Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man by Garry WillsMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I was drawn to read this examination of Nixon's campaign and first term. I can't help but wonder if there is a connection between the GOP base now and then which lurched into having a criminal head.
In exploiting fear and differences, this was the birth of the "Southern Strategy". Is the "solid South" crumbling, now? It certainly feels purplish in parts at least to me, now. The exploration here of the birth of that approach in racial and class differences also got the attention of Brad DeLong, author of Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century interested.
Only the South added Republican strength in 1964 when Goldwater ran at the top of the ticket; and convention votes are apportioned to the states according to their performance in the last national election. Moreover, each state that gave its electors to Goldwater—and only Southern states did—got a bonus of six extra votes. This meant that the Southern states had a whopping 316 votes to cast in Miami. “. Add Arizona and Texas, and the total came to 388 “votes. If Nixon could add a border state like Maryland (by adopting its governor), he would be bargaining for a package of 414 votes (with only 667 needed to nominate him).
Nor was it only a question of Miami. The South was just as important in November...
...What is at stake, if one accepts the Southern strategy as the basis for Republican growth, is a reversal of the Democrats’ reign as the majority party—a reversal that is likely to last for decades. Political scentists like Harry Jaffa and Samuel Lubell point out that the American party system has not been a matter of fairly equal see-sawing. The normal situation is to have one solidly established party, to which a minority party can make only partial challenges, until an electoral revolution effects a change in their relationship, giving the minority party a new dominance.
According to Jaffa, there have been only four such “electoral revolutions”—those marked by the rise of Jefferson (1800), Jackson (1823), Lincoln (1860), and Roosevelt (1932). The significance of Rusher’s article—and of the Nixon campaign which, far more than Goldwater’s, was based on its insights—is that Nixon’s election may go down in history as such a turning point. That is clearly what the Nixon organization had in mind. There was much talk among them, all through 1968, of “new coalitions,” of “the passing of the New Deal”—the meeting of their man with a great historic hinge and moment “of reversal.
...Always animated by one ambition—to know who hates who. “That is the secret,” he says with a disarming boyish grin, one that snags a bit on his front tooth, like an unmalevolent Richard Widmark’s. “In New York City, for instance, you make plans from certain rules of exclusion—you can’t get the Jews and the Catholics. The Liberal Party was founded here for Jews opposing Catholics, and the Conservative Party for Catholics fighting Jews. The same kind of basic decision has to be made in national politics. The Civil War is over now; the parties don’t have to compete for that little corner of the nation we live in. Who needs Manhattan when we can get the electoral votes of eleven Southern states? Put those together with the Farm Belt and the Rocky Mountains, and we don’t need the big cities. We don’t even want them.
...Jaffa claims that each revolution was in the direction of greater equality, and therefore “from the Left” in American politics. How could that apply to the Republican Party in 1968? “The clamor in the past has been from the urban or rural proletariat. But now ‘populism’ is of the middle class, which feels exploited by the Establishment. Almost everyone in the productive segment of society considers himself middle-class now, and resents the exploitation of society’s producers. This is not a movement in favor of laissez-faire or any ideology; it is opposed to welfare and the Establishment…
...I asked Phillips if the growth of Negro registration would not recompense Southern Democrats for their losses to the Republican Party. “No, white Democrats will desert their party in droves the minute it becomes a black party. When white Southerners move, they move fast. Wallace is helping, too—in the long run. People will ease their way into the Republican Party by way of the “American Independents”—just as Thurmond eased himself over by way of his Dixiecrat candidacy in 1948 and his independent write-in race in 1956. “We’ll get two thirds to three fourths of the Wallace vote in nineteen seventy-two.”
The demographic shifts in America have been away from the old centers of population. The big cities are declining in population, and declining even more drastically in voting population. The large cities now make up only 30 percent of the national population, against 35 percent suburban, and 35 percent rural and small-town dwellers. This diffusion means that economic climbers do not try to adopt Brahmin standards from old social leaders. The suburbs of the new rich are, like the Sunbelt, unashamed of their gains, unburdened by liberal conscience.
I still feel today it is a lot more about urban versus rural differences, than it is about state borders, especially when current and historical gerrymandering is considered. Also, I resent how I feel from the Republican side it is about stoking prejudices.
Ultimately, this was a vision
...animated by one ambition to know who hates who. ... "In New York City, for instance, you make plans from certain rules of exclusion you can't get the Jews and the Catholics. The Liberal Party was founded here for Jews opposing Catholics, and the Conservative Party for Catholics fighting Jews. The same kind of basic decision has to be made in national politics. The Civil War is over now; the parties don't have to compete for that little corner of the nation we live in. Who needs Manhattan when we can get the electoral votes of eleven Southern states? Put those together with the Farm Belt and the Rocky Mountains, and we don't need the big cities. We don't even want them. Sure, Hubert will carry Riverside Drive in November. La-de-dah. What will he do in Oklahoma?"
The vision of a rabid base feels current:
…They are not, as Nixon knows, the kind who march or riot. They just lock their doors. And they vote. They do not, most of them, go to Wallace rallies; but those who do go speak for them in growing measure. This is the vague unlocalized resentment that had such effect in the 1968 campaign, tainting all the air around talk of law and order. America itself, like her major cities, has blight at the core, not in limbs and extremities. As I stood, bewildered like most reporters, in the insane din of that Wallace rally, saw a crowd of eight thousand tormented by a mere few hundred, I realized at last what had not sunk in at Miami's riot, or Chicago's. I realized this is a nation that might do anything. Even elect Nixon.
In a chapter with the epigram from Shakespeare
I find the people strangely fantasied;
Possess'd with rumours, full of idle dreams,
Not knowing what they fear, but full of fear
…The maker of international mischief was no longer the UN, but the CIA. The chemical that poisoned the world was no longer fluoridated water but Dow Chemical napalm. Instead of Roosevelt's treachery at Pearl Harbor, we had the CIA's plot to kill Kennedys. The point of McCarthyism, old or new, is that whatever has gone wrong was planned to go wrong. It was treason, conspired at. The uncovering of this labyrinthine plot or plots is almost hopeless, so encased in protective secrecy is The System, so deeply has it brainwashed the public; but virtuous citizens must make the effort. This conspiratorial view exactly reflects what Richard Hofstadter, analyzing McCarthyism, called the paranoid style in politics: "When it argues that we are governed largely by means of near-hypnotic manipulation (brainwashing), wholesale corruption, and betrayal, it is indulging in something more significant than the fantasies of indignant patriots: it is questioning the legitimacy of the political order itself."
At the end of World War II, a strong sentiment for what was called internationalism, a tendency to blame the world's past troubles on "nationalism," led to the expectation that there would be greater cohesion in the world, an amalgamation of groups (e.g., a United States of Europe), experiments in federalism leading eventually to World Government. But the very steps taken to promote this movement seem to have had an opposite effect. Not only were many new nations born, but "double nations" arose (Germany, China, Korea, Laos, Vietnam, Nigeria). Liberals, forced to explain these unintended effects, tried to distinguish Bad Nationalism (attacked in propaganda for the UN) from Good Nationalism (nurtured by the UN). Professor Schlesinger was ready to oblige: "The nationalism that arose after the Second World War was, in the main, not the aggressive and hysterical nationalism that had led nations before the war to try to dominate other nations. [That is: It was not Bad Nationalism.] It was, rather, the nationalism generated by the desire to create or restore a sense of nationhood. [That is: It was Good Nationalism.]" Yet this Good Nationalism had all the marks of the Bad jealousy of one's own sovereignty, prickliness toward neighbors, militarism. Most of the nationalist lead-
It interests me how in this book an examination of the context of the first Nixon presidency considers the foreign policy of Woodrow Wilson and an evolution of Liberalism which includes Liberal elements of the Nixon worldview.
Schlesinger's nondistinction was based on the assumption that nationalism is an anomaly in the framework of liberal internationalism. But it is not; it was implicit in liberal theory from the outset a point recently stressed by Professor Seliger of the University of Jerusalem (in John Locke, Problems and Perspectives, edited by John W. Yolton): "To the extent that liberalism provides foundations of modern democracy, it does so also with regard to modern nationalism," since "collective is derived from individual self-determination."
Now we see why it was so urgent for Wilson to demand open elections everywhere in the world as a necessary condition for peace anywhere in the world. We need some uniform mechanism to discover what the people want, who the people are, who shall represent each people in the Covenant. Where the ballot does not exist, we must introduce it; where voting is restricted or rigged, we must supervise the elections; and then, having created the conditions for free choice, we must abide by the results. Which means there must be results. Clear results some policies and leaders chosen, others rejected. If there is no popular will expressed through this machinery, there is certifiably existing no people. If two wills are expressed, there are two peoples. If more than that, then more peoples. If an ambiguous will is expressed, then there is no moral agent for the nation, no body to house the ghostly rights of nationhood. That is why we must have faith in the power of elections to "settle matters." We must believe, even, that where no clear popular will existed previously, election can create one (not just reflect it) can, in that sense, create nationhood, call a people into being. So Nixon summons a new nation to arise in South Vietnam, the result of an election internationally supervised. Though the power of elections is in many…
[…]
A false analogy underlies this whole complex of beliefs. The analogy runs: as the individual is to the nation-state, so the nation-state is to the international organization. We have already seen Wilson's expression of this equation: he said nations must be "governed in their conduct toward each other by the same principles of honor and respect for the common law of civilized society that govern the individual citizens of all modern nations in their relations with one another." The analogy suggests that each country has a unitary national will, expressed in the result of its elections. This leads to difficulties already mentioned in the case of inchoate or crumbling or questionably existent nations. But it leads to even more pervasive (and less suspected) misunderstanding in the established nations, those which have apparently successful electoral systems. America, for instance, is presumed to have a machinery capable of expressing the national will, at least on matters of great importance to the nation. That is why Nixon refers to "what America wants in Vietnam." Yet it is clear, from an analysis of the 1968 election, that the American people had no way of indicating what they wanted in Vietnam that no one can know for sure what they want there, or know whether they know what they want. And if America, with an electoral system as open and flexible as any in the world, cannot say with confidence what its national will is on such a crucial issue, how can countries without settled constitutional processes arrive at knowledge of the popular will?
Yet the concept of a unitary popular will cannot be shed by liberal thinkers. That is why, despite his antiauthoritarian philosophy, the liberal so often yearns for a strong executive - the Super-President of Richard Neustadt, of all those liberals who canonize maximum leaders like Wilson, FDR, and John Kennedy. The clash of blocs and interests in Congress is a constant reminder that there is no such thing as a single will in the nation.
To my ears today, “the Super-President of Richard Neustadt” hardly Unitary executive theory sounds “liberal”, but more like the Unitary executive theory which I associate with Reagan, Bush, etc. in its strong version.
A good summary of some inherent Americanism hypocrisy.
…when we are willing to "send the gunboats" to "protect the flag" when one American citizen is threatened abroad, by foreigners, but are unwilling to think of the national prestige as engaged in the protection of American children from rats in this country's slums. The competitive ethic makes us think of any American as "on our team" when we are competing abroad, with other countries, but reduces that same American to a rival, a potential enemy, in our domestic competition, our struggles against each other in the marketplace; so that patriotism is degraded from love of countrymen to mere hatred of foes, mere xenophobia, and men consider it "patriotic" to prefer the muddled abstractions of "confrontation with Communism" in Vietnam to the lives of our young men.
The growth of American business has little to do with the free market. The reality behind that growth was governmental favoring of manufacture over agriculture (e.g., in the great preferential tariff fights that led up to the Civil War), governmental expansion at the proddings of commerce (e.g., in the political deals for rail rights and land grants that determined the westward expansion), governmental protection of capital risks abroad by "gunboat diplomacy," governmental shelter for big combines in turn-of-the-century Supreme Court decisions. Big business and big government grew in the past by feeding each other - and they still do. That is why Republican fundamentalists, who took the strictures against big government seriously, were regularly defeated by the party's Eastern Establishment. Senator Taft, defeated in 1952, huffed that "Every Republican candidate for President since 1936 has been nominated by the Chase National Bank." And now, as money shifts westward following population trends, Richard Nixon combines old-fashioned attacks on "Big Government" with the promise of big government contracts to the military industries of the Sunbelt.
Here is an interesting observation:
"Participatory politics" is not the way to make men happy, whole, humane. We should have learned that long ago, simply by observing the effect of politics on its most intimate participants the pros, the politicians themselves. If anything, politics is a drain upon the humanity of its practitioners, not a heart-pump to restore it. The most fully "politicized" man in the world may well be Richard Nixon.
There are many books referenced here. Two that sounded interesting are:
* The Deadlock of Democracy: Four-party Politics in America
* Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan
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