Dashed expectations turned to anger

Sunday, June 5th, 2022

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, by Rick Perlstein, is as authoritative a volume as you’re likely to find on the history of how the unrest of the 1960s began, and how America reacted to it, Noah Smith says:

Perlstein leaves no ambiguity about what touched off the unrest: It was the Watts Riot of August 1965. That event set the stage for the big explosions of rioting in the summer of 1967 and after MLK’s assassination in 1968, both of which saw over a hundred American cities burn.

But the riots didn’t cause the 60s. Instead, Perlstein’s tale makes it clear that the unrest resulted from the confluence of several interrelated trends:

  • Black anger over ghetto conditions in American cities, liberal politicians’ attempts to solve the problem, and rightist backlash against those solutions
  • Cultural liberalization, especially the sexual revolution, among the middle class
  • The Vietnam War and the protests against it

The parallels between then and now are striking and immediately apparent. The widespread hope that the Kennedy/Johnson administration heralded a new era of liberalism in America outpaced reality, much like hope that Obama heralded a post-racial era outpaced reality — even though LBJ pushed through more substantive liberal policy than anyone except FDR, there was just no way even the famed “master of the Senate” could keep up with the wild expectations of the early 60s. And those dashed expectations turned to anger — anger over Vietnam, anger at the police, anger over ghetto conditions, anger at the dominant culture. Much as in the 2010s, dashed liberal expectations turned to anger in the form of BLM protests and riots. 2014 was our 1965, and 2020 was our 1968.

And what’s even more striking is how much the conservative reaction to 1960s liberal rage resembled the Trump era. Conservatives rallied around a leader they felt was reactionary, who would clamp down on urban Black unrest and antiwar hippies alike. Especially striking are Perlstein’s anecdotes about how right-wing counter-protesters felt they were standing up for Nixon personally — similar to the protectiveness MAGA people developed around Trump. (The irony, of course, is that in many regards Nixon governed as a liberal president, creating the EPA and OSHA and proposing universal health care and basic income! The only real similarity with Trump was in his authoritarian, paranoid personality.)

Nixon is, of course, the narrative throughline of this book, but in many ways he was just a symbol for a broader reactionary outpouring that eventually became the conservative movement of the 70s and 80s. That counterrevolution, which Perlstein has made it his life’s work to study, was far more violent, passionate, and downright scary than people realize. Americans were rightfully aghast when they saw Nazi symbols displayed openly at Charlottesville, but few realize how common those same symbols were at right-wing demonstrations in the 60s. People know about the MLK assassination riots, but few today have heard of the Hard Hat Riot. The counterrevolution was not televised.

And of course the culture war that started in the 60s is still with us today. That’s the thesis of Nixonland — which makes it all the more remarkable that the book was published in 2008, before Obama was even elected or Trump was on anyone’s radar.

Comments

  1. Bob Sykes says:

    We still had Big Tent parties in the 60′s, and on average the Republican Party was to the left of the Democrat Party. The Republicans still had a liberal wing including Nelson Rockefeller and John Lindsay and, arguably, Richard Nixon. The Democrats did have a communist/socialist wing, like Adlai Stevenson, but they also had a hard right, segregationist, militarist wing that was absent in the Republicans.

    Much of LBJ’s social agenda, especially the Civil Rights Act, depended on Republican support for passage. The segregationists had seniority and controlled committee chairs in both the House and Senate. Democrats like Fulbright opposed much of the liberal program.

    The 70′s saw a major realignment of the parties along ideological lines. McGovern and Mondale socialists gained control of the Democrat Party and more or less expelled the conservatives and segregationists. They by and large became Republicans, and the liberals in the Republican party became Democrats, like Jay Rockefeller.

  2. Gavin Longmuir says:

    That is an interesting Far Left perspective. But the attempt to identify the causality is probably completely wrong. The more likely cause of the 1960s was generational — the Baby Boomers reached puberty and outnumbered everyone else. The rest, as they say, is history.

  3. Jack says:

    The dominant culture now seems to be the one waving the rainbow flag and raising the clenched fist of BLM.

  4. Hoyos says:

    The persistence of the paranoia about Nixon is making me think maybe he was, for all his policy faults, a truly great president.

    Projection isn’t just a river in Egypt either, Trump and Nixon weren’t all the paranoid, they really were being plotted against.

  5. Adept says:

    “The persistence of the paranoia about Nixon is making me think maybe he was, for all his policy faults, a truly great president.”

    How is a presidency measured if not by policy? And, if policy is our yardstick, Nixon was an atrocious president, easily among the worst of all time. The “regulatory explosion” happened on his watch. He’s ultimately responsible for the passage of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, National Environmental Policy Act, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the creation of OSHA and the EPA, and much more. The number of pages in the Federal Register more than doubled under Nixon.

    Glenn Reynolds wrote a good article about this, in USA Today of all places:

    “Maybe it’s just a coincidence that progress suddenly slowed down, but I don’t think so.”

    Nixon was a lawyer and a bureaucrat, both by trade and by inclination. As a Naval Officer, he functioned primarily as a lawyer and bureaucrat. Little surprise, then, that he governed for the benefit of lawyers and bureaucrats. The parasitic fraction of the economy exploded under Nixon, and has been gorging itself on our blood ever since.

    And don’t even get me started on Nixon’s China policy, the most generous possible view of which is that it was short-sighted and founded on faulty assumptions.

    Nixon is responsible, in whole or in part, for many of the great problems of the present.

  6. Bruce says:

    America is a liberal country and we get what liberals want, good and hard.

    In the fifties there was a liberal consensus that we should get desegregation, but not riots or a big spike in crime. Liberal R like Eisenhower and liberal D like Stevenson agreed, Mort Sahl made jokes about it. We got desegregation without riots or crime.

    In the sixties there was a liberal consensus that we should get riots and a big spike in crime. You see this everywhere, from Freeman Dyson’s diaries to old news magazines. We got riots and crime.

  7. Altitude Zero says:

    What a crock. I was alive then, I saw lots of American flags and “Love It or Leave It” signs and stickers, but I never saw any Nazi symbols at any right-wing demonstrations. Hell, lots of the hard hats were veterans who had fought the Nazis, they weren’t going to be waving swastikas around. I did see lots of Viet Cong flags at left-wing demos, along with chants of “Ho, Ho, Ho-Chi-Minh”. I’d be willing to bet that was conveniently not mentioned.

  8. Dan Kurt says:

    File this post under: Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes.

  9. Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

    “Perlstein’s tale [is that] the unrest resulted from the confluence of several interrelated trends: Black anger[...]”

    Is no more effectual than any other prole caste’s anger. The birth, life, and victory — or defeat — of any revolution, is contingent on the primacy of the rival elite faction(s) instigating it, the pedestrians, by definition, serving only as pretext and or source of foot soldiers to be directed, being headless, and thus powerless, otherwise. This is the basic causality reversal that all demotist subversives throughout history engage in their rhetoric.

    The chaos happened because the later-day Wilsonites desired for chaos to happen. There are a number of reasons why our gnostic managerialists would have such a desire, and you could say they are all interrelated.

    They like it because they are genuinely attracted to cacophony on an aesthetic level, in a way that more functional humanoid species fundamentally aren’t.

    They like it because fuck the peasants.

    They like it because creating crises are the first steps for grabbing more power and pushing through measures you want in the first place, which you call the solution to the crises; the primary way rulership takes place under ‘popular governance’.

    More people starving after liquidating kulaks is evidence we need to liquidate even more kulaks; more blaques rioting is evidence we need to give even more power to philonegrites; and so on and so forth.

    To put it in other words, in order to ‘surrender’ (take power) to the ‘demands’ (our policy objectives) of the ‘people’ (our Astroturf), it is first necessary to invent a ‘demanding people’.

  10. Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

    The reason things are changing so rapidly now and why it hasn’t just stayed 1970 forever, is because all the men responsible for 1970 are all dead or close to dying. And by the very nature of those same men’s Weltanschauung, they could not pick worthy successors; because men of worth could be rivals or threats, so the only permissible replacements left are holy dysfunctionals, and true believers in the ideological smokescreens, which selects for stupid insanity (or insane stupidity).

    The contemporary ruling ‘elite’ is anything but now; they have been getting progressively (pni) more braindead for generations, and are hemorrhaging power like water through a wicker basket.

    Which means opportunity.

  11. Jim says:

    Pseudo-Chrysostom, you should know that your writing has an oily consistency to it. Reading your words makes me want to have a shower. The movements of your mind can only be described as smarmy, self-righteous, and smug. Though you are right on some points, you think that you are far smarter than you are. In my mind’s eye you typify the Backpfeifengesicht.

    Bluntly, I would be surprised if you find “opportunity” anywhere.

  12. Wang Wei Lin says:

    Then, just as now, the Democrats use violence at every opportunity.

  13. Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

    Jim,

    This experience in a common phenomena is those who feel a personal antipathy to someone, but who cannot find any particular fault in their offering to nit pick; the animus comes first, when then sets out in search of reasons to rationalize itself.

  14. Curri says:

    Americans were rightfully aghast when they saw Nazi symbols displayed openly at Charlottesville, but few realize how common those same symbols were at right-wing demonstrations in the 60s.

    Like the guy above, I was around back then and never saw any Nazi symbols at any of the demos I attended. But this off-base comment led me to search for an odd item I ran across a few years ago:

    Some NSWPP activities may seem startling by the standards of 2018. In 1976 and 1977, a contingent of uniformed stormtroopers, led by three drummers and a flag bearer, marched in the annual Arlington, Virginia, Fourth of July parade, along with the high school band, the VFW, the Rotary and other non-controversial participants. As I can personally attest, the National Socialists received both cheers and catcalls from onlookers along the parade route.

  15. Contaminated NEET says:

    Jim, the oily, self-righteous, and smarmy face in dire need of a slap is yours. Bluntly, you should actually win the argument before acting like you’ve dominated your opponent.

  16. Altitude Zero says:

    As for 1960′s Nazis, yeah, there were doubtlessly a few around, in a country of 170 million (as it was then) there are bound to be a few nutcases, but I never saw one. I would imagine a lot of those people in Arlington thought that it was some kind of weird joke. For every Nazi in the US in the 1960′s, there were at least a hundred commies – but somehow, for guys like Perlstein, that’s not the same.

  17. Jim says:

    Pseudo-Chrysostom: “This experience in a common phenomena is those who feel a personal antipathy to someone, but who cannot find any particular fault in their offering to nit pick; the animus comes first, which then sets out in search of reasons to rationalize itself.”

    Concretely, you’re dead-wrong about the Apollo Program, the Puritan Hypothesis, the nature of power, what drives the U.S. government, 9/11 presumably, and where America is headed.

    Those are big errors, but not irreconcilable. I can have reasonable conversations with smart people who disagree with me but are willing to listen to reason and don’t want me to die.

    The problem really is your presentation. If I could tell you how to fix it, I would. All I can say is that the physiognomy of your writing is approximately this: https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1346314816827232256/zCQCJW6N_400x400.jpg

    (Minus, it goes without saying, his salarymanlike subtlety and social grace.)

  18. Jim says:

    Contaminated NEET: “Jim, the oily, self-righteous, and smarmy face in dire need of a slap is yours. Bluntly, you should actually win the argument before acting like you’ve dominated your opponent.”

    Who are you?

  19. Jim says:

    Adept, you raise some very interesting points. I like Nixon because in my limited knowledge he had all the right enemies. But if he was principally or even significantly responsible for the onset of the regulatory state, that could easily weigh against everything else.

    On the other hand, the article you link says that “everything that defines the modern world either came about, or had its seeds sown, during [the "golden quarter", or "the 25 years between 1945 and 1971"]. The Pill. Electronics. Computers and the birth of the internet. Nuclear power. Television. Antibiotics. Space travel. Civil rights.”

    Only one of those is unambiguously good, and we didn’t get nuclear power. Electronics, quite frankly, haven’t delivered on their great promise, and it doesn’t look like they ever will, unless we happen to roll “straight sixes” on the Great Wildcard of AGI. The others are somewhere between a farce, a hoax, perennially overrated, or apparently fatal to the future of civilized man.

  20. Jim says:

    A quote from Adept’s linked article: “Within a decade or so, Washington was transformed from a sleepy backwater (mocked by John F. Kennedy for its “Southern efficiency and Northern charm”) to a city full of fancy restaurants and expensive houses, a trend that has only continued in the decades since. The explosion of regulations led to an explosion of people to lobby the regulators, and lobbyists need nice restaurants and fancy houses.”

    How much of this is due entirely to the U.S. government’s then-newfound ability, courtesy of the aforementioned Richard Milhous Nixon, to print infinity money?

    This is not a rhetorical question.

  21. Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

    “Concretely, you’re dead-wrong about the Apollo Program, the Puritan Hypothesis, the nature of power, what drives the U.S. government, 9/11 presumably, and where America is headed.”

    Concretely, you can stop blowing smoke out of your ass any time.

    It’s really unfortunate seeing a grown ass man act like a gossiping high school girl. I earnestly suggest you get over your preoccupation with me. We can talk about things men care about instead.

  22. Adept says:

    Jim,

    It was a poorly selected list, I agree. I would however suggest that we had nuclear power, but the regulatory state strangled it in its cradle.

    A better list would include:
    - Penicillin and antibiotics (1942)
    - Nuclear power (1951)
    - The transistor (1947–1959)
    - The internet (1969)
    - The solar cell (1955)
    - Cellular data networks (1947–1973)
    - The shipping container (1955)
    - Information theory (1948)
    - Digital physics (Conrad Zuse, 1969) — the only interesting philosophical theory of the 20th century.

    Alongside penicillin, honorary mention could be given to corticosteroids (1949) — the development of which, and indeed the development of synthetic steroids in general, was entirely linked to the development of The Pill. (The guy mostly responsible for The Pill, Carl Djerassi, is also responsible for dozens of anabolic steroids and corticosteroids.)

    It’s also true that some of these inventions don’t seem to have, on net, benefitted humanity. But that could be because of the ways in which they were forced to develop. The post-Nixon regulatory state strongly penalizes building things in meatspace and potently, however indirectly, promotes a solipsistic digital economy and an almost wholly parasitic “service” economy. That our brightest young minds waste away inventing better ways to generate clickbait, and increasingly sophisticated zero-sum financial constructs, is a tragedy of world historical proportions.

    Things definitely went haywire on Nixon’s watch, and we’re suffering through the consequences. Rule number one ought to be “never trust a lawyer,” and Nixon was one, through and through.

  23. Contaminated NEET says:

    Jim:
    >Who are you?

    I’m terribly sorry; my post count must be too low to address someone like you.

  24. longarch says:

    Pseudo-Chrysostom, you should know that your writing has a buttery consistency to it. Reading your words makes me want to have lunch. The movements of your mind can only be described as savory, lightly seasoned, and calorific. Though you are right on some points, you should probably drink more alcohol before you post. In my mind’s eye you typify the pain à l’ail aux escargots.

    Bluntly, I am going to ruin my diet by eating too many calories and I blame your writing for forcing me to surrender to gluttony.

  25. Jim says:

    Contaminated NEET: “I’m terribly sorry; my post count must be too low to address someone like you.”

    Thank you for recognizing my clear posting superiority. My vast output, crystal-clear prose, and biting wit do indeed put me on another level to mere mortals such as yourself. I will go down in history as one of the greatest commentators of the Internet Age. Will history even remember the name of Contaminated NEET?

    (In other words, who are you, and why are you interjecting in a no-stakes duel between Internet-commenter ostensible equals?)

  26. Jim says:

    Pseudo-Chrysostom: “Concretely, you can stop blowing smoke out of your ass any time. It’s really unfortunate seeing a grown ass man act like a gossiping high school girl. I earnestly suggest you get over your preoccupation with me. We can talk about things men care about instead.”

    You pretend to be high and mighty and poised for seizing “opportunity” (i.e., power) from “the Damnyankees” but the interesting thing is that each time I prod you a little bit you invariably revert to certain distinctly working-class linguistic tics. It’s difficult for me to imagine anyone I know saying “stop blowing smoke out of your ass”, but the dead giveaway is the use of “ass” as an emphatic modifier, as in “grown-ass man”.

    I can practically hear the Deep South blue-collar drawl from here. Are there cigarette butts in the picture?

    Be honest, now, you hear?

  27. Jim says:

    Adept:

    You’re clearly very knowledgeable about this subject. What single book, or small handful of books, would you recommend for someone looking for the bird’s-eye view of the “Nixon Shock Doctrine” as it pertains to the proliferation of the American regulatory state?

    Adept: “Things definitely went haywire on Nixon’s watch, and we’re suffering through the consequences.”

    Is it possible, in your opinion, that the regulatory state as it exists is a consequence of Nixon’s failure? Or do you think that he intended to foster such a beast?

    Adept: “It’s also true that some of these inventions don’t seem to have, on net, benefitted humanity. But that could be because of the ways in which they were forced to develop.”

    That’s an excellent point.

    Adept: “Never trust a lawyer.”

    Words to live by.

  28. Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

    Jim,

    Your preoccupation is exemplified in your inetpretation of the line about opportunity, seeing it focused only or primarily on myself, as you yourself are focused only or primarily on myself.

    On the contrary, the opportunity is for every body that heretofore has had to suffer existence operating under the influence of the wilsonian empire as if a given – it ceasing to be a given, with ever more accelerating rapidity.

  29. Adept says:

    Jim,

    It’s not terribly specific, but you’d probably enjoy “Where Is My Flying Car?” by J. Storrs Hall. There’s a review here: https://rootsofprogress.org/where-is-my-flying-car

    It was also reviewed at Scott Alexander’s place, and very briefly by Tyler Cowen.

    “What went wrong in the 1970s?” is the central question of the book. Hall is an interesting, passionate, engaging, and technically-minded writer.

    A more specific book is George Hoberg’s “Pluralism by Design: Environmental Policy and the American Regulatory State.” It examines the transition between the vague and informal New Deal regulatory regime and the bureaucratic and legalistic regulatory regime that picked up in the late 1960s, on Nixon’s watch.

Leave a Reply