The Nixon Effect

How Richard Nixon's Presidency Fundamentally Changed American Politics

Douglas E. Schoen

• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781594038006
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Nixon Effect examines the 37th president’s political legacy in broad-ranging ways that make clear, for the first time, the breadth and duration of his influence on American political life. The book argues that Nixon is the key political figure in postwar American politics in multiple ways, some barely acknowledged until now. His legacy includes a generational shift in the ideological orientations of both the Republican and Democratic parties; the Nixon influence, both intentional and unintentional, was to push both parties further out to their ideological poles. So stark was Nixon’s influence on party identities that it shaped the hardened partisan polarization in Washington today and the evolution of what has come to be called Red and Blue America.Stemming in part from this, and also from Nixon’s scorched-earth political warfare and eventually his Watergate scandal, we have also seen the evolution of politics as war, where adversaries and ideological opponents are seen as evil or unpatriotic. Finally, Nixon’s pioneering tactics—from the identification of the Silent Majority to the Southern Strategy, from "triangulating” between both parties and claiming the political center to launching the culture war with attacks on "elites” in media, academia, and the courts—have shaped political communications and strategy ever since.Other books have argued for Nixon’s importance, but Douglas E. Schoen’s is the first to take into account the full range of this fascinating man’s influence. While not discounting Nixon’s many misdeeds, Schoen treats his presidency and its importance with the seriousness—and evenhandedness—that the subject deserves.

SECTION II

THE

NIXON

INFLUENCE

– CHAPTER 3 –

Nixonizing the Republicans

Part One: The Southern Strategy and the Silent Majority

Out there the juke boxes don’t play “New World Coming”; they play “Welfare Cadillac.” In the heartland, it’s all Agnew put to music.

—KEVIN PHILLIPS¹

It is time for America’s silent majority to stand up for its rights.

—VICE PRESIDENT SPIRO AGNEW²

With one rhetorical stroke, Nixon identified a new populist category that redefined how political groups strive for influence.

—MATTHEW D. LASSITER, “WHO SPEAKS FOR THE SILENT MAJORITY?”³

The Nixon revolution in the Republican Party started out with an insight about weakening Democratic appeal within a key demographic: white men. As he prepared for another presidential run in 1968, Nixon began formulating a strategy that could peel off a large portion of whites—especially working-class whites and Southerners—from the Democrats. Before 1968, the idea that blue-collar workers might come out for the GOP was considered fanciful. But what Nixon and his team would then identify was a fault line, and a strategy to exploit it, that would redefine American politics. The evidence of their success, over forty years later, is clear in the continued difficulty today’s Democratic Party faces in attracting white male voters, especially those in the working class.

“Democrats are for a bunch of freeloaders in this world as far as I’m concerned,” said a sixty-three-year-old Avis bus driver, interviewed for a March 2014 New York Times feature. “Republicans make you work for your money, and try to let you keep it.” Another white working man who was interviewed criticized the Democrats’ obsession with social issues: “I don’t see why that’s at the top of our priority list,” he said. “But you say that out in the open, and people are all over your back.” And a Republican Party spokesman put it: “When you’re spending 60 percent of your time talking about birth control and Obamacare, not a lot of men are paying attention to you.”⁴

Where the Democrats have managed to win elections with poor results among white working-class men—President Obama won reelection with a stunningly low 38 percent of the overall white vote—Democrats like Frank Houston, a Democratic Party chairman in Michigan’s affluent Oakland county, worry that the losses among white men must be contained to some degree, lest the party rely too heavily on its “ascendant coalition” of women, gays, and minorities.

“There’s a whole cadre of us—of young, white men political leaders in Oakland County—who are saying, ‘We can’t just write off 30-year-old to 40-year-old guys, let alone anyone who’s older,’” Houston said.⁵ The writer of the Times feature, Jackie Calmes, reminded readers that Democrats often win the votes of fewer than four out of ten white men in elections, and that they haven’t won a majority of white men since it was done by Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

And yet, this very cohort was once the bedrock of Franklin Roosevelt’s Democratic coalition that won five consecutive presidential elections between 1932 and 1952, and seven out of nine elections between 1932 and 1964. During that era, it would have sounded exotic to suggest that the Republican Party—a motley coalition of upper-crust business and financial types and Northeastern elites, along with a small-but-intense coalition of ideological conservatives—could break through with this demographic, let alone come to own it. Yet that is precisely what happened over the last half century.

And that brings us back to Richard Nixon. It was Nixon’s 1968 campaign that first shifted this well-worn pattern and his 1972 landslide victory that made the reversal permanent. Many factors, policies, and decisions played a role in this transformation. But two key approaches paved the way:

• The Southern Strategy: An approach that took shape among Nixon advisor Harry S. Dent Sr.—a veteran of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign—and the shrewd young political operative Kevin Phillips.

• The Silent Majority: A phrase Nixon first used to refer to a broad spectrum of American voters in a 1969 speech about the Vietnam War.

These approaches—one electoral, the other rhetorical—helped make possible not only Nixon’s electoral victories but also the wholesale transformation of the Republican Party, and, indeed, of the American political landscape. They made up a landscape that, with some alterations, remains in place today.

The Republican Party has deeply internalized the concept of the silent majority, and the party’s ideological commitments and communication style have been directly shaped by it. Inevitably, the identification of this majority involved a separating of the electorate into us-versus-them camps. But what made Nixonian polarization so remarkable was that the “us” comprised a huge majority. Perhaps that’s why Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, called this sorting of desirable and undesirable voters “positive polarization.”⁶ While the men spoke in polarizing terms, their words did not serve to narrow but to expand their political base—at least until Watergate intervened.

But the coining of the term “silent majority,” and its derivatives, was only the rhetorical portion of the Nixon polarization strategy. On the electoral side, he and his team also found a way to draw sharp lines while expanding their political support. They did so by looking to the beleaguered South. Nixon’s Southern strategy forged the most dramatic political realignment since the New Deal and changed the Republican Party forever. The presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush are unimaginable without it, and later presidential candidates, like John McCain and Mitt Romney, would also rely on the South as their electoral bedrock.

The Southern Strategy

The Southern strategy’s genesis was as simple as arithmetic and as methodical as typical political calculation. Ever since Reconstruction, the South had been a “solid” bet for the Democratic Party, as white Southerners voted steadfastly against the party of Lincoln and the liberal Republican architects of Reconstruction, black suffrage, and civil rights. No region of the country was such a lock: in every presidential election from 1876 to 1964—a span of eighty-eight years—the South went Democratic. There is no parallel for this kind of long-running regional dominance by a major party. Even in elections where the Republican Party won the White House smashingly—in 1924, with Calvin Coolidge; in 1928, with Herbert Hoover; and in 1952 and 1956, with Dwight Eisenhower—it did so without the South.⁷

But by 1968, the Democrats had reached a crossroads with their disparate coalitions. They maintained the support of Southern “Dixiecrats,” but this support was threatened by their growing electoral reliance on the North, particularly on blacks, who had come north by the millions in the Great Migration starting around 1910—and then, from the 1940s on, in the Second Great Migration. In the early sixties, the civil rights movement changed the calculus. The 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act, along with desegregation and growing national support for the civil rights movement, threatened the South with a political and social revolution rivaling anything since secession. Many Southern whites saw their way of life under attack, and more than a dozen Southern governors and senators boycotted the 1964 Democratic Convention. Most of the Alabama delegation refused to pledge support for the Lyndon Johnson/Hubert Humphrey ticket. Some were already talking about becoming Republicans.⁸

“We have lost the South for a generation,” President Johnson is said to have told an aide after signing the landmark 1964 civil rights legislation. If anything, LBJ was being overly optimistic: the South began drifting away from the Democratic party immediately. The Southern strategy’s dry run came later that year, with Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign. Goldwater was far to the right of most American voters in 1964, and, though an honest and thoroughly decent human being, he was a crude politician. In one of the greatest presidential routs in history, Goldwater was trounced around the country, but not in the five core states of the Deep South: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. Goldwater won them all, in addition to his home state of Arizona. Johnson took everything else.⁹

By 1968, the Democratic Party’s turmoil was driving white Southerners en masse to the GOP. If the Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts weren’t enough, there was the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. The convention chaos, marked by infighting between the liberal mainstream of the party and its more militant left wing, convinced many working-class Americans—especially in the South—that the Democrats could no longer be trusted with national leadership.¹⁰ As longtime Democratic advisor Ted van Dyk put it in a 2008 Wall Street Journal article, “Democratic presidential candidates have not since 1968 been able to restore the party that was broken that year.”¹¹ That remains true even today, recent Democratic wins notwithstanding.

Richard Nixon and his advisors thought they saw the outline of a new political alignment. Their goal was to capitalize politically on the alienation of Southern whites resulting from the civil rights movement and Washington liberalism generally—which seemed bent on forcing radical change on the South. Aware that many Southern whites would cast protest votes against Democratic candidates, Nixon and his advisors hoped to convert this demographic into a solid base of loyal Republican supporters. Their timing was good: demographic changes since World War II made the South highly amenable to such a strategy. By 1970, the South was less than 20 percent black.¹² At the same time, white transplants relocated to the South—many of them Republicans already, lacking any generational loyalty to Democrats.¹³ Nixon and his team did not just pursue the Southern strategy among voters but also among political leaders, wooing prominent southern Democratic politicians into the Republican Party. These included former South Carolina senator Thomas A. Wofford,¹⁴ Texas attorney general Will Wilson,¹⁵ future Mississippi senator Trent Lott¹⁶—and most important, South Carolina senator and former Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond.¹⁷ Thurmond’s support would be crucial in the 1968 election. In addition, some formerly Democratic representatives became the first Republican congressmen from their states since Reconstruction.¹⁸ And other prominent Southern Democrats eventually became Republicans, such as Texas governor John Connally.

Unlike Goldwater, who came out explicitly against the Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts, Nixon did not question these legislative achievements. Instead, he appealed to Southern whites’ concerns about the effects of broad-ranging liberal reforms as well as the federal government’s impositions on local authority. Nixon threaded the needle between accepting existing federal legislation—especially legislation narrowly tailored to protect basic rights—and opposing the newer efforts with more expansive goals, like forced busing and desegregation mandates. He spoke out against Washington’s attempts to direct state Republican parties that were more conservative on civil rights. “Washington cannot dictate,” Nixon said to state parties. He sometimes couched his positions as a defense of the two-party system: “I will go to any state in the country to campaign for a strong two-party system, whether or not I agree with local Republicans on every issue.”¹⁹

He carved out nuanced positions on civil rights court decisions. He spoke of Brown v. Board of Education as settled law, but he also said that the federal government, under a strict reading of the Constitution, had only limited ability to enforce it.

The Southern strategy is widely regarded today as racist, even by many Republicans. (Few Democrats seem as eager to condemn their own party’s exploiting of the Solid South for a century, at a time when the region was immeasurably more racist and more violent than it was by the time Republicans began winning there.) For many liberal critics, Nixon’s commercials from 1968 on crime, in particular, only strengthened the impression that the candidate was using race to stoke white fears—and win white votes.

“It is time for a proper look at the problem of order in the United States,” Nixon said in a voice-over for his most provocative ad. As quick-cut photos of urban crime scenes, bloody faces of protestors, police, and conflagrations splashed across the screen, Nixon intoned: “Dissent is a necessary ingredient of change. But in a system of government that provides for peaceful change, there is no cause that justifies resort to violence. Let us recognize that the first civil right of every American is to be free from domestic violence.” As the frightening imagery continued, Nixon concluded: “So I pledge to you: we shall have order in the United States.”²⁰ The use of the word “order,” not to mention the use of the phrase “civil right” in a different context than black rights, leaves room for interpretation about the ad’s intentions.

However, in my view, the Southern strategy was far more nuanced—politically and ethically—than its liberal critics have long maintained. Certainly Nixon and his men were, at minimum, politically unsentimental; at such a delicate moment in the nation’s social history, to forge ahead with the Southern strategy so unapologetically was, at the least, opportunistic. Nixon’s own reputation for private racism—his statements about blacks on Oval Office tapes, for example—and the hard-boiled attitudes of his men, like Patrick Buchanan and Kevin Phillips, didn’t alleviate that impression. Phillips was prone to saying things like: “The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. Without that prodding from the blacks...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Walking in Nixon’s Shadow
• Section I: The Nixon: Record
• Section II: The Nixon: Influence
• Section III: The Nixon: Legacy
• Afterword: Nixon in 2016
• Notes
• Index