Why Liberals Hate Nixon
Owen Boydon argues that JD Vance's recent comments on Nixon, and the reaction they provoked, are a class-based reaction to defend liberal elite circles from effective outsiders.
A few weeks ago, Vice President JD Vance committed political heresy: he said that Richard Nixon’s “historical legacy is enjoying a bit of a renaissance,” and joked that if Watergate happened tomorrow “it would be like a 12-hour news story”. Cue the media freakout. CNN ran a story with the headline ‘Why JD Vance is downplaying Richard Nixon’s corruption’; Joe Scarborough took to his morning perch to warn that Vance’s take on the former president was “dangerous”. Vance’s comments hit a deep nerve with the liberal media class—and it seems likely that Vance knew exactly what he was doing. What is at the root of this reaction and what does it mean for American politics today?
America’s 37th president, Richard Nixon, was no saint and certainly not perfect. Which president was? Nixon did, like all of us, have personal flaws and, as the release of the Nixon tapes revealed, perhaps said some things in his life which he would regret. Conspiracy theories notwithstanding about the true causes of the event, Watergate was obviously a massive scandal and, as the tapes revealed, Nixon clearly did want to cover it up, although his knowledge about the break-in is disputed.
