Modern Age editor Daniel McCarthy, writing in The Spectator, notes the phenomenon of young Republicans turning to Richard Nixon as a political icon. Scott Greer in The American Conservative writes that “a new generation of conservatives … see [Nixon] as the model Republican leader.” The Wall Street Journal marvels at the Nixon craze among young conservatives, labeling it “Nixonmaxxing.” Vice President JD Vance praised what he called a Nixon renaissance during a recent speech at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda. After a half-century of media and liberal vilification, Nixon is back.
This is yet another comeback for the much-maligned 37th president. His first political comeback was when, after suffering political defeats in 1960 and 1962, he won the presidency in 1968 and four years later won reelection in a 49-state landslide. The second political comeback was his emergence as a respected elder statesman after resigning the presidency in the wake of the Watergate “scandal.” Nixon accomplished this by writing a series of post-presidential books on foreign policy, including The Real War, Real Peace, Leaders, No More Vietnams, 1999: Victory Without War, Seize the Moment, and Beyond Peace. The story of that second comeback is told in Kasey Pipes’ After the Fall. (RELATED: Nixon Goes Viral)
The appeal of Nixon is not ideological; it is better explained as admiration for, and a defense of, the enemy of my enemy.
What is behind this third Nixon comeback? Some credit must surely go to Geoff Shepard, who has spent the last two decades exposing the myths of Watergate in his books The Nixon Conspiracy: Watergate and the Plot to Remove the President and The Real Watergate Scandal, in podcasts, interviews, and a documentary titled “How the Deep State Took Down Richard Nixon.” (RELATED: Murray on Rogan on Woodward)
It surely hasn’t escaped the attention of young Republicans that the deep state and the legacy media — which they rightly distrust — used essentially the same playbook in destroying Nixon’s presidency and in their efforts to destroy Trump’s presidencies. Vice President Vance made this very point at the Nixon Library: “If you look at the story of how the Deep State took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions tried to do to Donald Trump.” (RELATED: How Richard Nixon Became Cool Again)
Another factor is likely young Republicans’ admiration for Nixon’s foreign policy achievements — from ending an unpopular war in Vietnam, promoting burden-sharing among our allies (the “Nixon Doctrine”), using skillful diplomacy to stabilize the Middle East in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, and brilliantly triangulating between the Soviet Union and China to set the stage for Ronald Reagan to end the Cold War. Even Nixon’s many detractors praise his foreign policy realism. (RELATED: Nixon–Mao, Trump–Putin, and Triangular Diplomacy)
Daniel McCarthy, Scott Greer, and other conservatives have noted that Nixon’s domestic policies were not very conservative. Young Republicans and conservatives would probably prefer Reagan’s domestic policies over Nixon’s. The appeal of Nixon is not ideological; it is better explained as admiration for, and a defense of, the enemy of my enemy. Young conservatives greatly distrust the groups that took Nixon down and who still revile him as one of our worst presidents. Theirs is a reaction to the Nixon hatred on the left — a hatred that has existed at least since Nixon exposed Alger Hiss as a communist and espionage agent for the Soviet Union. The young conservatives have come to the conclusion that, as the great British historian Paul Johnson noted, Watergate was a “media putsch” to overturn the 1972 election.
One hopes that someday some of these young conservatives will become historians, college professors, and journalists so that Richard Nixon will attain his rightful place in history as a great president.
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