Nixon Forever
Discover more from Christopher F. Rufo
Nixon Forever
The thirty-seventh president’s blueprint for counter-revolution.
As I have written recently, America finds itself caught in the loop of 1968. With the Left’s seemingly wholesale capture of major institutions—public education, the universities, private-sector leadership, culture, and, increasingly, even the sciences—the current battlefield can appear overwhelming.
But today’s Left has an Achilles heel: its power is, to a significant degree, a creature of the state, subsidized by patronage, loan schemes, bureaucratic employment, and civil rights regulations. These structures often appear permanent, but they can be reformed, redirected, or abolished through the democratic process.
For some ideas for what that might look like, we can turn to a surprising guide: the thirty-seventh president of the United States, Richard Nixon. In this new film, I tell a new story about a man, reviled in his time, who left behind a blueprint for counter-revolution—the last hope for restoring the American republic.
Nixon Forever
While it may be true that Nixon had a coherent and potentially effective strategy for combatting illiberal political evolution in the US worth considering in our current times, putting him and his ideas forward as a model for how our country should deal with its current ideological evolution is a losing call-to-arms.
No one is going to rally around Richard M. Nixon as the inspirational martyr for action. Your video attempts to white wash Nixon’s unacceptable Watergate actions by suggesting the “deep state” did it to him. No one will believe that, mostly because it’s not true. The “deep state” certainly was trying to undermine him, and they may have laid a trap, but he himself took the bait.
Further, it’s not at all clear Nixon’s strategy would have been a winner had he continued in office: the FBI’s tactics would have eventually been discredited yet would show future bureaucrats how to use it for political purposes, sending Federal money to the States only both strengthened the Federal government’s bureaucratic control of local politics and provided funds to those looking to reshape society “in their image,” and strengthening “law and order” only gave license to police departments to brutalize the very communities that needed resurrection through the ill-considered “War On Drugs.”
While I have great respect for your thinking about DEI/ woke ideology, I think your use of Nixon as a beacon we should use to reclaim American values misguided.
We should not ban certain ideologies at educational institutions save for one rationale: those that are illiberal in the classical sense. Those that deny the search for objective fact. We should ban Ideology that denies the enlightenment and its keystone of exploration. That is the greatest risks of critical theory and postmodernism. They seek not the exploration but indoctrination with dogma.