Have You Been Nixonmaxxing?
/“Nixonmaxxing” — apparently this is a trendy new term in conservative circles. It refers to a rising level of interest in all things Nixon, particularly among younger conservatives.
Philip Wegmann and Vera Bergengruen report on the phenomenon in the Wall Street Journal of July 18:
The kids are “Nixonmaxxing.” More than half a century after Watergate, conservative youth are discovering the aesthetic, and adopting the attitude, of the late Richard Nixon. . . . Nixon is being recast as a forerunner of “America First” by a new generation of conservatives: a combative president loathed by the press and besieged by investigators who was brought down by the same establishment they believe targeted President Trump.
The Nixonmaxxing trend got a boost on June 25 when Vice President JD Vance appeared at an event at the Nixon Foundation in Yorba Linda, California.
“I think that his historical legacy is enjoying a bit of a renaissance,” Vice President JD Vance said last month at an event at the Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, Calif. “And I think deservedly so.”
In my own case, I have a strong natural sympathy for Nixon based on the extent to which he was loathed and hounded by the press. The press has loathed all Republican Presidents during my lifetime, but the loathing for Nixon was particularly intense, likely the worst until the current situation with Trump. You would think that the press would have liked many of Nixon’s most significant initiatives — détente with the Soviet Union, the opening to China, winding down the war in Vietnam. But the hatred was just too visceral to ever ease up.
After all he went through, I would like to think highly of Nixon. But unfortunately, my view is that his legacy is mixed at best. The thing where I would rate him most negatively is for the explosion of the regulatory state that took place on his watch.
If you look at the metastatisized regulatory state that Trump and his people are now trying to reduce a little, it is remarkable how much of that dates from Nixon’s five and a half years in office. Let me hit some of the highlights:
You might think that the War on Drugs goes far back in our history, but in fact it only really began with the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, during Nixon’s first term. Prior to that Act, marijuana had only been made illegal through a back door scheme whereby the government levied a tax but made it impossible to obtain the necessary tax stamps. This scheme was declared illegal by the Supreme Court in 1969 in the Timothy Leary case, whereupon we promptly got the Controlled Substances Act. The Controlled Substances Act not only made marijuana directly illegal, but also brought in the entire regime of schedules of different classes of illegal drugs. At the time of enactment of the Controlled Substances Act, literally no one thought to ask how it could be that banning alcohol in 1920 had required a constitutional amendment, but banning large numbers of drugs in 1970 only took a statute.
EPA was created by Nixon by executive order in 1970. The creation of the agency at that time coincided with the extensive Clean Air Act amendments of the same year, that transformed the CAA as originally passed in 1963 and added things like enforceable air quality standards. The Clean Water Act followed a couple of years later in 1972, still during Nixon’s first term.
Also dating to 1970 is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, created by the Occupational Safety and Health Act of that year.
The Consumer Product Safety Act and its associated Commission date from 1972, during Nixon’s first term.
The Endangered Species Act dates from 1973, now during Nixon’s second term.
The so-called Bank Secrecy Act dates from 1970. This is the Act that essentially requires your bank to spy on you and report to the government on request (and makes it illegal for the bank to tell you that the government has demanded information about you). The BSA is the law that underlies one after another shakedowns of financial institutions for doing business with bad guys, AKA “money launderers,” without ever slowing the bad guys down.
And how about the National Cancer Act of 1971? That’s the one that declared a war on cancer. Fifty-one years later, in 2022, President Biden launched his “cancer moonshot” to “end cancer as we know it,” seemingly unaware that the government had already been conducting a totally futile “war on cancer” for decades on end.
And I’m sure there are some others that I’ve missed. Basically, Nixon was by no means a small government conservative. What’s remarkable is how much the press hated him even as he grew the government tremendously.