“Reporters want to fan the flames of conflict leading to war because they’re so damn stupid. That is my belief of your profession.” As Sir Bedivere (Terry Jones) might say, who is this who is so wise in the ways of the media and world peace? Why, it’s Jerry Brown, billed by the allegedly damn stupid reporter as a former governor of California. That is true, but there’s so much more to the man.
MATT TAIBBI:
Actually, our press had the playbook, he just gave them an excuse to run with it. And though Taibbi may not be ready to admit it, they ran that playbook with Obama, too.
W
What the Left Has Done to America
Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
In the last 20 years, the Left has boasted that it has gained control of most of America institutions of power and influence—the corporate boardroom, media, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the administrative state, academia, foundations, social media, entertainment, professional sports, and Hollywood.
With such support, between 2009-17, Barack Obama was empowered to transform the Democratic Party from its middle-class roots and class concerns into the party of the bicoastal rich and subsidized poor—obsessions with big money, race, a new intolerant green religion, and dividing the country into a binary of oppressors and oppressed........
POWER, UNLIMITED POWER
: For the Second Time, U.S. Scientists Have Achieved Fusion Ignition.
On December 5, 2022, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) achieved something truly remarkable. After firing 192 lasers at a small pellet filled with deuterium-tritium fuel, the resulting reaction essentially created a tiny star for a few nanoseconds. Crucially, the energy created by this reaction was more than the energy put into the reaction. In other words, science had finally achieved nuclear fusion ignition.
Until that point, humans had never been able to recreate the life-giving power generated in the center of our Sun on Earth. But for the first time, the clean energy promise of nuclear fusion—arguably the greatest energy source imaginable—suddenly seemed possible. Now, fast forward only eight months, and LLNL has achieved ignition again. But this time, they had even greater results.
LLNL spokesperson Paul Rhien spoke with The Financial Times on Sunday, and said that “in an experiment conducted on July 30, we repeated ignition at NIF. Analysis of those results is underway, but we can confirm the experiment produced a higher yield than the December test.”
Maybe the question now isn’t whether we’ll ever achieve usable fusion power but whether the powers that be would allow affordable, unlimited energy. That certainly hasn’t been the case with nuclear fission in recent decades.
L
Why Jews are a Problem for Progressives
Progressive theology is built on a mythic hierarchy of group victimhood which has endured throughout time, up until the present day; the injuries that the victims have suffered are so massive, so shocking, and so manifestly unjust that they dwarf the present. Such injuries must be remedied immediately, at nearly any cost. The people who do the work of remedying these injustices, by whatever means, are the heroes of history. Conversely, the sins of the chief oppressors of history, white men, are so dark that nothing short of abject humiliation and capitulation can begin to approach justice.
It goes to say that nothing about the terms of progressive theology is original. It is the theology of Soviet communism, with class struggle replaced by identity politics. In this system, Jews play a unique, double-edged role: They are both an identity group and a Trojan horse through which history can reenter the gates of utopia.
Ghettos were invented for Jews. Concentration camps, too. How can Jews be “privileged white people” if they are clearly among history’s victims? And if Jews aren’t white people, then perhaps lots of other white people are also victims and therefore aren’t “white,” in the theological sense in which that term gains its significance in progressive ideology. Maybe “Black people” aren’t always or primarily Black. Maybe the whole progressive race-based theology is, historically and ideologically speaking, a load of crap. Which is why the Jews are and will remain a problem.
Obama didn’t invent any of this stuff; he was just a wounded kid trying to figure out his own place in the world and get ahead. Still, looking back, it is hard to avoid the sense that Obama himself was exceptional. He was the guy chosen by history to put something in the American goldfish bowl that made all the fish go crazy and eat each other: America’s emerging oligarachy cementing its grip instead of going bust. The rise of monopoly internet platforms. The normalization of government spying on Americans. Race relations going south. Skyrocketing inequality. The rise of Donald Trump. The birth of Russiagate. It all happened with Obama in the White House.
The Remaking of America
Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
We are in the midst of one of the most radical revolutions in American history. It is as far-reaching and dangerous as the turbulent years of the 1850s and 1860s or the 1930s. Every aspect of American life and culture is under assault, including the very processes by which we govern ourselves, and the manner in which we live.
The Revolution began under the Obama administration that sought to divide Americans into oppressed and oppressors, and then substitute race for class victimization. It was empowered by the bicoastal wealth accrued from globalization, and honed during the COVID lockdown, quarantine-fed economic downturn, and the George Floyd riots and their aftermath. The Revolution was boosted by fanatic opposition to the presidency of Donald Trump. And the result is an America that is unrecognizable from what it was a mere decade ago.
Here are 10 upheavals that the Left has successfully wrought.
Free expression. In large swatches of American society—particularly the corporation, the media, the government, the public schools, and the university—it is suddenly dangerous to speak freely. At a DEI workshop, politely object that “whiteness” does not account for all the challenges of “marginalized peoples,” and you will become either ostracized, reprimanded, or perhaps fired.
Suggest to a class that man-made climate change and the state remedies for it, are still under debate—and your career and livelihood are endangered. In 2020, state that Covid lockdowns would do more eventual damage than the virus—and your career was through. Express doubt that there are more than two biological sexes, and if an athlete or high school principal you will be shunned or rendered professionally inert.
The government, in league with social media, censors the news. “Liberal” universities often first require McCarthy-era type “diversity” statements for one to be hired. Commissars review syllabi to spot incorrect or improper speech or insufficient DEI zeal.
The Left now seeks to modify the First Amendment, and its empowerment of “hate speech,” defined as most anything impeding the progressive project. The state and the universities properly issue word lists of approved vocabularies.
The old ACLU or Sen. Church Committee would now probably be deemed rightwing. The methodologies of Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover are the preferred models, once they were rebooted to the right cause.
The Weaponization of Justice. Administrations and their efforts to stock the justice department with supporters come and go. But in the last decade the Left has viewed the Department of Justice as a political extension of the party—whose unchecked power must properly be directed to hurt enemies and help friends. Nomili wonder Eric Holder described himself as Obama’s “wingman” and became the first Attorney General to be held in contempt for ignoring a congressional subpoena.
Never in U.S. history have the Department of Justice and sympathetic state and local prosecutors indicted a leading opposition candidate and likely nominee of one of the two major parties, and at the beginning of a presidential campaign. Donald Trump is currently charged with nearly 100 felonies by at least two prosecutors. He likely eventually will be hit with more than- 500 indictments, from four prosecutors, every one of the latter with a long record of either leftwing associations or Democratic service.
The mass murderer Charles Manson faced less legal exposure. No one believes Trump would have been indicted on such counts—most of them involving allegations from years past—were he not running for President.
One count that Donald Trump is not charged with is bribery, or taking money while in office, a crime cited as impeachable in the Constitution and germane to the accusations that Joe Biden and his family raked in millions from foreign governments due to the improper use of his prior Vice Presidency. For what reason did Joe Biden lie that he never discussed his son’s business? Why did Hunter complain to his daughter that Joe demanded half of his own grifting income? Why would a Vice President serially call disreputable Ame1rican grifters and foreign corrupt oligarchs? Can Joe’s lifestyle ever be reconciled with his reported income?
Given such asymmetry in the application of the laws, conservative or even apolitical Americans are apprehensive that any political prominence will draw the attention of government in effort to either indict or bankrupt them with legal expenses.
The last four FBI Directors have either admitted they lied under oath, or preposterously under oath claimed ignorance or amnesia about events directly under their control. Or they simply stonewalled subpoenas and testimonies about alleged FBI crimes.
The former CIA Director admitted to lying twice under oath. The FBI hired social media corporations to suppress election-cycle news deemed unhelpful to the Left. The agency, along with Democratic operatives, helped hatch the election-cycle conspiracy of the 2015-2016 Russian-Collusion hoax, and the 2020 Russian disinformation laptop hoax. The FBI played a central role in many of the 2024 indictments. In other words, the FBI along with the DOJ, has sought to warp three presidential elections in a row.
On the prompt of a Joe Biden campaign official (and now Secretary of State) and a former interim CIA director, 50 former intelligence officials lied to the electorate that an authentic but incriminating Biden computer was a likely Russian plant—a fact known to be lie but not disclosed as such by the FBI.
The Attack on the Supreme Court. Once the Court achieved a more or less predictable conservative majority, the Left sought to diminish it in a variety of ways. It has called for packing the Court with leftist jurists to create a new 15-justice bench. Leftist law professors in the Ivy League, in neo-Confederate nullification and insurrectionary style, call for the nation to ignore Court rulings on abortion and affirmative action.
The Senate minority leader led a throng to the doors of the court, threatening justices by name: “You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”
Protestors now mob the homes of individual justices hoping to intimidate them and alter their upcoming opinions—confident that the Department of Justice will exempt them from any legal consequences of such felonious behavior.
The media routinely accuses conservative justices of improper or illegal behavior, without worry about the emptiness of the charges. A traditionalist justice now accepts that a controversial ruling can result in media charges that he is corrupt, in shrieking protestors mobbing his home, in a mob assembling at the doors of the Court, in disruptions during Court hearings, in politicians issuing threats to his person, in congressional calls to alter the century-and-a-half make-up of the Court, and in Ivy League law professors urging the country to ignore majority decisions.
In sum, conservative jurist must be careful where and when he goes out in public.
The Media-Democratic Fusion. If one were to listen during the last few years to NBC, ABC, CBS, NPR, PBS, MSNBC, or CNN, or read the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, or the Los Angeles Times, then one would have believed the following:
In sum, for the first time in American history, nearly all the major communication and journalistic networks have been fused with a political party. They believe the new role of the media is to advance a shared progressive cause, oppose and even defame common opponents, and feed their audiences things that are not, and cannot possibly be, true.
The Destruction of Common Law. By defunding the police in major cities, and by showering leftwing district attorney candidates with millions of dollars in campaign funding, the Left systematically eroded the law as we know it in our major cities.
As a result, downtowns are after-dark, no-go zones, as once great metropolises resemble veritable combat theaters. Cities are becoming depopulated as consumers and businesses no longer find it safe to conduct commerce. Criminals and homeless now routinely break the law with impunity. Public violence, defecation, urination, fornication, and injection do not even rate as misdemeanors.
The Left has redefined violent crime to such an extent that shoplifting is no longer actionable. Flash mobs that take over streets and swarm to loot stores are rarely if ever arrested. Security officers who apprehend thieves or intervene to stop violence are more likely to be prosecuted than criminals themselves. There is no longer any immigration law; it has been utterly destroyed by Joe Biden. Seven-million illegal entrants flood into the U.S. and, along with the Mexican government, make demands on their hosts to accommodate their illegality.
In sum, in blue states and at the federal level, leftwing prosecutors and justices decide to enforce or ignore statutes, pile up or reduce indictments, increase or decrease punishments not on what the law entails, or evidence directs, but on the race, class, or ideology of the perpetrator, usually in connection with the particular status of his victims. If asymmetry in race, class, or ideology is suggested, then the law must modulate in redistributive fashion to contextualize the crime and criminal as a victim rather than a victimizer. The result is the veritable destruction of law and order as we once knew it.
The Erosion of the Military. Rarely has the American people polled so little confidence in the U.S. military. It perceives the Pentagon mission largely one to greenlight social change through the rapidity of the chain of command, not necessarily to maintain deterrence, much less to win all its wars.
The Left has ensured that our armed forces are underfunded, short on munitions and weapons, and military officers are used to promote progressive social agendas. Officers expect to be promoted or stalled on the basis of their views on race and gender.
Those who traditionally died at twice their numbers in the general population in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan are ostracized and in near record numbers leaving, while their friends and relatives are no longer enlisting in the military.
Former Pentagon four-star officers violated the Code of Uniform Military Justice in attacking a sitting president with the harshest invective, invoking comparisons to Hitler and Mussolini, again predictably from a leftwing point of view.
The public expects the Joint Chiefs to be both appointed on ideological considerations, and from time to time even to free-lance to contact enemy counterparts should they feel a conservative president is dangerous to world peace.
There is no longer any social stigma or legal jeopardy for retired officers in working as defense contractor lobbyists or board members, after revolving from or soon back to the Pentagon.
Sexes. The heterosexual male and female, marriage, and the nuclear family are all to be suspect. There are three sexes or perhaps still more. English language pronouns are inadequate to reflect sexual diversity.
So adherence to such ossified languages is career endangering. An epidemic of childlessness, singlehood, and collapsing fertility rates are either of no national importance or illustrate the preferred non-nuclear family model. Powerful hormonal drug regimens and permanent radical sex-change surgery should be the choices of minors alone who know best when they choose to transition to another sex. Graphic sex manuals and drag queen shows with simulated sex acts can perhaps acculturate preteens to the dangers of growing up in an oppressive “normative” binary society.
Sex, but not race, is constructed, and thus a matter not of biology but of individual choice.
Race, Not Class. Racial inequality and lack of parity are due to “whiteness.” Racial quotas, segregated dorms, graduations, workshops, and safe spaces are exempt from civil rights statutes given they are necessary to achieve equity. Integration and assimilation are the opiates of the masses. Apartheid and segregation are misunderstood modalities, and thus, if enlightened, sometimes necessary corrective measures.
Reparations are to supersede ineffective affirmative action. Wokeness liberates us to see how race explains everything in America, past and present. At universities and in popular culture “proportional representation” of various ethnicities and races is no longer sufficient remedy.
Instead reparatory hiring and admissions are required to atone for prior generations of discrimination. It is taboo to suggest that cultural conditions not just race accounts for inequality. Everything from meritocracy to promptness to physical fitness is racist in nature, requiring DEI experts to expose and inform about the systemic nature of American racism.
Debt is a Construct. Modern monetary theory proved that annual deficits and national debt are just a state accounting challenge. So printing more money is an act that properly diminishes the value of existing capital improperly horded by parasitic profiteers. Spreading the ensuing cash wealth to the more deserving and victimized is long overdue social justice.
At any time, the national “debt” can be deconstructed by renouncing usurious bond obligations, appropriating private retirement accounts, or further inflating the currency—if governments are committed enough to social justice.
Universities. It is now heresy that universities should be places of disinterested inquiry and inductive investigation. They can properly instead become a valuable tool in ridding society of racist and sexist forces, platitudes about free speech and equality under the law, and the tyranny of private property, capitalist profiteering, and white, male heterosexual Christian oppression.
So the role of a university is to create a brief safe space in which graduates can leave with proper training about the terrible history of the United States and the ways in which it must be dismantled and then be rebuilt by the properly trained experts from the ground up. Counterrevolutionaries or deluded liberals and their quaint adherence to a racist and archaic Bill of Rights have no place on these islands of progressive resistance.
None of the above was true at the millennium; all are now—with more still to come.
Victor Davis Hanson
Conservative America has been growing ever angrier. But it still had remained inert and in somnolence about the ongoing woke revolution.
But just lately that comatose dragon is beginning to awake—and with a roar.
Poking the Snoring Conservative Dragon Part 1
Poking the Snoring Conservative Dragon Part 2
Poking the Conservative Sleeping Dragon Part 3
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
Rudyard Kipling, “Recessional”
There is proverbially a lot of rot in any great nation, which accordingly can endure a lot of self-induced damage.
But has the U.S. exhausted its reserves? Britain after World War I denied that its empire was doomed and its standard of living unsustainable. The Soviet Union was in decline gradually, then abruptly by 1989 became doomed. In the fourth century AD, Rome had established a modus vivendi of incorporating non-Romans into the empire, defending its borders, and tamping down on corruption. A century later, the Western empire collapsed from internal decay and tribal invasions across the Danube and Rhine.
Victor Davis Hanson
There is a narrative that half the country is paranoid, prone to conspiracy theories, and generally nuts, in the off-the-grid, January 6th sense.
But in some sense why not, given the lies that have been promulgated?
Here I do not mean the usual political serious and even life-changing untruths such as gas was more expensive when Joe Biden entered office than it was after his inauguration, or that Afghanistan was a great success, or that Ukraine was/is on the verge of a great victory over Russia, or that “five” people died violently due to the MAGA crowd violence on January 6, or that the nonexistent border is “secure.” I mean even more explicit, shameless lies that transcend politics and change the popular culture.
Victor Davis Hanson Here are a few institutions that have quite outlived their age. Tribal Graduations Consider 40 percent of California’s population now identifies as Latino, predominately Mexican American. Fifty percent of current BAs in the California State University system this year were awarded to self-described Latinos. That paradox brings up the question, why are …
Victor Davis Hanson We can calibrate the decline in the quality of American life by comparisons to both societies of the past and contemporary civilization elsewhere. And the result is not encouraging for Americans. I believe I may have visited 80 percent of the so-called first world countries in Europe and the Middle East, and …
Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a leading figure of the establishment Right in education, asks if Americans can find “common ground in our history wars.” He answers in the affirmative. “Happily,” Hess tells us, “there is copious common ground to be found.”
Unfortunately, he is wrong.
Fifty years ago this November, Nixon buried the hapless George McGovern under the third-largest landslide in the history of American presidential elections. McGovern carried only one of the 50 states, Massachusetts. The benighted American masses wouldn’t stop chanting “four more years,” to the dismay of peaceniks and intellectuals everywhere.
Five decades later, we still haven’t absorbed the reasons behind Nixon’s triumph. Few liberals grasp the sources of Nixon’s appeal, which cut across partisan lines and gave him a huge victory, even among voters who wanted out of Vietnam immediately, which was supposed to be Nixon-haters’ signature issue.
Until you get Richard Nixon, you don’t get America.
In the eyes of the left, Nixon won because he stoked mid-America’s resentments, which became their charge against Reagan and Trump as well. (Lately, channeling resentment has become the go-to explanation among liberal journalists and others when someone you disapprove of wins an election.) Trampling on our better angels, Nixon brought out the vicious, racist, sexist underside of the American psyche, at least that’s the way the story went. Ordinary racist, sexist white guys were just fed up with the Blacks, the gays, and the bra-burning women.
But Nixon was not Archie Bunker, despite his disdain for Ivy League meatheads. His appeal sprang not from reactionary grudges but from commonly held moral ideas that McGovern’s Democratic Party had turned its back on. The McGovern forces, like today’s progressives, believed that worries about crime were overblown, that all inequities come from the system, not culture or individual choice, and that American history was nothing to be proud of. Post-1972 debacle, McGovern’s manager, Frank Mankiewicz, lamented that the campaign had given in to pressure from wild-eyed radicals, “the cause people.” “If I had to do it all over again, I’d learn when to tell them to go to hell,” Mankiewicz said, a word of warning to present-day Democrats.
Hunter S. Thompson covered the 1972 campaign for Rolling Stone. His dispatches from one-night cheap motels, aided by liberal doses of speed, ayahuasca and bourbon, became a superb book, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. Thompson had already traveled with Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign. “Getting assigned to cover Nixon in ’68 was like being sentenced to six months in a Holiday Inn,” Thompson wrote. The one bright spot was when Nixon’s campaign manager invited him to ride with Nixon on the campaign bus so that the candidate could talk football with Thompson, the only seriously football-savvy journalist to be found. “We had a fine time,” Thompson reported, since Nixon was “a goddamn stone fanatic on every facet of pro football.”
Thompson walks a razor’s edge between hard-drinking, hard-drugging cynicism and a desperate chink of hope, which he fastens to McGovern in spite of the South Dakotan’s flaws. Thompson’s prose, usually more fun than a barrel of meth-addled spider monkeys, turns sober and dull when he lauds the McGovern adviser Fred Dutton, who proclaimed that the younger generation could singlehandedly win elections for Democrats—another presage of current Democratic fantasies.
The Democratic presidential wannabes of 1972 were a rabbit hutch of also-rans, another sad likeness to the present day. “Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here ... Except Maybe Ted Kennedy ...,” Thompson wrote—but Kennedy wasn’t running. Instead, Hubert Humphrey was in the house, “a treacherous brain-damaged old vulture,” Thompson observed. By late spring Humphrey, the Joe Biden of his day, was the last chance of the anti-McGovern faction.
The runt of the litter was John Lindsay, mayor of New York, a basket case of a city with a towering crime rate and over-the-top welfare rolls. In Florida he courted the Jewish vote, donned a scuba suit and acquired a tan, but this didn’t help him in the primary. Instead Florida went to the racist troglodyte George Wallace.
The early front-runner was Maine Sen. Ed Muskie, anointed by Big Labor and the Democratic establishment. Muskie called his chartered election train the “Sunshine Special.” On board was football star Rosey Grier, who sang “Let the Sun Shine In” (Grier had tackled Sirhan Sirhan after he killed RFK). Muskie gave people absolutely no reason to vote for him, and so he was a goner. After “crying in the snow” in New Hampshire, Muskie was eclipsed by McGovern, who crushed the competition in Wisconsin’s primary.
Like many others at the time, Thompson believed that McGovern’s double-crossing of his VP pick, Sen. Tom Eagleton of Missouri, put the kibosh on his chances to be president. Eagleton seemed like a “harmless, Catholic, neo-liberal Rotarian nebbish from one of the border states,” Thompson wrote, but he turned out to be a major calamity for the campaign. McGovern said he stood behind his veep choice “1000 percent” when the news broke that Eagleton had been hospitalized three times for nervous breakdowns, even getting electroshock therapy. Eagleton stubbornly refused to leave the ticket and so McGovern had to kick him out, substituting the equally nebbishy Sargent Shriver, a Kennedy in-law. The man of integrity from South Dakota was suddenly revealed as a backstabber, and an incompetent one to boot.
Here Nixon showed the streak of nobility that so many have denied him. The president wrote a letter in longhand to Eagleton’s 13-year-old son Terry: “What matters is not that your father fought a terribly difficult battle and lost. What matters is that in fighting the battle he won the admiration of foes and friends alike because of the courage, poise and just plain guts he showed against overwhelming odds.”
The Eagleton scandal was a serious blow, but even without it, McGovern would have lost. He was forever saddled with the spectacle of the hippies who canvassed for him, knocking on suburban doors with their unkempt beards, psychedelic shirts and sandals. McGovern didn’t even favor legalizing pot, but that didn’t matter. Except for the Black communist Angela Davis, who campaigned for the Kremlin stooge Gus Hall (and later ran with him twice on the Communist Party ticket), every crackpot domestic terrorist-sympathizer in the land was for George McGovern.
The 1972 Democratic convention, held in Miami Beach of all places—headquarters of Jackie Gleason, where the hotel lobbies were chilled to 60 degrees so that ladies could wear their furs—looked like the disgruntled celebratory dirty flowering of 1960s youthcult. The New York and California delegations, which Mayor Daley had kept to the back of the auditorium in 1968, were now front and center, and full of colorfully attired freaks.
McGovernites welcomed the flavor burst of radicalism. They desired the greening of America, so we could all be hipped to what the kids were up to, whether it was dropping acid, burning draft cards or making pipe bombs. Nixon’s people were the silent majority, who wanted to keep politics in its place, not sprawled all over their daily lives. The silent majority still exists in our PC age. Harangued, guilt-tripped, and policed for microaggressions, they want the media and academic-elite diversocrats out of their hair.
The McGovern forces stumbled over the issue of people’s moral choices, which Nixon voters acknowledged but which they often ignored. Nixon talked about law and order, not out of resentment but rather loyalty to the ethics that most people shared. Killing cops was bad, the Nixonites said (in 1971, 129 police officers were murdered, the highest number anyone could remember). McGovern’s superleftist fans blamed something called oppression, not criminals with guns.
Finally, there was busing, a doomed policy that McGovern defended to the hilt, in robotic fashion, as the unpleasant but necessary payback for a history of racial injustice. Busing used white and Black kids as pawns instead of working to better African American schools, which had been decimated by the widespread elimination of tracking and gifted programs in the 1960s. Most people saw busing as an injustice the government was doing to their child, rather than a serious effort to achieve racial equality. Once again, the silent majority was following a commonsense moral feeling, but the McGovernite left tarred them as mere racists. To be sure, there were racists among the anti-busing forces, but that didn’t make busing a wise or just policy.
Nixon was a hard-bitten survivor all his life. Minutes before being ditched by Ike as VP, Nixon clawed his way back with the Checkers speech. He lost by a whisper of a hair to JFK, an election some claim he actually won (Daley, it was rumored, had unearthed dead voters in Chicago to give Illinois to JFK, and LBJ had done the same in Texas—accusations that today would be censored by high-handed techno-elites as “disinformation” but which eminent historians like Robert Caro would show to have been well-grounded). Pat Brown trounced him for California governor in 1962, and for the next six years Nixon had to scrape out a slow comeback, protecting his neck at every moment, and going kung fu on his opponents.
The same paranoia that serves you will later do you in, might be the lesson of Watergate, which reduced Nixon to a miserable, wounded jackal drunkenly addressing presidential portraits after midnight. Nixon was skulking and brazen-faced, arguably a war criminal, unquestionably a raving antisemite and prejudice-monger (“Aristotle was a homo, we all know that. So was Socrates ... the last six Roman emperors were fags,” he reminded Haldeman and Ehrlichman). Always apt to stick a furtive shiv in his enemies, he knew only the law of the jungle. Still Neil Young was right when he warbled, “Even Richard Nixon has got soul” (in “Campaigner,” a song prompted by Pat Nixon’s 1976 stroke).
Conniving, untrustworthy, a shameless crook and classic dorky overachiever, Nixon was also the last president who combined New Deal politics with a clear grasp of the moral beliefs shared by most Americans. He also championed many causes we now consider progressive. In 1971 he persuaded Southern schools to accept racial integration, 17 years after “Brown v. Higher Ed.” He brought Title IX into being, and hired far more women than any earlier president. Nixon started the EPA, got the Clean Air Act passed, and tried to get guaranteed basic income through Congress. He revolutionized Native American policy, giving tribes rights they had long been denied. His health care plan, blocked by Congress, was far to the left of anything proposed today.
Nixon’s opening to China was a grand strategic masterstroke. He edged us closer to peace with the Soviets. He also pounded Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos with more bombs than the U.S. had dropped in World War II, killing civilians in vast numbers. The alternative, Nixon argued, was to give in to the North’s inflexible demand: withdrawing all U.S. forces from Vietnam and toppling the Thieu regime so that the North could more easily turn all Vietnam communist. No American citizen could swallow such a course of action except for a few intellectuals and the hippies and yippies that most of the country despised.
Exiting Vietnam was Nixon’s only morally defensible option. It was what the public wanted, too. But North Vietnam was also demanding that America help them conquer the South, which neither Nixon nor the American public could accept. By November 1972 the North had left the negotiating table. They returned only after Nixon’s Christmas bombing in 1972, and they did so because of the bombing.
None of this excuses the cluster bombing that maimed and killed the people of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. But American public opinion, which approved of Nixon’s bombing raids by a large margin, was guilty too.
Fifty years after his triumphant reelection, which would soon turn to ashes, in part because of his own deep personal flaws, American history still can’t live with Richard Nixon—but it can’t live without him, either.
David Mikics’ excellent piece reminded editors and writers at Tablet of how good “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972” is, and how relevant it is today. If you’d be interested in joining some of us for a Zoom book club about it, write to us at info@tabletmag.com
