Town Halls, Teabaggers, Obama Birthers and Nixonland
Once in a rare while, a book captures the spirit of its age. So it is with Nixonland, Rick Perlstein's stunning chronicle of the rise and fall of Tricky Dick. But his story of the "fracturing of America" isn't simply the harrowing tale of how Nixon, "a serial collector of resentments," fanned the flames of racism, anti-communism and the budding culture war to take power in his time. As the hateful rhetoric and dangerous tactics of furious Birthers, raging Teabaggers and town hall intimidators edges towards the brink of violence, today's bitterly divided Americans are still living in Nixonland.
To be sure, the frothing-at-the-mouth conservatives wreaking havoc at Democratic events around the country are still fighting their losing 2008 campaign by other means. But whether emanating from Glenn Beck or Michael Steele, Mitch McConnell or Rush Limbaugh, the standard GOP rhetoric of nascent government control destroying the economy - and America as we know it - is almost unchanged after two generations.
Take, for example, this excerpt from Perlstein's book. Substitute, say, Bill Clinton for Harry Truman, Barack Obama for Adlai Stevenson and Beck, Jim Demint, Eric Cantor, James Inhofe or Sarah Palin for Richard Nixon, and you'd think you were reading about current events:
It was the eve of the 1954 congressional election season. On the campaign trail for his party's congressional candidates, Nixon did some wild shooting of his own. McCarthy originally claimed dozens of subversives had infiltrated the Truman administration. Nixon claimed the new Republican administration had rousted "thousands." (Eisenhower's civil service administrator later admitted they hadn't found a single one.) Nixon also claimed that the new White House occupants had "found in the files a blueprint for socializing America." Reporters asked him for a copy. Nixon claimed he had been speaking metaphorically. Though he also claimed possession of "a secret of the Communist Party" proving "it is determined to conduct its program within the Democratic Party."
He also made no mistake about whom the Communists' vector would be. Adlai Stevenson was also chasing around the country campaigning for Democratic congressional victories, in pursuit of which Nixon accused him of "attack[ing] with violent fury the economic system of the United States."
The delusional Birther movement, the grandstanding Teabaggers (almost all of whom received a tax cut courtesy of President Obama) and the combustible conflict over health care, too, are being stoked by not-too-thinly veiled racial fears at a time of immense social and economic change. Imagine not Nixon hitting the trail to back GOP candidates in the wake of the 1965 Watts riots, but instead Sarah Palin warning about Obama's "death panels" or FEMA concentration camps run by what Limbaugh and Beck deemed a "racist", an "angry black man" who "hates white people":
He was campaigning in traditionally Republican districts where a Democratic congressman had won in 1964 on Lyndon Johnson's coattails, but was likely to be swept out in the conservative backlash.
For instance, Iowa's first district. A five-term Republican, Fred Schwengel, was running to recover the seat he'd lost to a young political science professor from the Bronx named John Schmidhauser. One day, Representative Schmidhauser appeared at a farm bureau meeting, prepared for a grilling on the Democrats' agricultural policies. The questions, though, were all on rumors that Chicago's Negro rioters were about to engulf Iowa in waves, traveling, for some reason, "on motorcycles." The liberal political science professor was as vulnerable as a sapling...Now that farmers were afraid that Martin Luther King would send Negro biker gangs to rape their children, the Republican restoration seemed inevitable.
Of course, Richard Nixon's dark purpose was transparently cynical - and ultimately successful. Nixon not only helped wash away the commanding Democratic Congressional majority in 1966 and regain the White House two years later. By 1972, Nixon won in a mirror image landslide to Johnson's sweeping victory in 1964. "In the eight years in between," Perlstein wrote, "the battle lines that define our culture were forged in blood and fire."
And to be sure, Perlstein captured the "sense of victimization" gripping those Nixon voters:
When the people who felt like losers united around their shared sense of psychological grievance, their enemies somehow felt more overwhelming, not less...Martyrs who were not really martyrs, oppressors who were not really oppressors: a class politics for the new white middle class.
Shortly before his assassination, Robert F. Kennedy saw where this victimization was taking the nation and what the man marshalling it stood for.
"Richard Nixon represents the dark side of the American spirit."
Just swap Richard Nixon's name for that of almost any of today's leading Republican politicians, pundits or propagandists and RFK's characterization rings true 41 years later.
In ways large and small, we're still living in living in Nixonland.
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I have to say, the current crew seem only superficially similar to Richard Nixon. Richard Nixon was very smart, and these guys are very stupid (except maybe Limbaugh); and, being a junior high school kid in the days of the Nixon presidency, what I remember it for is a series of economic emergency measures that would make Michael Savage melt into a puddle of putrid ooze (and which made me stand outside in the dark for the schoolbus, due to the clocks being moved an hour ahead).
Posted by Barry Schwartz on August 9, 2009 1:26 AM