Nixon also influenced the Democratic Party’s future direction. Domestically, he did this by co-opting liberal domestic policies, thereby taking the center away and forcing the Democrats either to support his policies or to move further left. The most relevant example today is Nixon’s attempt to mandate universal health insurance in 1971. Nixon’s proposal is now regarded as the (more liberal) precursor to the health care plans put forth by presidents Clinton and Obama, the latter of which, the Affordable Care Act, became law in 2010.16
One key reason the Nixon health care legislation failed was the opposition of key liberals, including Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts. Kennedy and his cohorts held out for an even-more-liberal health care proposal, and they helped kill Nixon’s legislation. Their reaction illustrates how Nixon had boxed in liberals and progressives. Having offered such a liberal, generous program, Nixon gave Democrats room to maneuver only further to his left—well to the left of mainstream Americans. The other option was to vote with him and hand a Republican president a major political victory. For the most part, the Democrats chose to move further left, and their decision had disastrous results for the party. Kennedy later called it his biggest political regret.
Or consider how Nixon incorporated a liberal concern—the environment—into policy choices that pleased not only many mainstream Democrats but also the centrist Independents who made up a good portion of his silent majority. Nixon saw the momentum of the environmental movement in the early 1970s, and he knew that the man he assumed would be his 1972 challenger, Massachusetts Senator Edmund Muskie, had been an early champion of environmental protection. So he moved to preempt the Democrats on that issue by pushing popular and ambitious environmental-protection legislation, especially on air and water pollution.17 Nixon’s advocacy of environmental issues turned out to be a shrewdly moderate and appealing pitch to the middle class constituency whose support he relied upon. Nixon positioned himself, again, as a sensible centrist between those who rejected all environmental appeals as statist interference with business and those, on the other side, who wanted more radical ecological measures.
A similar dynamic occurred with Nixon’s Vietnam War policies, which turned almost all Democrats into doves. Nixon made Democrats appear weak on national security and foreign policy by pursuing policies that were, again, essentially centrist: He emphasized a tough approach to peace—withdrawing our troops while simultaneously bombing aggressively in an attempt to force the enemy to the negotiating table. Americans supported this policy. To oppose it seemed defeatist or unpatriotic. The image of Democrats as guilt-ridden apologists, weak on national security and defense, took shape in the Nixon years and has held, more or less, ever since.18 And, of course, Nixon’s brilliant overtures to China and Russia both served America’s national-security interests—by exploiting divisions between the two Communist powers and, at home, by blunting the antiwar Left’s energy and bringing calm to the American domestic scene.
Nixon’s perceived political cynicism also pushed Democrats leftward, inaugurating an era of Democratic efforts to reform the political process—leading to things from open primaries and campaign finance reform to an all-out embrace of identity-group politics. These efforts first took concrete form at the 1972 Democratic Convention, in which the party set up a commission to reform how it chose delegates. The commission eventually decided to impose a quota system so that blacks, women, and young people could be selected as delegates “in reasonable relationship to the group’s presence in the population of the state.”19 The commission’s chairman was Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, who would go on to become the party’s 1972 nominee, with the most diverse set of delegates—including minorities, women, grassroots activists, and the young—in American history. What the Democrats did, in effect, was to empower activists at the grassroots level, maximizing local participation but creating unwinnable candidacies at the national level—such as with presidential nominees George McGovern and Walter Mondale and Governor Michael Dukakis. Except for President Jimmy Carter’s narrow win in 1976, the Democrats, from 1972 until 1992, suffered one presidential blowout defeat after another, an unprecedented run of failure for a national party.
Even Nixon’s demise in the Watergate scandal proved hugely influential on the opposing party: it ushered in a new generation of Democratic congressional leaders—the Watergate Babies—who were less traditional and considerably more liberal than their predecessors. That orientation has more or less held ever since. Though the Democratic party moved toward the center in the Clinton years, in 2008, it nominated Barack Obama, who couldn’t have won without the key changes made to the primary system and whose coalition represented the maturation and fulfillment of the McGovern candidacy.
The Great Polarizer
More than any other politician, Richard Nixon planted the seeds of the polarization and partisan warfare that characterize our politics today. This is partly because, as just described, Nixon pushed both parties out to their ideological poles—a result not likely to produce political bipartisanship. Not only can the Nixonian dynamics be glimpsed between the two parties; they also can be glimpsed within the parties themselves, even forty years after he left office. Consider the state of the respective parties’ current leadership.
Former House speaker John Boehner represents the contemporary Republican mainstream; by 2015 standards, he is a Republican moderate, or at least a Republican pragmatist, of the kind Nixon himself was. On the far right is Senator Ted Cruz, champion of the Tea Party and hero of conservative intellectuals. Cruz’s leadership and rhetoric played a crucial role in the fall-2013 government shutdown, as he inspired his Tea Party caucus not to give in and make a deal with the Democrats. Cruz resembles no one as much as he does Barry Goldwater—the leader of the right wing during Nixon’s time, a right wing that Nixon both neutralized and exploited for political advantage.
On the Democratic side, similar tensions prevail. Bill and Hillary Clinton remain the standard bearers of post-Nixon Democratic centrism; they are “small-l” liberals who learned from history that, for contemporary liberalism to survive, it needs to stay close to the concerns of the American middle class on both domestic policy and on matters of national defense. Further to the left are President Obama, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, and most other congressional Democrats. Like Ted Kennedy in the early 1970s, they see themselves as progressives, and their political goals remain to institute an expansionist social welfare state and a pullback from American military commitments abroad.
Moreover, relations between the parties have deteriorated steadily since the end of the Nixon era, in no small part due to the scorched-earth political tactics that he and his team unleashed.
One of Nixon’s longtime political adversaries, Democratic senator Adlai Stevenson, described what he called “Nixonland” as “a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to win.”20 Nixon’s approach to politics—being obsessed with leaks, at war with the media, determined to cripple political foes—was something like war, in that opponents were not just seen as misguided or wrong but, in fact, as evil and dangerous. It’s an approach that has become the operative outlook of both parties today. (The obsessive secrecy of the Obama administration is a vivid example.)
Its genuine criminality aside, the lasting legacy of Watergate is less noted: it is the key event in shaping today’s intense partisan polarization. Our Red-and-Blue political map—the outline of mutually incompatible Americas that don’t understand one another and have mostly stopped listening to the other side—was forged in the Nixon White House.
As a young lawyer, the former secretary of state and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton served on the Watergate Committee investigating the impeachment charges against Nixon. Congress eventually voted to bring those charges, but before it could proceed, Nixon resigned from office. Twenty-four years later, some saw a Watergate redux—“payback,” some called it—when conservatives