Richard Nixon is enjoying a vogue these days on the right, especially among JD Vance and other Millennial and Gen Z right-populists who want Nixon to displace Ronald Reagan as the model for modern Republican success. It’s worth recalling why the people who actually lived through the Nixon and Reagan years understood that Nixon was no Reagan.
A little Nixon revisionism is appropriate. Nixon was a brilliant, combative, self-made man and Second World War veteran who swam against the high tide of mid-century liberalism. He had a gift for making the right enemies, whose enmity in many cases should be a badge of honor. Much of the hard anti-communism of his early career has been vindicated by history. Nixon was on five out of six national GOP tickets between 1952 and 1972, and his narrow defeat in 1960 was the only one of those that wasn’t a comfortable win. He won the presidency after Democrats enjoyed the only two-term partisan trifecta in the postwar era, from 1961 to ’68. In an impossibly contentious time, he demonstrated that his “silent majority” still outnumbered the hippies. Many of the people who started their careers in his administration went on to cut long and significant paths through the American right, including Antonin Scalia, Dick Cheney, and Pat Buchanan.
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