President Nixon may have ridden into the presidency on a wave of fanatic conservatism and backlash against the rights revolutions going on in the 1960s, but his actual policies proved to be a somewhat confusing mix of conservatism, liberalism, and many areas in between.
On one hand, President Nixon knew that he could not lose the Republicans’ support and echoed them in his words and a few of his actions. Like his fierce conservative supporters, Nixon condemned student protesters and called for “law and order.” He even established a program of New Federalism, which gave federal “block grants” to states as they saw fit rather than for a specific federally determined purpose. He also abolished the Office of Economic Opportunity, effectively ending President Johnson’s War on Poverty. In addition, he nominated two staunch segregationists, Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court (although they were both rejected by the Senate). It could even be argued that his seemingly liberal Philadelphia Plan, which was an extension of President Johnson’s affirmative action efforts, was a backhanded score for conservatism--the idea was to fight inflation by weakening the power of the building trades unions and keeping workers’ wages low to keep construction prices low; Nixon also calculated that the plan would only benefit Republicans if it caused dissension between blacks and labor unions.
In contrast, several other points of Nixon’s domestic policy were pretty liberal. Part of this was due to the fact that because he and Kissinger were so focused on foreign policy and diplomatic relations, Nixon had little desire to fight the Democrat-controlled Congress on domestic matters. For example, Nixon accepted and expanded many elements of the Great Society. He created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which sent inspectors to workplaces to ensure health and safety. He also created the National Transportation Safety Board, which instructed car makers on how to make their automobiles safer. Furthermore, Nixon signed congressional measures that expanded the food stamp program and indexed Social Security benefits to inflation (meaning that benefits would increase proportionally to the cost of living). Perhaps most surprisingly, Nixon noticed the disturbing effects of air and water pollution and founded the Environmental Protection Agency (the EPA!) to address these problems. Under his administration, the EPA oversaw programs to combat water and air pollution, cleaned up hazardous wastes, and required environmental impact statements from any project that received federal funding. A few more environment-friendly acts that he signed include the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Air Act.
While the aforementioned policies were mostly classifiable into one political orientation or the other, there were still some issues on which Nixon sent mixed signals. One of these was the Family Assistance Plan, which Nixon proposed to replace the Aid to Families with Dependent Children plan. Instead of providing welfare to families below a certain threshold income, the Family Assistance Plan proposed a national minimum income. The plan was rejected by both sides of Congress--conservatives saw it as too radical, while liberals argued that the proposed minimum income was nowhere near enough. Nixon also waffled on affirmative action. While his administration proposed the Philadelphia Plan to impose affirmative action quotas on employers, he later condemned the whole plan during his 1972 reelection campaign.
Based on Nixon’s wide swath of policy views, perhaps it can be seen that President Nixon did not live up to the heroic conservative expectations of his 1968 fans. What do you think Nixon’s motivations were? Did he just not care about political labels, or was he dancing a more intricate political tango? What other presidents in history have campaigned on hardline principles and waffled upon taking office? If this is a recurring trend, why do we bother assigning categorical labels to political views?
Sources:
Give Me Liberty Chapter 26
http://time.com/4696104/environmental-protection-agency-1970-history/
It was really interesting to see a different perspective to a president who seemed like the leader of the conservative movement. From what we have learned, he always seemed like the hard line anti communist president who was advocating for less government interference. However, the introduction of a concept similar to a universal basic income is astounding. It's incredible how the simple policy was erased from his mind by a six page report that outlined the failure of a similar policy in England. The discoveries that he made ultimately were what shaped him in a president very big on small government and made him even more conservative. From starting off as a president willing to enact liberal policies, his time in the White House changed Nixon's perspective on the nation and caused him to become even more conservative
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Karina, I really liked your article because you went into great detail explaining How Nixon's policies were surprisingly liberal. I wanted to add on the fact that he was the first president to meet with the leadership in Communist China in 1972. Using the source http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/nixon-arrives-in-china-for-talks I read more about this topic. This supports your claim because Nixon rose to power as a conservative that was "hard on communism" but he was "soft on communism by meeting in China trying to arrange a peace treaty with a communist power.
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