Justin Miller, Staff Editor, The Atlantic.com
Nixonland, by Rick Perlstein
Pop quiz: who won more votes: Franklin Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, or Richard Nixon? Surprise: Nixon.
How did Nixon win so triumphantly across the middle 25 years of the last century? In his book Nixonland, Rick Perlstein makes clear that it was thanks to Nixon’s ability to tap into and capitalize on a growing backlash against liberalism among middle-class whites.
This is not a political biography, though. Rather, it offers a disturbing, detailed look at how America was torn apart during the sixties to a degree rivaled only by the Civil War. Unlike many political histories of the sixties, it doesn’t place the locus of action in the South, where civil-rights pioneers marched, but instead in the big cities: Los Angeles, Cleveland, and Detroit, where blacks rioted and whites revolted against integration. Meanwhile, in Berkeley and Chicago, the New Left hijacked liberalism and helped drive it into the ground.
Perlstein explains that not Nixon but Reagan was the first major figure to campaign against liberalism by linking it to the chaos afoot in America. It was in the course of watching Reagan run for the 1966 California gubernatorial race that Nixon picked up Reagan’s tactics and rhetoric. Two years later—just four years after LBJ’s landslide presidential victory—Nixon successfully campaigned for the presidency by casting the election as a contest between the “Silent Majority” and liberal elites. And in 1972, he built on those divisions to turn that narrow win into a landslide.
Perlstein’s master argument is that we are still living in Nixon’s America, where politicians claim to represent us against a ruling class that threatens to corrupt and take advantage of us. (Perlstein makes the case that this trope was integral to the rise of the right, from Barry Goldwater through George W. Bush.) Nixon didn’t just adopt this us-against-them stance for the sake of his campaigns—it was an outlook that characterized his thinking well before he ran for president. During his undergraduate years at Whittier College, many of the popular, privileged students belonged to an organization that gave them the name of “Franklins.” In response, Nixon created a rival group, a resolutely unpretentious band of kids calling themselves the “Orthogonians.” After reading Nixonland, it’s hard to resist concluding that we are all Orthogonians and Franklins now.
How did Nixon win so triumphantly across the middle 25 years of the last century? In his book Nixonland, Rick Perlstein makes clear that it was thanks to Nixon’s ability to tap into and capitalize on a growing backlash against liberalism among middle-class whites.
This is not a political biography, though. Rather, it offers a disturbing, detailed look at how America was torn apart during the sixties to a degree rivaled only by the Civil War. Unlike many political histories of the sixties, it doesn’t place the locus of action in the South, where civil-rights pioneers marched, but instead in the big cities: Los Angeles, Cleveland, and Detroit, where blacks rioted and whites revolted against integration. Meanwhile, in Berkeley and Chicago, the New Left hijacked liberalism and helped drive it into the ground.
Perlstein explains that not Nixon but Reagan was the first major figure to campaign against liberalism by linking it to the chaos afoot in America. It was in the course of watching Reagan run for the 1966 California gubernatorial race that Nixon picked up Reagan’s tactics and rhetoric. Two years later—just four years after LBJ’s landslide presidential victory—Nixon successfully campaigned for the presidency by casting the election as a contest between the “Silent Majority” and liberal elites. And in 1972, he built on those divisions to turn that narrow win into a landslide.
Perlstein’s master argument is that we are still living in Nixon’s America, where politicians claim to represent us against a ruling class that threatens to corrupt and take advantage of us. (Perlstein makes the case that this trope was integral to the rise of the right, from Barry Goldwater through George W. Bush.) Nixon didn’t just adopt this us-against-them stance for the sake of his campaigns—it was an outlook that characterized his thinking well before he ran for president. During his undergraduate years at Whittier College, many of the popular, privileged students belonged to an organization that gave them the name of “Franklins.” In response, Nixon created a rival group, a resolutely unpretentious band of kids calling themselves the “Orthogonians.” After reading Nixonland, it’s hard to resist concluding that we are all Orthogonians and Franklins now.