The End of Nixonland?

[Cuchulain]

Rick Perlstein's Nixonland brilliantly covers a period that is finally coming to an end.

Perlstein's book focuses on Richard Nixon's runs for the White House, beginning in 1966. Democrats, facing a voter backlash over rioting, crime, and the Vietnam War lost 47 House seats in 1966. Nixon rode that revolt into the White House two years later and exploited it while in office to win re-election in a landslide in 1972.

Perlstein correctly states that Nixon came "to power by using the anger, anxieties, and resentments produced by the cultural chaos of the 1960s," and defines Nixonland as the state of total political warfare over class and cultural conflicts.

Nixonland, the book, ends in 1972, but Nixonland, the place, endured, through the 70s and 80s, up until George W. Bush's re-election in 2004. Welfare queens, Willie Horton, Swiftboats; all Nixonland tactics, all designed to cleave Americans along racial and cultural lines. Perlstein writes, "What Richard Nixon left behind was the very terms of our national self-image: the notion that there are two kinds of Americans. On the one side the "Silent Majority"...On the other side are the "liberals."

The politics of Nixonland proved very successful for the Republicans, if not for America. Of the ten Presidential elections between 1968 and 2004, Republicans won 7. The only two term Democrat elected in that period was hamstrung for three-quarters of his Presidency by a Republican Congress. In Nixonland conservatives mostly set the agenda and framed the debate. http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_flack/archive/2008/10/18/the-end-of-nixonland.aspx

The rightwing is still using Nixon's startegy of divide and conquer. http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/politics/2008/10/29/feyerick.religious.extremes.cnn
Polls suggest that it's not working, Is the era of Nixon/Lee Atwater finally over?

"If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin." - Hunter S Thompson

[Oli]

I don't know the answer to your question Cuchulian, but I'm glad Lee Atwater was included in there. I'm fairly confident there is a special place in Hell for those 2.

[Cuchulain]

I don't know the answer to your question Cuchulian, but I'm glad Lee Atwater was included in there. I'm fairly confident there is a special place in Hell for those 2.

You know, I suspect Karl Rove has a Lee Atwater shrine, complete w/bloody altar, in his basement, and some of the neighbor's pets have gone mysteriously missing...

[qeuqheeg222]

i really believe that dick cheney wants to get back at the baby boomers for gettin rid of nixon....rove too..they cant stand the idea of democracy takin precedence over patriarchy.....

[chefmike]

Love that HST quote about Tricky Dick's funeral. Those two had such a special bond.

[BrendaQG]

I don't think so. What Richard Nixon did was just his particular expression of the "Imperial Presidency". As described in the book by that name. He grabbed power and held on to it by whatever means he could go get his agenda done.

He fooled southern conservatives into electing him the first time then what did he do while in the white house. He enacted laws that gave us Affirmative Action, and the ERA for women, and expanded welfare to give us things like Social Security Disability payments and workmans comp. He got us out of the Vietman war which Kennedy had started... Let me put it this way. It is a gross over simplification to say that Nixon's Silent Majority was all rabbid conservatives and the others were liberals.

It's more like this... Nixon appealed more to the rabbid conservatives than those he was running against. George mc Govern (best political name ever), and Hubert Humphrey (second worst political name ever!)

With Obama's election this will not have ended. Lord knows Obama has in his own way divided the nation along racial lines by virtue of his very skin. Let us not celebrate yet. (I was for Obama back when he ran for senate before most of you knew him.) He is still a black man and when push comes to shove the likely voters in swing states may not show up for him. :-(

[Cuchulain]

i really believe that dick cheney wants to get back at the baby boomers for gettin rid of nixon....rove too..they cant stand the idea of democracy takin precedence over patriarchy.....

Yep, it's well known that Cheney's problem with Watergate and the break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsburg's psychiatrist were not the crimes, but the 'limitations' subsequently imposed on Presidential power. Dick's manipulations as ranking minority member of the Congressional committee investigating the Iran-Contra affair may well have kept Ronnie Reagan out of jail as well.

[Cuchulain]

I don't think so.

You may be right, Brenda. While Nixon's 'Southern Strategy' may be breaking down, the South is still mostly Republican (white people, anyway). That's a big block of formerly Democratic territory that flipped because of Republican race-baiting.

Of course, there are still plenty of racists up north, as seen in the youtube vid of McCain's Pottsville, Pa. rally, where several whites were willing to say on camera that they would never vote for a black person.

[Cuchulain]

Love that HST quote about Tricky Dick's funeral. Those two had such a special bond.

Thanks, chef. Here's some more for you:

"Nixon's spirit will be with us for the rest of our lives--whether you're me or Bill Clinton or you or Kurt Cobain or Bishop Tutu or Keith Richards or Amy Fisher or Boris Yeltsin's daughter or your fiancee's 16-year-old beer-drunk brother with his braided goatee and his whole life like a thundercloud out in front of him. This is not a generational thing. You don't even have to know who Richard Nixon was to be a victim of his ugly, Nazi spirit.

He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.

KICKING NIXON WHILE HE WAS UP

It is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character that almost every country in the world has learned to fear and despise. Our Barbie-doll president, with his Barbie-doll wife and his boxful of Barbie-doll children is also America's answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the Werewolf in us; the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable, full of claws and bleeding string warts, on nights when the moon comes too close....

At the stroke of midnight in Washington, a drooling red-eyed beast with the legs of a man and head of a giant hyena crawls out of its bedroom window in the South Wing of the White House and leaps 50 feet down to the lawn ... pauses briefly to strangle the chow watchdog, then races off into the darkness...toward the Watergate, snarling with lust, loping through the alleys behind Pennsylvania Avenue and trying desperately to remember which one of those 400 iron balconies is the one outside Martha Mitchell's apartment.

Ah...nightmares, nightmares. But I was only kidding. The President of the United States would never act that weird. At least not during football season. But how would the voters react if they knew the President of the United States was, according to a New York Times editorial on Oct. 12, presiding over "a complex, far-reaching and sinister operation on the part of White House aides and the Nixon campaign organization ... involving sabotage, forgery, theft of confidential files, surveillance of Democratic candidates and their families and persistent efforts to lay the basis for possible blackmail and intimidation?" -HST

The sad thing is that Reagan was at least as bad and Dubya is worse.