Thomas Frank: Welcome to Nixonland
[Mr. Frank is the author of What's the Matter with Kansas.]
... Well, now the main events of the '60s are 40 years behind us, and still we can't shake them. In the last national election, we redebated the Vietnam War. In the one coming up, we will be forced to debate Barack Obama's not-even-tenuous connection to the Weathermen. (We will probably not be asked to judge the poisonous legacy of the Young Americans for Freedom, although McCain adviser Charlie Black was actually a leader of that group.)
We can also be fairly sure of the word that will be used as the demon decade is again wheeled out: elitism. In the '60s-as-remembered, the conflict that overlays all the others from that period was between ordinary, hard-working Americans and the privileged kids who went to fancy schools where they learned to disrespect the American flag and call the police names. Like the ghost of Archie Bunker, this peculiar class war has appeared over the years whenever some well-polished liberal is in need of a comeuppance.
The politician who fashioned a permanent Republican parable out of the decade's antagonisms was Richard Nixon. The man was born for the backlash. In "Nixonland," a brilliant and engrossing study of the politician and the period, Rick Perlstein uses, as a motif for the future president's career, the society of outsiders Nixon started at college in opposition to the establishment club.
"The Orthogonians" was a made-up name that might well have meant, "the squares." Orthogonians weren't working-class, exactly, but nevertheless there was a real authenticity to their revolt against the glamorous ones – the "Franklins" – who lorded it over them. Recruiting like-minded Orthogonians and fueling their grievances, Mr. Perlstein writes, became the signature maneuver of Nixon's career, from the days of Alger Hiss all the way to the White House. (Mr. Perlstein is a friend who has said kind things about my work in the past.)
"There were new currents to surf in the soaring sixties, based in the same kind of old resentments," Mr. Perlstein writes, "new kinds of common people being put upon by new kinds of insolent and condescending Franklins – the new kind of liberal who seemed to be saying that . . . college kids who spat on the flag were oh-so-much more with-it than you."
Nixon is gone today, along with the rioters and the radicals who riled his Silent Majority. Most of the culture-war issues of those unhappy days are forgotten too; even the culture-war issues of 2004 have already lost some of their potency.
Yet the strange class war that defined Nixonland renews itself endlessly, with different leaders and different symbols, but always with the same dynamic: the striving squares revenging themselves upon the hip and the snooty....
Read entire article at WSJ
... Well, now the main events of the '60s are 40 years behind us, and still we can't shake them. In the last national election, we redebated the Vietnam War. In the one coming up, we will be forced to debate Barack Obama's not-even-tenuous connection to the Weathermen. (We will probably not be asked to judge the poisonous legacy of the Young Americans for Freedom, although McCain adviser Charlie Black was actually a leader of that group.)
We can also be fairly sure of the word that will be used as the demon decade is again wheeled out: elitism. In the '60s-as-remembered, the conflict that overlays all the others from that period was between ordinary, hard-working Americans and the privileged kids who went to fancy schools where they learned to disrespect the American flag and call the police names. Like the ghost of Archie Bunker, this peculiar class war has appeared over the years whenever some well-polished liberal is in need of a comeuppance.
The politician who fashioned a permanent Republican parable out of the decade's antagonisms was Richard Nixon. The man was born for the backlash. In "Nixonland," a brilliant and engrossing study of the politician and the period, Rick Perlstein uses, as a motif for the future president's career, the society of outsiders Nixon started at college in opposition to the establishment club.
"The Orthogonians" was a made-up name that might well have meant, "the squares." Orthogonians weren't working-class, exactly, but nevertheless there was a real authenticity to their revolt against the glamorous ones – the "Franklins" – who lorded it over them. Recruiting like-minded Orthogonians and fueling their grievances, Mr. Perlstein writes, became the signature maneuver of Nixon's career, from the days of Alger Hiss all the way to the White House. (Mr. Perlstein is a friend who has said kind things about my work in the past.)
"There were new currents to surf in the soaring sixties, based in the same kind of old resentments," Mr. Perlstein writes, "new kinds of common people being put upon by new kinds of insolent and condescending Franklins – the new kind of liberal who seemed to be saying that . . . college kids who spat on the flag were oh-so-much more with-it than you."
Nixon is gone today, along with the rioters and the radicals who riled his Silent Majority. Most of the culture-war issues of those unhappy days are forgotten too; even the culture-war issues of 2004 have already lost some of their potency.
Yet the strange class war that defined Nixonland renews itself endlessly, with different leaders and different symbols, but always with the same dynamic: the striving squares revenging themselves upon the hip and the snooty....