Why was Watergate such a big deal? I’m no expert, but it seems like a relatively mild level of corruption compared to what I see generally?
Was Nixon a popular and successful president? His electoral results blow my mind sometimes, 520 electoral votes in 1972! Why did he fall from grace? Did he deserve it?
Watergate created a problem because of what it exposed about the atmosphere inside the Nixon inner circle. I believe that this was when the saying “It’s not the crime. It’s the cover-up” became established. Beyond the Watergate burglary itself, Nixon had a group dedicated to violating the civil rights of his enemies, including someone who broke into the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. Back then, people cared about this sort of thing.
Nixon had to contend with a Democratic Party that continued a long period of dominance in Congress. His domestic policies were pretty far to the left (wage-price controls, big increase in Social Security payments, Environmental Protection Agency). He personally only cared about foreign policy, and although he was more hawkish than the Democrats on Vietnam, his policies with respect to Russia and China were well to the left of Republican orthodoxy. So if he was popular and successful, it was by appeasing the left.
In the end, that was not enough. The left still hated him, in part because of his history during the McCarthy period, in part because the left always hates prominent opponents (and, yes, the right also always hates its prominent opponents), and in part because Nixon had an unlikable personality.
Nixon also had to contend with a media environment in which the major news outlets had total control over the narrative. There were no outlets to give widespread voice to any counter-narrative.
Nixon fired his special prosecutor, Archibald Cox. Trump retained his special prosecutor.
Nixon’s scandals also had momentum. As new information came out, the surprises were that things were worse than previously thought. In contrast, Trump’s scandals have not produced momentum. They produced the opposite. Expectations were raised in the media, and when the scandals fell short of those expectations, scandal-mongering became a spent force.
The 1972 electoral-vote landslide? You could never do that now. California would not vote for a Republican for President today even if the Democrats put up Josef Mengele. But in the 1970s, voters were more flexible. They seemed to care about stuff other than just party label. In 1964 the landslide went the other way, toward the Democratic incumbent, Lyndon Johnson, because they perceived him as a candidate of peace and prosperity. The 1974 post-Watergate Congressional elections were a major landslide for the Democrats, because people were sick of scandals and unhappy with economic performance.
In 1972, Nixon’s opponent, George McGovern, did not have popular policy proposals. Most Americans wanted “peace with honor” in Vietnam, not a humiliating withdrawal. It was the post-Watergate Congress that prohibited any spending on Vietnam, making it impossible to deter North Vietnam from violating the agreement. Another policy of McGovern’s that Americans rejected was a $1000 income floor for every citizen–a universal basic income.
By 1976, Warren Zevon was singing
Everybody’s desperately trying to make ends meet
Work all day, still can’t pay, the price of gasoline and meat
Alas, their lives are incomplete
The price of gasoline was driven up by the actions of the international oil cartel. The price of meat was driven up in part by the “Russian wheat deal,” in which the U.S. sold grain to the Soviet Union, which had suffered from bad harvests.
Between Watergate and high prices for gasoline and food, the Republican Party “brand” was in bad shape. So the country elected Jimmy Carter, whose idea for gasoline was to continue with oil price controls and to establish a Department of Energy. By 1980, the failure of these efforts was evident, and Carter was defeated by Ronald Reagan. By 1984, the price of oil had plummeted, the overall direction of the economy was positive, and we saw another landslide, re-electing Reagan.
But as I said, back then voters cared about such strange things as war and peace, the unemployment rate, the cost of gasoline, and maintaining the appearance of propriety. Today, your party is inherently good, and the other party is inherently evil, regardless.
Other Points:
1) Watergate was the first Prez scandal in 50 years (and second one ever other Tea Pot) and there were a number of other scandals (New York City cops, in local governments. It felt like everything needed cleaning out.
2) The longer I live the more I accept the US hit the Middle Income trap in the 1970s and the lengthy Recessionary time from 1974-1982 where the huge increase in labor supply took high inflation instead of falling nominal wages. Remember the job increases during Carter where quite ‘good’ on paper and on a percentage basis both Reagan terms. Anyway I always thought it was the Iran Hostage Crisis that ensured a Carter loss.
3) Divided national politics is not new and quite normal in the Gilded age with very set Party voters. Also California was quite Red in the Post War years from 1948 – 1988 with only LBJ winning the state in 1964. (Some of this is the boom in defense spending those years that diminished a lot in early 1990s.)
4) But as I said, back then voters cared about such strange things as war and peace, the unemployment rate, the cost of gasoline, and maintaining the appearance of propriety.
This was true in 2008 and Obama especially won the Primary for his stance against Iraq while McCain won for his vote for the Iraq surge. (Listen to Romney’s concession speech to McCain in 2008 where everybody must vote McCain for the Iraq war.) I say what happened was the timing of the Financial Crisis in 2008 overnight changed the nation and the nation was in the midst of The Great Recession. Note both Obama and McCain had positive favorables in 2008.
Also, in modern times, add Health Care issues and they are far more impactful than gas prices today. The reality of the 2018 Midterm win, it was protecting Pre-Existing that won the Midterms not the raging cultural battles.
Anyway, I always thought the worst Presidential scandal was Iran-Contra because it directly go against Congress wishes. However, it was a lesson that Presidents can survive scandals as long as unemployment are falling.
I listened to the Iran Contra series on the American Scandal podcast. Recommend it. I knew nothing about it beforehand.
I had a bunch of outraged questions about these morons typed up but I think it would distract the thread.
Being older I remember Iran-Contra heavily and how the Reagan administration reacted with Ronnie over-playing his ‘confused and bewildered’ persona. (Jokes about Reagan being easily confused by complicated subjects and taking lots of naps everywhere in the 1980s including every night on Johnny Carson.) I truly was engaged at the time being a peacenik and all but the Reagan boom was still moving and most of the country wanted him to admit the scandal and move on. Even Bush Sr. won the 1988 election fairly easily.
Thanks Arnold. As always, I love hearing your perspective.
As someone born in the 80s, all I ever learned about Nixon was Watergate. None of the other scandals come through. Perhaps in realtime it seemed like a series of denial and revelation over and over.
With Trump I don’t watch the news but the only scandal that seeped through to me was the whole “Russia” thing. It was so preposterous on the face of it that I frequently wondered if the left had gone mad.
I think the breakdown of media control is a good thing. Given how wrong the news media is about things, it would not be an improvement for them to have total control of the narrative.
I don’t think that people care any less about the issues today. As I keep saying over and over, Romney got as many white voters as Reagen but lost. California would be a battleground state if it was just white voters.
I have a theory that really can only get answered by someone older than me. It goes like this:
1) In the late 60s/early 70s, what I would today call the progressive left tried to take over.
2) The results of both their government policy and cultural norms were so devastating in the 1970s (drug use, economic stagnation, family breakdown, our cities becoming dens of rioting and crime with failing disorderly schools) that the “Silent Majority” of middle class bourgeois white people rebelled against it. They elected Nixon in a landslide, even if he was sometimes an imperfect avatar of their movement.
3) The progressives never really changed from the late 60s/early 70s. A few token issues might have changed but the core issues (gender, sex, abortion, drugs, political correctness, equality of outcome between certain groups) remained the same.
4) At first this was electoral suicide (see Reagen). Even corporate leaders wouldn’t get on board (“even republicans buy nikes”). There was an attempt by academics to push PC again in the 1990s, but it was a flop outside the academy. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair invented third way politics to bridge the gap between what the progressives wanted and what was electorally, culturally, and economically possible.
5) But as the electorate (as well as the national customer base) got less white, and as more people grew up being taught progressive assumptions, it became less and less necessary to compromise on that same progressivism they had wanted from the 60s. Romney’s loss of the election to Obama was a kind of floodgate, because it signaled that maybe you could just completely dump working class whites and still win.
6) There were also private and cultural market changes around the same time that sent the same signal. Corporate wokeness replaced “republicans buy Nikes too”.
I think the legalization of gay marriage by the Supreme Court also played a big role. You may think it ho-hum, but it opened the floodgates to every crazy idea about sex and gender, not to mention creating another protected class.
7) The “Great Awokening” seems to have happened after the 2012 election but before Trump ever appears (2014-ish).
8) I don’t see middle class white people as any less concerned with the issues you talk about. And a lot of them are turned off by The Great Awokening. However, there are less of them. Trump managed to play an electoral college inside straight with their help, but they are getting less strong every day.
P.S. If only white people voted, California would have gone 53% to 45% in Romney’s favor. White voters haven’t changed…the electoral demographics have changed.
9) It seems like the progressives today are the same progressives from the 60s/70s, just with demographic changes allowing them to do as they would have liked to this whole time.
Is this accurate? I never knew these people. I wasn’t even born. I just sort of looked at what they said they believed and how they behaved. Like with Nixon, I only get the highlight reel. I was never really down in the muck day to day.
Probably the big unifying issue for young boomers of 1970 was Vietnam. It was huge and every night the newscast would report on the latest updates. And there would reports of how the US military was winning and then the Viet Cong would hold a surprise attack, etc. And the US population was used to winning wars in four years and Vietnam was going 4, 5, 6, and 10 years and no distinct victory in sight. It was much like Democrats and Center voters turning against Bush in 2005 and 2006 when Iraq increasingly got worse and it looked like an extended war lasting 8 -10 years. (Or the Iran Hostage Crisis in which every night there would be no updates and 50+ Americans held hostage for 400+ days. It was daily grind of bad news.)
1) In terms of Democrats the big internal battle was the old Union Bosses of the past vs. young Progressives that grow up to Clintons. Anyway, we forgot our powerful and sometimes detrimental the private unions were back in the day. (Check out 1957 recession along with strike days that year.)
2) There is probably some truth to this but in general there was huge society ‘Creative Destruction’ as well. In terms of neighborhoods, the African-American middle class could move to the suburbs in the 1970s (which accelerated the collapse of the inner cities for several decades.) Or that woman could do any career. Or the final aspect was foreign companies (think Japan Inc.) could out-compete the US manufacturing. Also if you view the job creation totals of the 1970s, they look quite good and was higher percentage than any other decade afterwards.
3) I would the great compromise of the Reagan Revolution & Feminism is that that more families were two income necessary to make ends meat. (Many workers did not see real wage increases from 1974 to 1994 but with more workers family incomes went up.)
4) I still find how much ironic 1992 and 2016 book end each other. Considering how popular George Bush Sr was in July 1991 that he end up losing Nov. 1992 was jaw-dropping in many ways. (In 1991 SNL made a mock D Primary debate where the comedians claim how bad they would be as President ending with Cuomo stating “Mob Ties!” at the end.) 1992 was a bizarre election with Perot burst of Paloconservatism (ran like Trump) getting 19%+ of the vote and it was a weird cultural battle with Quayle complaining about Murphy Brown and HRC baking cookies.
5) Again, Romney lost since he literally a huge business outsourcer and had Paul Ryan as VP. TBH Trump ran closer to a Democrat in 2004 if you think about the issues.
6) In terms of corporate wokeness, large corporations are global so now there consumer and workforce is very diverse and multicultural. I have worked with people in Canada, Mexico, numerous Europe nations, India, and Australia. (And I not that high up.) Check Disney animation and Marvel foreign grosses to see it truly is a global audience they see.
7) Was there a big ‘wokeness’ here or simply a shift in the political coalitions? At the heart of the white working class is the diminished opportunity due Private companies globally outsourcing? It was not Bush or Obama that outsourced but Koch Brothers or Apple that literally did. (This is where Left Center missed 2016) And really has anything really changed since Trump’s election? The most noted Trump campaign worker was coal miners and US coal demand continues to drop.
8) Well, it probably depends on the Middle Class and many suburbs are quite diverse in nature. And many are turned off by this ‘White Nationalism’ in general as they live, work, friends and even married non-whites. Look up the demographics of Irvine, CA sometime and white populations are only ~50% there with a huge Asian-American populations. (Also most suburban families are not sold on Trump’s trade ideas.)
9) TBH, I am not sure what the big goals of SJWs are as really minorities gains can not be achieved through national politics at this point. (Some local politics that might change local police behavior.) And I still think the simple message of protecting Pre-existing conditions will be the best one for 2020. Of course, somebody has to show where Trump/paloconservatives are here as well. The hope of bringing back higher paying manufacturing jobs to return to 1965 society seems impossible in 2019. The economy hit its manufacturing job highpoint in 1980 so there seems to be no distinct plan but lots of pretending.
Finally, I still say we over-analyzing the shifts just on race of voters. I remember Bush Jr. 2004 winning 44% of Hispanic-Americans. (In California Hispanic-Americans really sound like the working class voices of 1960s.)
Collin:
Bush won 40%, not 44%. You can find a detailed report on this. 44% was an exit poll number, but 40% was the more accurate follow up.
Bush also really ran up the score with certain Hispanic subgroups, but their influence is fading. Anti-communism just isn’t going to be a Cuban obsession forever, and we aren’t importing more Cubans.
Bottom line is that Hispanic vote % has varied between 20-40% over the years for the GOP, and it doesn’t even necessarily respond to the things that are supposed to win it (Reagen Amnesty didn’t help the GOP, Trump racism didn’t hurt him with Hispanics). In Latin America there is a political split between light skinned Hispanics that are majority white DNA and dark skinned Hispanics that are not. That split appears to cross the border when they come to the USA, and the 20-40% number is probably in line with the white DNA % of Hispanics.
Bottom line, you don’t win elections with 40% fo the vote, and that’s the GOPs best showing.
I remember after 2004 Republicans were stating that they would win the Hispanic-Americans voters. (They were hard working and religious, etc.) The reality in SoCal a lot Hispanic-American families sound like WWC from early 1960s where they went to church, helped within community and seeing a brighter future for their kids. And they vote Democrat like WWC in 1960 and in the past they tended to follow the white working class voting patterns.
And the real big move of Hispanic-American voters was 2012 when Obama won like 73% compared to like 64% in 2008. (They were the one demographic that moved towards Obama in 2012 if I am correct which occurred because McCain was from Arizona, and the 2012 Republican started getting anti-Immigration. And Trump got a higher percentage than Romney btw altough that could be HRC got lower than Obama 2012.)
I just saying that Republicans can win with Hispanic-Americans and I do believe most H-A are actually most conservative voters within Democratic right now. (Our State rep is a Republican Hispanic-American.)
There was no liberal takeover in the late 60s/early 70s. Nixon had some very unconservative legislative ideas, but his political tone was very much like Trump’s. He appealed to the same sort of fears about crime and disorder, and ran a similar campaign. He won in 1968, and won again by an much larger margin in 1972.
Watergate was quite similar to what is happening today, with similar denials. The difference was quite explicit audio tapes were eventually uncovered, and that broke the fever.
Gerald Ford replaced Nixon, so a Republican was in office until 1977. The problems in the 70’s wasn’t the result of some sort of progressive failure. Norms did change very quickly, but those trends were all bottom up, not top down.
Oil shocks and too many baby boomers hitting the job markets made the economy unstable. We were migrating from a simpler economy that needed no rules, to a more complex one with international competition beginning to develop. Germany and Japan were recovering enough to re-establish their traditional industrial muscle.
Equality of outcome has only gradually become more expected. It was absolutely not expected in the 70’s and 80’s.
The 70’s were tough times. You may not believe this but the world is quite a bit nicer today. I would recommend that you stop thinking that Baltimore serves as a model for how America works. The rest of the country is in pretty good shape. We were not better off 50 years ago.
Before I moved to Baltimore I lived in NYC. NYC is considered a success story, but if your middle class not so much. My mothers old neighborhood got taken over by Puerto Ricans, and you wouldn’t want to live there anymore. The parts of NYC you would want to live in are so expensive no middle class person could ever live there.
I think when people talk about things being better 50 years ago they mean:
1) If we had the same level of technology as today but 1950s norms. Nothing about having iPads implies a collapse in marriage or a surge in crime.
2) They compare the pre-60s revolution country to today, not the 1970s. When I think of the 1970s I think of the fruits of leftism.
This is also something people miss when they talk about the past. I always hear things like “divorce rate is down since year XYZ” or “crime is down since the 1990”. 197X or 199X aren’t the year people are talking about when they say think America Was Great.
Fifty Years before Trumps election would have been the mid 1960s, just before the leftist revolution. Have you ever looked at social statistics from Americas Golden Age. Seems like a paradise to me.
I agree things have gotten tougher for the middle class, but as has been discussed on this blog before, NYC is one of a handful of closed access cities, so that trend is particularly exaggerated there. If the NYC middle class is your other data point, that’s still a tough perspective to apply to America.
I don’t know why crime rose so fast starting in the 60’s, but it does not look like the social change caused the crime. It started accelerating immediately following the Kennedy assassination. If anything it came slightly before the social change.
Perhaps it was just that we were exiting a phase that was specific to the effects of WWII and exiting the Great Depression, which are obviously unique. You can’t recreate that value set. You can’t wipe out international competition like that. It wasn’t normal.
” If we had the same level of technology as today but 1950s norms. Nothing about having iPads implies a collapse in marriage or a surge in crime.”
Perhaps not, but it does imply thinking differently. IBM was a reflection of the values of the 50’s. They would have not gotten there as they were constituted. It took a Steve Jobs to break free from that mentality. He was about as liberal a dude as you could get.
Well, in terms of inner city crime, living in SoCal, I was 20 – 30 minutes away from the gang capital of the nation, Compton, CA. And I do remember driving through the neighborhoods almost felling like it was a different world altogether and remember the LA Rodney King riots that were the worst race in the 40 years. (And I remember shocked with the Rodney King tape and still have memories of local newcaster Hal Fishman, who the Simpsons character Kent Brockman was based on.)
1) I would say there is a lot of Andy Griffin Syndrome in terms of the past and we forgot how awful crime was in the 1970s and 1980s to 1995. I remember being really scared buying over-priced beer at liquor near USC in 1989. It was terrible in terms of death, destruction, etc.
2) The odd thing is we never settled on why crime grew so much in 1970s and then suddenly declined starting 1990. It is weird that every developed nation saw crime rates start declining in 1990 – 1992 and NOBODY was predicting this back then. (The strongest theory to me is the change of abortion laws gave young adults the flexibility to avoid young family formation and made birth control more acceptable.)
(My theory of crime increase in 1965 was a combination that in modern eras, there was a flood of young people in more urban settings at the time and the old neighborhoods/desegregation starting changing communities. So the African-American communities had middle class doctors in 1960 who go to rent parties and church, moved to suburbs in the 1970s and become the Cosby. Also urban manufacturing disappeared in the 1970s as well. The WWC Rust Belt had a slower moving emigration problem with the more productive younger people moving away when they went to college and never returned.)
Of 1965 seemed like paradise but as a father of two 17 year olds, the reality of 1965 is:
1) One would have drafted for Vietnam next year.
2) My other son who had back cancer probably does not live past 21 but today is doing fine.
In reality we did not over-emphasize the good and the bad of past history without understanding the middle. And in terms of past nostalagia there are African-Americans my age that drive around Compton and pretend like it was the old gang days of 1990.
And the reality of Compton, California is it was mostly ‘Latino Genetrification’ starting in the late 1990s. The race that moved and invested in the city were Latinos and they built the biggest Spanish speaking mall in the city.
On the Nixon weakness, as compared to Trump’s strength, an important issue is the VP.
Nixon’s Re-elect The President campaign included VP Spiro Agnew.
A famous quote from him opposed the “nattering nabobs of negativity”, while he was moving to a more anti-Dem position than Nixon.
But he was corrupt, and investigated for many crimes; with some evidence. He pled “no contest” to one felony count of tax fraud, and resigned.
This really hurt Nixon a lot more than is talked about, since the talkers hated Nixon more than Agnew. A famous quote from Nixon: “I am NOT a crook.” But many, probably most folk, did think he was a crook. And Agnew being guilty made many think “all politicians are crooks.”
The PC folk only started moving from a majority to a big domination in the Colleges after Nixon. In the 80s, under Reagan, the colleges were lost to the Dems, who mostly stopped hiring Reps* and pro-life folk. (*my new worst fixable problem). Booting Nixon was very bi-partisan; most Reps wanted to be clean. Today, only a few NeverTrump Reps would be willing to boot Trump — most know that he stinks a bit, or a lot, but still a lot less than Hillary.
As noted, many Trump voters “held their noses” and voted against Hillary. Most will be much more happily vote Trump with smiles in 2020 (I expect to.)
See https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/04/the-week-in-pictures-free-dem-entertainment-edition.php
PowerLine pictures with Schiff sort-of as Nixon:
“I am not a crock” << instead of crook (that's the joke).
Lots of Dems back then were pro-life, big gov't types. Now almost all pro-life folk are Reps, including the pro-life, big gov't folk. The culture war re-alignment on abortion has warped the big-gov't (Dem) and smaller-gov't (Rep) econ differences.
So now it's big (Rep) vs ever bigger faster (Dem). It would be nice to have a freeze on gov't size. It's already too big.
“Today, your party is inherently good, and the other party is inherently evil, regardless.”
I think that needs some finesse, at least insofar as views regarding politicians.
My impression is that many conservatives / traditionalists take a “hold your nose and vote” attitude towards most of their “own” Republican politicians in a kind of desperation and terror at what would happen if the “even worse and increasingly nuts” progressive Democrats obtain power.
Mainstream progressives seem less upset at their own politicians, more like impatient and frustrated at inertia and moderation attributed to political expediency, age, or to being bought and controlled by big money interests.
I don’t think there is an equivalent to the biting “cuckservative” accusation on the left with its strong connotation of betrayal and insincerity of espoused beleifs and desire to be esteemed as respectable by the other side or the mainstream press.
“Today, your party is inherently good, and the other party is inherently evil, regardless.”
Yes, but why? One might answer that it’s because identity politics dominates (both one the right and left btw) and, as Arnold mentions in his next post, there’s no compromise or swinging back and forth when it comes to identity. But, then why does identity politics dominate?
Hypotheses on why don’t we care any more about
1) war and peace: with no draft, most people have no risk of being sent to war. The draft was a big contributor to the anti-Vietnam movement.
2) unemployment rate: maybe, generous unemployment/disability benefits and two-earner families makes unemployment less stressful than in the past.
3) cost of gasoline: was it cost of gasoline per se that mattered in the 70s or long lines at the gas station? Even when gasoline prices hit $3-4/gallon a few years ago, one could always get gas when one needed it. Besides, now that US frackers are the swing producers of oil, energy prices are much more stable. US frackers cannot operate as a cartel due to anti-trust.
4) maintaining the appearance of propriety: not sure. Perhaps, PR/communications methods have become more effective, just as all industries innovate over time. The professional spinmeisters seem pretty good at giving political supporters just enough rationalization to allow those supporters to keep supporting “their guy”. Of course, this depends on those supporters *wanting* to be convinced that the latest scandal is not really that scandalous.
Maybe, identity politics dominates now because we don’t need to worry about (1)-(3). We can “afford” to treat politics as entertainment — a concept Jonah Goldberg likes to emphasize — and our version of identity politics is entertainment. Admittedly, (4) seems like something that arises as a result of identity politics rather than a precursor to it.
The usual story is that tough times lead to nasty politics. People look to blame someone for problems, etc. Given that our identity politics tends to focus on the trivial — politics as entertainment — I think good times are the cause.
It’s not symmetric. Generally speaking, Republicans think Democrats are mistaken about public policy; Democrats think Republicans are Nazis.
I think you might be able to find some evidence to the contrary by reading a few of the blog entries on this site.
“Today, your party is inherently good, and the other party is inherently evil, regardless.” — this has long been the Dem position, perhaps since Nixon.
But most Reps have been thinking the Dems are just wrong, only “wrong”, in their policies, not “evil”. Even today, plenty of Dems, including atheists, will and do call the Reps evil, while Reps are unlikely to call the Dems evil as people, altho often will call their policies evil.
The Dem takeover of college, media, and deep state, with the PC-Klan e-Lynchings, Free Speech banning & gun grabbing, plus their frequent public statements that Reps are racists (evil) , sexist (evil), homophobic (evil), Islamophobic (evil), and transphobic (evil) — these frequent accusations are making many Reps conclude that maybe the Dems are not just wrong. But possibly they’re evil.
Such defamatory calls, far more from the PC-Klan Dems than from Reps, will increase the polarization and generate an increasing backlash against those whose keep making accusations.
Arnold, do you have some examples of famous Reps calling the Dems evil? It might also be that I’m missing out, but in reading Trump’s tweets, I see him calling the Fake News the Enemy of the People. But that’s not quite calling them evil.