Nixon, the liberal

Nixon at 100: Was He ‘America’s Last Liberal’?

The man I voted for in 1972, my first election.

I had attended many anti-war demonstrations in my college years, before that, and had not changed my mind that the war in Vietnam was a fool’s errand.

But McGovern just seemed too much a flake.

The conservatives still don’t like Nixon, much, though they laud and the liberals damn his early days and the whole Chambers/Hiss affair.

(Hiss, it seems to me, was guilty.)

Except for Pat Buchanan, who worked for him in the White House.

In 1968 you still had to be 21 to vote, and I wasn’t.

But Humphrey was first way too hawkish and then too sudden with a late conversion.

I would likely have voted for Nixon, then, had I been able to.

John Fund writes pollster Doug Schoen

[N]otes that Nixon’s 1974 national-health-care proposal “was a far more liberal concept than Bill Clinton’s or Barack Obama’s.”

Nixon would have required employers to buy health insurance for their employees and subsidized the employers who couldn’t afford it.

He also imposed a minimum tax on the wealthy (the dreaded Alternative Minimum Tax, which is only now being permanently indexed to exclude the middle class) and unsuccessfully backed a guaranteed income for all Americans.

And that’s before we even get to how Nixon embraced Communist Beijing, dumped America’s diplomatic recognition of Taiwan, and signed a highly flawed Vietnam War ceasefire that within two years led to South Vietnam’s being overrun by Communists.

Contrary to current mythology, when American labor supported Nixon it did not abandon New Deal liberalism, as the anti-war radicals of the time - not liberals by any stretch of the imagination, themselves, but mostly flaming reds who loathed America and wanted Ho to win - claimed.

Nor did I.

But it did abandon liberals who were happy to defend Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, Stokely Carmichael, and the likes of Hanoi Jane, for whom I had no sympathy, either.

Somebody still owes us an appreciative biography of Nixon.

My biggest regret about him is that he and Kissinger didn't get us totally out of Vietnam in his first term.

But he didn't want the debacle to come on his watch.

Just like Obama stalling around in Afghanistan?

Some exceptionally hostile liberals allege Johnson would have ended the thing in 1968 if Nixon hadn’t sabotaged negotiations.

But only them and nobody else believes it.

Anyway, Fund thinks this is a litany of complaints.

In a single day in 1971, Nixon famously imposed wage and price controls in a naïve attempt to curb inflation, ended the U.S.’s last ties to the gold standard, effectively devalued the dollar, and imposed a 10 percent import surcharge.

The list of agencies he created from scratch includes the EPA, the Council on Environmental Quality, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

He signed the command-and-control Clean Air Act into law and instituted racial quotas as federal policy.

“Incredible but true,” Fortune magazine recalled upon Nixon’s death in 1994. “It was the Nixonites that gave us employment quotas.”

As historian Joan Hoff has noted, “Not until the Nixon administration did ‘affirmative action’ begin to become synonymous with ‘civil rights.’”

Nixon’s most controversial federal-spending proposal was the Family Assistance Program, which would have guaranteed a minimal annual welfare payment for all Americans below a certain income level.

It was blocked by a coalition of conservative Republicans and moderate Democrats in the Senate, but under Nixon spending on Food Stamps increased from $610 million in 1970 to $2.5 billion in 1973.

Today, 47 million Americans, or nearly one in six, depend on the program.

In addition, Nixon created the Supplemental Security Income portion of Social Security, which constitutes a guaranteed annual income for the aged, blind, and disabled[.]

On things like this, possibly excepting affirmative action, Nixon and IKE saw absolutely eye-to-eye.

IKE thought the conservatives were utter crackpots.

Do you think all this means the progressive agenda is actually compatible with a kind of conservatism, now wholly obsolete, that isn't just a front for plutocrat greed or libertarian foolishness?

Maybe.

Bismark stole much of his domestic agenda from the German Social Democrats, a Marxist party from first to last.

It used to be called "stealing the Whigs' clothes."

Or maybe it was just a different kind of liberalism.