Nixonmaxing Makes Little Sense

The 37th president lacks the record for veneration

Nixonmaxing is all the rage now on the Internet. Ask a right-winger for his favorite president over the last 100 years, and he’s guaranteed to tell you it’s Richard Milhous Nixon. Our sphere can’t get enough of the Nixon edits. When asked why Nixon was so BASED, they’ll inevitably point to the tapes where the 37th president went off on Jews, blacks, and other groups.

Rarely will they point to anything Nixon actually did as president. There’s a reason for that: Tricky Dick didn’t do much as president. His main domestic accomplishments were enlarging the civil rights regime and doubling down on New Deal policies. Both the economy and crime worsened under his tenure. He was a good diplomat, but even his accomplishments in that realm aren’t that relevant to our time.

I explain at length in The American Conservative why I think Nixonmania is misplaced:

On the one hand, Nixonmania is a necessary corrective to the image propagated by the media over the past 50 years. His critics, basing their arguments mostly on hysteria and liberal hand-wringing, largely succeeded in portraying Nixon as one of the worst presidents in American history—a characterization that falls apart before the actual evidence.

But the new Nixon myth also has issues. Nixon had few substantive accomplishments as president, especially on the issues dear to the Online Right. While one of the better presidents when it comes to foreign policy, he had no real domestic achievements, aside from advancing liberal causes and programs. In many ways, the country actually got worse on his watch, with crime spiraling out of control and the economy plummeting. Nixon may not be responsible for these developments, but he certainly didn’t solve them.

What, then, explains the right’s newfound enthusiasm for Nixon? At its core, the hype is driven less by substance and more by the need for a New Right predecessor to Trump.

You can read the rest here.

I would add that “Nixonmaxing” is particularly ridiculous at a time when many right-wingers attack Trump for not doing anything. Nixon is more guilty of that charge than Trump. Trump has least done significant work on the domestic issues right-wingers care about. Yet, many right-wingers pine for a president who did nothing on these issues but made some BASED remarks in private.

Nixon doesn’t deserve the infamy assigned to his presidency, and he was a fascinating man. But he wasn’t a great president.

You can now preorder Scott Greer’s new book, “Whitepill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump’s America,” from this link.