When did Howard Wolfson become so insightful?

[scheming daemons]

The End of Nixonland

Rick Perlstein's Nixonland brilliantly covers a period that is finally coming to an end.

Perlstein's book focuses on Richard Nixon's runs for the White House, beginning in 1966. Democrats, facing a voter backlash over rioting, crime, and the Vietnam War lost 47 House seats in 1966. Nixon rode that revolt into the White House two years later and exploited it while in office to win re-election in a landslide in 1972.

Perlstein correctly states that Nixon came "to power by using the anger, anxieties, and resentments produced by the cultural chaos of the 1960s," and defines Nixonland as the state of total political warfare over class and cultural conflicts.

Nixonland, the book, ends in 1972, but Nixonland, the place, endured, through the 70s and 80s, up until George W. Bush's re-election in 2004. Welfare queens, Willie Horton, Swiftboats; all Nixonland tactics, all designed to cleave Americans along racial and cultural lines. Perlstein writes, "What Richard Nixon left behind was the very terms of our national self-image: the notion that there are two kinds of Americans. On the one side the "Silent Majority"...On the other side are the "liberals."

The politics of Nixonland proved very successful for the Republicans, if not for America. Of the ten Presidential elections between 1968 and 2004, Republicans won 7. The only two term Democrat elected in that period was hamstrung for three-quarters of his Presidency by a Republican Congress. In Nixonland conservatives mostly set the agenda and framed the debate. When Bill Clinton famously declared "the era of big government is over" in 1996 he was conceding the obvious -- in fact it had ended at least a decade earlier.

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http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_flack/archive/2008/10/18/the-end-of-nixonland.aspx