Nixonland
by digby
A few years back, I read a book about the Goldwater campaign that changed my view of conservatism. It was called Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus
After I read that book, Rick Perlstein and I became friends. He was working at the Village Voice when we first met and it was shortly thereafter that he began to work full time on his new book, a sequel of sorts to Before The Storm, called Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
I know people don’t want to hear that. We want to leave all that hideous old 60s nonsense behind and move forward into a new day. But even if you believe that it’s possible to bury those old issues, you still need to fully grasp them in order to do it. What Perlstein explores in his sweeping, epic history of Nixon’s America are the events which laid bare the class resentments that fueled Richard Nixon’s own complicated psyche — and American culture. We have dull marketing terms for this phenomenon today: “beer track/wine track,” “blue collar/elite” but Perlstein uncovers a fascinating metaphor about Nixon’s high school years in which the young social outcast formed a club called the “Orthogonians” to compete with the kewl kids who called themselves the “Franklins.”
Nixon always had a gift for looking under social surfaces to see and exploit the subterranean truths that roiled underneath. It was an eminently Nixonian insight: that on every sports team there are only a couple of stars, and that if you want to win the loyalty of the team yourself, the surest, if least glamorous, strategy is to concentrate on the nonspectacular — silent — majority. The ones who labor quietly, sometimes resentfully, in the quarterback’s shadow: the linemen, the guards, the punter. ..
Nixon beat a Franklin for student body president. Looking back years later, acquaintances marveled at the feat of this awkward, skinny kid the yearbook called “a rather quiet chap around Campus” … They hadn’t learned what Nixon was learning. Being hated by the right people was no impediment to political success. The unpolished, after all, were everywhere in the majority.
Perlstein writes toward the end of the book:
I have written of the rise of the two American identities, two groups of Americans, staring at each other from behind a common divide, each equally convinced of its own righteousness, each equally convinced the other group was defined by evil. I have written of the moments where, at the extreme, members of these groups killed one another or tried to kill one another, most often in cold blood. Klansmen killing civil rights marchers in Selma; and two pacifists shot through the back of the head in Richmond, Virginia, and left in a ditch; a hippie shot in the back of the head in New Mexico. A teenager shooting a rabbit dead during a service in Louisville, crying, in the New Left’s new language, about the congregation’s “phoniness and hypocrisy.” Weathermen preparing bombs for a massacre at a servicemen’s dance at Fort Dix. Vigilante Cubans setting fires and bombs at the offices of Soviet attaches and talent agents handling Soviet artists. State police carrying out extrajudicial killings, following the pacification of the riot in Newark; black nationalists ambushing cops in Cleveland. I have dedicated this book to the memory of these Americans killed by other Americans, for reasons of ideology.
I have written of the rise, between the years 1965 and 1972, of a nation that had believed itself to be at consensus instead becoming one of incommensurate visions of apocalypse: two loosely defined congeries of Americans, each convinced that should the other triumph, everything decent and true and worth preserving would end.
That was the 1960s.
We Americans are not killing or trying to kill one another anymore for reasons of ideology, or at least for now. Remember this: this war has ratcheted down considerably. But it still simmers on…
I would guess that most people would agree, particularly after the last few weeks, that these divisions have not yet healed. While we will undoubtedly continue to argue about whether it’s possible to heal them, and if so, how and who will accomplish such a thing, we cannot believe that the breach no longer exists. Indeed, in reading this book, I often had a strange feeling of deja vu — not at the events themselves, but the arguments that were made around them.
I lived through those times, and had the not uncommon experience of being a young person in a house divided. There were many families out there like mine, with privileged Franklin kids raised in the affluent post war world by World War II era Orthogonian parents. This low grade civil war was often very, very personal. But nonetheless, for many years I did what most people do when remembering their youth: I shaded the distinctions, romanticized my cohort. And I tended to see the period through the minds eye of one who believed that the majority must approve of all the changes even if they didn’t know it. In other words, I believed we had reached a new sort of cultural and political consensus: the culture was liberal even if our politics were conservative. It made me feel naively confident that the culture war was some sort of phony problem that would eventually right itself as soon as we could defeat these awful conservatives who were stoking these unnatural resentments.
I was wrong about that. The culture war is real, not some sort of mistaken division created out of whole cloth by wily conservative politicians to gain office. The Orthogonians are people like my father. He’s not a libertarian or a social conservative; he’s not motivated by any fancy philosophical construct of the modern conservative movement. He is just a regular American who doesn’t trust educated elites, who thinks that too much change is harmful and that we’d all be better off with a little more authority and a little less freedom (to cause trouble.) The country is full of people like my father — and they resent the hell out of people like me. For real. Not because they are racist and sexist (although plenty of them are, including him) and not because they can’t imagine a world unlike the 1950s (although plenty of them can’t.) They simply think that those of us who are out here grandly proclaiming that we know what’s good for everyone and that we have the all the answers strike them as well — full of shit. Full of ourselves. And, you know, we often are.
The big social and cultural changes of the Nixon era — many of them long overdue and unstoppable — were like a harsh and painful noise to people like this. And they rose up, right along with the draft resisters and the civil rights marchers and the “women’s libbers.” They were called the “silent majority” but they made their voices heard. It wasn’t just the kids and the college professors who were radicalized. That seething Orthogonian resentment came to the surface and they stared down the Franklins — for the next forty years.
In Nixonland, in an almost Rashoman fashion, we see the events with which we are familiar — and many with which we aren’t — unfolding from the perspectives of both the freaks and the straights (as we used to call this division.) It reveals a different picture than the one we thought we all know — a different country. Perlstein believes that Nixonland was a unique moment in American history and I agree, (although I tend to think it was an earthquake that dramatically opened up long standing fissures in American society rather than a unique event that will someday be over.) But either way, we agree that it isn’t over yet. When you think about it, the 40 year period of the 60s until now is a blink of an eye in the broad historical sense and yet fundamental changes have taken place in our society during that time. It’s not surprising that there would be turmoil and resistance. What has been surprising is how badly we grasp the way our American tribes work even though we’ve been circling around each other for a very long time.
Nixonland is a wonderful, entertaining history filled with fascinating characters evoked in loving and penetrating detail. Nixon himself features heavily, of course (and who is more fascinating than him?) He is probably the most important politician of the last half of the 20th century and his character, in many ways, encompasses all the contradictions of the America he represents. It’s a great story, written with the graceful flow of a novel and a sense of drama that often makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. As odd as it might be to say about a work of history that weighs several pounds, it’s hard to put down once you’ve started.
Buy the book. It’s a masterpiece. You are in for a great read and a most insightful look at the period from which we are still feeling cultural and political aftershocks every day. We are still living in Nixonland. Maybe we always have been. Maybe we always will.
Update: Bookforum offers a lengthy, juicy excerpt from the book about the 1972 convention. here’s a taste:
At McGovern headquarters at the famous Doral resort, the usual haunt of golfing Shriners, hordes of kids awaited their hero’s arrival, “wearing,” Norman Mailer wrote, “copper bangles and spaced-out heavy eyes.” He imagined the reaction of the Democratic regulars: “Where were the bourbon and broads of yesteryear?” Not at the Doral’s rooftop restaurant-bar; it was one of the few rooms left in town that still required a suit and tie. That meant this week it was empty. Prostitutes were lonely, too. The New Politics, this movement of acid and abortion for all, had a Calvinist work ethic. Many McGovern delegates had won their spots by outlasting the flabby old regulars in caucuses, just as they’d outlasted rival left factionistas at endless antiwar meetings. They were not in Miami to party. Germaine Greer, the women’s liberationist, complained she “couldn’t find anyone to ball.” Presidential candidates arrived at Miami International Airport, one by one: Wilbur Mills, still rumored to be fronting a Ted Kennedy draft; George Wallace, who touched down in a plane provided him by the White House and was honored by the DNC with a brass band; Hubert Humphrey, who responded when asked whether he thought he could win, “I didn’t come down for a vacation.” John Lindsay landed to rumors that he was so unpopular that the New York caucus would be avoiding him. The front-runner touched down one hour late due to a tropical storm, after an airport press conference from George Meany in which the labor boss intoned, “We’ve made it quite plain we don’t like McGovern.” But could he stop McGovern? That was the question. Any kind of chaos seemed possible. Meany called it “the craziest convention I’ve seen.” And he’d seen a few.
And for those who have read the book or are planning to, it would be helpful if you could do a review on the Amazon site. Evidently it is some sort of metric that publishers like.
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