Remarkably this statement comes just a few paragraphs after Kristol’s declaration that The Public Interest was effective in its early days because “most of us were social scientists, and as Pat Moynihan put it, the best use of social science is to refute false social science.” One guesses that it all depends on the use to which false social science is put.
Ronald Reagan’s 1966 California campaign marked the first great electoral success for movement conservatism. Reagan’s achievement was, however, overshadowed by the rise of Richard Nixon to the presidency, and his landslide victory in 1972. Nixon’s success, however, can’t be regarded as a triumph for movement conservatism, because Nixon was a transitional figure. He used the movement’s political strategy—indeed, to a large extent he invented it. But he didn’t share the movement’s goals. For Nixon it was all personal.
It’s almost impossible to overstate Nixon’s impact on the way American politics is conducted. Nixon, after all, showed how you could exploit racial divisions, anxiety about social change, and paranoia about foreign threats to peel working-class whites away from the New Deal coalition. He introduced the art of media manipulation: Roger Ailes, the president of Fox News, was Nixon’s media consultant, and is a central figure in Joe McGinniss’s 1969 book The Selling of the President. Later, Nixon pioneered the media intimidation that so successfully suppressed dissent for much of the Bush administration, as well as the tactic of blaming the news media for reporting bad news.
It was during the Nixon years that the successful execution of dirty tricks became a passport to advancement in the Republican Party. In 1970 a young Karl Rove printed fake leaflets advertising free beer on campaign stationery stolen from a Democratic candidate, disrupting a campaign rally; the next year Rove dropped out of college to become the paid executive director of the College Republican National Committee.[14] Two years later, when Rove ran for chairman of the College Republicans, he cheated his way to victory—with the blessing of the then chairman of the Republican National Committee, one George H. W. Bush.[15]
Movement conservatives applauded these tactics. What they didn’t like were Nixon’s policies. When Rick Perlstein, the author of Before the Storm, gave a talk (to a group of conservatives) about the conservative role in the Nixon administration’s dirty tricks, one of the other panelists protested that Nixon hadn’t been a conservative, adding, “I didn’t like Nixon until Watergate.”[16]
Indeed Nixon’s actual policies, as opposed to his political tactics, were not at all what movement conservatives wanted. In domestic affairs he governed as a moderate, even a liberal, raising taxes, expanding environmental regulation, even seeking to introduce national health insurance. In foreign affairs he showed equal pragmatism, opening a dialogue with Communist China while simultaneously continuing to fight the Communist China–allied North Vietnamese. Nixon, it became clear, hated many things, but he did not share the conservative movement’s hatred for government intervention and the welfare state. In any case the times weren’t yet right.
By the mid-1970s movement conservatism was, in a sense, in a position similar to that of the movement that eventually became the New Deal in the late 1920s. The ideas were there; the organization was there; the intellectual cadres were in place. To achieve power, however, the movement needed a crisis.
What it got was a double crisis, both foreign and domestic.
In foreign affairs the fall of Vietnam was followed by what looked at the time like a wave of Communist victories in Southeast Asia and in Africa, then by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and—unrelated, but feeding the sense of anxiety—the Islamic revolution in Iran and the humiliation of the hostage crisis. On the domestic front a combination of bad policy and the energy crisis created the nightmare of stagflation, of high unemployment combined with double-digit inflation.
In retrospect the hand-wringing over Communist advances looks ludicrous; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, in particular, turned out to be the beginning of communism’s collapse. The Islamic revolution in Iran was a real setback, but it’s hard to see how an aggressive foreign policy could have done anything except worsen the situation. As for the economic crisis, it was caused by a combination of bad luck and bad monetary policy, neither of which had anything to do with liberalism.
Nonetheless the dire mood of the 1970s made it possible for movement conservatives to claim that liberal policies had been discredited. And the newly empowered movement soon achieved a remarkable reversal of the New Deal’s achievements.
7 THE GREAT DIVERGENCE
Medieval theologians debated how many angels could fit on the head of a pin. Modern economists debate whether American median income has risen or fallen since the early 1970s. What’s really telling is the fact that we’re even having this debate. America is a far more productive and hence far richer country than it was a generation ago. The value of the output an average worker produces in an hour, even after you adjust for inflation, has risen almost 50 percent since 1973. Yet the growing concentration of income in the hands of a small minority has proceeded so rapidly that we’re not sure whether the typical American has gained anything from rising productivity.
The great postwar boom, a boom whose benefits were shared by almost everyone in America, came to an end with the economic crisis of the 1970s—a crisis brought on by rising oil prices, out-of-control inflation, and sagging productivity. The crisis abated in the 1980s, but the sense of broadly shared economic gains never returned. It’s true that there have been periods of optimism—Reagan’s “Morning in America,” as the economy recovered from the severe slump of the early eighties, the feverish get-rich-quick era of the late nineties. Since the end of the postwar boom, however, economic progress has always felt tentative and temporary.
Yet average income—the total income of the nation, divided by the number of people—has gone up substantially since 1973, the last year of the great boom. We are, after all, a much more productive nation than we were when the boom ended, and hence a richer nation as well. Think of all the technological advances in our lives since 1973: personal computers and fax machines, cell phones and bar-code scanners. Other major productivity-enhancing technologies, like freight containers that can be lifted directly from ship decks onto trucks and trains, existed in 1973 but weren’t yet in widespread use. All these changes have greatly increased the amount the average worker produces in a normal working day, and correspondingly raised U.S. average income substantially.
Average income, however, doesn’t necessarily tell you how most people are doing. If Bill Gates walks into a bar, the average wealth of the bar’s clientele soars, but the men already there when he walked in are no wealthier than before. That’s why economists trying to describe the fortunes of the typical member of a group, not the few people doing extremely well or extremely badly, usually talk not about average income but about median income—the income of a person richer than half the population but poorer than the other half. The median income in the bar, unlike the average income, doesn’t soar when Bill Gates walks in.
16.
As posted at the Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rick-perlstein/i-didnt-like-nixon-_b_11735.html, Dec. 5, 2005.