Nixon, Culture, and Party Politics

 Pat Buchanan (Schoen 92):

What the Left never understood, or would never accept, is that Nixon brought the South into the Republican column not because he shared their views on segregation or civil rights.  He did not.  What he shared was the South’s contempt for a liberal press and hypocritical Democratic Party that had coexisted happily with Dixiecrats for a century but got religion when conservative Republicans began to steal the South away from them.

The Goldwater-Nixon party in which I enlisted was not a segregationist party but a conservative party.  Virtually every segregationist in the eleven states of the old Confederacy, and every Klansman from 1865 to 1965, belonged to the party of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman.

Democratic Congressional Party Strength in the South

(House: dotted line. Senate: solid line)

Military enlistments by region

Democrats for Nixon ad in 1972

Chutzpah: Nixon campaigns against a guaranteed income!

Culture:  Richard Nixon Meets Johnny Cash.  The song that RN requested (Cash declined because he did not know it well enough to perform it on short notice.)  Welfare Cadillac

RN welcomes Merle Haggard (see the lyrics)

Hardhats

New York Steamfitters leader George Daly hands a ceremonial hard hat to President Nixon. Beside Daly is Peter Brennan, the president of the 200,000‐member New York trades union council. Nixon honored twenty-three union leaders on May 26, 1970. (Oliver Atkins/The Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum)

Nixon and the conservatives (ch. 5)

Buckley and China

Reagan on foreign policy (start at one minute)

Nixon and the Equal Rights Amendment