He proposed government-run, universal health care coverage; he signed the most sweeping environmental protection legislation in American history, freed us from the chains of the gold standard, and offered olive branches to our direst enemies. He set peacetime wage and price controls that seem, well, Soviet in their stringency; he expanded the costs of Social Security to extents that seem, well, imprudent in retrospect.
Yet, almost half a century later, why is Richard Nixon still the bogeyman of Watergate?
Noam Chomsky has called him "our last liberal president." Chomsky's only half right. Nixon was the last of the moderate Republicans, the pre-Reaganites who still maintained some semblance to the progressive Republican tradition passed down from Theodore Roosevelt, Hiram Johnson, and Robert LaFollette. He represents a most vital link to a different era of American politics, before Reagan and the conservative revolution brought a new set of discourses – culture wars and trickle down economics, evil empires and welfare queens.
The contemporary distrust of government comes mainly from Gen Xers who themselves are the unfortunate by-products of bad governance – that is, misguided policies under Reagan leading to economic decline under Bush SR; a decline that produced Clinton, a centrist Democrat who naively embraced the orgiastic future of globalized technocracy; to Bush JR, a one-time realist swayed to ideological extremes by bad advice and poorer judgment. We now have Obama, a man whose policies have not reached and never will reach the regulative drive of Nixon. Tricky Dick had the privilege of standing on marble pedestals built by the 60's economic prosperity, while Obama is left combing through the wreckage of a deregulated past.
