But his us-against-them nastiness -- as displayed against Vietnam War protesters -- and his no-holds-barred politics -- as demonstrated in his creation of a burglary team to conduct break-ins against his enemies -- represented an ugly assault on the democratic process itself.
Ultimately, Nixon's excesses were his undoing as the Watergate scandal plunged the nation into an acrimonious two-year crisis that ended in Nixon's resignation on Aug. 9, 1974. But Nixon's maudlin self-pity made the angry Republican base even angrier as it set its sights on endlessly getting even with Democrats and liberals.
What Nixon touched -- and irritated -- was the itch of Southern white "victimhood," which had spread through other parts of the country especially among conservative white men.
One of the Worst: Ronald Reagan
The most skillful politician in harnessing white resentments was Ronald Reagan, a former movie actor who was talented in twisting facts into colorful anecdotes about "welfare queens" buying vodka with food stamps, trees causing pollution, and desperate Latin American peasants representing a Soviet "beachhead" and a lethal threat to the United States.
Having honed his skills as a General Electric pitchman, Reagan could sell almost anything; his words and images could transform reality into the opposite.
Reagan launched his national campaign for President in 1980 with an appeal to "states' rights" in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of an infamous lynching of three civil rights workers -- James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner -- in June 1964. Reagan played on this ugly white resentment even as his aw' shucks style softened the crude appeals.
Like Nixon in 1968, Reagan also apparently benefited from his campaign's secret maneuvers to undercut the sitting president, Jimmy Carter who was desperately trying to negotiate the freedom of 52 hostages held captive in Iran.
According to what is now overwhelming evidence, Reagan's campaign went behind Carter's back to contact Iranian officials with promises of a better deal for them if they held the hostages until after the 1980 election or until Carter left office. As it turned out, Iran released the hostages immediately after Reagan was sworn in. [For details, see Robert Parry's America's Stolen Narrative and Secrecy & Privilege.]
After becoming the 40th President, Reagan lost little time in declaring an end to the long era of FDR's New Deal and the bipartisan consensus that had built on his legacy for nearly half a century. In his inaugural address, Reagan declared that "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."
Essentially, Reagan moved to restore the principles of "states' rights" and "free markets," resuscitating the coalition of white supremacists and laissez-faire capitalists who reigned from the end of Reconstruction to the start of the Great Depression.
Ever the master pitchman, Reagan sold many middle-income whites on the necessity for massive tax cuts weighted heavily to the rich, who supposedly would juice up the economy through a trickling down of the money, what Reagan called "supply-side economics."
The strategy blew a hole in the national debt and accelerated what became a three-decade shift toward massive income inequality, a level that hadn't been seen in America since the Gilded Age of the early 1900s. The Great Middle Class began to stagnate and contract. Boom-and-bust returned with the savings-and-loan collapse, a troubling harbinger of things to come.
In foreign policy, Reagan brushed aside the bipartisan strategy of détente with the Soviets, especially around arms control. As part of his new red-ink budget, Reagan demanded a major arms buildup and support for brutal proxy wars in Central America and Africa, supposedly justified by the rapid ascendance of the Soviet Union when in reality the Communist bloc was careening toward a final crackup.
While blind to the signs of the coming Soviet collapse, Reagan threw massive sums of money and weaponry at Islamic fundamentalists fighting a Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan. To buy Pakistani help in financing the Afghan mujahedeen, the Reagan administration also turned a blind's eye to Pakistan's secret development of a nuclear bomb. And the Afghan "freedom-fighters" included foreign jihadists led by a wealthy Saudi named Osama bin Laden.
Another major part of Reagan's legacy was the systematic substitution of fantasy and propaganda for fact and reason. The Right began a massive investment in an ideological media and attack groups to go after independent-minded journalists. The goal was to indoctrinate a substantial portion of Americans in propaganda "themes" un-tethered from reality. Reagan's success in this regard was impressive.
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