waned as the war dragged on. He faced steep opposition from within his own party, embodied by such figures as the antiwar activist Allard Lowenstein and Senator Eugene McCarthy.11 In 1968, the Democratic Party suffered a traumatic collapse symbolized by the street violence that took place outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Thus, the two major parties were both in turmoil in 1968. The Republicans, suffering as a result of their rightward turn in 1964, were struggling for a new identity. The Democrats were divided and leaderless. It was a perfect storm for the ideological realignment that was to come. And here is where Nixon entered the picture. (Or reentered it: Nixon had, of course, run as the Republican nominee for president in 1960, losing the narrowest election in history, and before that he served eight years as Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president.)
The remarkable thing about Nixon’s influence in pushing the GOP to the right is that Nixon himself was hardly an ideological conservative. He had a troubled relationship with the intellectuals who had forged the conservative movement, as well as with conservative Southern politicians. National Review refused to endorse Nixon for president in 1960; when the magazine decided to back him in 1968, it did so mostly for pragmatic reasons. Yet after Nixon, the Republican Party was primed for a conservative revolution. How did this happen?
Perhaps Nixon’s most enduring influence on the GOP today is his formulation of conservative populism—a force that first took shape in his 1968 campaign and that, nearly half a century later, is still the vital engine powering the American Right, from the Tea Party to talk radio. Nixon put conservative populism on the map by pioneering a new target of populist opposition: not big business and the rich per se—the usual targets of FDR and other Democrats—but rather the intelligentsia, whether in the media, the academy, or the professions. Nixon portrayed these groups as privileged, out-of-touch mandarins no longer fit for governance.
Like all populist appeals, this one had a class-based element—but Nixon’s class arguments were based on culture and values, not economics. Nixon helped show Republicans that they could borrow a traditionally Democratic strategy and make it work for them. And his timing was exquisite—the late 1960s, when the promises of liberalism’s “best and brightest” lay in shards, from Watts, to the War on Poverty, to South Vietnam. Nixon’s identification with ordinary Americans—he called them the “silent majority”—inspired conservatives and rallied them to his side, at least for a time.
To be sure, Nixon made race a political hot button in ways that continue to influence the GOP. He did this, most importantly, through his Southern strategy in 1968, in which the Republican candidate sought to sweep Southern states by playing on the resentments of white voters—some of them were threatened by the civil rights movement and explicitly antiblack in their views, and others were angered by the aggressive agenda of the Johnson administration and how it signaled Washington’s increasing willingness to impose mandates on states in the most explosive areas of social life. Though he never made this an explicit pitch, Nixon’s message unquestionably had racial undertones: he tapped into white fears, not only of black advancement but also of black crime and black militancy, and he forged a formidable voting bloc out of white anger at increasing black demands. Nixon sought to walk a tightrope, where he would stress racial moderation and his own civil rights record while also appealing to Southern whites drawn to Alabama segregationist governor and presidential candidate George Wallace. In effect, Nixon ran in 1968 (and 1972) as if all of white America were Southern—and it worked.
Here again, Nixon campaigned from the Right but governed from the center. Though he pushed racial buttons with his Southern strategy, he went on, as president, to effect remarkable and substantive gains for the civil rights agenda. But his political rhetoric and the tenor of the times conspired to present him as racially unsympathetic.
On race, then, the Nixon legacy has left the Republicans with unwanted baggage: the party has made major efforts to renounce the Southern strategy in the years since 1968, but it has had little luck in breaking free of the Nixonian identification. In a hotly contentious 2011 essay, Sam Tanenhaus branded the GOP “the party of white people.”12 Tanenhaus’s characterization is unfair and historically dubious, but his opinion is widely shared among commentators and millions of minority voters. On race then, too, Nixon continues to shape the GOP reality—in this case, much to the party’s chagrin. This legacy must be doubly frustrating to conservatives, since Nixon was never truly one of them.
By his own admission, Nixon said that “political positions have always come to me because I was there. . . . It all depends on what the times call for.”13 Except for his support for law and order, Nixon infuriated conservatives with left-leaning policies on everything from education, the environment, welfare, and affirmative action, to wage and price controls and monetary policy. In 1971, Patrick Buchanan, who had worked in the Nixon White House, wrote that conservatives were “the niggers of the Nixon administration.”14 National Review publisher William Rusher called the magazine’s earlier endorsement of Nixon “the blunder of 1968”15 and urged readers not to vote for Nixon in 1972. Many conservative Cold Warriors were appalled by Nixon’s outreach to Moscow and Beijing. They saw his reaching out to Chinese totalitarians as shameful and his policies as an abdication of American anti-Communism and leadership on issues of democracy, liberty, and human rights.
As the seventies dragged on after Nixon’s presidency, his ill-considered economic policies helped create stagflation—unemployment plus high inflation, a combination once thought impossible. A tax revolt began around the country. In California, businessman Howard Jarvis sparked Proposition 13, the landmark property tax reform that kicked off the modern tax-reform