THE PROBLEM WITH 'NIXONMAXXING"

The Nixon revival is a bit surprising

The newest trend among conservative young people is Nixxonmaxxing. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal described the phenomenon. Nixon has become a popular figure in viral YouTube, Instagram and Tik Tok videos where his archival footage is typically paired with rap music. The Nixon Foundation is actively pushing this content.

Some of the hoopla is mere nostalgia: Nixonmaxxing hats, Nixon gear, “Nixon Now More Than Ever” items, and so on. But there’s more to it than this. Nixonmaxxing means maxing out on Nixon, going all-in on Nixon, in a sense resurrecting Nixon from the dustbin of history and making him an important and relevant figure again. Nixon has become the younger generation’s uncool, cool guy.

The Nixon revival is a bit surprising, because for the past several decades the iconic conservative figure was Reagan. Reagan dominated the era from 1980 to 2008—these are my dates for the Reagan era—and Trump has dominated from 2015 to now. Other figures—Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, the two Bushes—have been consigned to the shadows, to the hazy background of history.

Young conservatives, however, seem a bit out of sync with Reagan. They don’t identify with Reagan’s sunny optimism, his Big Sky conservatism. And so they have picked Nixon as a sort of anti-Reagan. They picked the guy the Left hated the most, the president they have tried to stomp on for 50 years, and that guy is now their new hero.

I am not a Nixonmaxxer, but I think the reappraisal of Nixon is both welcome and overdue. J.D. Vance recently said nice things about Nixon at the Nixon Library, comparing Nixon to Trump. I’d like to give my own take on Nixon, which comes not from a millennial or Gen Z but from someone who came to America as a teenager in the aftermath of the Nixon era.

I came to America in 1978. Nixon had been out of office for four years, and Jimmy Carter was elected in 1976. Republicans suffered a terrible wipeout in the midterm election of 1974—the year Nixon resigned his office. Ford was his well-meaning but clumsy successor.

Nixon’s failure, I have to say, gave the Democrats not only the presidency but large majorities in the House and the Senate. Yes, Nixon won 49 states but he still never had the sweeping control of the government that his removal and disgrace gave the Democrats. Jimmy Carter almost destroyed the country, until the American people came to their senses and elected Reagan.

Reagan defined a whole era, as Nixon did not. Both served two terms and both won with big majorities, but Reagan had a revolution and Nixon didn’t. Reagan brought the top marginal tax rate down from 70% to 28%. Reagan won the Cold War, helped to liberate Eastern Europe, and brought down Soviet Communism itself.

What does Nixon have to compare to that? Well, Nixon went to China, and he played an important role in breaking a potential Soviet-Chinese alliance. In a way, he separated the Russian Communists from the Chinese Communists. Nixon’s bold move did contain Soviet expansion, and it opened a pathway to closer ties with China. But what has that brought us?

It’s a mixed bag, at best. China was a sleepy, backward nation when Nixon went there. Since Nixon opened up China, it has become more dangerous than the Soviet Union ever was. It is now an economic and military juggernaut, basically the manufacturing hub of the world, and China has now become our new rival and adversary, so the Soviet bear has been displaced by the Chinese dragon.

While Reagan described the Soviet Union as an “evil empire,” Nixon never understood the ideological dimension of Soviet totalitarianism. For him the Russians were no different than the Prussian empire or Napoleon. Nixon studied Clausewitz and Sun Tzu to learn how great powers deal with one another.

Nixon was into the art of warfare because that’s what statesmanship was for him, an art. He agreed with the Democrats on the need for arms control, but insisted on what he called “hard headed détente.” He scorned Reagan’s goal of rolling back the Soviet empire itself, regarding that prospect as an ideological pipe dream, foolish, reckless and dangerous.

Domestically, Nixon was a liberal. Not only did he lavishly fund New Deal and Great Society projects; he is also, in a sense, the founder of DEI. While Lyndon Johnson had advocated for government-sponsored affirmative action, the first significant affirmative action project was carried out by Nixon. He backed racial preferences for blacks in the public sector unions in Philadelphia. Nixon’s program was called the Philadelphia Plan.

Now Nixon’s motive was Machiavellian. Nixon was a very sneaky political operative. He knew the Philadelphia unions were dominated by working class white Democrats. He wanted to drive a wedge between the blacks and the working-class whites.

So this was his reason for pushing affirmative action or DEI. But in the end Nixon’s maneuver backfired. The Democrats got the blacks and they kept the white working class. The joke was on Nixon. DEI became embedded in the American workforce, first in the public sector and then in the private sector. Nixon, I’m sorry to say, had a big role in starting it.

Nixon was not a conservative. How could he be? He didn’t even know what conservatism was. He was certainly a patriot and anti-communist. That’s why he liked Pat Buchanan so much. Buchanan too was fiercely pro-American and anti-communist.

But Buchanan recounts in his autobiography how Nixon kept asking him, “Pat, who are these conservatives? What do the conservatives believe?” Nixon was asking as an outsider. Not only did he not regard himself as a conservative, but he viewed conservatives as some strange breed, and he had to investigate who they were and what they believed.

For these reasons—Nixon’s blindness to Soviet ideology, his welfare state liberalism, his role in affirmative action and DEI, and his manifest ignorance of conservatism—many conservatives did not like Nixon. Several times did I hear the publisher of National Review, Bill Rusher, say, “I hated Nixon—until Watergate.”

Rusher’s point is that only when the Left tried to destroy Nixon did conservatives rush to his defense.

Given all this, I ask myself what is the great appeal of Nixon now? Why do young people today find Nixon a more interesting figure than Reagan? Why do we have Nixxonmaxxing but no Reaganmaxxing? Is this simply a case of the younger generation rebelling against its elders and picking its own guy? Well, maybe, but why him?

I think a single experience I had with Nixon—the one time I met Richard Nixon—might help answer this question. I can’t remember the year exactly; it was in the early to mid-1990s. I lived in Washington DC where I was a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

Several of my Dartmouth buddies—about 10 of us—also came to DC to be part of the Reagan revolution. We asked ourselves, who is the person we would most like to meet? Reagan? Margaret Thatcher? Lech Walesa? Gorbachev? Pope John Paul II? We agreed that the person we most wanted to meet, not the most consequential person but the most interesting, was Richard Nixon.

But how to meet him? One of our group, Greg Fossedal, a Dartmouth grad who worked as an editorial writer at the Wall Street Journal, was a Nixon admirer. Greg was brilliant but also a bit of an eccentric, and Nixon was also eccentric, so Greg identified with Nixon. And he had several years earlier written a letter to Nixon and Nixon has courteously replied.

So Greg was our “in” with Nixon. But what to say to him? We came up with the idea of inviting him to address the Dartmouth Breakfast Club. Of course there was no such thing as a Dartmouth Breakfast Club. But, on the spot, we started it. We made up a letterhead, and Greg sent an invitation to Nixon. To our amazement, he said yes.

We had breakfast, if I recall correctly, at the Hay Adams hotel. We rented a room, and had a photographer—that’s how I got my sole photo with Nixon. He was very generous with us. Afte breakfast, he gave a 15 minute talk on foreign policy—a brief tour d’horizon of current events—and took questions. It is one of those questions, and his reply, that has stayed with me over all these years.

Greg, who was never shy to ask awkward questions, put this question to Nixon. “How is it,” he asked, “that Reagan survived the Iran contra scandal but you were forced to resign over Watergate? In both cases Democrats tried to impeach a Republican president, but in Reagan’s case they failed. With you, they didn’t impeach you but they did get you out of office. So what did Reagan have that you didn’t?” A bombshell of a question.

Nixon paused. He scowled—the famous Nixon scowl. I could see he was annoyed. I began to feel uncomfortable. Several in our group gave Greg a dirty look. How could you ask that? And then Nixon replied. It was one line, very Nixonian. Nixon said, “Ah, yes, Ronald Reagan. Well, at least he could say he was stupid.”

And there you have it. What an insight, not so much into Reagan, as into Nixon. Nixon never understood how Reagan survived but he didn’t. More broadly, he never understood how Reagan succeeded in transforming the world and he didn’t. Nixon always considered himself smarter than Reagan, and academically speaking, he was.

Thus Nixon concluded that Reagan’s secret was his stupidity. People expected Reagan to be clueless about Iran-contra, and that’s how he got away with it. No one would say that Nixon was stupid, and therefore Nixon couldn’t claim ignorance and he was held fully accountable for the deceptions around Watergate.

Here, in a nutshell, we see several of Nixon’s signature qualities, which become even more clear when they are contrasted with Reagan’s qualities. Reagan was fundamentally an optimist, and that optimism characterized the Reagan era and also the Reagan generation—me included—that came of age in that era. Nixon was fundamentally a pessimist, as I guess many of his contemporary millennial and Gen Z admirers also are.

Nixon was also paranoid, and we see this from the Watergate scandal itself. Remember: Nixon was on the verge of winning 49 states. It was not exactly a close presidential election in 1972. So what’s the justification for organizing elaborate spying campaigns on the other side? Then you have to do elaborate cover-ups. And you ed up throwing away your presidency over the scandal.

Nixon is no longer with us, but his paranoia surely is. In fact, we live in a paranoid epoch of Nixonian dimensions. I can see how the paranoia of our own era came from. It came from numerous conspiracy theories coming true. It came from previously trusted institutions—the CDC, the NIH, the FBI—all forfeiting their public trust.

It also came from bitter developments in American society—the outsourcing of jobs, the march of technology that also takes away jobs, the erosion of the family and the old civic sense of community, the collapse of normal dating and courtship, the experience of censorship and political targeting and in general the brutishness of the Left—all of this has not only fostered paranoia but also a profound sense of victimization.

Nixon’s paranoia and his sense of victimization are both palpable even in the one incident I recounted. Nixon remained paranoid to the end. He never gave up his sense that he was shafted. And here’s the thing. He was right to be paranoid.

Remember the saying, “Even paranoids have enemies.” Nixon feared the Eastern establishment—even in the Eastern establishment in his own party—and he was right to fear them. He hated the Ivy League people and the mainstream media and he thought they were out to get him, as they were.

Some of the most amazing material in the Nixon Library is taped recordings of Nixon talking about Jews and Ivy Leaguers. He says things like, “Henry, there are too many Jews on the invitation list.” Or “Henry, I don’t want to have dinner with anyone who went to the Ivy League.”

He hated those people, and in the end, I suppose, they got him, so Nixon was justified also in regarding himself to be a victim. He was, in fact, ousted in a coup that goes by the name of Watergate.

So I can understand, to a point, young people’s enthusiasm for this strange fellow who took on an all-powerful establishment in the paranoid, conspiratorial belief that it was secretly arrayed against him. Nixon’s paranoia, his conspiracy-mindedness, even his borderline craziness have many counterparts on all our social media platforms today.

And in some ways what they like best about Nixon is that he lost, they destroyed his presidency and his reputation, and this confirms the notion of an omnipotent, omniscient elite that always win in the end. Many young people today don’t see a way out. They don’t see a way to win. They expect to lose. And they want to lose like Nixon, ignominiously, to be sure, but also in a way that supports and confirms their utter feelings of hopelessness.

Here’s the mantra of the Nixxonmaxxers. “See—we told you we were doomed, and now we are, just like we said.” I suppose it could be said of Nixon that he remained interesting, even in defeat. He said things like, “You won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore,” which is not surprising for its bitterness, but surprising that someone would publicly say it.

He was more of a thinker than a doer. He read the nineteenth century historians, as Reagan didn’t. He didn’t defeat the Soviet empire, as Reagan did, but he could give an analysis of Russian history in a manner that Reagan never could. Kissinger in his memoirs recounts the culmination of a brilliant negotiation in the Middle East. He was astounded by Nixon’s grasp of events, and his negotiating prowess.

Kissinger’s regret was that, even then, Watergate was closing in on Nixon. From Kissinger’s point of view, a great thinker and strategist of a kind America rarely gets was being undone. Kissinger saw it almost in terms of Greek tragedy. Nixon was ultimately defeated not by his foreign adversaries but by his hamartia—his own tragic flaw.

Nixon wanted to be a populist, and used the campaign theme of the “forgotten man” in his 1972 campaign. He was quite right to stand up for the ordinary American against the hippies, the druggies, the nudists, the angry feminists and the Black Power revolutionaries. Yet while Nixon identified with the working class American, he didn’t relate to him. He remained aloof and insular—a real contrast with a genuine populist like Trump.

He was a loyal friend, but also a great hater. He didn’t conceal his envy of Reagan—all it took was a single question to bring it into full display. He was still the guy who walked with his two arms moving in the same direction, not swinging opposite ways like most people. He was still the guy who walked on the beach in his leather shoes.

The philosopher Nietzsche said of the Greek tragedians that they took the crushing burden of human suffering, and made it interesting. Nixon was a deeply flawed man, but he had a way of making the world, and himself, interesting.

We never regretted our choice to have breakfast with him. He might not help us come to terms with our situation in America today, or with our future, but he does help us gain a better understanding of him—and perhaps also of ourselves.

And that’s the way I see it.

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