http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/earticle/6326/
A study of how Richard Nixon exploited the Culture Wars in the 1960s
sheds new light on his political era - and on the Obama era, too.
Sean Collins
6 March 2009
When we think of America in 'the Sixties', a certain set of images
comes to mind. The counterculture: hippies, drugs, Woodstock. Social
upheaval: the civil rights movement, anti-Vietnam war protests,
feminism, the 'sexual revolution'. Political assassinations: Martin
Luther King, Robert Kennedy.
Yet one of the apparent paradoxes of the Sixties as an era of radical
reform in the US is the fact that the president during most of that
period was Richard Nixon, a Republican who expanded the Vietnam War
and was dead-set against the counterculture. What we refer to as 'the
Sixties' actually began around the mid-1960s and ended in the early
to mid-1970s. Nixon was first elected in 1968, and then even more
confounding for those who trade in clichéd Sixties images
re-elected by a landslide in 1972.
Historian Rick Perlstein tackles head-on the question of the
relationship between Nixon's ascendancy and the changes occurring in
American society in Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the
Fracturing of America. Indeed, putting Nixon's name in the title
might be slightly misleading: the book is really a broad review of
society and culture as well as politics in this period, and for long
episodes Nixon virtually drops out of the picture. Weighing in at a
hefty 748 pages, Nixonland is as sprawling, noisy and character-full
as was the era itself. While uneven at times, it is a riveting read.
Given the fact that much has already been written about the Sixties,
it is to Perlstein's credit that he provides fresh insights and
unearths important but oft-neglected events. He reminds us just how
violent the Sixties in America were, marked by riots, assassinations
and bombings. But while it may not come as news that America was a
brutal country in those days, Perlstein's graphic account of the
police shoot-to-kill squads responding to the Newark riots in 1967
will still blow you away. He also takes advantage of declassified
information, such as FBI and CIA reports, and these reveal, among
other things, how Cold War paranoia raged on. Nixon sought to find
Moscow paymasters behind virtually every high-profile antiwar
protester, and after he demanded the FBI pursue John Lennon, the
agency reported back: 'Lennon appears to be radically oriented;
however he does not give the impression he is a true revolutionist
since he is constantly under the influence of narcotics.'
Perlstein's story begins with an account of the riots in the Watts
section of Los Angeles in the summer of 1965. Nine months prior,
Democrat Lyndon B Johnson had been elected president by an
overwhelming margin. That election was meant to mark a strong
national consensus behind liberalism. Following his election, Johnson
said: 'These are the most hopeful times since Christ was born in
Bethlehem.' He later added: 'We have achieved a unity of interest
among our people that is unmatched in the history of freedom.' But
soon enough, the Watts riots along with bloody scenes from Vietnam
and protests at home were the first signs that the consensus was
unravelling.
Perlstein's innovation is to focus his Sixties narrative on the rise
of a conservative backlash, particularly among the white working
class. A New York Times headline after Republican Barry Goldwater was
defeated by LBJ in 1964 read 'White Backlash Doesn't Develop', but,
says Perlstein, 'backlash was developing', the pundits just didn't
see it. Perlstein then sketches the rise of a 'politics of
resentment', which takes off after Watts and other riots in ghettos
around the country, and becomes evident in the response to Ronald
Reagan's campaign for Governor of California in 1966. By 1969 this
backlash would provide a striking counter-image to the standard
Sixties tableau: 200 construction workers and Wall Street
stockbrokers ganging up to clobber hippies in lower Manhattan.
A particular focus of concern for this backlash was the rise of the
civil rights movement; for example, some argued that the riots showed
that blacks were ungrateful for the reforms introduced under Johnson.
The traditional liberal story about Sixties partisan politics is that
it was all about Republican race-baiting. Racism was a strong
component, but as Perlstein shows, there was more to the fearful
reaction than simply anti-black sentiment. More and more of the
populace over time felt that the country was out of control,
threatening their beliefs and traditional way of life. Various issues
were increasingly seen as having their roots in one overarching
problem moral decay.
Moreover, Perlstein breaks new ground by highlighting that the
backlash was in no small measure a response to the condescension of
the liberals. He notes that liberals had 'developed a distaste' for
the more-prosperous working class: 'The liberal capitalism that had
created this mass middle class created, in its wake, a mass culture
of consumption. And the liberals whose New Deal created this mass
middle class were more and more turning their attention to critiquing
the degraded mass culture of cheap sensation and plastic gadgets and
politicians who seemed to cater to this lowest common denominator.'
Perlstein illustrates his argument about liberal arrogance via a
discussion of changing views of morality. When a poll in 1969 found
that lower-income people had more traditional notions of law
obedience and sexual mores, Time magazine a voice of mainstream
liberal opinion at the time wrote that there was 'a huge gulf
between the old verities and life as it is actually lived by the
American people today'. Perlstein calls this interpretation
'patronising': it is 'as if the non-professionals lived in simple
denial of social reality. As if their objections were not really
moral ones at all.' Another example is how liberals insisted upon
introducing sex education in schools, and dismissed objections as
outdated prudery. Perlstein writes: 'What liberals did not understand
was that the hysterical anti-sex-ed crusaders were not without
reason… Sex, people were realising once they had suddenly been given
the opportunity to give it thought as a public policy issue, was intimate.'
At numerous points in the book Perlstein notes how liberals were
blind to the emerging backlash. Nixon, however, noticed: 'This was
something Richard Nixon, with his gift for looking below the social
surfaces to see and exploit the subterranean truths that roiled
underneath, understood: the future belonged to the politician who
could tap the ambivalence the nameless dread, the urge to make it
all go away; to make the world placid again, not a cacophonous mess.'
Perlstein portrays Nixon as the consummate opportunist, shifting as
the wind blows. Nixon was not original, but he knew who to rip-off:
Reagan, for one, who as governor in California sounded these themes
sooner than him. Moreover, Nixon was able to give a new language to
trends and use them to his political advantage. Reagan, it is
claimed, was the first to use the term 'liberal elite', but it was
Nixon who in practice turned the tables and wrested the mantle of
populism away from the Democrats. Nixon referred to middle America as
a neglected mass constituency that did not have a voice. He
formulated this idea in various ways before hitting upon the winning
one in 1969: 'So tonight, to you, the great silent majority of my
fellow Americans, I ask for your support.' The 'silent majority' were
Americans who did not join the counterculture or protest against the
Vietnam War, and who were looked down upon by the liberal elite.
Nixon's use of that phrase was a code that said to people that it was
acceptable to stand fast against change in society (including black
civil rights) and the sophisticates who held them in contempt for
doing so. Nixon and Republicans after him would go on to utilise the
'silent majority' strategy to great advantage.
Speaking of majorities, Perlstein highlights that indeed there were
some surprising ones that received little attention: such as the fact
that 58 per cent of Americans blamed the four Kent State University
students who were shot in cold blood by the National Guard in 1970
for their own deaths (only 11 per cent blamed the National Guard); or
the fact that during the 1972 election race, 57 per cent of those
under 30 thought Nixon (who is generally regarded as a shifty figure)
was more sincere than his Democratic opponent, George McGovern.
Perlstein argues that Nixon won support not despite his anxieties and
insecurities, but because of them; he became 'the cross-bearing
embodiment of a Silent Majority's humiliations'. An attack on him was
seen as an attack on them.
In electoral terms, Nixon was able to turn this into a new Republican
coalition that combined voters from the south (which was
traditionally Democratic, but were moving to the other side in
response to Johnson's civil rights reforms) and the north, including
sections of the working class.
In stressing the emergence of a conservative backlash, Perlstein
seeks to redress the balance of the discussion about the Sixties,
which has mainly focused on the liberal and radical left. He is
critical of both the left and the right in this period, and shows how
they were locked in a bitter conflict. At the same time, he argues
that both needed each other; he concludes that the outcome of a
Columbia University protest was: 'The cops got the confrontation they
wanted. The revolutionaries got the confrontation they wanted. Lo, a
new crop of revolutionaries, lo, a new crop of vigilantes: Nixonland.'
But in attempting to restore balance, Perlstein goes too far. In his
account the left is just a joke, a 'burlesque'. It is true there were
many aspects of radical politics that were silly and juvenile, like
the stunts tried by Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and the other Yippies.
But the initial impulses to stand up for civil rights and against
American imperialism were idealistic and positive ones. Over time
these movements degenerated into the politics of the personal, but
Perlstein's account empties the radical movements of any progressive
content, and they end up appearing like cartoon characters.
Perlstein also misses an important point about the disarray of the
Sixties: namely, how the crisis of confidence among the ruling elites
was at its root (1). While radical youth were mocking establishment
values, the elites could not hold the line. Perlstein describes, for
example, how inept were the authorities at Cornell University in
responding when black students took control of a building. While
Nixonland contains other examples of the authorities being unwilling
or unable to assert control, Perlstein does not spell out the
inability of the elite to defend their values. Similarly, the book
rightly acknowledges that the anti-war activists and hippies were
always a minority, but Perlstein does not directly challenge the
prevalent idea that this minority was to blame for bringing down
traditional values.
Perlstein writes that the legacy of Richard Nixon was 'the very terms
of our national self-image: a notion that there are two kinds of
Americans'. Conservatives versus liberal, silent majority versus
cultural elite, red state versus blue state. This culture war is one
that Nixon 'gave us the language for'.
The question today, after last year's election, is whether this
conflict will continue. Perlstein, writing in 2008 but before the
election results, says the 'war' has 'ratcheted down considerably'
since the violent Sixties, but 'still simmers on'. Nixonland 'has not
ended yet'. Certainly some antagonisms persist, but it appears that,
at least for now, the liberal side has won and the Nixonland dynamics
are not in play. Very few, especially younger people, uphold
traditional views, and much of the steam has been taken out of the
culture wars. Consequently, as the last election showed, the Nixonian
silent majority strategy no longer works for the Republicans (2). But
the new political, media and celebrity elite that are in the
ascendancy along with Obama hold anti-populist views on a range of
issues, including pro-green behaviour, diet and health, and
materialism. Perlstein's history of the Nixon Sixties shows that
populist backlashes do happen, catching the elite unaware. But let's
hope that the battles of the future focus on the fundamentals, rather
than dead-end culture wars.
--
Sean Collins is a writer based in New York.
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