ANATOMY OF NIXONISM
Harrington, Michael
The old Nixon and the new Nixon are one and the same man: the president of the United States. That is at least one secret of Nixonism. For, alas, it is now necessary to name an ism after...
...For those who still see Russia as the living heritage of the October Revolution, that is a shocking notion...
...The entire book is filled with such statements, and its hero is John Foster Dulles, that Manichaean theologian of the Cold War...
...On January 22, 1971, he therefore formally abandoned Milton Friedman's laissez faire for John Maynard Keynes's interventionism: "By spending as if we were at full employment," he told Congress, "we will help to bring about full employment...
...But for all his new sophistication, Nixon is deeply committed to the disastrous old values in this area...
...Most explicit of all, "Any American policy toward Asia must come urgently to grips with the reality of China...
...Nixon's twentieth-century Metternichianism has led to a de facto recognition of Communist China and to the Moscow agreements on arms limitations, two quite desirable events...
...It is people's government in a far more intimate way than government in Washington can ever be...
...It socializes, but only on behalf of part of the society...
...Nuclear weapons systems allow only one "mistake" this side of holocaust...
...In accordance with the Nixon Doctrine announced at Guam in 1969, America would lower its profile and the South Vietnamese would take over the burden of heavy casualties through "Vietnamization...
...That in itself might cause one to ask if the "Revolution" is going to live up to its rhetoric...
...The settlement did not rest on mere good faith, which would have put too great a strain on selflimitation...
...Not only was this policy outrageous...
...to this we might add that those who repeat the past are fated not to understand the present...
...Medicare and Medicaid, those portions of a comprehensive system that had been passed, increased the demand for health care, but there had been no planning or investing on the part of the government to increase the supply...
...For the true conservative is not at home in social struggle...
...To translate this into real terms: not only would the private health insurance system become the government's handsomely subsidized check-writer for medical care, but the corporations, which have always MICHAEL HARRINGTON 574 demonstrated enormous ingenuity in passing federal taxes onto the consumer, would by doing so become the regressive taxing authority for the financing of the plan...
...by conquest or legitimacy...
...Yet in this area one can discern the features of Nixonism even more clearly than in its global manifestations...
...Indeed it is precisely the gross, vulgar persistence of the old Nixon in domestic politics that, by way of dramatic contrast, makes the new Nixon more visible...
...To transform humanity by an act of will, to transcend French nationalism in the name of that of Germany, would have seemed to them to make peace by revolution, to seek stability in the unknown, to admit that a myth once shattered cannot be regained...
...Echeverria, a reformist committed to social capitalism, argued that if this situation persisted, nationalist dictatorships would emerge throughout Latin America...
...On the one hand, we have internal uncertainties in countries that are supposed to follow a rationalistic policy of sophisticated self-interest...
...But in order to make his proposal acceptable to his constituents, Nixon had to put some genuinely reactionary provisions into the legislation as well as making ritual incantations to the states' rights he was so appropriately violating...
...As Luis Echeverria the president of Mexico, made quite clear in his visit to the United States in 1972, even the best-off of the developing countries, like his own, find it difficult to achieve economic independence in the face of the massive power of American capital...
...There was the veto of a program providing day care for families that are not poor on the grounds that it favored "communal" methods of child rearing—and the insistence that poor mothers be required by law to accept exactly such "communal" care so that they could be forced into the menial labor market...
...Just as "right to work" laws never guarantee a right to work, so the "job development credit" will not necessarily develop jobs and most likely will destroy them...
...Where the multinational corporations do invest in the Third World (during recent decades they have been more interested, Lenin notwithstanding, in profiteering from affluence than from poverty), they tend to make enclaves that make balanced development still more difficult...
...This is a kind of international analogue to the domestic strategy of having the state plan for, and subsidize, the private sector...
...That is not surprising...
...In this case, one gets the feeling that Nixon is responding negatively, warily...
...But even with this lurch to the "Left" (really a move to the sophisticated Right, as we will see), Nixon still clung to part of the old faith...
...It provided President Nixon with a conservative rationale for breaking bread with Mao and Chou...
...Second, the President's Realpolitik is predicated on ignoring, or suppressing, the rights of the less powerful nations...
...Transportation, he concluded, "is a national concern and that is why it should continue to be funded in part from federal tax resources...
...the failure to reckon with the Third World's fury against ancient injustices...
...Its methods are incipiently non-, or even anti-, capitalist...
...As far back as the 1950s the sophisticated rightists insisted on "local planning" in the Urban Renewal Program they detested...
...There was the intervention into the abortion debate in New York State in which the President aligned himself with those who, in the name of the "right to life," would move abortions once again from the hospital to the back alley...
...So Nixon completely misrepresented the problem once he dropped his quite accurate generalities about the need for a systems approach...
...His battle is not personal but social, his justification not individual but historical...
...It was, Le Monde commented, a dialogue of the deaf...
...Whatever one may think of the moral content of their solution," Kissinger says of the leaders at Vienna, it excluded no major power from the European concert and therefore testified to the absence of unbridgeable schisms...
...Nixon has his own version of the theory of the "convergence" of the two systems: as status quo powers, whatever their profound differences on internal social and economic organization, they have a common stake in maintaining order...
...That clearly involves choosing between alternate national approaches: mass transit as against the private automobile, trains as against planes or buses, etc...
...And Secretary Laird's campaign for an escalation of weapons systems after the Moscow Pact, his urge to unbalance the American-Soviet nuclear relationship as best he can, is an indication that Mr...
...The "job development credit" is symbolic of this process...
...we have taken the reins firmly in hand...
...He will attempt to avoid unbridgeable schisms, because he knows that a stable social structure thrives not on triumphs but on reconciliations...
...In Kennedy's approach, the federal tax system, the most progressive source of funds in America (for all of its * For some time now Fortune has been an ideological organ of corporate collectivism, particularlyin the writings of its staff philosopher, Max Ways...
...So it is necessary to say that, in these matters at least, Nixonism has been better than anyone had thought in 1968 Nixon would be...
...That is at least one secret of Nixonism...
...They suffer from an international division of labor established in the heyday of capitalist hegemony that transfers wealth from the starving to the fat...
...Late capitalism is a corporate collectivism which, particularly under Republicans, must pretend to be individualistic and bourgeois...
...Thus the global economic vision of Nixonism is much more classically capitalist than his domestic perspective, not the least because there are no international equivalents of the American labor, liberal, and socialist movements capable of imposing that modicum of humanity upon the world market which they have imposed on the welfare state...
...This is not to say that the old Nixon has been completely subsumed under the new Nixon...
...In the last analysis," Mitchell answered, "it is a requirement that they [the recipients] comply with their own plan...
...The federal government would set up its own program of paying for those who were poor, unemployed, etc...
...The miscalculations of three administrations in Indochina...
...And in Japan, to be less speculative, Nixon's trip to Peking—or, more precisely, the secret way in which it was negotiated— helped to topple the political leader of a superpower...
...Moved by the concerns of the former, Nixon nevertheless had to help the latter...
...On August 15, 1971, he used it...
...In all cases, however, business will profit mightily and it is even possible that a little bit of the wealth will trickle down to the people...
...In pursuit of this goal it is, unlike the moralistic policy of Dulles, willing to strengthen the power of its enemies if only they will accept the model of a global equilibrium...
...It is conservative, not reactionary, seeking to shore up the old order by shrewd concessions to its enemies rather than through righteous violence...
...Richard Nixon—and this is a crucial defining element in his Administration—is an inveterate socializer...
...It was, they said in critiques of Phase I and Phase II of the New Economic Policy, designed to maximize the interests of the companies, the banks, and the rich, and to tightly control the wages of working people...
...There was the disastrous economic policy of the Administration's first year or so, which, by attempting to trade off higher unemployment for price stability, pushed a million Americans back into poverty...
...John Foster Dulles, the old Nixon hero and himself a Burkean, would not even shake hands with Chou at Geneva in 1964, since he saw the Chinese leader as the very incarnation of social evil...
...The war in Vietnam, candidate Nixon wrote, had taught the United States that it must not engage in unilateral interventions...
...The first phase of the Old Economic Policy involved this attempt at budget balMICHAEL HARRINGTON ancing, a cut in federal employment, and only a 1 percent growth in the money supply...
...Politically, then, the choice is not between free enterprise and state intervention (it really never was) but between kinds of state intervention...
...and G. Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court...
...Blue-ribbon commissions were appointed to study student unrest, population, and pornography...
...The most advanced states with the most powerful corporations thus became a dumping ground for America's social tragedies...
...This program [welfare reform] does not provide it...
...INTERNATIONALLY, then, Nixonism has a profoundly conservative, shrewd yet utterly flawed approach...
...These systems become economical only when there are millions of users [even as with telephones or TV...
...but the questions, by exacting a reply, have demonstrated a kind of validity...
...This, I take it, is one more clear indication of the reality that undergirds Nixonism: that the old, entrepreneurial capitalism is utterly incapable of dealing with problems ANATOMY OF NIXONISM at home and abroad and that state planning and subsidization are now essential...
...During the period of Metternichian balance, the "natives" could be dealt with by a gunboat or two and the dominant powers had only to refrain from slaughtering one another...
...For it is dangerous even for one's own country to be "infinitely more powerful in relation to its potential competitor" and a significant American advantage over the Soviet Union in nuclear weaponry therefore comes to be undesirable from an American point of view...
...Two business spokesmen were, however, quite explicit about it this year, and I will quote them at length...
...But the "dialectical unity" of his old and new selves is marvelously suited to its needs...
...The pioneering capital needs are beyond what even the largest corporations are likely to consider...
...the temperamental behavior of the man who has the ability to blow up a good portion of the civilized globe...
...Policies are now being considered that would encourage the hopeful technologies through research and development tax incentives...
...If the Democrats (or the best of them) expanded the domestic power of the state in order to help the poor and working people while unwittingly aiding the rich, Nixon continues this trend—only quite wittingly on behalf of the corporate rich...
...But even if America does defend its grizzly "honor" in this case, my point still holds...
...A key falsehood in that rhetoric was stated in the January 1971 speech: "Local government is the government closest to the people...
...David Rockefeller wrote, During the 1930s when the social contract binding business to society was being extensively rewritten, the business community resisted innovation and wound up with some unpalatable reforms and a blemished reputation...
...When Nixon signed the first authorization for wage-price controls in August 1970, he said he would not exercise the power being thrust upon him by a Democratic Congress...
...The issue at Vienna, then, was not reform against reaction—this is the interpretation of posterity...
...Reality again dictated a turn to sophisticated conservatism...
...For instance, by having 50 state welfare systems, a tremendous incentive was established for the poor to migrate from places with low benefits, like Mississippi, to those with high benefits, like New York...
...Even this right-wing intention must confront reality...
...In both cases the underlying motive was the same: to further the politics of conservatism in a revolutionary age...
...That enabled the local power structures to turn it into an instrumentality of department stores, luxury apartments, and monument building rather than a means of coping with the disintegration of the American city...
...III et us try to put Nixonism into historical and political perspective...
...Instead, the problem was to create an order in which change could be brought about through a sense of obligation, instead of through an assertion of power...
...CONSIDER FIVE IMPORTANT CASES: welfare reform, economic management, health insurance, technology planning, and revenue sharing...
...Capitalist collectivism, in other words, wants to make a deal with bureaucratic collectivism to preserve the status quo...
...If the domestic American response to an adventure that was not only criminal and foolish, but did not even work, can provoke a Metternichian president to such a tantrum, does that not subvert the whole notion of a calculated balance of power...
...Since no anti-imperialist movement had come to power for all of a year this cri de coeur was, as usual, ignored...
...There were the nominations of Clement F. Haynsworth, Jr...
...This was intolerable from a business point of view, as well as from that of the Mississippi poor...
...I think it would be a safer world and a better world if we have a strong, healthy United States, Europe, Soviet Union, China and Japan, each balancing the other, not playing one against the other, an even balance...
...Very early in his Administration, in April 1969, the President declared himself: "We must enlist the energies of private enterprise, here and abroad, in the cause of economic development...
...it was also a demonstration of how the instabilities of the Third World can intrude upon the arrangements of the big powers...
...Part of Nixon's strategy was to deny the very existence of the best things he was proposing...
...In Nixon's case, that assumption has proven to be dangerously misleading...
...There are many things that can be said about this outburst—the great universities being "systematically destroyed" are alive and fairly well...
...It thereby becomes an outlook unwittingly encouraging the very instability it is designed to control...
...If that were all there is to Nixon, one would simply dismiss him as a hack—and not name an ism after him...
...He did not dismantle it because he could not, and one of the functions of his administration was to legitimate welfarism--conservative welfarism, to be sure—on the Right...
...He was reminded that the Justice Department recently had to step in and correct the scandalous use of law-enforcement grants in Alabama, and was asked what he could and would do in such a situation if the new system is adopted...
...Six Crises was written after Nixon's defeat in 1960 and published in 1962...
...That, I take it, is what leaving Vietnam with "honor" means—and it is a goal to which Nixon has already sacrificed almost 20,000 American lives, many more Vietnamese lives, and for which he has carried on a savage bombing campaign...
...It was said of him that he was like a splendid summit of polished frost...
...All of this makes little sense if one is primarily concerned with creating a decent health system in America (in which case one would go beyond even Kennedy–Griffith, the best hope today, which should be enthusiastically backed and provide free care womb-towomb for every citizen, i.e., real socialized medicine...
...accelerated depreciation...
...To keep them from winning and to win ourselves, we must have more stamina and more determination than they have...
...One could see that most clearly in the President's March 1971 message on revenue sharing in transportation...
...For the poor, the minorities, and the organized working people, the federal power, however distant in miles, has been much more accessible than state government (until recently controlled by rural conservatism and now under the dominance of the suburbs) and city government (in which real estate interests usually prevail...
...q 578 MICHAEL HARRINGTON...
...China, to take one example, could be wracked by a succession crisis after Mao's death...
...The use of state power for private purposes is hardly an invention of Richard M. Nixon...
...The health of a social structure is its ability to translate transformation into acceptance, to relate the forces of change to those of conservation...
...It provides a world perspective for that corporate collectivism which is at the center of Nixonism and is likely to cause more turbulence in the poor countries than will their Communist parties...
...He addressed the nation on April 30: My fellow Americans, we live in an age of anarchy both abroad and at home...
...During a revolutionary period, Kissinger argues, political life loses its spontaneity because the existing patterns of obligation have been challenged...
...Nixon's new sophistication is not entirely shared by all men in power...
...It is possible that, with the connivance of the Russians and the Chinese and the use of indiscriminate air power, the United States will so wound the North Vietnamese and their Southern allies that a government supported by Washington may linger in Saigon for a few years...
...The "Revolution" was introduced with the usual Nixon incantation: "The time has now come in America to reverse the flow of power and resources from the states and communities to Washington, and to start power and resources flowing from Washington to the states and communities and, more important, to the people all across America...
...What then, he was asked, did the federal government require...
...the acceptance of de facto segregation in every area of American life and the fraudulent talk of being against "forced" integration of lily-white suburbs built with tens of billions of federal subsidies...
...Those who do not understand the past, Santayana said, are fated to repeat it in the present...
...And hardest of all to believe, Richard Nixon has been true to himself...
...It is, he said, in the long-run interest of American 568 business to allow, and even encourage, economic development...
...The Joint Chiefs seem not to have read Metternich...
...the manipulation of the busing issue...
...It would remove competition from the insurance system— and with it an incentive to experiment and innovate...
...The present and immediate past are devastating enough...
...the security of the United States...
...The Metternichian, on the other hand, fought against the revolution "not because it was immoral, but because it was disastrous...
...In A World Restored Kissinger writes about the peace of Europe created after the turmoil of the French Revolution and after Napoleon had upset all the traditional supports of legitimacy and stability...
...If carried out, this program will mean that the enormous profits resulting from the intervention of the government will be assigned to private corporations...
...his virulent anti-Communism gives him a political license to toast Mao, as William Buckley put it so bitterly, in terms more appropriate to Florence Nightingale...
...In March 1971, he campaigned for -a two-year extension of that power...
...Two porMICHAEL HARRINGTON traits might even contain intimations of Richard Nixon...
...This need for action must also have been forcibly brought to the President's attention when a senator named Edward M. Kennedy came up with his own comprehensive health-care bill (the Kennedy– Griffith bill...
...That is no longer the case...
...It was he who regrouped [and expanded] the White House staff into functional units—a Domestic Policy Council, a Council on International Economic Policy, as well as the existing National Security Council and Council of Economic Advisers...
...But then: "The hard fact is that the best mixture of transportation modes is not something that remote officials in Washington can determine in advance for all cities, of all sizes and descriptions, in all parts of the country...
...Not, to borrow from Kissinger's Metternich, that it is immoral but that in the long run it will prove disastrous...
...This deception is necessary not merely because a majority of the electorate would hardly agree to a straightforward socialization of the economy in behalf of the rich...
...This puts the conservative in a strange position: ANATOMY OF NIXONISM His fundamental position involves a denial of the validity of questions regarding authority...
...So welfare reform was called "workfare" and a compulsory work rule was made part of it...
...I do not favor a guaranteed annual income," Nixon told the Republican Governors' Conference in 1971...
...Broder fills out his generalization with even more detail, but his point is now clear enough...
...Nixonism is rhetorically dedicated to the virtues of the global division of labor but actually committed to utilizing America's state power to socialize the enormous advantage of our corporations on the world market...
...For here it is immediately tied into the structure of late capitalist society...
...Icy and reserved, Castlereagh walked his solitary path, as humanely unapproachable as his policy came to be incomprehensible to the majority of his countrymen...
...The Foreign Affairs article did provide one major portent of the Nixon to come...
...Looking back on his "kitchen debate" with Khrushchev, he remembered: It had been a long tense day and I would have welcomed the chance to relax and enjoy some of the sense of accomplishment which comes from a degree of success after so many hard months of preparation...
...He completely ignored, however, the "unequal nations," i.e., the majority of the peoples of the world...
...More to the point, there is today a potential for instability that makes of planetary balance a most precarious strategy...
...Now, with the social contract again up for revision, new social and environmental problems are generating increasing pressure for future modification and regulation of business...
...Since World War II, for instance, the prices paid for the industrial goods of the rich nations have gone up, while those for the agricultural products and raw materials of the poor countries have gone down...
...In one of his first budget messages, in April 1969, he said, Our proposals mean not only a substantial cutback in the spending of tax dollars in the coming year, but a substantial reduction in claims against future tax dollars and future budgets...
...It is no accident that in revolutionary contests the conservative position comes to be dominated by its reactionary—that is, counterrevolutionary— wing, the group which fights in terms of will and with an ethic of loyalty...
...I do not mean this, alas, in a Marxist sense: that a democratic movement from below is finally taking control of the means of life...
...His face was delicate but without depth, his conversation brilliant but without ultimate seriousness...
...The question all Americans must ask is this: does the richest and strongest nation in the history of the world have the character to meet a direct challenge by a group which rejects every effort to win a just peace, ignores our warnings, tramples on solemn agreements, violates the neutrality of an unarmed people and uses our prisoners as hostages...
...The government may need to sponsor largescale experiments and encourage joint ventures of private industry to share risk...
...In the first period the employer would pay 60 percent of the cost and, later on, 75 percent...
...But history is, of course, unfair and one must therefore confront both Nixon and his Administration as complex and important phenomena...
...Nixon himself cannot afford to be too blunt about these matters...
...Red China ...," he wrote in the same article, "does [threaten Asian nations] and its threat is clear, present, and repeatedly and insistently expressed...
...Only, Nixon systematically underestimated the political factors...
...II Li omestically, Nixonism is more complicated than in international affairs...
...Republican Presidents are just assumed to be essentially laissez-faire in their approach...
...The National Recovery Administration of Franklin Roosevelt, with its legally sanctioned cartels, can be seen as the culmination of a corporate dream...
...He was, he said, against the "nationalization of our health insurance industry" for that "would deny people the right to choose how they will pay for health care...
...Long ago Marx and Engels described Bonapartist and Bismarckian "socialism," and in his theory of "state socialism" Karl Kautsky analyzed planning, and nationalizing, capitalist governments...
...and they were taking this opportunity to put in pollution controls...
...It was easy enough for him to accept themore unashamedly corporatist perspective of Nixonism...
...I do not intend to impose wage and price controls," he said in February 1971, "which would substitute new, growing, and more vexatious problems for the problems of inflation...
...And of the British conservative Castlereagh he writes: "Few individuals have left behind them such a paucity of personal reminiscences...
...But this vague piety must be put into Nixon's 1967 context...
...Because of one sentence, it has often been cited as a signal of policies to come: "Taking the long view, we simply cannot afford to 564 leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbors...
...Note that Alger Hiss's old adversary is here advocating a strong Soviet Union and China as a means of promoting...
...In transportation and revenue sharing as in everything else, Nixonism seeks a maximum of federal financing and aid along with a MICHAEL HARRINGTON minimum of federal interference with the private interests working to turn that social spending to their own advantage and, often enough, to antisocial uses...
...But one thing I had learned through my years of conflict with Communism, going clear back to the Hiss case, is that there is never a period when it is safe to let up in the battle with our Communist opponents...
...The power of the American government is, in short, to be used internationally as well as domestically to subsidize the American corporation...
...administrators not innovators...
...In economic affairs that drive is called the competitive spirit...
...Nixonism, as the articulation of social tendencies much more profound than any of its individual spokesmen, is a sophisticated, conservative ideology of late capitalism...
...MICHAEL HARRINGTON 570 Consider just a few of the President's exercises in old-fashioned, unambiguous reaction...
...There were, I am sure, many reasons why he adopted it, Daniel Patrick Moynihan's persuasiveness being one of them...
...First, there is the theory that the world of the late twentieth century can be manipulated like nineteenth-century Europe...
...This geographical truism is a political falsehood...
...It is when one nation becomes infinitely more powerful in relation to its potential competitor that the danger of war arises...
...I favor unilateral American withdrawal now, but I am not of that romantic school which holds that Communist flesh and blood must prevail against American jets...
...The statesmen at Vienna were not interested in transforming humanity, because in their eyes this effort had led to the tragedy of a quarter-century of struggle...
...Third, Nixon is dedicated to perpetuating the very injustices in the Third World that will promote the instabilities threatening his grand design...
...In other words, Nixon wanted to subsidize the private health insurance industry— an industry that, since it is basically a disbursement agency, has never shown the least cost- or health-consciousness, and has contributed mightily to the recent inflation...
...ANATOMY OF NIXONISM And Simon Rao told the White House Conference on the Industrial World Ahead, The modification of the structure of operations needed to exploit the new technology will involve massive startup costs...
...I hese anomalies are most obvious in the area of foreign policy...
...By acting promptly, business can assure itself a voice in deciding the form and content of this new social contract...
...These suggestions have been screened by the Domestic Council, the International Economic Policy Council, and the Office of Management and Budget...
...The difficulty is not merely geographical and demographic, although these factors contribute to the profound difference between Nixon's world and Metternich's...
...Three years later, Nixon was presiding over the largest federal deficit since wartime Franklin Roosevelt...
...these and other factors do not make one optimistic about the possibility of reviving Metternich in the late twentieth century...
...That was a far cry from the orthodox Republicanism of Eisenhower's Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey, who was so anxious to balance the budget that in 1953 he proposed a deal with the Chinese Communists in order to cut military costs...
...Thus the Nixon scheme was certain to socialize a windfall for the insurance companies and, as the "job development credit," would probably make full employment all the harder to realize...
...It is infinitely preferable to Dulles's conviction that massive retaliation could somehow defend, or even liberate, people under Communism by unleashing a nuclear war...
...This upwardly mobile high school debater, this designer of Graustarkian uniforms for White House guards, has to be taken seriously...
...My central point here is not the wiliness of Henry Kissinger, Pat Moynihan, or even Richard Nixon...
...Kissinger's analysis paralleled Nixon's 1967 thesis that the United States could no longer play the role of policeman of the globe, but it also went far beyond that new commonplace of our politics...
...Mr...
...Were there any justice to history one could simply excoriate this second-rater who, by a series of accidents, finally insinuated himself into the presidency...
...For twenty-five years Europe had been convulsed by an effort to achieve order through power [the French Revolution and Napoleon], and to contemporaries the lesson was not its failure but its near success...
...And then there was—and is—the oppressive, moralistic atmosphere of the Nixon White House...
...Nixon obviously understands—and said publicly as early as his Foreign Affairs article in 1967—that the Soviet Union has become a conservative and imperial power...
...If they are allowed to do this on their own—which is what Nixonism is about —we will back into the future with the old, intolerable values intact, and the new technology will provide an advanced basis for immemorial repression...
...Kissinger writes of the Congress of Vienna: There are two ways of constructing an international order: by will or by renunciation...
...Vietnam was supposed to follow Nixon's general scenario...
...There is a contradiction between Nixon's political values, which still contain much old-fashioned rightism, and the economic and social facts of life in America...
...Kissinger persuaded him to be a Metternichian, subordinating his most cherished convictions to the imperatives of international equilibrium...
...His attitude toward technology, by contrast, is much more aggressive and positive...
...We err," Nixon said...
...For what does it profit a conservative to emerge victorious in a battle of wills...
...Have no illusions," he told Richard Wilson, editor of his public papers, ANATOMY OF NIXONISM "it's a new game, economic competition among the world's five great superpowers...
...National Health Insurance is another example of the same trend...
...Its name is a fraud...
...faults), was to be the primary source for financing a fairly extensive program...
...William R. Galeota explained in the Wall Street Journal, in March 1972, why the companies were rushing to increase their capacity even though they had more than they could use...
...a technology development bank...
...For instance, Nixon joined them in opposing congressional standards on auto pollution...
...With this approach we believe we have made a necessary and significant beginning toward bringing the federal budget under closer presidential control...
...That was one of the main reasons his Administration was marked by chronic unemployment and growing poverty...
...The breakup of the Communist monolith, Nixon continues, does not change this reality: "National communism poses a different kind of threat than did the old-style international communism, but by being subtler it is in some ways more dangerous...
...In the long run this synthesis is inherently unstable...
...The Democrats have more than their share of corporatist tendencies (as I documented at length in my analysis of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society in Toward a Democratic Left) but they contain the forces that might make this statism a servant of the people rather than of the wealth...
...Reality, as we shall see, is not quite as neat as these theories of international gamesmanship would suggest...
...This fostered the ugly myth that the welfare rolls are populated by loafers and chiseler—most people getting benefits are actually unemployable...
...So it is difficult for a conservative president to hand power "back" to the localities since the imperatives of the society, which he himself recognizes in other contexts, require centralization and planning...
...Indeed, I think the case can be made that there has been more serious, loqg-term planning at the high levels of the government, actively supported by the interest of the President, in the Nixon Administration than in any of its Democratic predecessors...
...So in his August 15, 1971, message on the freeze he urged a "job development credit" ANATOMY OF NIXONISM for business, repeal of the 7 percent excise tax on automobiles (which had quickly produced the highest profits ever in that industry), protectionism against Europe, Japan, and the Third World, and state planning and subsidies for "stimulating research and development of new industries and new techniques...
...This rationalist and even pragmatic approach legitimizes deals with and concessions to a revolutionary power so long as these will work toward the "restoration" of the world, i.e., stability and harmony...
...he therefore has considerable room for maneuver...
...in the second, the commendable goal of reducing pollution will be "paid" for by the joblessness of men and women whose futurework will have been automated out of existence...
...In The Party's Over he brilliantly summarizes one of the most distinctive and surprising aspects of the Nixon presidency: Most Presidents improvise, even if they are Democrats, and talk the rhetoric of social planning...
...The problems of unemployment and inflation were to be dealt with by giving credits and inducements to corporations, which is the essence of late-capitalist collectivism, i. e., of Nixonism, in the United States...
...In the case of Bangladesh, insane notions of strategic realism led Washington to side with the West Pakistanis...
...When the pre-Allende foreign minister of Chile explained to Nixon in 1969 that American capital takes more money out of Latin America than American aid puts in, the President responded with a promise to send...
...Their findings, based on considerable scientific research and much soul-searching, were then dismissed because they did not conform to the tenets of our new state religion, Billy Graham Protestantism...
...The only place where an intelligent decision can be made about the proper mix of various modes of transportation is in Washington...
...But if it is not true that local government is "closest to the people," it is certainly true that it is closer to the conservatives than Washington is...
...For, alas, it is now necessary to name an ism after a man whose identity, after 25 years of public life, still seems to be nothing more than a succession of wooden poses...
...The old Nixon and the new Nixon are one and the same man: the president of the United States...
...Ways was enthusiastic about Lyndon Johnson'sGreat Society, quite rightly stressing to businessmen that it was basically corporation-oriented inoutlook...
...What is remarkable about Kissinger's book is not that one finds in it occasional phrases that apply to Nixon, but rather that it presents a clear rationale for the current detente with China and Russia...
...This obfuscation is, however, functional...
...They are out to win, and one of the tactics they use is to keep the pressure on...
...This is simply not true...
...Nixonism in foreign affairs, then, is based on a sophisticated amoral analysis of the realities of world power...
...It is not our power but our will and character that is being tested tonight...
...After this bow to the Buckley wing of the Party, the President then proposed to nationalize the welfare system...
...His contemporaries, Kissinger writes, did not understand that it was an accident of history which projected Metternich into a revolutionary struggle so foreign to his temperament...
...loan guarantees with, or without, reimbursement of interest...
...government development funding...
...Ironically, businessmen pointed out a basic defect in the Nixon plan: it would motivate the corporations to fire marginal workers in order to avoid these statutory costs...
...it is intelligently rightist as compared to his Old Economic Policy, which was stupidly rightist...
...the indictment of the North Vietnamese could, except for the point about the prisoners, be better applied to the United States...
...I believe in a system that insures a man is rewarded for working and not penalized...
...This state-planned and subsidized "free enterprise" is objectionable on many MICHAEL HARRINGTON grounds...
...its purposes are impeccably procapitalist...
...I take Nixonism to be a portent of the end of the capitalist epoch...
...Nixon was, and is, a conservative...
...That availability is currently decided by private industry and a series of unplanned, uncoordinated federal subsidies...
...566 Here is the President in a January 1972 interview: We must remember that the only time in the history of the world that we have had any extended periods of peace is when there has been a balance of power...
...Richard Nixon did not, of course, invent this system...
...It was President Nixon who reorganized the White House staff and the executive office to facilitate such planning— linking budget and central management functions in an expanded Budget Bureau called the Office of Management and Budget...
...It is, however, completely rational from a Nixonist perspective for dealing with an intolerable health situation but only in such a way as to shore up the estab lished order...
...They try to wear us out...
...Here, and in every other area of national life, Nixonism uses the most modern methods—including the very substantial planning mechanism of the Technology Opportunities Program—to preserve, and even deepen, the class inequities in the society...
...Early in the Nixon administration the President had inadvertently referred—accurately enough—to the "crisis" in medicine...
...Still, when the Great Depression made it imperative that the state save the capitalist economy from itself, business tended to be in violent opposition, and the New Deal contained, in Richard Hofstadter's insight, more of a "social democratic tinge" than any administration in American history...
...Now that the state is being used so blatantly in the private interest, we can perhaps better educate the great mass of people that it must instead be used in the common interest of mankind...
...In the competition among equals advocated by Nixon, he intends to see to it that American business is more equal than anyone else...
...And the benefit levels in the President's pro posals were set unconscionably low, at about 60 percent of what a family needs according 572 to the optimistic computations of the Office of Management and Budget...
...nor on the efficacy of a pure evaluation of power, which would have made calculation too indeterminate...
...In his August 1971 speech announcing the wage-price freeze, the President was philosophic about this point: "A nation, like a person, has to have a certain inner drive in order to succeed...
...Nixon would have preferred to effect conservative goals in a conservative way, but when reality intruded, he was prepared to promote conservatism in a collectivist way...
...by treating the 576 transportation challenge as a series of separate problems rather than as a single problem with many interrelated parts...
...The United States consciously allowed the Soviet Union to reach parity on the grounds that such an equality would then decrease the danger of nuclear war...
...liberalization of the antitrust laws...
...Nixon, on the other hand, proposed that all interstate employers provide medical and hospital insurance for employees under private contracts...
...There were the numerous betrayals of civil rights: the "Southern strategy" and the influence in the White House it brought to a racist like Strom Thurmond...
...If, when the chips are down, the world's most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world...
...YET, EVEN while greeting the positive in Nixon's foreign policy, one must criticize its basic assumptions...
...For the difference between a revolutionary order and a healthy legitimate one is not the possibility of change, but the mode of its accomplishment...
...His obvious devotion to the Protestant ethic qualifies him uniquely to be the pallbearer of that ethic...
...Daniel Patrick Moynihan, less successfully, convinced him, for a while at least, to emulate Disraeli and "Tory socialism...
...In the first instance, the "job development credit" could do wonders in creating future unemployment...
...That description of the glories of the present private setup must come as a shock to -those people who have seen its costs mount and its coverage decline...
...But the mass of conservatives did not understand these sophisticated—and concealed—goings-on and Eisenhower compaigned in 1952 as if he intended to dismantle the welfare state...
...the costs would be shared by employees and employers, much as they are today under most collective bargaining agreements...
...But the specific manner in which any city or metropolitan area goes about achieving this goal is not something that can be most effectively determined at the federal level...
...The existing welfare system has obviously become dysfunctional, even from a corporate point of view...
...They are embarrassed about their collectivism, which explains their quaint rhetoric, but since billions are at issue they have managed to get over .their qualms...
...In saying this I do not exclude the possibility that Nixon will "win" in Indochina...
...They were anticipating, he said, high labor costs and therefore becoming more capital-intensive...
...But it should not be thought that these things can be done easily, for Nixonism is a profoundly contradictory doctrine, not the least because it is a philosophy of transition...
...For like the century that formed him, his style was adapted better to the manipulation of factors treated as given than to a contest of will, better to achievement through proportion than through scale...
...and so on—but one aspect of it is especially pertinent here...
...Nixon also held that "the federal government would pay nothing for this program...
...Richard Nixon, the new Metternichian, could go far beyond shaking hands precisely because he thought that conciliation would forward conservative purposes...
...In April 1970, during the invasion of Cambodia, Nixon, betting on a highly calculated scheme to achieve a conservative peace, became hysterical...
...Rather there was created a structure in which the forces were sufficiently balanced, so that self-restraint could appear as something more than self-abnegation, but which took account of the historical claims of its components, so that its existence could be translated into acceptance...
...The result was rapidly increased unemployment, the most expensive money for home builders in the century, a rise in the number of the poor—and all without slowing the rate of inflation...
...We must do so by stimulating investment through businesslike channels rather than offering ringing exhortations...
...Ideology, in short, had to be put aside...
...There are other reasons as well: the sentimentality of the Republican rank and file...
...Saying that, however, does not mean that the planners would then impose the specifics of a national policy upon a given locality but only that the choices open to that locality, in the future as at this very moment, would be determined in considerable measure by the kinds of transportation available to it...
...At the same time, the technology of destruction is much more tippable than it was a hundred years ago...
...It was entirely Metternichian on the part of the Russians to receive their American guest even as he was mining the harbors of their North Vietnamese allies and threatening their own ships...
...In internal politics the chief executive is the focus of a myriad pressures since every citizen has strong opinions about work, prices, housing, and the like...
...The world," Nixon concluded, "cannot be safe until China changes...
...We see mindless attacks on all the great institutions which have been created by free civilizations in the last 500 years...
...The old Nixon is obviously alive and unfortunately well...
...With Richard Nixon—and this is the historic significance of the ism that bears his name—American conservatism adopted the ideology of corporate collectivism, at home and abroad...
...One of the main goals of the President's Technology Opportunities Program (about which more later) is to socialize the research that will make private companies more competitive— and more profitable—on the world market...
...more American capital...
...With that remarkable non sequitur the President protested too much: the guaranteed income has always been designed for people out of the labor market and this is as true of Nixon's version of it as of the leftist "Triple Revolution" document of 1964...
...Then came the election of fall 1970 and, largely because of •a disastrous economic record, Nixon suffered a severe setback...
...The President took unilateral protectionist measures on August 15, 1971, and John Connolly, his then secretary of the treasury, followed up with some of the most unabashed tough-talking heard recently in international financial circles...
...Small nations all over the world find themselves under attack from within and from without...
...Even this seemingly Manchesterian faith in the efficacy of the world market is quite ambiguous, as much new Nixon as old...
...A good part of what the President said is patent nonsense...
...The American military establishment, speaking through Defense Secretary Laird, announced in the summer of 1972 that it would accept the Moscow accords only if they were taken as justification for a major escalation of the offensive arms race...
...Fourth, there is a shrewd perception in international Nixonism that the authoritarian Left should take to heart...
...The quality of American health was, and is, declining by comparison to other advanced countries...
...Nixon failed...
...Required are billions of dollars in operating losses, with more billions at risk for years before turnaround into a profit period...
...The keystone of this proposal was revenue sharing, an idea Nixon borrowed from Walter Heller and the Democrats—i.e., from those very centralizers whom the President regards as the source of our present problems...
...Despite the economic gain inherent in the productivity increase, the speed with which this technology can come into existence is contingent on teaming of corporations and government...
...It provides an incentive to business for investment in new machinery at a time when there is roughly 25 percent excess capacity and 6 percent unemployment...
...governmental purchase...
...But even while accepting much of what he said he abhorred, Eisenhower remained true to the ideal of a passive presidency...
...In questions of foreign policy Americans usually rally behind their president—except when, as in the case of Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam, his leadership is a clear failure...
...Even here in the United States, great universities are being systematically destroyed...
...I mean it in the spirit of Joseph Schumpeter: that the capitalists themselves are inexorably being forced to liquidate their ethic, psychology, and eventually their distinctive form of society itself...
...Yet, for all of Nixon's passion to seem much worse than he is, the new principle he has advanced is the most important structural innovation since the New Deal...
...Both England and Sweden, which spend a smaller percentage of GNP on medical care, have much better results through socialized medicine...
...That was particularly obscene when one considers that, while justifying the bloodbath in Vietnam on the ground that we are fighting for the principle of free elections, we simultaneously and in part surreptitiously were aiding the Pakistanis in their attempt to wipe out a freely elected government in Bangladesh...
...I don't think we need to get into what might have been or will be until the actual circumstances are presented to us," he replied...
...Typically, Nixon thrashed a straw man to bits in the course of arguing for this plan to put the private companies on the dole...
...It was the Nixon Administration which began the first five-year projections of federal finances—outlining in the Budget and Economic Report its estimates of future governmental revenues and the foreseeable demands upon them as an aid to rational planning...
...But Nixonism also allows an opening to the Left...
...But a month later there were signs that the most vexatious problem of all—the reelection of Richard Nixon—was bringing a change of heart...
...In the United States—after we have just learned that a four-star general carried out his personal Vietnam bombing policy (or was it the private policy of insubordinate Joint Chiefs...
...Nixonism is a carefully schizophrenic strategy, appropriate to a man who once wrote that he never lost his temper—except deliberately...
...At the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in Santiago de Chile in 1972, the spokesmen of the globe's poor once more announced to the affluent powers that their desperate demands—prayers would be a more accurate word—had again not been met...
...Just as the President abandons Adam Smithian premises in domestic politics in order to preserve the capitalist essence, so internationally he forMICHAEL HARRINGTON goes the consolations of Dulles theology to make a deal with the Communists that he believes will make his kind of anti-Communism more secure...
...At one point, Kissinger raises his historical analysis to the level of philosophy and his comments are as relevant to the domestic Nixon as they are to the international one...
...An observer who realizes there is much more to the President is David Broder...
...Fortune magazine, hardly a Bolshevik periodical,* came out with an entire issue in 1970 documenting the shambles of the American health system...
...The new Nixon in foreign affairs— at least in the dramatic persona of the voyager to Peking and Moscow—required, at the least, the coaching of Henry Kissinger...
...Nixonism must reconcile increased federal planning and spending with the persistence of private power...
...The old Nixon, the red-baiting free entrepreneur of the forties, accompanied the new Nixon, the president of the seventies, to toast Chou En-lai and to proclaim a wage-price freeze...
...So there was a tremendous cost inflation as doctors' bills went up faster than any other item in the American family budget...
...ANATOMY OF NIXONISM • The rhetoric of Nixon's speech on welfare reform in August of 1969 was impeccably conservative: "Athird of a century of centralizing power and responsibility in Washington has produced a bureaucratic monstrosity, cumbersome, unresponsive and ineffective...
...KISSINGER'S WRITINGS offer the most important clue to the strategy of Nixonism...
...One of them is that by using the resources of the United States to reinforce and intensify the injustices of the world economy—particularly the injustices imposed upon the Third World—Nixonism will exacerbate the troubles of the majority of mankind...
...We must persuade China that it must change...
...Nixon's advisers, John Kenneth Galbraith has remarked, were the worst since the days of Herbert Hoover...
...Reactionary anti-Communism was not, is not, and cannot be a bulwark against national Communism...
...I quote extensively because this account of nineteenthcentury politics can be taken as an objective anticipation of what Nixon is now doing...
...Only a few years ago, after all, it was the "Cultural Revolutionaries" and Red Guards who seemed to have the upper hand...
...So I believe in a world in which the United States is powerful...
...The key to this controlled schizophrenia, and to the ism it incarnates, is provided by the subtitle to Henry Kissinger's book A World Restored: The Politics of Conservatism in a Revolutionary Age...
...He fraternizes with Communists and engages in post-Keynesian economic policies as the best, the only way to defend the status quo in a time of tumultuous change...
...It was this philosophy that provided the basis for the agreement on strategic arms limitation signed by Nixon during his Moscow visit...
...For example, his welfare reform obviously puts forward, in some sense, the principle of a guaranteed annual income, which is what makes it one of the most important social innovations in a generation: yet in this matter Nixon has to conceal his decency...
...Karl C. Harr, the president of the Aerospace Industries Association, described Nixon's Technology Opportunities Program in a January 1972 article in the Wall Street Journal (the President himself has constantly alluded to the broad outline of the scheme but not, to my knowledge, to the details) . Both governmental and private bureaucracies had been canvassed for information about innovations that would help solve domestic problems and/or make the United States more competitive on the world market...
...the sincere ignorance of the leaders who, like the spokesmen for every ruling class, believe in their own ideology and are more functionally deluded than cynical...
...After all, did not the British and the Russians in the nineteenth century subordinate the considerable differences between bourgeois democracy and Czarist autocracy...
...Yet the mood of the piece is one in which Mao leads a nation called "Red China," not as President Nixon was beginning to say, "the People's Republic of China...
...Fifth, as regards Vietnam, it is not necessary to speculate on the difficulties in Nixon's ANATOMY OF NIXONISM balance-of-power politics...
...The Burkean regards revolution as "an offense against social morality, the violation of the sacred contract of a nation's historic constitution," and there can therefore be no practical coming to terms with the phenomenon...
...This became clear in the "New American Revolution," proclaimed by the President in January 1971 and described by John Mitchell, then attorney general, as the most important development in American history since the Constitution...
...This is the new Nixon, a case for systems planning...
...This is why it must be stressed that Nixon's dirigisme is not at all "leftist...
...Even a famous article written by Nixon in 1967—"Asia After Vietnam," published in Foreign Affairs in October of that year— offers no real hint of his impending rapprochement with Mao and visit to Moscow...
...that should be a sobering consideration...
...America would then once more be "prosperous," but its prosperity would be viciously lopsided precisely because of the way the government intervened to stimulate the economy...
...This does not mean, as many would simplistically have it, rushing to grant recognition to Peking, to admit it to the United Nations and to ply it with offers of trade—all of which would serve to confirm its rulers in their present course...
...There also was some responsiveness to a deep-running trend...
...By taking the initiative, it can contribute technical competence, rational analysis, and imaginative innovation to the process of adjusting our system—but it must recognize that some adjustments are inevitable...
...He was a Rococo figure, complex, finely carved, all surface, like an intricately cut prism...
...The AFL-CIO and the UAW were quick to understand the class character of this post-Keynesian interventionism...
...As John Osborne described the background press conference on revenue sharing at the White House in 1971: Mitchell had a terrible time with the provision that state and local governments must submit comprehensive plans but don't have to get federal approval of the plans...
...By establishing a minimum-income floor through federal law Nixon would be forcing the state of Mississippi to raise its welfare benefits by about 500 percent...
...In his August 1971 speech, the President also said that "the time has come for exchange rates to be set straight and for the major nations to compete as equals...
...Economic policy is another area where old-fashioned reaction would not work and new-fashioned conservatism was required, though it took a while for Nixon to learn this...
...Like all American administrations since Harry Truman began in 1950 to finance French imperialism in Indochina, the President thought money and hardware could create a government out of military men who had fought for the French in a struggle against a national liberation movement that literally had been pushed into Communist leadership...
...The Republicans, as Richard Nixon illustrates, are dedicated to socialism of, for, and by the rich...
...There is no question that Nixon's new rationalism is superior to his previous Manicheanism...
...Indeed, Nixon's conversion to Nixonism in this area is relatively recent, dating from the beginning of his relationship with Henry Kissinger...
...This was a fairly clear harbinger of the "Nixon Doctrine" with its lowered American profile and its insistence that Asians die on their "own" behalf...
...During World War II, the executives began to learn that the New Deal agencies would not be at all hostile, if only they were staffed by reliable Republicans...
...In each case there is a continuity of conservative purpose (the old Nixon lives) and a somewhat radical departure in tactics (the new Nixon also lives...
...In America there were sophisticated businessmen, like Mark Hanna, who favored such intervention...
...It seeks a Metternichian arrangement among the superpowers, capitalist and Communist, according to which change would be relegated to controllable channels...
...British statesmen, Kissinger remarks, preferred some domestic structures to others, "but their preference was based on the greater likelihood that these governments would maintain the European equilibrium...
...for those who realize it is a new class society, anticapitalist and antisocialist, it is not...
...Effective federal planning could well intrude upon the plans of the automobile companies, and they are special allies of the President...
...Yet, by provoking even more insurgencies throughout the globe, precisely this economic "realism" on the world market could tip the balance Richard Nixon is so carefully constructing...
...This dilemma leads to two counterposed conservative strategies...
...In the first year of his Administration the President practiced an idiot orthodoxy in fiscal matters...
Vol. 19 • September 1972 • No. 4
