Nixonland: The genius of Tricky Dicky

[BurtWorm]

I just started reading Rick Pearlstein's Nixonland this weekend, and already I have to recommend it to everyone I know who cares about American politics. (And that means YOU.) What an insight into how we got where we are--or at least to where we were before Obama got elected! There's no good reason to believe, however, that we've left Nixonland yet, and we can't know that until a few more election cycles go by. But reading Nixonland makes you start to wonder about the wisdom of ever writing those ratfuckers on the right off. Their guiding principle--resentment of people perceived to have it easy--is usually unbeatable when a master like Richard Nixon is in charge of it.

To give you an example of how this works: In 1966, Nixon was in New York, recovering from the hair's breadth loss of the presidency in 1960 and a trouncing from Pat Brown in California in 1962. He wound up a partner in a white-shoe law firm of the kind he had been rejected from when he came job hunting straight out of Duke law school in 1937 and kept finding himself losing out to Harvards and Yalies. He was carefully rebuilding his image, with the help of Madmen and guys like William Safire, who got him a profile in the NY Times Magazine. He'd had a reputation along the lines of a typical OC wingnut, but in 1966, he was being groomed to look more like a moderate, establishment-consensus type.

Across the river in NJ, Eugene Genovese, an alleged communist and professor at Rutgers University, had caused a stir with a speech saying he was rooting for the reds in Vietnam. The right wing Republican candidate for governor called for Genovese's dismissal, and to the dismay of the Nixon-groomers in NY, RMN went to Jersey to stand with the wingnut, saying Genovese's academic freedom may be a right in peacetime, but in times of war, there should be no such right. He compared Geneovese to a Nazi in WWII who openly rooted for Germany.

The NY swells rolled their eyes, Geneovese kept his job and Nixon's candidate lost. But, Pearlstein notes, it wasn't really about Genovese or the other Republican. It was about Nixon and his base, the "silent majority" types who, like Nixon, hated the reds and pinkos on college campuses, resenting them for making all that noise and getting all that attention saying un-American things while folks like themselves played by the rules, respected the flag, rooted for the US in war, and worked their asses off only to have Negroes and immigrants move into their neighborhoods to lower their property values even as their tax bills grew and grew. Those were Nixon's people, and they were watching and appreciating and taking note. It was a little sign, a little red meat for the masses so they would know he hadn't gone all the way over to the Rockefeller side. And this was going to be crucial in 1968.

Makes you wonder what signs these Orthogonists, as Pearlstein calls them (for the "right-angle" club of strivers Nixon started back at Whittier College as an alternative to the old boy net Franklin Club of BMOCs and "guys who had it easy"--get it?), are picking up during the Obama years and from whom? Do these kinds of signals work any more? Is the nation becoming too diverse for the resenters to form a coherent coalition anymore?