One of the most intriguing aspects of the political personality of Richard Nixon — that stiff, charmless, Quaker-raised professional politician who remains the only person to be elected America’s vice president and president twice — was his ability to successfully cultivate the white working class.
Nixon recognised the white backlash developing against civil rights in the 1960s, and growing white anger at “elites” on issues like bussing. He worked out that New Deal politics were no longer as effective for the Democrats, as working-class voters began enjoying real prosperity and their political focus switched away from wages and working conditions.
It was Nixon who channelled white working-class anger toward protesters and far-left students, the kind of anger displayed by New York construction workers beating up Vietnam marchers. One of the factors helping Nixon to a landslide reelection in 1972 was union hostility to the anti-war Democrat nominee George McGovern, with the trade union giant AFL-CIO — which Nixon had carefully cultivated — refusing to endorse McGovern.
Nixon combined an appeal to white working-class values with some decidedly un-Republican economic policies: a price and wage freeze, a universal income proposal (as advocated by raging socialist Milton Friedman) that he nearly managed to deliver, heavy regulation of business, and affirmative action. Ronald Reagan, one of Nixon’s Republican rivals in 1968, would also win over many white working-class voters, but his domestic policies were a combination of doctrinaire neoliberalism — attacks on unions, privatisation, deregulation — with big government spending. While pollsters still talk about “Reagan Democrats”, it was Nixon who turned white working-class voters Republican first, and whose example is most useful for what’s now happened in the US.
Like Nixon, Trump combines atavistic tribalism with some left-wing policies. But while Nixon used code like “law and order” to signal his alignment with the white backlash, there’s no code from Trump, and no fig leaf like Nixon’s oft-promised “Black capitalism“. Trump’s appeal to white Americans, and particularly white men, is unsubtle and has far more targets: migrants, especially, as well as African Americans, women and trans people. Trump offers white voters a zero-sum game in which only one group of Americans can ever win, with Trump determined to ensure it will be white men.
Trump’s economic policies aren’t a continuation or extension of previous Democratic policies, as many of Nixon’s were. Instead, Trump himself has dragged the Democrats to the left on economics. “Bidenomics” was an embrace and expansion of Trump’s protectionism during his first presidency, combining economic policy with America’s geopolitical goal to suppress a rising rival in China, to halt China’s rise while delivering blue-collar American jobs — thus signalling that the economy could work in favour of the working class and middle-income earners in a way it hadn’t in the decades since Reagan.
The lesson from this week’s election, however, is that delivering economically is not enough, not anymore. The Democratic Party has survived since the Nixon years by cobbling together coalitions of minority voters with the white working class — enough to regularly deliver control of Congress, elect three presidents and win the majority of votes even when they didn’t win the White House. Having learnt from Trump to shift back leftward on economics, the Democrats now face the much more difficult task of switching to the right on issues like migration, minority rights and values, which are likely to shear off sections of the coalition, leaving them to left-wing groups outside the Democrats.
In short, if this was a bizarre version of 1968, the next election might be one of 1972, in which the Democrats openly split between minorities and white working-class institutions like unions. Trump, theoretically, can’t run again, and seems too exhausted to serve his coming term, let alone another. But he has shown a path for future Republicans to take the white working class, perhaps in a way that shifts them permanently to the GOP, nigh on 100 years since FDR completely changed American politics with the New Deal.
Then again, we now know what was going on in 1971 and 1972. Nixon and his highest cabinet officials and advisers had a team of crooks operating out of the White House, agents of Nixon’s intense paranoia, obsessive personality and conviction that the east-coast Establishment wanted to destroy him. Even as he played 3D chess with the Russians and the Chinese, operating at a geopolitical level rarely seen in US history, he was trampling the rule of law at home, so much so that eventually his own party abandoned him.
It’s hard — impossible — to see the MAGA Republican Party ever doing that. They already know Trump is a criminal and they love him for it. And as I pointed out a couple of years ago in a piece that attracted some attention at the time, Nixon didn’t have some of the most powerful media proprietors in the US in his corner like Trump does. But as Americans who lived through 1968, 1972 and Watergate can tell you, funny things happen when you put an obsessive, unstable paranoiac in a position of ultimate power.
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