During the election I immersed myself in history as a way of understanding the tactics and divisions that arose during the primaries and the general election. One of the most brilliant was Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland. The lessons I learned from that book and a look-back at the history of Nixon’s rise, spectacular fall, and emergent gaping divide are no less relevant in today’s world of health care debates and town hall meetings gone mad.
Nixon’s message to the insecure and hard-working
Here’s what progressives can never, ever let themselves forget about Nixon: He successfully turned traditional alignments and narratives on their head, using his own anger, bitterness and perennial insecurity as a prototype to speak to the fear and prejudice of middle class Americans across the nation. He spoke to their inner sense that what they had was somehow threatened by what others didn’t have.
The long-standing effectiveness of Nixon’s strategy lingers today. When Republicans stand before senior citizens and sympathetically coo that yes, they’re right to be concerned that they were justified in their fear that the government would “pull the plug on Grandma”, when they stoke the fear by telling those seniors “they have every right to fear…”, Nixon is sitting on their shoulder writing the playbook, word by sympathetic word.
Perlstein, pg 747-748:
“I have written of how, as these furies advanced, this man Nixon was able to be so stubbornly successful in answering Americans’ yearning for quiet; but that, even so…Nixon also rose by stoking and exploiting anger and resentment, rooted in the anger and resentment at the center of his character. For what was his injunction to join his Silent Majority if not also an invitation to see one’s neighbors as aliens, and to believe that what was alien would destroy us?“
Aliens and Patriots
Then, what was alien were those angry blacks in the inner cities burning with the humiliation of generations enslaved, freed, and oppressed. What was alien were the young people with long hair and college educations marching against a war begun “in the wrong time and the wrong place with the wrong country.”
Then wasn’t much different from now. Throughout the years, Nixon’s archetypes have been locked into place and groomed by his successors: Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush, George W. Bush, and the assorted students of Nixonian strategies: Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove, Pat Buchanan, et al. Over the years, these men have been aided and abetted by the high representatives of Nixon’s “Silent Majority”: James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, and the shadow people who finance and advance their agendas.
Progressives are not exempt either, as Perlstein points out (same page references):
“I have written of liberals’ rage at the rise of Richard Nixon, the Nixon of the Checkers Speech, who so brilliantly co-opted the liberals’ populism, channeling it into a white middle-class rage at the sophisticates, the well-born, the “best circles”– all those who looked down their noses at ‘you and me’ (a favorite phrase of Ronald Reagan’s, who was both a student and a teacher of Richard Nixon’s), whose aggravating moral one-upmanship seemed so often to Nixon’s people to license moral relativism; a ‘torygood of change’ that sneered imperiously at the simple faiths of ordinary folk, their simple patriotism, their simple pleasures. I have written of these liberals’ simple faiths, too, compared them to the drama staged by the Henry Fonda character in Twelve Angry Men; the belief that if only Nixon’s poeple could truly see reason, grasp “the responsible literature in the field,” their prejudices would melt away, their true interests would be recognized — and they would end up liberals, too.
I have written of a cult of “American consensus” that rose up among the punditocracy and reached its apogee with the landslide defeat of Barry Goldwater — their fervent imagining, alongside Lyndon Johnson’s, that “these are the most hopeful times since Christ was born in Bethlehem,” that America was united and at peace and would forever be, if only “extremists” stopped stirring up the pot. And I have written about the kind of intellectual self-repression it took to believe this: that the demonic furies of race and war were gathering even as the words were written, that America has always been divided and always will be…” – emphasis mine
The words that should reach in and chill progressives (liberals, Democrats, whatever you want to call us) are the ones that start with the “if only…”
- If only people would quit believing the lies of the mainstream media and investigate for themselves…
- If only people would realize that Democrats are not acting against their interests…
- If only people could get over their racism…
- If only we all believed that yes, we can…
“If-onlies” are the blind spot in progressives’ rear view mirror. “If-onlies” are wishful thinking. As Perlstein rightly points out, we live in a divided country and the line falls between what we hope for and what exists. Progressives see hope and reach for the change to move toward it. Conservatives, that silent majority, act on the fear that what they have will be forever lost to them as the necessary price of progress.
The fierce divide
Everyone shows up at town halls, imagining our President as Hitler or the ‘extremists’ as puppets of the right, speaking for the status quo and moneyed interests instead of considering others. The right pulls out every rabbit from their fear hat and sends them out to deliver one consistent message: Those guys want to take away what you have earned with blood, sweat and tears.
Reality: The conservative strategy is one that involves speaking to the darkest, most deep-seated fears of that “Silent Majority”, the ones that have served them well for 35 years. Their framing of the health care debate is intended to speak one message: “What you guard and hold dear is at risk. The liberals want to take it away from you. Not only do they want to take it away from you, they want to give it away to that guy you’re afraid of.”
The politicians speaking in populist terms are not progressives. They’re conservatives.
There has been a lot of talk about how the Republican strategy to stall and ultimately defeat health care reform is purely racist. I don’t believe that. I don’t think it’s about race as much as it is about USING race to stoke the fear that the lives people have built for themselves is about to be swept away by someone who is “alien”. This is why the birthers, with their insidious claims that Barack Obama isn’t really American have gained such traction. It frames him as alien, and to be feared as the one who will take away from them to give to those who are in need. That was step one. Step two was to tell Granny the liberals wanted her dead. What could be scarier to senior citizens and their children (those baby-boomers who comprise the middle class and large sector of voting/taxpaying public) than the idea that a)their own health care benefits were at risk; and b)if they got too expensive, they’d just be offed?
Perlstein (same page reference):
“What Richard Nixon left behind was the very terms of our national self-image: a notion that there are two kinds of Americans. On the one side, the “Silent Majority.” The “nonshouters.” The middle-class, middle American, suburban, exurban, and rural coalition who call themselves, now, “Values voters,” “people of faith,” “patriots,” or even, simply, “Republicans” — and who feel themselves condescended to by snobby opinion-making elites, and who rage about un-Americans, anti-Christians, amoralists, aliens. On the other side are the “liberals,” the “cosmopolitans,” the “intellectuals,” the “professionals” — “Democrats,” who say they see shouting in opposition to injustice as a higher form of patriotism. Or say “live and let live.” Who believe that to have “values” has more to do with a willingness to extend aid to the downtrodden than where, or if, you happen to worship — but who look down on the first category as unwitting dupes of feckless elites who exploit sentimental pieties to aggrandize their wealth, start wars, ruin lives. Both populations — to speak in ideal types — are equally, essentially, tragically American. And both have learned to consider the other not quite American at all. The argument over Richard Nixon, pro and con, gave us the language for this war.” [emphasis mine]
Our national PNTS (Post-Nixon Traumatic Syndrome)
The current tone and tenor of the national debate over health care reform is classically Nixonian. We have locked ourselves into archetypes and scripts that were written 40 years ago. On the one side, the defenders of the elderly and weak have become the Republicans, while the crusaders for equality and access have become the Democrats. Dueling calls to ‘read the bill’, ‘have respect for Grandma’, and “keep Big Government out of our health care”, “fight the profit machines”, “give universal access to health care to all”, to “make health care affordable for all”, to “prevent ‘rationing’”, and above all, to make the entire effort so utterly confusing and fraught with enough fog that any thinking person would be afraid of the outcome have once again exposed the deep divide that exists between those who fear the loss of what they have and those who want to provide equal pathways to a more just and fair system, but lose their message in complex frames and messages.
We are suffering from PNTS – Post-Nixon Traumatic Syndrome. It’s easy enough to drown in the habit of political discourse we’re used to, but this time there’s a difference: We are ALL in danger of losing what we have. Whether we’re liberal or conservative, the health care crisis in this country has risen to a level where it’s entirely non-partisan and the Nixon dividing line has been pulled down, chalked over and drawn into a circle that encompasses us all, alien and native alike.
Consider Perlstein’s parting lines:
“Do Americans not hate each other enough to fantasize about killing one another, in cold blood, over political and cultural disagreements? It would be hard to argue they do not.
How did Nixonland end? It has not ended yet.”
Searching for the cure
We need a way to understand that we’re all facing a common enemy, that the Bin Laden of our debate exists and is a real threat to every single one of us, no matter who we are, where we live, what color we might be, or what political party we belong to. One place to start would be to hear the voices of those conservatives who do believe reform is necessary. Another would be for progressives to step back and truly listen to the concerns of those who oppose, with the understanding that the purpose of listening is to begin a dialogue that defines our common enemy.
The only time this country unites is when it is threatened by some outside force: Bin Laden, the “Communist” threat, Hitler, Stalin, and yes, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and any other country that is perceived to threaten our safety and well-being.
This time we are threatened by an enemy within, and one of our own creation. Just as the banking system proved itself to be no friend of the common man, so too are the insurers and the pharmaceutical companies no friend of the common man in need of medical care and health care reform. If we can define the debate in a way that clearly frames the common threat, perhaps we can find ways to move the discussion out of Nixonland and back to America, where we share the same values, the same passions, the same fears, and for some, the hope that their children and children’s children will have a future of promise ahead of them.
Or, we can remain in Nixonland, where guns go to rallies and violence is not only a tragic result, but often a goal.
How will Nixonland end? It’s up to us to decide. We either go for another generation or two of deep, bitter division, or we begin right now to change the debate, find the common ground, find the ground we’ll never agree upon, and work from there.
We all have something we fear losing, but we all have more we hope to gain. Perhaps a focus on the potential gain instead of the potential loss is the pathway out of Nixonland to a place that’s greener, cleaner, and consists of one Commons that we all inhabit, instead of the open space with the canyon dividing us.
Cross-posted to The Bipartisan Report
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