Nixonland

Nixon continues to haunt the boomers. He offers those who grew up in the sixties a core reason to revolt against his callow heartless amorality. Just as he nursed insane grudges against defenseless individuals even to the point of resorting to criminal behavior he continued to expand the cruel and inhumane VietNam war after promising using his "secret plan" to end it. As Frank makes clear that revolt was grist to the Nixon mill--he thrived on it as he knew his political base --the great "silent majority"-fearful of losing power to minorities and women were looking for a leader to preserve their sense of themselves. They were the ones that appreciated the code word "law and order" as they ran from the central cities and inner suburbs to discover ever new areas to re-create their 1950s nirvanas.




It was fitting that on his enemies list was John Lennon as well as a host of other boomer intellectuals and artists--as if in the depths of his inner personae he was also waging a deeper war against anyone who struggled towards wholeness and authenticity. Thomas Frank has already distingushed himself by writing one of the best recent books of our political analysis-What's the Matter with Kansas--and in his review of Rick Perlstein's Nixonland for the Wall Street Journal he writes that Nixon was the "The politician who fashioned a permanent Republican parable out of the decade's antagonisms was Richard Nixon. The man was born for the backlash." What Nixon mastered and became his road to political power, according to Perlstein was the revenge of the a resolutely indeterminate class who felt left out of the sixties cultural revolution leaving them isolated and insecure. In college he started a society he termed the "The Orthogonians" The term was as Frank describes it..."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."


Frank's column is worth reading for the way he brings the Nixon achievement up to date by suggesting that the war between the elites and the rest of us is something that continues to fuel our politics in ways that may seem non obvious. Frank writes,

"Backlash is a chronic condition now, and one of the reasons is that hipness is chronic, too. The '60s culture that infuriated Nixon and his followers is everywhere today, because hipness and "revolution" have become a default mode of corporate speech. Youth had nothing to do with it: It happened thanks to the need for ever-accelerating novelty, reverence for a supposedly enlightened cyber-vanguard, and the great god "creativity.""

Frank gives what he terms a "typical example":

"Six years ago, when Business Week wanted to report that the South Korean economy was doing well, it ran a cover story proclaiming not that Korea was "Prosperous," or "Recovering," but that the country was "Cool," a concept it illustrated with a pair of young hipsters hanging out on the main drag of their university neighborhood."


Bringing Frank to some sobering conclusions about our current plight;


Yes, this culture is elitist. Just walk down the aisles of your local, union-free organic grocery, unutterably cool but way beyond your price range. Or stroll through the most upscale shopping district of your city, where you might notice the fake-shattered windows favored by one national retailer, evidently trying for that '60s look while not losing any stock to actual looters.

Yes, it's offensive, too. It's meant to be that way, to remind you always that you are not hot; that you've bought the wrong brand; that the vanguard is way ahead of you; that, with your organization-man craving for health benefits or job security, you probably need to be fired.



That is as close as anyone in recent memory has come to tracing the contortions of our current idiotic politics --with some large blame pointing back like the fingerprints on that Watergate door so many decades ago to the trickster in chief.