[Vision2020] Where would Richard Nixon fit in the GOP today?

[Art Deco]

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September 4, 2012
G.O.P. Shift Moves Center Far to Right By EDUARDO
PORTER<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/eduardo_porter/index.html>

To hear Republicans<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/03/republican-convention-obama_n_1850846.html?utm_hp_ref=elections-2012>on
the campaign trail, the United States could not have elected a more
left-wing president than Barack Obama, one more hostile to business or more
eager to expand government power. Left-wing Democrats, I’m sure, would
disagree. If they had their druthers, they would probably make a more
liberal, more pro-big government choice. Somebody, perhaps, like Richard
Nixon<http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/09/03/1013155/-Nixon-more-liberal-than-Obama>.


That’s right. The Nixon administration not only supported the Clean
Air Act<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/clean_air_act/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>and
affirmative action, it also gave us the Environmental Protection
Agency, one of the agencies the business community most detests, and the
Occupational Safety and Health Administration to police working conditions.
Herbert Stein, chief economic adviser during the administrations of Nixon
and Gerald Ford, once remarked: “Probably more new regulation was imposed
on the economy during the Nixon administration than in any other presidency
since the New Deal.”

Nixon bolstered Social
Security<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/social_security_us/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>benefits.
He introduced a minimum tax on the wealthy and championed a
guaranteed minimum income for the poor. He even proposed health
reform<http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/stories/2009/september/03/nixon-proposal.aspx>that
would require employers to buy health insurance for all their
employees and subsidize those who couldn’t afford it. That failed because
of Democratic opposition. Today, Republicans would probably shoot it down.

Historians might protest that it is crazy to brand Nixon a lefty. He was
rabidly anti-communist. If anything, they might argue, his seemingly
left-leaning policies underscore how uninterested he was in the economy and
how far he would go to buy popularity with public money.

Still, Nixon’s initiatives would never pass muster in the Republican
Party<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/r/republican_party/index.html?inline=nyt-org>of
today, focused as it is on cutting taxes and public spending. His
decisions not to try to undo big government programs passed by Lyndon
Johnson’s Democratic administration underscores how much the political
center has moved.

The difference between then and now is that Nixon — like most mainstream
Republicans — accepted that government had a role to play guaranteeing
Americans’ economic well-being. That consensus cracked around the time of
Ronald Reagan’s inaugural speech in 1981. “Government is not the solution
to our problems, government is the problem,” the president
intoned<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ixNPplo-SU>.
And the country’s political center set off on a long rightward migration.

Interestingly, Americans say their political ideology has changed little
since the late 1970s. The share of voters who defined themselves as liberal
was 20 percent in 2010, up slightly from 19 percent in 1980, according to
polls by The New York Times and CBS News. The conservative share over the
same time rose to 35 percent, from 30 percent.

But these polls ignore how much the meanings of the terms have
changed<http://www.nytimes.com/1996/11/03/weekinreview/a-conservative-is-fill-in-the-blank.html>.
The rightward drift in economic thinking becomes apparent in surveys asking
about specific issues. In
surveys<http://www.people-press.org/2012/06/04/partisan-polarization-surges-in-bush-obama-years/>25
years ago, 71 percent of Americans believed it was the government’s
job
to take care of those who couldn’t care for themselves, according the Pew
Research Center. This year the share is down to 59 percent. And most of the
shift reflects a decline among Republicans.

Republicans’ support for labor unions has fallen sharply since the late
1980s, according to Pew’s research, as has their support for protecting the
environment. Their drift fits the position of Congressional Republicans,
whose views on the economy have been
shifting<http://voteview.com/blog/?p=494>right for the last
quarter-century while Democrats’ views have remained
roughly still. And as Republicans have moved to the right, economic policy
has followed <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6QOuoqeOFQ>.

Consider what has happened to federal nonmilitary discretionary spending,
which pays for housing vouchers and veterans’ health, highway maintenance
and the Food and Drug Administration — essentially all the domestic social
programs that are not mandatory like Social Security,
Medicare<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/medicare/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>or
Medicaid<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/medicaid/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>.


When Nixon resigned from office in 1974, nonmilitary discretionary spending
amounted to about 4 percent of the nation’s economy — roughly the same as
at the end of the Johnson administration before him. Discretionary spending
expanded through the administrations of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter,
reaching a high in 1980 of 5.2 percent of the nation’s gross output. Then
the tide turned: by 2008, before the Great Recession shrank the economy and
the fiscal stimulus lifted spending, nonmilitary discretionary spending had
fallen to 3.6 percent of national output.

Conservatives will say their ideas won simply because they are better.
Social scientists have some alternative hypotheses of our great
conservative shift.

The big government strategy from the 1940s through the 1970s produced a
spectacular improvement in living standards. But many economists now say
they believe the focus on full employment and income redistribution at the
expense of everything else also contributed to the strategy’s demise,
removing the fear of joblessness and encouraging excessive wage increases.

Combined with cheap money printed by the Federal Reserve, it produced a
burst of high inflation and high unemployment that bedeviled the 1970s —
discrediting government as an economic steward and letting a new belief
take hold: the economy should be left to the market, which always knows
best. The end of the cold war, which discredited central planning and other
left-wing economic theories, probably helped solidify this stance.

Economic philosophies could shift again, of course. Just as the big
government policies of the New Deal emerged from the Great
Depression<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/g/great_depression_1930s/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>and
World
War II<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/w/world_war_ii_/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>,
the financial crisis and recession just past might again persuade Americans
of the perils of unfettered capitalism and cause the pendulum to swing
back.

Still, the scorched-earth debate over Obamacare underscores how difficult
it will be for the American political system to swallow a more activist
government than it has today.

Those nostalgic for Johnson’s Great Society programs might remember that
they occurred in a kinder, gentler economy in which American companies
faced much less competition than they do today. Eastman Kodak could run a
mini-welfare state through much of the 20th century —with profit-sharing,
health benefits and pension plans — because it had fat monopoly-type
profits. Detroit’s Big Three amounted to a cozy oligopoly.

Globalization and its attendant burst of competition put an end to the
fairy tale. Companies squeezed costs to stay in the game, zeroing in on
wages and working conditions.
Unions<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/18/business/economy/unions-past-may-hold-key-to-their-future.html>,
once politically powerful institutions fighting for workers’ share, became
weaker and weaker.

Half a century ago, American employers might have accepted a higher minimum
wage on the ground that they needed American consumers to be able to afford
their products. They might have supported public education on the ground
that they needed an educated American work force. They might have accepted
financial oversight because they raised money from small investors in
American markets.

But globalization freed businesses from the limitations of one nation and
the clutches of the nation state. As businesses’ footprints extended around
the world, these objectives became less important than assuring low taxes.
Free to jump borders, businesses became much more difficult to tax or
regulate. And in the current dismal economy, they don’t seem too eager for
a return of the big government days.

The United States is in ideological flux. The Great Recession has given us
both the Tea Party<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/t/tea_party_movement/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>and
the Occupy Wall Street movement, and produced perhaps the most
polarized government of the modern era. Liberal-leaning Democrats, often
disappointed at the president’s compromises, will pine for a more
aggressive champion of workers’ rights. But they may want to count their
blessings. Americans today might not elect somebody as
liberal<http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2011/07/22/Barack-Obama-The-Democrats-Richard-Nixon.aspx#page1>as
Richard Nixon.

E-mail: eporter at nytimes.com;


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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