Thuggish politics, Nixon style and the origins of the "culture war"
I've written a number of times about the Republican obsession with their bogeyman of the "dirty hippies", i.e., everything that bothers the "culture warriors" about American society, which they project back onto "the '60s" as the root-point of all the evils.
In his book The Year the Dream Died: Revisiting 1968 in America (1997), Jules Witcover interviewed a number of political figures about the impact of the events of 1968 in particular. His interview with John Ehrlichman elicited an antidote that reminds us that heavy-handed packing of campaign rallies to create a uniformly receptive audience did not begin with Karl Rove and George W. Bush.
The context involved the fearful images of Bad Stuff that were scaring good suburban white folks in those days. Witcover interviews Ben Wattenberg, who he identifies as "a Johnson speechwriter at the time who eventually became a prominent neoconservative". Wattenberg was a Nixon supporter by 1972. Wattenberg, speaking specifically about the 1968 Democratic convention, which became notorious for the Chicago "police riot" in which Mayor Richard Daley's cops pummelled peaceful antiwar demonstrators in front of the network TV cameras, told Witcover that "the convention was not just a liberal revolt".
Now, the people who thought of themselves at that time as being in a political "revolt" would have identified themselves as "left" or "New Left", and would have been offended to be called "liberal". Certainly, some prominent liberals were supporting antiwar demonstrations by that time. But it takes either a romantic perspective or an authoritarian mentality to see a "revolt" in peaceful demonstrations against the Vietnam War or in intra-party political challenges of that time. I don't think Ben Wattenberg suffered from excessively romantic views of politics.
Wattenberg characterized the events, specifically those around the 1968 Democratic National Convention, in culture-war terms (Witcover presumably interviewed him in 1996 or 1997 for the book):
There was a tremendous amount of resentment against everything people were seeing on television, and in many ways properly so. A lot of the so-called social issues, the erosion of order, and some of the sexuality, were personified by the events - the drugs, the nudity, all that kind of stuff - that people saw on television for the first time.
Nudity? In the Democratic Convention?
This is a classic example of the muddiness of "culture war" politics as we know it today in its early stages. With a bunch of protesters gathering in Chicago in the summer of 1968 after all that had happened in the year already, some of the images presented to TV viewers in the coverage of the convention undoubtedly did feature young people smoking pot or at least talking about smoking pot. Maybe even some nudity - with key parts discreetly blocked on-screen, of course! I haven't seen any footage from that event any time recently. But I don't recall the Nudists Against War or whatever being a major feature of the protests.
But, whatever kind of amount of clothing they had, the protesters were demonstrating against the Democratic administration. The cops that were clubbing the demonstrators - and it wasn't even only demonstrators that got clubbed - were the police force of Mayor Daley, one of the best-known Democratic politicians in the country.
Did anyone seriously imagine that elected Hubert Humphrey President in 1968 would have brought hordes of nekkid people into the streets of cities and small towns in Iowa and Georgia to have orgies and smoke dope? And yet culture-war imagery lumps together Humphrey and Bobby Kennedy and nekkid dope-smoking protesters against the Democratic Party as all being The Liberals. Or in Wattenberg's appropriately murky formulation, "the so-called social issues, the erosion of order, and some of the sexuality", those were all lumped together in the minds of many rightwing Republicans as the wicked Democrats and Liberals. Kind of weird, when you stop to think about it.
This image of the Democrats as being somehow advocates and co-participants in riots and pot-smoking and antiwar protesters and guys with unconventional haircuts was used to justify the police-state methods and generally thugish attitude of the Nixon administration. From Witcover:
John Ehrlichman, Nixon's campaign aide in 1968 who became the chief of domestic affairs in the Nixon White House and later was convicted and jailed on charges growing out of the Watergate coverup, agreed. "An element of noncivility was involved that was not present eight years before [when Nixon ran for president the first time}," he said in an interview much later. "Heckling, rock-throwing, vegetable-throwing came into play. It was almost impossible for the candidate to speak without screening the crowd in advance."
(This, Ehrlichman said, was accomplished in the Nixon campaign several times by extraordinary efforts. At the Nixon-Agnew rally in Madison Square Garden in late October of 1968, he said, "we issued tickets broadly, and anyone who presented a ticket who didn't look right, was carrying a sign [critical of Nixon] or was a hippie, was referred down one hall, and the others dressed right were sent down another hall." Those routed to the first hall, he said, "were led to a door that let out onto the street, where there was a 'cop' standing. When they came back around the front and complained, they were directed to go get another ticket a block away in a storefront. There, a Nixon man would stand on a table and report that the fire marshal had just announced that no more would be allowed in." The storefront, he said, was rented just for the purpose of diverting potential hecklers.)
This is one reason that I'm so skeptical of the search for the "real conservatives" who supposedly are true to conservative principles of the balanced budget and civil liberties and a limited Executive and the rule of law.
Because the real existing conservatives in the real existing Republican Party haven't focused on such things when they were actually in control of the White House since the days of Dwight Eisenhower. And even he with his hyper-moralistic foreign policy and his "tripwire/massive retaliation" nuclear force policy was scarcely what I would consider the Model Prince.
Nixon practiced out-and-out thuggery, though the above example is a relatively mild one. His dirty-tricks operation was a preview of the current administration's massive warrantless spying. His administration made the Republican Party the standard-bearer of culture-war politics as we know it today.
Gerald Ford the "healer" set a precedent for enabling the President to operate outside the law and the Constitution with his blanket pardon of Nixon. He also gave probably the single most important career boosts to Dick Cheney and Rummy, who went on to become two of the most destructive figures in the history of the Republic.
Reagan's Iran-Contra operation was the template for the entire foreign policy of the Cheney-Bush administration. And he furthered the culture-war politics of the Nixon administration and raised it with a new level. It was Reagan who formed the Republican Party's current type of alliance with the Christian Right and gave Presidential-level sanction to their creationist pseudoscience.
Old Man Bush was willing to sling sleaze and practice culture-war politics like any supposedly more rightwing Party guy. He also used his pardon power to let Iran-Contra criminals evade legal responsibility for their actions.
The authoritarian streak of today's Republican Party did not spring full-blown from the brow of Antonin Scalia with the Bush v. Gore decision in 2000. It's been a long time in developing, and has a ancestry that goes back quite a bit farther than that the Supreme Court's overriding of the 2000 Presidential vote.
