The Manhattan Institute’s Chris Rufo is blazing a wide trail of destruction through critical race theory and wokism these days, but along the way he produced the 10-minute video below making the case that President Nixon was the first significant political figure to grasp the essence of the modern administrative state along with the determination to fight it. Alas, despite some early successes, Nixon’s larger plans were undone by the blunder of Watergate. Late in the video Rufo draws on the work of our friend John Marini, to whom Nixon once wrote in the 1980s in praise of Marini’s rare perception of the matter.

Now things are worse than ever. And so maybe another old Nixon slogan from 1972, “Now more than ever,” is worth bringing back.