We’re All Nixon Now

Richard Nixon, after pulling himself out of obscurity onto the national stage in the 1940s, saving his vice-presidential nomination in 1952, coming back from the 1960 defeat to win the presidency in 1968, and emerging out from scandal back into the esteem of the American people by the early 1990s, has made yet another incredible comeback. He’s all the rage these days in a surprisingly politically diverse array of circles; serial moderates appreciate his third-way tacking on domestic policy, foreign policy realists have been resuscitating his and Kissinger’s ideas of statecraft, left-ish social activists of all sorts continually reappraise his environmental and civil rights advances. Most notably, the factions on the Right that consider themselves “realigned” see Nixon as an apt model for socially conservative, economically progressive governance within both the Republican and New Deal traditions. (There’s also a subset with a strange but constitutionally wholesome fixation on Nixon as a victim of deep-state infighting.)

As someone who was on the Nixon Special many years before it was cool, I find all of this delightful—the complexification of a previously wooden cartoon myth, the rediscovery of the relevance of history by new generations. People of diverse political ideologies and social backgrounds squabbling over who Richard Nixon would actually vote for in the 2020s is a splendid new public discourse! And yet, something central is still missing.

The best versions of the post-Watergate myth—Nixon, a deeply insecure and profoundly talented and fundamentally decent, patriotic public servant, driven to great heights by the force of his perseverance and brought down by his inability to defeat his own darkest angels—are basically correct. His career was, in fact, marred by a series of perhaps relatable but certainly contemptible flaws which, while he struggled against them, he never defeated. 

The soft-spoken and shell-shocked moral clarity of his farewell address to the White House staff (“Always give your best, never get discouraged, never be petty; always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself”) would not make any moral sense at all if he did not understand himself to be exactly as flawed as those who hated him believed. And it is the combination of his very real flaws, his very real gifts, and his final acceptance at the height and end of his career that only the grace of courage and charity could have redeemed him, that make his an indisputably great American life, compelling to this day. To gloss over these because he saved the Earth or owned the libs would be not to understand what made Nixon himself.

So I propose a revised interpretation of Nixon’s moral meaning in his own life, in the American story, and for our times, one which I hope can speak more clearly to those younger folks hungry to achieve great things who feel stymied by the mundanity and stupidity of modern life, who resent those who wallow in unearned comfort and prestige, and who dream of great grand futures and want nothing more than to give themselves to causes far higher than themselves. As the Nixon Foundation’s excellent YouTube shorts series continues to hammer on, the driving principle of Richard Nixon was gritty perseverance against all odds, a long, hard road that usually ended unexpectedly in redemption. In work, in love, in statecraft, in soul, this was the story of his life.

Far outside of any specific political alignment or policy program, Richard Nixon in the 2020s is ripe to become a cultural argument and a personal style. He can ascend to that level of myth in Americana that Theodore Roosevelt did for the “strenuous life,” Franklin Roosevelt for patrician responsibility, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan for the grace and glamour of celebrity and sophistication in public life, and Dwight Eisenhower, George H.W. Bush, and John McCain for the idea of the patriot-hero as elderly guardian of the republic. In each of these cases, the politics and the policy are secondary. It is the vibes, the vibes, the vibes that matter, and those vibes carry on and help perpetuate a kind of virtue otherwise hard to come by.

Nixon has already been a very tepid cultural argument. Still, the existing sources of that cultural argument should be honed and updated for our times, and they should be purged of their explicit political jabs. One of these is Middle-American simplicity, an un-resentful belief in the dignity and the decency of the average American, and the public service idealism that comes out of it, best expressed by Frank Capra and Norman Rockwell. Another one is the fervent, uncompromising perseverance, which was the key to every victory Nixon ever made throughout all the defeats. This was never just a question of hard work alone. It also brought with it an almost existential endurance of pain. He mulled this little meditation as he resigned from the presidency over fifty years ago, on August 9, 1974, in that splendid little farewell speech quoted above:

We think sometimes that when things happen that don’t go the right way… we think that when we suffer a defeat, that all is ended. We think, as T.R. said, that the light had left his life forever. Not true. It is only a beginning, always. The young must know it; the old must know it. It must always sustain us, because the greatness comes not when things go always good for you, but the greatness comes and you are really tested, when you take some knocks, some disappointments, when sadness comes. Because only if you have been in the deepest valley, can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.

Nixon said that while facing possibly the greatest failure and humiliation any president has ever endured. And yet he endured. The American character has a thousand faces, but Nixon’s wrestled with fundamental questions of a man’s relationship with himself, and in Tocquevillian America, that most isolating yet empowering struggle is nothing but heroic. And you don’t have to resign from the presidency to get an idea of what he’s talking about. 

We need not rehash here the numberless crises the coming generations of Americans face, the material stagnation and institutional dysfunction, all the woes of cultural decadence and social distrust, and the strange neuroses of identity, personal and collective. Strength, grit, endurance, and a fervent and idealistic devotion to realities higher than oneself are not particularly encouraged under current conditions. It is our own job, and nobody else’s, to get beyond this, save ourselves, and maybe serve our country. 

So Nixon’s example is something I think the Americans of my generation—the stymied corporate professional jammed into bureaucratic machinery, the invisible and forgotten young man or woman blackpilled on the internet, the unreconstructed romantic wistful for the America that has passed—can pull a little bit of hope from. 

Let’s kick the memory of Nixon out of politics and rope him into lifestyle, self-help, and culture. Strangely enough, the odyssey of Richard Nixon’s personal and political life is probably one of the best compass-mirror guidebooks for struggling people in American political culture and American life in general today. Nixon Now, More Than Ever!

Luke Nathan Phillips is a writer, tour guide, and MC in Washington DC.

Image: Mark Reinstein / Shutterstock.com.