In today's NYT book review section, George F. Will pens a thought-provoking, amusing, and deeply silly review of Rick Perlstein's new book Nixonland. It's hard to be silly and intelligent at the same time, but Will, as usual, manages. I've not yet read the book, although I'm likely to do so. It's the sort of 800 page popular history slog that, in my weirdness, I find deeply enjoyable. It's the review itself, and also the brief editors' note at the beginning, that's so fascinating.
On the one hand, Will takes Perlstein to task for inaccuracies. Hallelujah. Editing at major publishing houses has gone into a steady and perhaps irreversible decline; not only are all kinds of books often far too long, they're also filled with basic factual errors. Good for Will for pointing this out.
On the other hand, Will's clearly got an intra-conservative ax to grind and that tells us a lot about the state of affairs in the contemporary Republican Party. To Will, Perlstein's thesis is clear: Nixon created contemporary Republican politics and profoundly influenced the nation as a whole. Nonsense, says Will. This may be a rollicking, enjoyable read, but it's fiction (thus the catalogue of factual errors). Will contends that Nixon cared not a whit for domestic policy and used that purely for political advantage. In foreign policy, Nixon's fabled realism was too pessimistic about the power of our primary adversary and, in effect, made choices that hurt the United States by overestimating our foes. On one level, Will concludes, the substantive issues today are so different from those of 1968 that it makes no sense to see any links. On a second level, he says in the editor's note, Nixon had no influence in any way: "How, then, does Nixon fit into the larger story of modern conservatism? 'He doesn't. His tenure was an empty parenthesis.'"
Really? An Administration uses domestic policies purely for political advantage, to buy off potential foes and supporters, and, as a result, badly damages the nation's economy in a variety of ways, from budget deficits to a sinking dollar. At the same time, it proclaims the extraordinary reach and power of foreign foes and insists on staying in an unwinnable distant civil war long past the time that this war serves any reasonable purpose. It does so to show "credibility" and demand peace with "honor," yet badly damages the military in the bargain. All the while, it claims that it and it alone is patriotic and it and it alone supports the troops it continually abuses. The Administration also lies to the American people and tries to keep secrets from said people while wiretapping and spying to an unprecedented extent. Those activities eventually leak out, however, and, along with the policy failures, make the president among the most unpopular in polling history. That model has influenced no contemporary conservatives?
George Will's preferred history of modern conservatism might read something like this: Part I The Rise of Barry Goldwater, 1960-1964; Part II The Glories of Ronald Reagan, 1976-1988; Part III Um, hmmm, dang, uh, The Rise of, um, 2009-?.
In all seriousness, commentators have used a variety of labels to identify conservative factions: realists, neoconservatives, social conservatives, etc. It seems evident that Will has a different, simpler set in mind: Nixon's heirs (the House of Bush) and Reagan's heirs (just about everyone else). And he knows who the "real" conservatives are. It's always a good time for a party to stare at its navel and decide who counts as a member and who doesn't. That makes for electoral success, all right. As a liberal, I couldn't be happier with Will's discourse.
