The Perfect Storm in 2008? Part I -- Saying Goodbye to Nixonland

As we move closer and closer toward Election Day, I’ve found myself zooming out of the daily back-and-forth of the campaign, focusing on the larger meanings of this election. Since Obama began to seriously challenge Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president, I have observed a few different dynamics that, should Obama go on to win the election, would lead to a groundbreaking shift in American politics. I’d like to examine these over two posts -- one today and one next Saturday -- with the understanding and acknowledgment that we still have much work to do and that nothing in presidential politics (including an Obama victory) is a given.

Setting the Stage – Nixon’s Contribution

Earlier this summer I read Nixonland by Rick Perlstein, and I found it fascinating (if you’re at all into politics and current affairs, you must read it). Perlstein looks back at our modern political history, tracing the culture war dynamic present in our politics to Richard Nixon’s campaign for president in 1968, and eventually clear back to his childhood. Prior to running that campaign, the curiosity of Nixon’s strategists was peaked by a memo written by a young, former aide of conservative Bronx congressman Paul Fino named Kevin Phillips; the title was “Middle America and the Emerging Republican Majority.” The effects of that memo have shaped the political battlefield of the last forty years.

The language was new, but the theory was as old as the crusade against Alger Hiss: elections were won by focusing on people’s resentments. The New Deal coalition rose by directing people’s resentment of economic elites, Phillips argued. But the new hated elite, as the likes of Rafferty and Reagan grasped, was cultural – the “toryhood of change,” condescending and self-serving liberals “who make their money out of plans, ideas, communication, social upheaval, happenings, excitement, at the psychic expense of ‘the great, ordinary, Lawrence Welkish mass of Americans from Maine to Hawaii.’ (Perlstein 275-76).

As Perlstein would go on to note, the cultural resentment fostered by the Nixon campaign capitalized on the humiliation many Americans were feeling at not being able to defend what, to them, were obvious American values: “Nixon described the ‘silent center’ as ‘the millions of people in the middle of the political spectrum who do not demonstrate, who do not picket or protest loudly.’ They were loud. You were quiet. They proclaimed their virtue. You, simply, lived virtuously” (275).

Emphasis original. At a time when a crevice was already developing within the electorate, Nixon sought to create a canyon. And he was successful. We all know what happened at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and the 1968 election was one of the closest decisions in history: Nixon nabbed 301 electoral votes to Humphrey’s 191 (George Wallace had 46), but the razor-thin margin in popular vote told the story. Nixon received 43.42 percent of the popular vote, while Humphrey collected 42.72 percent. America was divided, and Perlstein, throughout his book, demonstrates the coalitions’ hardening into the two red-blue political camps we see today.

Gridlock – Red Versus Blue

These red and blue camps, formed in the 1960s, have organized our political culture for the past forty years. If you’re a Millennial, it's all that you have experienced. The two sides slug it out: the party’s candidates and his/her supporters are seen as the “cultural elite.” This candidate is portrayed by the other side as out of touch, and his/her followers are painted as weak and un-American. The other candidate and his/her supporters are seen as stupid fools, voting against their own self-interest and doing it proudly, while lining the pockets and inflating the egos of the conspiring elites.

The most important dynamics in presidential elections since 1968 have not been stances on issues; the “game-changers,” instead, have been the results of the rational-efficient approach taken (the Republicans have been better than the Democrats at applying it, winning seven out of the ten elections over the last forty years). Cheating, preying on fear, and limiting the political discourse to symbols and character assassination have all been incorporated in these campaigns at one time or another since 1968. Republicans, in particular, have their own greatest hits album of win-at-at-all-costs, short-sighted politics (mainly because they've been the party to benefit from this approach): Watergate; Reagan’s “bear” ad in 1984; the Willie Horton ad sponsored on behalf of the Bush campaign in 1988; Pat Buchanan’s speech pushing the culture war at the RNC in 1992; the Bush ad emphasizing the word “rats” in connection with Al Gore in 2000; the “Swiftboating” of John Kerry in 2004; and, in 2008, the attempt to paint Barack Obama as a mere celebrity, and therefore, “not ready to lead.”

The shrinking of the political dialogue is not limited to presidential campaigns. In numerous confirmation hearings on Capitol Hill (especially those of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas), in the filibuster showdown that erupted in 2005, and in Dick Cheney’s directing the phrase “Go f**k yourself!” to a Democratic senator, we have seen the breakdown of the collegiality and devotion to the common good needed in order to make any kind of political progress.

Let’s be clear: the Baby Boomer generation’s relationship with this approach to politics is symbiotic. We know, from Neil Howe and William Strauss, that Baby Boomers inject morals into their politics. Fiercely ideological, they will dig in and refuse to compromise for the greater good, because, to them, the greater good is their cause. Nixon’s emphasis on cultural warfare while in pursuit of drilling a chasm within American society played to the Boomers’ moralistic and individualistic tendencies. And with the political dialogue repeatedly calibrated to Boomers’ minds, the Boomers reinforced, again and again, their brand of politics.

We’ve seen the divisive approach to politics in 2008, especially given the racial and sexual tensions in the nominating contests and the general election thus far. But with the emergence of 1.) the Millennial generation, the civic-minded counter-balance to the values-driven Boomers; 2.) various traumas to the country (9/11, The Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina, the Financial Meltdown) that have combined to serve as Howe and Strauss’s “crisis,” and 3.) presidential candidates representing both brands of politics, a perfect storm may be about to strike that transforms the political landscape for years to come. What might this transformation look like?

Please read Part II next Saturday to find out.

Sources cited:

Perlstein, Rick. Nixonland. New York: Scribner, 2008.