Almost three score years after his political handlers promised a “New Nixon,” some on the right have sought to bring the record of the 37th president into focus for a conservative audience. A recent Politico story, and a lengthy journal article discussing Nixon’s presidency by Manhattan Institute fellow Christopher Rufo, have examined ways in which 21st-century conservatives can emulate one of the most prominent Republicans from the second half of the 20th century.
Those efforts largely fall short for one simple reason: Particularly when it comes to domestic politics, Nixon’s “conservativism” focused on style, not substance. Not only did Richard Nixon not stop the trends that contributed to the growth of government power, but in many ways, he accelerated them.
Big Government Ambitions
In his analysis, Rufo frames Nixon as a counterrevolutionary, one whose strategy contained three elements intended to push back the left’s advances: taming the national bureaucracy, dismantling the radical terrorist and other related groups that had caused so much internal strife in the late 1960s (e.g., Weather Underground, Black Panther Party, etc.), and creating a counter-elite to rebut leftist domination of the media and universities.
But not meeting the goals of the first prong of Nixon’s “strategy” (such as it was) practically guaranteed the failure of the entire enterprise. While temperamentally, most Americans viewed him as conservative due to his hawkish anti-communist stance and his emphasis on “law and order,” in most areas of domestic policy, Richard Nixon governed in ways that most Republicans, let alone most
