Columbia Professor Todd Gitlin provides a broadly accurate history of the resurrection of Richard Nixon in the context of the populist uprising presented by then-Alabama Governor George Wallace. Much of this piece is contentious in its fine details, but not so much so as to ruin his point.
And his point is that Nixon served a useful purpose by taking on the anger and frustration represented by Wallace’s campaign and taming it. Of course, one of the ways he tamed it was by transferring anti-black attitudes to the New Left and the hippies. Having been born in Nixon’s first year in office and raised in the liberal bastion of Princeton, New Jersey, I don’t think we appreciated this transfer of anger, nor did it ever seem all that complete.
But I was isolated from “the Real America” in a variety of ways. In 1972, as I toddled after my older brother in his McGovern-Shriver t-shirt, it was truthfully said that you could walk up and down Nassau Street and not find anyone willing to express support for Nixon-Agnew. When I walked into my first kindergarten class, the Ford administration was less than a month old. By Thanksgiving, the Democrats had crushed the Republicans in the midterms and added significantly to their congressional majorities. In second grade, so many of my classmates supported Jimmy Carter in our mock election that I can still remember the two heretics who supported Ford.
In our classrooms, Martin Luther King Jr. was presented as an uncontroversial saint, and the segregationists were no longer present; they were as thoroughly defeated as Hitler’s armies. In the high school, racial tensions still ran high, but that was no longer true by the time the eighties rolled around and I began attending classes there.
What we all knew, however, was that the rest of the country hated New York City and hated liberal college towns like Princeton. There were no words for this phenomenon until later, when people began talking about the Reagan Democrats and the effectiveness of the Southern Strategy. But, by then, the focus was off the New Left and back on racial backlash.
I’m sure we all experienced those years quite differently, depending on whether we were black or white, or where we grew up or lived at the time. But there was at least a real sense that, while racism percolated on the surface of everything, it had been defeated as an overt political force. It had to be talked about in code, which offered constant testimony to its disreputable nature. The reemergence of open racism in our current climate has seemed like the reemergence of a beast we thought had been vanquished.
But here it is again in all its Wallace-esque glory, and Prof. Gitlin is concerned that there is no Nixon to harness and transform it into something less potentially violent.
Wallace roused his crowds against left-wingers in the same way Trump turns his followers’ rage against Muslims and immigrants. Like Wallace, the game Trump plays is, “Make my day.” Disruptors in his audiences are props for his performances, rallying his supporters more fervently and defensively around him. The result, as in 1968, is a growing climate of violence. It feels as if, somewhere, fuses are lit…
…The menace of the late 1960s eventually subsided as Richard M. Nixon harnessed his “silent majority” to calm the political climate early in his presidency as the ultra-radicals burned through whatever base of sympathy they had started with. But today’s chaos won’t be so easy to stop. The splenetic fury Trump taps may be immutable, and no Nixon is on the horizon to focus it…
…Today’s nativist animus — and the violence it has spurred — will not be so handily co-opted. First, there are stickier economic problems. In the past few decades, plutocracy, globalization and compliant governments have betrayed workers, most of whom are white…
…Most of all, though, there’s no respectable version of Trump — no Nixon — waiting in the wings to deliver on promises and contain the free-floating hatred. There’s no one to placate the enraged white working class, especially the men, and it’s hard to imagine policies that would make a re-greatened America “take the country away from you guys.”
I’m going to do a follow-up piece that will revisit some of the themes I’ve developed over the years. These mainly relate to the importance and power of leadership, and the fragility of American norms when that leadership is lacking.
Stay tuned.
