Welcome back to Nixonland

How Richard Nixon built the political world we live in

This is the first in a four part series I wrote to process Nixonland and its connections to the our current political moment. This first post introduces the book, its framing of Nixon, and the way he created the modern culture wars template. The second post drills down on some of the issues of Nixon’s day like Vietnam and urban unrest. The third post takes a detour to Philip Roth’s American Pastoral for a fictional take on the cultural divides of Nixon’s day. And the final post asks the question, “Are we still living in Nixonland?" and compares and contrasts Nixon with Trump and the 1960s culture wars with our contemporary divides.

Richard Nixon’s story has been told a million times—Watergate, foreign policy maneuvers, his paranoia and downfall. But what often gets overlooked is how much of our modern political world was shaped by him. Nixonland, Rick Perlstein’s deep dive into the political and cultural battles of the 1960s and early ’70s, isn’t just a biography. It’s an origin story for the divided America we still live in today. The book makes the case that Nixon didn’t just win elections—he transformed American politics by turning cultural resentment into a political weapon, fracturing the New Deal coalition, and setting the stage for the modern culture wars. The country that went from LBJ’s landslide victory in 1964 to Nixon’s in 1972 didn’t just shift ideologically—it splintered into two sides that increasingly saw each other as enemies.

I picked up Nixonland because it felt like we were living through something similar after Donald Trump was elected again. The themes of the 1960s and early ’70s—disillusionment with elites, protest backlash, a growing gap between cultural liberals and the middle-class mainstream—are all still playing out today. It’s not a perfect one-to-one comparison, but the echoes are loud.

This is the first in a series of posts digging into Nixonland and processing what it has to say about the political world we live in now. In this post I’ll introduce Nixon himself—his ambition, paranoia, and political instincts—and explain why he’s such a useful figure for understanding the last 50 years of American politics.

The second post will focus on the issues that divided Americans and how Nixon was able to weaponize cultural resentment, turn liberals into a common enemy, and build a coalition that realigned American politics. The third post will be a bit of a detour into fiction, looking at how Philip Roth’s American Pastoral captures the generational divide of this era on a personal level—how did it feel to live through the collapse of the postwar political consensus? And finally, I’ll wrap up with some reflections on what all of this means for today, and whether we’re still stuck in Nixonland after all these years.

Who is Richard Nixon?

It should come as no surprise in reading a Presidential biography that we’re talking about someone who’s smart, incredibly ambitious, and a shrewd political operator. But there are many ways to be a successful politician— what was Nixon’s?

Again, it feels tautologous to describe a US President as ambitious, but I truly think Nixon was on another level. His climb was rapid. He became a US Rep at age 34, Senator at age 37, and Vice President at age 40. He failed to beat JFK in 1960, but came back to win the Presidency 8 years later. He won re-election in 1972 in a landslide that feels impossible today, winning 49 states. And even after that near-unprecedented amount of success, he’s calling his aides grousing about how they only won 49 states and should have won Massachusetts, too.

Nixon unsurprisingly comes across as a paranoid, vindictive man. Perlstein describes him as a “serial collector of resentments.” And, anyone familiar with Watergate knows, he wasn’t shy about weaponizing the federal government against his enemies and breaking the rules. As he said to an aide in a piece of unbelievable foreshadowing, “It’s a piece of cake until you get to the top. You find you can’t stop playing the game the way you’ve always played it because it is part of you and you need it as much as an arm or leg…. You continue to walk on the edge of the precipice because over the years you have become fascinated by how close to the edge you can walk without losing your balance.”

A foreign policy buff

What were his motives in politics, why did he want this power? It turns out most of his focus was on foreign policy, it’s what he really cared about and knew the most about. He was quick to recognize the emergence of a multipolar world in the wake of America’s post-WWII triumph. Agree or disagree with his policies (and there is plenty to disagree with), he really was a knowledgeable and deep thinker:

When the former vice president needed to sway an intellectual into loyalty to him, he gave a dazzling geopolitical lecture. People who heard it used the same phrase to describe it: tour de force–like listening to St. Augustine lecture on the Bible, or Darwin on the flora and fauna of the Galapagos. “Take any political situation in the damn world, and he has war-gamed it this way and that, considering every which way it might go,” one aide later recollected. “One senses that he knows the political geography of Planet Earth about as well as most Congressmen know their own districts,” recalled another.

On his inauguration day he moved swiftly to consolidate power over foreign policy, removing State Department checks on National Security Council power. Essentially, this meant that he and Henry Kissinger, as a pair, had “more single-handed control over foreign affairs than any other two men in American history,” and they “fetishized the secrecy of their deliberations more than any other two officers in American history as well.”

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Sometimes this worked out well. Kissinger’s “shuttle diplomacy” in the wake of the Yom Kippur War, explored in-depth by Martin Indyk in his great book Master of the Game, was an incredible feat that brought significant stability to the Middle East while checking Soviet power in the region.

Other times… not so much. But there will be plenty of time to talk about Vietnam in the next post.

Why was his domestic policy so progressive?

The foreign policy obsession sheds like on one of the head-scratching aspects of Richard Nixon. If he’s this big conservative figure, why did he have such a liberal policy track record? I mean, this is the guy who created the EPA! He supported Universal Basic Income!

Source: Nixon signing the Clean Air Act in 1970

Mainly, the answer is that he just didn’t care that much about domestic policy:

On domestic policy Richard Nixon’s positions were not too different from those of all the best circles. Nixon didn’t care much about domestic policy—except for the kind of stuff he hired Harry Dent to worry about: blocking school integration. The running of a welfare state he dismissed as “building outhouses in Peoria.” “I’ve always thought the country could run itself domestically without a president,” Nixon once told Theodore White. “You need a president for foreign policy.” Now that it was time at long last to turn to configuring a domestic agenda, Nixon was content to let the bureaucrats and policy intellectuals take care of it, following the conventional wisdom of their trade.

That conventional wisdom, in 1969, was liberal. A growing state was seen as the natural companion to human progress—“the price of rapidly expanding national growth,” President Eisenhower had said in 1958. The day before Nixon’s Vietnam speech the Harvard economist and bestselling author John Kenneth Galbraith testified to a rapt joint congressional subcommittee in favor of nationalizing any company that did more than 75 percent of its business with the Pentagon.

The picture is a little more complicated than that, though. Nixon’s basically a political chameleon who cared about winning elections and consolidating governmental power. He explored eliminating the electoral college to reduce Southern segregationist George Wallace’s ability to run a disruptive third party campaign. He supported giving 18 year olds the vote not out of any principle, but because he thought it’d further divide Democrats and make it harder for them to beat him.

The EPA is particularly interesting. Surprise surprise, it wasn’t born out of any deep love of the environment or conservation:

Nixon quietly submitted the plan to Congress, obscuring its implications. Congress took no action within sixty days—which the president then announced allowed it to take effect unilaterally. Then, by executive order, he created a new Environmental Protection Agency—more nobility the less noble the closer you looked: its 5,650 employees all came from existing agencies, its $1.4 billion budget taken from existing programs, the only difference being that these previously scattered centers of authority were now directly controlled from the White House.

Elsewhere in the book, he bucks conservative economic thought and institutes a 90-day wage and price freeze and plus 10% tariffs. At the same time, he eliminated the Gold Standard. Nixon was proudly about power over ideology and sought out others who understood the political game in the same way he did:

One of the things that delighted Nixon was that [Treasury Secretary John] Connally had no fixed ideology. In fact, he boasted that he had no fixed convictions about anything: “I can play it round or I can play it flat, just tell me how to play it” was one of his nostrums—paraphrasing the apocryphal applicant for a job as a rural science teacher, asked about his convictions on the shape of the earth.

The master culture warrior

Perlstein’s thesis is essentially that Nixon set the terms for the modern culture wars and perfected the Right’s role in it, riding that stance to victory twice. It’s part of what feels so resonant about Nixon and why he’s worthy of study in this political moment. He was instrumental in shaping a previous era of anti-elite backlash to progressive change.

In the final post of this series I’ll get more explicit about how this compares to what we’re living through right now in the Trump era. But unlike Trump, whose brand is built on being an elite who understands the game, Nixon injected an Everyman flavor into his political brand. He bolsters this with a sort of self-deprecating humor and charisma that even plays into his own awkwardness (particularly in the wake of his famous failed TV debate against JFK in the 1960 election).

This Everyman anti-elite charm is one of the throughlines of the book, going all the way back to Nixon’s time at Whittier College. The traditional “popular kids” at Whittier had a fraternity called The Franklins, while the rest of the student body was disorganized. It was Nixon who created a new club, called the Orthogonians:

The Orthogonians’ base was among Whittier’s athletes. On the surface, jocks seem natural Franklins, the Big Men on Campus. But 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 were only a couple of stars, and that if you want to win the loyalty of the team for yourself, the surest, if least glamorous, strategy is to concentrate on the nonspectacular–silent–majority. The ones who labor quietly in the quarterback’s shadow: the linemen, the guards, the punter.

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Perlstein constantly refers back to this idea, that Nixon is always finding those “subterranean truths,” appealing to new groups of Orthogonians to rail against the Franklins throughout his political career. His political success was as much about being against something as for something. “Being hated by the right people was no impediment to political success. The unpolished, after all, were everywhere in the majority.”

Who were Nixon’s Franklin enemies?

In the next post I’ll dive deeper into the cultural issues that divided America in Nixon’s day and how he rode the waves. But to wrap up this post, let’s answer the question: who were the Franklins of Nixon’s day? Who were the elites that he turned into a common enemy?

The short answer: post-War liberals. Liberals felt responsible for the New Deal, for entering and winning WWII, for rebuilding Europe and cementing US hegemony. All the while, they had built a modern middle class with economic security in a booming, prosperous society.

Political scientists often talk about “regimes,” or the sort of unquestioned bipartisan mood that shapes the politics of an era even as parties may exchange power. In this era, the regime was still New Deal liberalism.

Nixon was directly preceded by LBJ’s Great Society, to this day the biggest welfare state expansion since the New Deal and a period of rapid expansion of Civil Rights. Even when Nixon took power, the regime stayed liberal— look again at that quote above about Nixon’s domestic policy.

But Nixon was the first to notice cracks in this liberal post-War consensus and the ways that it planted the seeds of its own downfall. Liberals were a victim of their own success. This middle class was “becoming ever less reliably downtrodden.” As pollster Samuel Lubell put it, the “inner dynamics of the Roosevelt coalition have shifted from those of getting to those of keeping.”

To put it mildly, these shifts upset liberals. The rise of the middle class led to a new mass consumer culture they thought was cringy and vapid. Liberals saw a “working class that was no longer poor, but seemed so much poorer in spirit.” The fact that these new middle class members of the “comfortable class” could support RIchard Nixon and at times see themselves as victims in national politics was absurd and worthy of scorn.

These middle class people had power, how could they be whining while the literal Civil Rights movement was happening and the state-sponsored oppression and abuse of African Americans was so visible? At the same time, these white middle class Nixon supporters were seen as voting against their interests, against the elites who had helped create this new economy and world order that allowed them to live so comfortably.

Elites even had a new term for this gross new politics, right-wing populism. Sound familiar?

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Nixon’s innovation was to see these cracks in the liberal coalition and to channel it into a cultural movement. What’s remarkable is how quickly this movement rose to power:

The main character in Nixonland is not Richard Nixon. Its protagonist, in fact, has no name–but lives on every page. It is the voter who, in 1964, pulled the lever for the Democrat for president because to do anything else, at least that particular Tuesday in November, seemed to court civilizational chaos, and who, eight years later, pulled the lever for the Republican for exactly the same reason.

The key to this rapid shift is Nixon’s perfection of the culture war, a topic I’ll address more next week.