The Geopolitics of Impeachment: Recalling Nixon in the Trump Era

Throughout Trump’s presidency, the memory of Nixon has been invoked by both opponents and supporters of “The Donald.” Richard Nixon stands out as the only President in U.S. history to have resigned, and not completed his term in office.

During Trump’s presidential campaign, Trump used Nixon’s famous catch-phrases, referring to the “silent majority” and calling himself a “law and order” candidate. Roger Stone, who worked for the Nixon administration’s Office of Economic Opportunity, was notably on board with the Trump campaign. Meanwhile, outspoken Trump opponent Meryl Streep starred in the recently released film “The Post” dramatizing the Washington Post’s legal battle against the Nixon administration. Rachel Maddow and other liberal voices have compared allegations against Trump to the revelations surrounding the infamous Watergate Scandal.

Calls to impeach Donald Trump are widespread among the Democratic Party’s representation in Congress. While most leftists echo the calls to impeach Trump, they seem to miss the real motivation and driving force behind them. Amid their confusion, they also continue to invoke a misinterpretation of the events surrounding Nixon’s resignation.

Mobilizing The “Hard Hats” and “Silent Majority”

African-Americans were not alone. Among urban white intellectuals and college students, unrest grew and protests escalated. The Democratic National Convention in 1968 was surrounded by a bloodbath as leftist anti-war protesters were brutalized by the police. New York City’s Columbia University was shut down by a mass student strike.

Hard hats clashing with antiwar protesters in the financial district. (1970)

Nixon, a long-time Republican congressman whose trademark was anti-communism and contempt for mainstream media, moved into the spotlight. Nixon’s rhetoric gradually evolved throughout the 1968 campaign. He adopted much of the rhetorical style of George Wallace, the racist southern Democrat who was running as a third-party candidate in the race. Nixon discovered that Wallace’s narrative about “the good people” and “the silent majority” while castigating hippies and anti-war activities, was a big crowd-pleaser.

Nixon presented himself as a strongman who would bring the United States back to order, ending the domestic turmoil. He promised “an honorable end” to the Vietnam War, and “law and order” i.e. an end to the mass protests and violence.

In Marxist terms, Bonapartism is defined as one section of the capitalist ruling class violently suppressing other sections in the hopes of resolving turmoil. Nixon was an American Bonapartist, if ever. Like Louis Bonaparte in 1851, Nixon took office representing a certain section of America’s rich and powerful. Like the French authoritarian Marx described in his famous pamphlet “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon” the faction supporting Nixon hoped he could restore order by suppressing a lot of very powerful and influential people.

Nixon had a base of supporters who were often described as “hard hats” i.e. unionized construction workers. Nixon had huge support from within the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, one of the largest labor unions in the country. On May 8th, 1970, New York City witnessed the “Hard Hat Riots” in which union construction workers who supported Nixon were mobilized to attack anti-war protesters in New York City.

While the Kennedy and Johnson administrations had tried to restrain and control the FBI’s COINTELPRO program used to suppress leftists and civil rights organizers, Nixon granted J. Edgar Hoover a free hand to suppress Black nationalism and leftist activism.

Swift Global Maneuvers and Domestic Reforms

Nixon followed the strategic plan of Henry Kissinger, and began to court China as an ally against the Soviet Union. He enabled the People’s Republic of China to join the United Nations as permanent member of the Security Council. Nixon enacted the “One China” policy, recognizing Taiwan as part of China, not an independent country.

These dramatic moves would have been impossible under any other President and were openly opposed by many within Nixon’s own Republican Party. The “China Lobby” and the John Birch Society rallied against him with billboards denouncing Mao Zedong and falsely claiming China was responsible for the global heroin trade.

Nixon’s olive branch was embraced by the Gang of Four, an ultra-leftist clique within the Chinese Communist Party that was influential in the final years of Mao’s life. With “The Theory of Three Worlds” China presented the United States as an ally against what they called “Soviet Social Imperialism.” In Angola, Ethiopia, Chile, Cambodia, and many other parts of the world, Communists who took direction from China aligned with the United States in the name of fighting the Soviet Union which they dubbed “the main danger to the people of the world.”

At home, Nixon’s administration passed a constitutional amendment lowering the voting age from 21 to 18, in the hopes of bringing alienated young people back into the political process. Nixon also created the Environmental Protection Agency and signed a number of anti-pollution laws.

The Occupation Safety Health Administration (OSHA) was created in order to enforce laws designed to protect employees on the job. Nixon also enacted the first affirmative action policies in federal hiring, enabling a higher level of representation for African-Americans and Latinos in government jobs.

The Nixon Shocks – “We’re All Keynesians Now!”

Milton Friedman, the neoliberal economist who called for mass deregulation and shrinking of the government’s role in the economy was an adviser to Nixon’s Presidential campaign. During the first years of Nixon’s Presidency, Friedman played a key role in crafting economic policies. The result was an economic downturn.

The moves infuriated advocates of neoliberalism and were denounced widely in the pages of National Review magazine. Friedman, along with Ayn Rand and other widely promoted free right-wing intellectuals at the time, espoused an economic philosophy of “survival of the fittest.” They argued that the state should not intervene, but simply “let the economy take care of itself.” Many libertarians went as far saying that those without economic opportunity should be allowed to die off as inferior. The words of Friedman, Rand and Hayek often invoked memories of the Nazis, who utilized rhetoric about “useless eaters” to justify the extermination of disabled people.

The Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Family, while funding cultural leftist and anti-racist activism, also widely promoted libertarian economics during the 1970s. The Rockefellers financed and promoted various lectures and TV programs promoting Milton Friedman’s concept of “Free to Choose,” unregulated capitalism. Media mogul Ted Turner launched a billboard campaign promoting Ayn Rand’s philosophy. Famously, at the Ford Hall Forum, sponsored by the Ford Foundation in 1972, Ayn Rand proclaimed that the slaughter of the Native Americans was justified. At the same event she received massive applause for opposing the military draft.

Nixon’s purge of Friedman from his administration was not merely symbolic. Facing a serious economic downturn, Nixon utilized huge amounts of government spending, spending $25.2 billion to stimulate the economy in 1972. Nixon went as far to openly propose a plan to provide a universal basic income of $1,600 (the equivalent of $10,000 present day) to every American family of four. Congress blocked Nixon’s proposal for a Family Assistance Plan in 1969. He continued to push the idea even in his 1971 State of the Union Address saying “So let us place a floor under the income of every family with children in America-and without those demeaning, soul-stifling affronts to human dignity that so blight the lives of welfare children today.”

Nixon also made a point of being blatantly supportive of organized labor. He was endorsed by many labor unions in his campaigns. He famously commuted the sentence of Jimmy Hoffa, the strongman leader of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, and released him from Federal Prison.

Protecting “Archie Bunker” To Wield Political Power

At the time of Nixon’s Presidency, a TV comedy program called “All in the Family” became quite popular. The program portrayed an elderly, conservative, racist construction worker named Archie Bunker, who has ongoing political arguments with his liberal, college-educated son-in-law “Meathead.”

Nixon interpreted the TV program as an attack on him and his supporters, and discussed the program with his advisers. Nixon found the program’s support for LGBT rights to be particularly repugnant. Speaking with his spiritual adviser, Rev. Billy Graham, he used anti-Semitic language to describe what he viewed as a conspiracy against him in the media.