Washington Wednesday: Nixon, trending

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LINDSAY MAST, HOST: It’s Wednesday, July 22nd.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning. I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Time now for Washington Wednesday, and joining us is Hunter Baker, senior fellow at the First Liberty Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy. Good morning to you.

HUNTER BAKER: Good morning.

EICHER: All right. Issue one is Nixon’s revenge.

MAST: Hunter, more than 50 years after Watergate, Richard Nixon is suddenly cool again—at least among a surprising number of young conservatives. The Wall Street Journal reports that "Nixonmaxxing" has become an online phenomenon. There are memes and merchandise, not to mention a broader reappraisal of Nixon as an America First precursor, much more than simply the disgraced president who resigned in 1974.

EICHER: Vice President J.D. Vance recently argued that Nixon’s historical reputation deserves a renaissance, and many younger conservatives see him less through Watergate lenses than through his fights with the media, the bureaucracy, and the foreign policy establishment. So, Hunter, why Nixon, and why now?

BAKER: I think the first answer is social media. For those of you on Instagram, the Richard Nixon Library Foundation people have got some serious social media game. They have compiled so many fantastic clips and quotes. Nixon being interviewed, Nixon speaking, Nixon riding through ticker-tape parades, and just all kinds of amazing stuff. He comes across as incredibly strong, just as a great president.

Now, yes, it’s true that he was brought down in a massive way by Watergate. But before that happened, Richard Nixon was a dominant politician. He was on the national ticket five times, and four of those were winners. The last one was a huge winner.

So a lot of people are interested in paying attention to Nixon. I guess, with modern suspicion, people wonder about Watergate. Was Watergate right? In a different media environment, could he have ridden it out? So people are looking at Nixon again.

MAST: Well, is this merely Gen Z discovering history through memes, or are conservatives genuinely revisiting his presidency? Let’s put Watergate on the back burner for a moment. Nixon was for wage and price controls. He declared himself an economic Keynesian, created the EPA and OSHA—just really an economically liberal Republican.

BAKER: Yeah, I would say that Nixon’s primary identity was as a Cold Warrior. He really didn’t care that much about domestic policy. I think that he was willing to consider almost anything, Democrat or Republican, when it came to that sort of thing.

Mostly, he saw himself and the presidency as primarily being about foreign policy and defense, and he was a great Cold Warrior. For those people who remember the controversy with Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers, without Richard Nixon in Congress, you never convict Alger Hiss. You never discover how far that conspiracy went. So he was really important that way, and he was a strong Cold Warrior who worked well with Kissinger.

But why bring him back now? The Cold War is over. The foreign policy challenges are different.

I think you’ve put your finger on it with the different nature of his approach to domestic affairs. He was far more interventionist. Importantly, he was different than Reagan. For whatever reason, J.D. Vance and some others want to take the focus away from Reagan, as Trump has already done, and put it more squarely on some kind of new Republican identity.

EICHER: All right. So, if Nixon is being rediscovered, Hunter, what other conservative assumptions from the last 50 years are being reconsidered as well? What do you say?

BAKER: Well, we’ve seen the heavy emphasis on free trade revisited in a massive way.

In addition, Reagan was all about small government. He very much wanted to reduce the size of government, defeat the national debt, and reform the entitlement state.

With Trump, those areas of focus have largely been discarded, and that may have helped him. It’s not really popular to cut spending, and people like an interventionist approach. They like somebody who says they’re going to solve their problems in a forceful way.

I remember my father was a very small-government guy, but when Nixon slapped on those price controls, my dad was like, "That’s decisive leadership." I think a lot of people are like that. They want to see a leader who’s forceful in that way.

MAST: Well, issue two: moving across the pond to the end of Thatcherism. Britain’s new prime minister, Andy Burnham, represents something larger than a change in leadership. He has explicitly tied his political worldview to Catholic social teaching and Labour politics, while advocating an economic vision far removed from Margaret Thatcher’s free-market revolution.

EICHER: Hunter, you pointed out this may be Britain’s clearest rejection yet of Thatcherism, and yet it’s just because he climbed to the top of the Labour Party, not because he stood for a general election. So, are we watching Britain reach the end of the Thatcher consensus, or is this just something else?

BAKER: Well, as I paid attention to the news reporting about Burnham, I just noted he didn’t say anything about Thatcher, at least not that I saw. But he said he was going to make the biggest changes in 40 years. And if you think about 40 years, we’re basically talking about Thatcher, who, of course, was a sea change. In England

if you win the election, you win, and you can pretty much do what you want to do. Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady, made some big changes to make Britain more of a free-market country. She reversed a lot of the collectivism that had taken root. She was a tax reformer. All of those things.

And I think that Burnham, by saying 40 years—maybe he doesn’t want to say Thatcher because maybe she’s still popular, kind of in the way that Reagan is still popular—but when he says 40 years, he’s talking about a sea change. He’s talking about wanting to go in definitely a different direction.

MAST: Hunter, do you think if Britain abandons the Thatcher model, that’s perhaps a bellwether for America?

BAKER: It’s interesting how one seems to follow the other. You’ll notice that when we had Bill Clinton as the third-way guy, kind of the business-friendly Democrat in the United States, it was not long before Britain followed with its own prime minister in that sort of mold.

And then, when the Brits had Brexit, it was not long after that that we followed with Donald Trump, who had that Brexit sort of sensibility. So there’s definitely a strong tie between the two nations and what they do. And, of course, they had Thatcher before we had Reagan.

MAST: Well, a third issue for you today. We’ll call this one “50 Laboratories or One.” The Wall Street Journal points to Illinois, while noting neighboring states are moving in very different directions on taxes. You have Iowa flattening its income tax, Indiana continuing tax cuts, Wisconsin debating more relief, and Missouri voters may eliminate the income tax altogether. Yet Illinois continues considering higher taxes on top earners there.

Hunter, I want to use this to set up a discussion about federalism. What strengths do you see? Americans can vote with their feet, and states compete over public policy. What else?

BAKER: The American states are intended to be laboratories of democracy. And what that means is that the states can pursue different strategies with regard to taxes, with regard to regulation, with regard to how they treat business, with regard to how they treat labor—all of those different things.

And the great thing about that is it allows us to see what works and what doesn’t. In recent years, that competition model has typically benefited states in the South and kind of in the Sun Belt.

At one time, California, when it was more of a Republican state, led in just about every indicator, and states were eager to copy California. But now we see a lot of problems there, and people are not necessarily eager to follow.

So what we see is there’s a tension now because there are a lot of national politicians who don’t like this ability of some states to undercut the policy of other states. You see that, for example, with taxation.

I live in South Carolina. There are other Southern states that have lower taxes, and South Carolina feels pressure to reduce its taxes to compete with states like Tennessee and Florida.

EICHER: And to bring it around to a current topic, Hunter, is this not fundamentally one of the things the Democratic Socialists want to overthrow? The DSA put its platform out aiming to weaken federalism by, among other things, getting rid of the Senate, which is, as we know, the representative of the states.

So this interstate competition—the 50 laboratories—isn’t that also fundamentally a bulwark against socialism?

BAKER: It absolutely is. There’s no question that the conservative policies of a state like Florida undercut the policies that somebody may want to pursue in New York or California.

We’ve noted that with the election of Mamdani in New York—that there’s all this talk about how many companies, how many people are going to relocate to Miami.

The Democratic Socialists want to completely get rid of that dynamic. They want to have one big policy that governs everything.

And just to extend that further, when you have people talk about global government, that’s what they’re aiming at. They want global government so that there is nowhere for people or organizations to escape to—that it will just be one big policy environment.

EICHER: All right, we are entering the lightning round. Just some quick questions for you, Hunter, before we go.

MAST: All right, first up: Darlene Graham enters the South Carolina Senate race. Does Trump’s endorsement settle the Republican primary, or has the state become too competitive internally for that?

BAKER: Boy, I’m really tempted to make a prediction here.

EICHER: Do it.

BAKER: I don’t think that Trump’s endorsement will settle the Republican primary. I think that people may have been okay with her serving in this sort of interim fashion, but I think that when it comes to the office longer term, people want to elect somebody with experience.

Maybe we’ll even see another one of those Trump double endorsements, where he says somebody else may also be good.

EICHER: Well, Britain’s “openly Catholic” prime minister, as The New York Times put it—we talked a little bit about him a moment ago. Is this really a religious story, given Burnham’s own description of his Catholicism as cultural identity more than actual practice?

BAKER: It is so fascinating, that language “openly Catholic.” You’re right. What does that suggest exactly? Does it suggest that to be Catholic is somehow scandalous?

But, of course, the other interesting thing about it is that he identifies as Catholic almost in the same way that a man might identify as a woman. He is not really identifiably Catholic. So this is a fascinating sort of story in different directions.

MAST: And real quick, J.D. and Usha Vance’s new baby—it’s not just a family milestone. It’s a historical oddity, really. America hasn’t had a sitting vice president become a new father since the Grant administration, so surely this deserves some note. Even just that: what a cute new baby.

BAKER: I am here for it, because we have already had—by the time we finish Trump’s term—that will be 12 years of semi-octogenarians. So it’s time for some youth in the executive office, and I’m perfectly happy to have it in the form of children who are a lot younger than, say, a Hunter Biden.

EICHER: Well, speaking of Hunters, that’s Hunter Baker. He’s a senior fellow at the First Liberty Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy, and our regular Washington Wednesday analyst. Hunter, thank you, and we’ll see you next week.

MAST: Thanks, Hunter.

BAKER: Thank you.

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