Thursday, April 25, 2024
I think about Richard Nixon quite a bit. We are living in a landscape that was shaped by the culture wars that he created, and those wars came out of a weird, twisted sense of inferiority, even though he was probably the last Republican President who could legitimately claim to be an intellegent man. This piece gets it, I think.
Remember the Silent Majority? You probably do: they haven’t shut up since. Gore Vidal was the first to note that Nixon’s coinage had been Homer’s term for the dead. Truculent was the word for them. Nixon diehards often seemed moved to support him out of pure spite, relishing how he stuck in liberal America’s craw. They didn’t really act as if they liked him any better than we did; they just enjoyed the perversity of rooting for him anyway, because they knew that liberal America scorned them as much as it scorned him.
// posted by Bill @ 11:26 AM 
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