At InstaPundit, there are interesting links and quotes about the fact that Richard Nixon is enjoying a renaissance among young Americans. Many young conservatives are re-evaluating Nixon, and comparing him with Donald Trump. Those observations are worthwhile, and I commend them to your attention.
There are obvious parallels between Nixon and Trump, including the fact that both came back from what seemed to be the end of their political careers, Nixon after he lost the 1960 presidential election, and then his race for Governor of California in 1962, and Trump after he lost the 2020 election. But what they really have in common is the intensity with which they were hated by Democrats. Democrats impeached Nixon and drove him from office over a scandal–Watergate–which in hindsight amounted to very little. And they impeached Trump twice, doing their best to chase him out of the White House, and then pursued him with absurdly weak criminal prosecutions after he left office.
The most interesting aspect of this parallel, I think, is that neither Nixon nor Trump was particularly conservative. Nixon’s administration was centrist if not liberal-leaning. During that administration the EPA came into being, and Nixon signed the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act. Nixon proposed a negative income tax that would give all Americans a guaranteed income. He also proposed a Comprehensive Health Insurance Plan that would have required employers to furnish health insurance to all Americans. He issued executive orders that gave birth to affirmative action requirements in federal hiring and federal contractors. His administration ushered in OSHA and the Consumer Products Safety Commission. Three of his four Supreme Court appointees–Warren Burger, Harry Blackmun, and Lewis Powell–were squishes. And, almost unbelievably, Nixon imposed the first wage and price controls in peacetime in American history.
I am going from memory, but I am quite sure that during his time in the wilderness, Nixon gave an interview in which he said that his big mistake was going into politics as a Republican. He told the reporter that he should have run as a Democrat.
So, although he first became known as a strong anti-Communist–hardly unusual in that era–Nixon was not much of a conservative. Neither is Donald Trump. It has often been said, and truly, that Trump is basically a 1990s Democrat. And he was, in fact, a Democrat in the 1990s. But our country has moved so far to the left since then that Trump’s administration is properly viewed as conservative, in most respects, by today’s standards.
So why, exactly, did Democrats hate Nixon and Trump so much more than their more conservative contemporaries? It’s an interesting question. I think the main reason is that both men represented that segment of the American people whom liberals hold most in contempt–the middle class. Nixon was famously the candidate of the Silent Majority, the Uncool. Likewise with Trump. Both men expanded the Republican electorate to include many blue-collar workers. The contempt that the Left showed toward both men was mostly cultural rather than political. An important part of the cultural divide is that both Nixon and Trump were overtly patriotic–the ultimate faux pas in the Left’s eyes.
I wouldn’t try to diminish the hatred the Left expressed toward other Republicans, like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, who were equally patriotic and, in Reagan’s case certainly, more conservative. But I do think there is something to the Nixon-Trump analogy, if only the fact that the Left’s hatred was wildly disproportionate to the policies those men actually pursued.
Others may have more perceptive observations; if so, please leave them in the comments.
