Echoes Of Nixonland
The GOP has been playing the Trump game for a long time
by John Moretta
This is Part One of a three-part series on the 2016 GOP victory in historical context by professor and author John Moretta, whose book The Hippies is out now with McFarland Press.
Richard Nixon’s narrow victory in 1968 reflected widespread disaffection among white, working-class Democrats. Working-class voters had been one of the Democratic Party’s most vital constituencies, steadfastly loyal to the party brand and to the fundamentals of the liberal ethos since the days of FDR. By the close of Lyndon Johnson’s tenure, however, whites felt betrayed by a party they had faithfully supported for decades. Fueling the sense of alienation was the perception that the liberalism they had once embraced — the full employment and expanding consumption policies of the late New Deal rather than the compensatory and expanding welfare programs of the Great Society — had been hijacked and perverted by Ivy League-educated technocrats, social engineers, and “limousine liberals.”
In other words, they saw the privileged classes: those who lived in lily-white neighborhoods while preaching integration and welfare assistance to the less fortunate, condemning as bigots and racists anyone who did not support their policies. White, working-class Democrats felt equally outraged by a welfare state seen as rife with excess, abuses, and the pandering to special groups; rising crime; black militants; and government programs that favored minorities and elite special interests.
Many of them voiced their discontent by voting Republican for the first time in their adult lives. Richard Nixon and his campaign strategists devised a brilliant plan to leverage the politics of polarization, exploiting the alienation of white, blue-collar Democrats and other “Middle Americans” who were outraged by the decade’s supposed liberal profligacy.
George Wallace and White Rage
At the same time, emerging out of the woodwork of Southern white supremacy was the segregationist firebrand, former Alabama governor George Wallace. His running mate was former Air Force General Curtis LeMay, a loose-cannon, bombastic hawk who had urged using nuclear weapons against North Vietnam (“bomb’em back to the Stone Age”) and whose repeated indiscretions in off-the-cuff remarks made even some Wallace supporters cringe. Together Wallace and LeMay barnstormed the country, propagating their message of revenge and resentment, fueling and galvanizing the mounting contempt if not hatred for Great Society liberalism.
Although a Democrat, there was no way Wallace could ever win his party’s nomination, so he formed his own third-party movement: the American Independent Party. By 1968, Wallace enjoyed not only great appeal among Southern whites but also increasing ideological and political cachet among alienated working-class Northern whites. He became the champion of a white backlash and a defender of American values against social programs that many white voters believed had worked against them. These voters resented federal attempts to integrate schools, took pride in being God-fearing and law-abiding; practiced “traditional values,” and still believed wholeheartedly in the myth of rugged individualism.
In short, Wallace capitalized on fear, prejudice, and hatred, claiming to defend the interests of white people while offering simplistic solutions to complex problems. He denounced the “pointy-headed intellectuals” who had taken over Washington and the welfare mothers “breeding children as a cash crop.” He viciously assaulted the antiwar movement, pledging to audiences that “if any demonstrator ever lays down in front of my car, it will be the last car he will ever lay down in front of.” As far as Wallace was concerned, there wasn’t “a dime’s worth of difference between the Democratic and Republican parties” who were “building a bridge over the Potomac for all the white liberals fleeing Washington.” To stop the rioting, “We ought to turn this country over to the police for two or three years and everything would be all right.” As for the demonstrators, a “crease” needed to be “put in their foreheads.” To the surprise (if not shock) of many establishment Democrats and Republicans, Wallace’s racist rage and vengeful and hateful rhetoric attracted enough support to have his name appear on the ballot of all 50 states.
Trump went even further than Wallace at times in his diatribes, expanding the list of bogeymen whom white Americans should fear and despise to groups all but invisible to Wallace and Nixon in 1968: Muslims, Mexican-Americans, and “social justice warriors.”
Wallace ran the consummate negative campaign. People supported him for all the things he was against; rarely, if ever, did he speak about any ideas or specific policies for change. His language was often crude and most definitely “country,” with subject matter and message redundant and delivered in a straightforward, simple fashion. Void of any erudition, depth of thought, or sophisticated articulation, he railed relentlessly and venomously against both the Republican and Democratic political Establishments. Wallace’s campaign reflected that of an angry, demagogic populist (rather than that of a conservative), exploiting for political office the fears, prejudices, anger, and disaffection of a lower-income, poorly educated white electorate across the country.
In retrospect, he’s a pivotal transitional figure in the reshaping of post-1960s politics — a “fire-bell in the night” for politicians of both major parties that the American political landscape was indeed changing. The day might come when an individual with similar appeals could reemerge, winning not only a major party nomination but even the presidency. Wallace’s candidacy also helped to rip the South from its Democratic moorings, setting the region adrift until the 1980s when it finally dropped anchor at its current Republican port. In the North, especially in the pre-Rust Belt states, Wallace had significant appeal, especially among labor union households: his support there was three times greater than in non-union domiciles. White skilled workers, a traditional Democratic constituency, found Wallace particularly attractive, reflecting the deep fissures growing in the liberal coalition that had dominated American politics since the 1930s.
The GOP Goes Wallace
Although Wallace had broader appeal than most establishment politicians had reckoned, he nonetheless had no chance of winning in 1968. Still, he could have cost Republican nominee Nixon the race. As a result, Nixon moved to campaign in a similar fashion to Wallace, hewing close to him on the issues but delivering his message in a much more statesman-like manner. The Republican nominee proved equally if not more adept at exploiting white America’s anxieties about race, urban violence, and anti-war protest. He was the “new Nixon” — reflective, mature, and uniquely prepared to turn his years of experience into a new round of service to the country and his party. Gone was “Tricky Dick,” the rabid, scheming, anti-communist hatchet man the Eisenhower administration would engage to destroy political opponents.
According to many pundits, pre-1968 Nixon had been a politician with no roots, no inner security, no sense of self, integrity, or conviction. However, as the 1968 campaign unfolded, the new Nixon was nothing more than a more sophisticated version of the old, wrapped up patriotic bunting. He engaged in both race-baiting and red-baiting (accusing student activists of being outright “communists”), all while hammering away on restoring “law and order” to city streets and reminding voters that he had a secret plan to end the Vietnam war. He also pledged to transform the Supreme Court, intimating it had become a bastion of liberalism: soft on crime and other social issues, such as the forced busing of black children to white schools.
Nixon concluded his convention acceptance speech with an impassioned appeal to all Americans who felt slighted, stomped on, and abused by minorities, liberals, and student demonstrators. (Dog whistle: white Americans.) “As we look at America,” he declared, “we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame. We hear sirens in the night. We see Americans hating each other, killing each other at home. And as we see and hear these things millions of Americans cry out in anger: Did we come all this way for this?”
Nixon then proclaimed that he would speak “for another voice . . . a quiet voice . . . . It is the voice of the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans, the non-shouters, the non-demonstrators . . . those who do not break the law, people who pay their taxes and go to work, and who send their children to school, who go to their churches . . . people who love this country [and] cry out . . . ‘that is enough, let’s get some new leadership.’”
Nixon had tapped into a groundswell of conservative and alienated reaction in search of an articulate champion. To Americans outraged by radicals who rejected and demeaned middle class respectability, Nixon personified traditional virtues. His success in raising himself from poverty was personal proof of the American Dream, and he pledged to this “silent majority” that he would lead the nation out of the abyss of chaos and rebellion to stability and obedience. The average, embittered white American could identify with this man. As David Farber has observed, “George Wallace, in 1968, tried to mutate a racist populist politics of the Old South into a national politics of resentment. Richard Nixon, picking up on the cultural politics of Barry Goldwater and then California governor Ronald Reagan, tried to quietly unite the producing classes with the capitalist producers against the ‘critical’ and protesting segments of society.”
With clear consequences for the future of American politics, both Nixon and Wallace, as well as subsequent Republican right-wing office seekers, initiated a new politics of white rage and resentment against perceived minority privilege and other ginned-up liberal abuses and inequities.
Between them, they captured 57 percent of the popular vote and nearly two-thirds of the electoral votes.
A Legacy of White Pandering
In the decades following 1968, new patterns normalized, forming our contemporary political dynamics: conservatives ascendant, liberals on the defensive, and the center moving steadily to the right. Only sporadic refractions brought national politics back to the middle or (at best) slightly yanked to the left with the elections of neoliberals Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
As Wallace and Nixon stoked the fires of resentment and rage in 1968, so did Trump in 2016, delivering virtually the same message over and over as Wallace and Nixon had while blaming many of the same individuals and groups for the country’s alleged ills and decline. Trump went even further than Wallace at times in his diatribes, expanding the list of bogeymen whom white Americans should fear and despise to groups all but invisible to Wallace and Nixon in 1968: Muslims, Mexican-Americans, and “social justice warriors.” The fact that the United States has become a much more diverse, pluralistic demographic since 1968 afforded Trump more issues and more demographic groups as potential targets — in other words, even more ammo.
His verbal venom knew no boundaries as he insulted or attacked anyone or any idea, policy, or program guaranteed to incite his already zealous and frenzied followers further. His campaign rallies often degenerated into violence, either inside the venue or out on the streets. Rarely did he ever give a speech of any policy substance, let alone one reflecting any new ideas or solutions, and even when scripted he always digressed from the text into his comfort zone of spewing semi-literate hate and fear.
Trump exploited every issue currently dividing Americans, from race to xenophobia to police violence and trade policies to terrorism and foreign policy and even the media, blaming the Democrats and of course the Obama administration — and by extension Hillary Clinton — for all the ills presently afflicting the country. It worked for Nixon 1968 and the politics of polarization and resentment worked for Trump as well.
Indeed, Trump played the politics of grievance better than any of his predecessors, as his shocking Electoral College victory confirmed. Moreover, his coattails proved longer than anyone predicted. That reality should terrify not only progressives but more importantly the American people, especially those millions of citizens — red and blue alike — dependent upon various safety nets for their daily survival, which a Trump administration, working hand in hand with a conservative-dominated Congress, intends to obliterate.
Check in next week for Part II . . .
John Moretta is based in Houston. He is a professor of history at Houston Community College and University of Houston’s Honors College. His books include The Hippies: A 1960s History, William Penn and the Quaker Legacy, and William Pitt: Texas Lawyer, Southern Statesman, 1825–1888.
