http://campusprogress.org/books/3323/nixons-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 arguespassionately and sincerelythat 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 wasor at least he felt he wassimply 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'scivil rights, women's rights, and the political agency of
young peoplehave 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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