Nixon Reconsidered

In many ways Obama is to the right of Nixon, who created EPA AND OSHA, both of which became  targets for right wingers in the past 20 years. He signed the legislation which initiated the Earned Income Tax Credit, and made the opening to China. Politically he was a race-baiter and invented the Southern Strategy to politically separate southern whites from their economic interests. He tried repeatedly to appoint Federal and Supreme Court judges which were sympathetic to the white back lash against the civil rights movement. His policies on busing and particularly his rhetoric were inflammatory and egregious, but the percentage of children attending all black districts shrunk dramatically on his watch. Nixon implemented the first federal programs which considered race as a factor in hiring and placement, Affirmative Action, which later Republicans came to use as a cudgel against Democrats. Nixon extended the Food Stamp Program started in 1964, and after much delay protected the Legal Services Corporation which provides legal protection for the poor, from Republican efforts to eliminate it. In general his rhetoric was white hot, but his policies were cool, even progressive.

Of course Nixon was a mean, paranoid, little shit, politically and he is personally and directly responsible for a massive and disastrous expansion of the Vietnam War into Laos and Cambodia. As with the President that preceded him, fealty to Cold War ideology, and personal torment, made Nixon a tragic figure. What could might have been a historically positive Presidency is now remembered mostly for its various and scabrous sins.

But when one tallies what the perverse Nixon presidency created on the progressive side of the ledger and lines it up against President Obama it is, at least of today, NO Contest. This is not a knock on Obama. It is merely to point out the obvious: Republicans who claim Obama is a Socialist are just plain wrong, ill-informed maybe, willfully ignorant more likely.

What Republicans propose is a sprint like race back to a time before Nixon when blacks, knew their place, woman were more ladylike, and had no access to healthcare decisions regarding their own body, and upper crust white folk could count on the quiescence of the rabble. Conservatives long for a time of Ward and June Cleaver and their Beav’, where the problems of the world did not exist. Beaver came into our living rooms in 1957 and left in 1963. In that six year span, Elvis and The Beatles bore their way into a somnambulant American culture and the Rolling Stones released their first single. The Cuban Missile Crisis nearly brought the world to an end, four little girls were killed in a Church in Birmingham, Marines are sent to Lebanon, The Berlin Wall was built and breeched by John Kennedy’s airlift, and Betty Freidan’s book The Feminine Mystique was released. A gay man named Bayard Rustin took a seminal role in organizing the March on Washington.  

Republican policies and rhetoric expose nothing so much as their fear of the world we now occupy. This is not the most liberal presidency in our lifetime, as Hannity and the rest foolishly and endlessly claim. It isn’t liberal at all compared to Nixon, and with the possible exception of the Affordable Care Act isn’t particularly liberal even when compared to Clinton. Poor Conservatives, Leave it to Beaver turned out to be just a TV show. The endless march of history is in the direction of expanded civil rights for women, minorities, immigrants, the LGBT community. That all these communities have so much to do with who we are as Americans today, and in so many ways represent the richness of our culture and our workplaces is lost on those who now cower in fear to the change they have seen. The country is more dynamically diverse and engages a broader cross section of our population on all manner of societal endeavors than any time in our history. We have alog way to go, but we have come a long way thanks in part to the pragmatic and often progressive policies of Richard M Nixon.