“We’re all Nixonians here.”
Luke Nichter had spent the preponderance of his academic career shining a light on the historical legacy of Richard Nixon. Long condemned by a unanimous chorus of left-wing critics, Nichter had worked to tell the stories of Nixon administration members before they passed and bring nuance to the debate. On this warm May evening in Southern California, he had made the drive from his office at Chapman University to the nearby Claremont Colleges at the invitation of a College Republicans chapter. (RELATED: Murray on Rogan on Woodward)
Richard Nixon has become a popular figure on the right again, half a century after his ouster from office in 1974.
The young Republicans who assembled to welcome him bore Richard Nixon’s face emblazoned on shirts, his slogans printed on pins, and bushels of trivia about his struggle to redeem America. Had you told Luke Nichter to expect a sight like this 20 years ago, he might have called you crazy. Today, however, Richard Nixon has become a popular figure on the right again, half a century after his ouster from office in 1974.
Right-wing corners of every social media platform laud the man at every turn. The Nixon Foundation’s official accounts put his inspirational speeches to peppy music or mark Valentine’s Day with depictions of him and the First Lady laden with hearts. Ronald Reagan still maintains his stature as a figure of renown on the right. To many, however, Richard Nixon’s story simply resonates more.
Nixon came out of nowhere. His devoutly Quaker family owned a hardscrabble general store and couldn’t afford to send their talented son to attend Harvard after he was admitted. In Congress decades later, the establishment laughed off his claims to have unmasked State Department official Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy. Hiss bragged about attending Harvard Law in front of Congress and slyly smiled as he noted Nixon’s own pedigree from humble Whittier College.
Nixon kept fighting. After the fall of the Soviet Union, declassified documents proved that Hiss had indeed been a communist agent. As president, he was the first conservative to face the post-1960s radical Left. The recent work of historians such as Luke Nichter is opening the eyes of more Americans to his legacy. Others, such as Geoff Shepard, have worked to expose the crimes of the establishment that targeted Nixon with Watergate, including in the pages of The American Spectator. (RELATED: The Left’s Hypocrisy About the ‘Imperial Presidency’)
He led a more divided America — and lost to the radicals after decades battling them. Nixon’s resignation on Aug. 8, 1974, is, in many ways, the crowning political achievement of the institutional Left. Every voice in the media, academia, Hollywood, and the political establishment turned against a man who had won the largest landslide in American political history less than two years earlier.
Roger Ailes felt compelled to found Fox News after the realization, brought on by Watergate, that conservatives had no way to counter the dominance of the mainstream media. Today, Christopher Rufo is among the most prominent conservative activists seeking to revive Nixon’s legacy. On Rufo’s Substack, he lauds Nixon as America’s “blueprint for counterrevolution.”
Rufo produced a short film entitled Nixon Forever, defending the “law-and-order” leadership of the last president to mount a sustained attack on the managerial state until the advent of DOGE. Many conservatives have recognized what Rufo once argued in a City Journal piece, that “[I]f we can rehabilitate Richard Nixon in a balanced and fair manner… it will give us the skills, where we can more effectively defend a [modern] conservative president against these kinds of attacks.”
That Richard Nixon was little more than a crook has been one of the most persistent myths of the Left’s order. The potential for its overthrow has caught the attention of liberal media as well. Politico slammed the new Nixon praise on the right as “crazy” after Vivek Ramaswamy gave an homage to the 37th president at the Nixon Presidential Library during his own campaign for the White House.
Rufo and Politico have both recognized that the battle over Nixon’s presidential legacy often mirrors the conflict over Donald Trump’s ongoing presidential moment. Veterans of conservative politics argued that the toolbox used to remove Richard Nixon from office had been put to work again. This time, however, it has failed in the present because of the same arguments being used to reassess the past.
In a few weeks, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders will receive an award from the Nixon Foundation. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, journalist Bret Baier, and several others are headlining events there this fall. Countless conservatives will flock to Yorba Linda, California, to see them and experience the Nixon Library in the process.
The leftist gatekeepers of the American zeitgeist will continue to scratch their heads in puzzlement. In the meantime, more young conservatives will see themselves in the president’s struggle with each passing day.
The Nixon revival may have just begun.
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