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Nixon to rehab? No, no, no: Young conservatives call on one disgrace to restore power to another [1]
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Date: 2023-12-27
It’s a sign of some form of surrender when a political party tries to rehabilitate the tarnished icons of the past to validate the tarnished and flawed candidates of the present. Such a reclamation project is now under way in the kid’s-table wing of the GOP Remodeling & Repair Company, the outfit now deeply committed to Donald Trump’s reelection in 2024. While the Republican standard-bearer is busy furthering his own campaign agenda, doing all the Trumpian things that have made him the hill for his ride-or-die voters to die on, some of Trump’s youngest supporters are revisiting an old friend from very back in the day.
Uh, Richard Milhous Nixon, your rehab is calling?
Ian Ward, writing in Politico on Dec. 15, reports on the latest conservative campaign idea: “Among a small but influential group of young conservative activists and intellectuals, ‘Tricky Dick’ is making a quiet — but notable — comeback. Long condemned by both Democrats and Republicans as the ‘crook’ that he infamously swore not to be, Nixon is reemerging in some conservative circles as a paragon of populist power, a noble warrior who was unjustly consigned to the black list of American history.“
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But it’s not all wistful nostalgia for its own sake. As one could reasonably expect in the warmup to an improbable campaign season, there’s an ulterior motive behind this trip down memory lane. Ward reports that “the populist right’s ongoing effort to rehabilitate Nixon … is really about another divisive former Republican president: Donald Trump.
Ward continues: “In the topsy-turvy historical tableau of 2023, to defend Nixon is to back Trump — and to rescue the former from historical ignominy is, according to the thinking of some young conservatives, to save the latter from the same fate.
“’If we can rehabilitate Richard Nixon in a balanced and fair manner — or even if we can just create questions in the public discourse about Nixon and about Nixon’s presidency — then I think, by way of analogy, it will provoke similar questions about Donald Trump,’ said the conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who published a lengthy defense of Nixon earlier this year for City Journal. ‘It will give us the kind of template, it will give us the precedents, it will give us the skills, where we can more effectively defend a conservative president against these kinds of attacks.’”
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One of the flaws in this strategy is, it doesn’t effectively advance the conversation about, or increase our knowledge of, Nixon or Trump. We’ve had just short of 50 years to move our needle of perception of the 37th president, and not that much has happened. There’s really no rescuing him from historical ignominy now, not least of all because, first, there’s an essential truth about Nixon that has resisted any such revisionist rescue. And then, there’s too few of his contemporaries around either willing to rethink their old impressions, or able to properly shoulder that burden (one such intimate of the Nixon White House, Henry Kissinger, died a month ago).
Many of the current crop of Nixon supporters — fearless, unapologetic, enamored — weren’t alive when Nixon resigned the presidency in August 1974, never mind his 20 earlier years in the American political life. So it’ll be harder for the general public to align with their enthusiasm, and even more difficult to line up younger conservative adulation with the public record of a man so long off the scene. Nixon’s role in the tragedy of the Vietnam War; his politically expedient war on drugs (the first such misadventure for our presidents); the horrid folly of COINTELPRO; Watergate — all are the stuff of history books for much of the electorate, and nothing more than a distraction for Republican voters determined to keep their eyes on the prize — focusing on no one other than the Maximum Leader, and what it takes to regain the White House.
The challenge in going to great lengths to “welcome back an old favorite” is confronting a collective public memory that only occasionally saw him as a favorite in the first place.
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All of which underscores the wasted effort of trying to revive the memory of one disgraced politician as a way to resuscitate the fortunes of another. People remember politicians for any number of reasons, but for better or worse, there’s always one underlying ethical perception that sticks and prevails and endures. That won’t change for Nixon now any more than it’ll change for Trump in the future. That’s the amber of public perception, and it is tough, and often impenetrable. No one knew that better than Richard Nixon himself.
Crawling from the wreckage of the Watergate affair and its consequences, Nixon soon undertook his own very visible rehabilitation, in numerous high-profile interviews, op-eds and speeches, and writing books that sought to advance and clarify his world view. In time he assumed the cultural and media status of an Elder Statesman, a remodeled mandarin whose personal and political histories dovetailed with some of the late 20th-century’s most pivotal events. Never mind the devastation left in his wake, all the ones damaged, and broken, and gone. In terms of the public perception, Richard Nixon went from the basement to the penthouse in five years; in 1979, the Gallup polling organization named him one of the 10 most admired people in the world.
That political pilgrim’s progress is not superimposable on Donald Trump. Attempting to summon the memory and legacy of Richard Nixon as a way to buttress Trump’s bona fides is to call on the unchanging past to salvage the present and leverage an unknown future. People won’t fully revere what they fail to remember. With 78 million more Americans alive today than in 1994 (when Nixon died), with 127 million more Americans alive today than in 1974 (when he lost the presidency), the voice of Nixon gets thinner in our ears all the time, even as Trump’s voice gets louder, carrying from the 2020 vote and the 2021 insurrection to the edge of the next election. To revive Richard Nixon, inject his legacy and narrative into a 2024 presidential campaign already overstuffed with more pertinent, living personalities is likely to be a fool’s-errand exercise.
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And how does such a defensive strategy grow or expand the affinity for Trump in the primary season? Trump’s been a lock for Republican voters since he left office; a casual look at the wave of polls shows that hasn’t changed. So who’s this bring-back-Nixon thing intended for? Rufo’s idea, to templatize some of the past to use in the present, merely nudges people into making that too-obvious comparison: One president who’d have been compelled to stand trial if he stayed in office being used, “by way of analogy,” to shore up the reputation of a former president compelled to stand trial now that he’s out of office.
Telling a primary-season audience what they don’t need to know and what they don’t want to hear. Hey, just the connection needed to get ‘em inspired!
Back in July — when Trump was facing new obstruction-of-justice charges, and charges of violating the Espionage Act for allegedly possessing a classified document outlining possible plans for a war with Iran — Barbara Ann Perry, presidential studies professor at the University of Virginia, laid bare the connection between the two men for the Daily Beast.
“The two of them have what my family would call a ‘mental aberration’—a personality disorder of some kind. Their desire to be president and remain president causes them to act illegally,” Perry said. “This is so Shakespearean… Nixon brought himself down, and we don’t know how this will end for Trump … Nixon believed that he was justified in committing crimes because he assumed the Democrats were doing the same thing. Trump is the same.”
This conservative veneration of dubious, if not monstrous, legends has its antecedents. It’s the same thinking that would restore the statuary of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Roger B. Taney, and other supremacist apologists to their not-so-rightful places around the United States. It’s the same thinking that would reverse the tides of knowledge and the potential for empathy by pulling provocative books from library shelves, because uncomfortable.
In a time when the electorate and the wider public are hungry for a rational political voice in a position of leadership — never mind a full-blown, flat-out Hero — reanimating the Spectre of Tricky in an already cynical election season is a desperate, sadly astonishing gambit: invoking the legacy of the most dangerously strategic president of the last century, hoping to restore to power the most dangerously transactional president of this century.
Never did a reach for a role model look so much like a cry for help.
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