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The growth of political anger and the idea of political illegitimacy — 42 Comments

1. Just in my own lifetime, Nixon was very hated and actually considered evil by a great many Democrats.

   Nixon was defeated by Kennedy/Johnson by vote fraud. William Rogers told Nixon that he had enough evidence to over turn the election. Nixon declined because he worried about the country in the middle of the Cold War. Then, of course, was Nixon’s role in the Hiss matter.

   The Watergate scandal was an FBI coup d’eat that was successful. Nixon gave the FBI the coverup, which was an example of him being worried about underlings. Howard Hunt was a CIA plant in the CREP and was informing Helms. Hillary and Obama would never make that mistake. They care nothing about underlings.

   Nixon had weaknesses that Trump does not have. Nixon was more knowledgeable about foreign affairs but that was a different era.

2. I never thought that Obama was illegitimately elected, nor did I think that he was not a citizen. While I suspect his publicized birth cert. was a fraud (Photoshopped), his birth on U.S. soil was well corroborated.

   I do recall that Reps and Dems used to routinely come together on some the more immediate and pressing national security issues, especially where protecting our troops was concerned. It seems that much of that is gone, and the Bush-Gore election is a reasonable starting date.

   I do think that some of today’s political environment stems from the resistance movement on the right that sprung in to being the day Obama was elected. I still think today that his agenda was an aggressive socialist Islamophilic platform in disguise. Our saving grace was that both Obamas were as interested in self-aggrandizement as they were in any political agenda.

   Didn’t Mitch McConnell make a public statement in Dec. 2008, or Jan. that he would resist Obama’s moves at every step? I thank him for thinking or doing it, but he shouldn’t have said it. (Lack of transparency, whoo hoo!)

3. Mike K:

   I figured someone was going to bring up that accusation against JFK. I’ve read a great deal about it and am not at all convinced it’s correct, although it might be. I didn’t include it in the post because I didn’t want to make the post especially long, and the 1960 election wasn’t all that relevant because despite whatever happened, it didn’t cause widespread belief that JFK was an illegitimate president.

   If you want to see a brief discussion of the questions about the JFK election, with a few links, see this.

4. This trend of insisting that the president was not legitimately elected is tremendously destructive to the republic. I was furious over the Gore-Lieberman Florida lawsuit strategy, and I’m furious over the Democrats’ pretending that Russians “hacked” the election, for which there is no evidence. Let me include here my distaste for the right-wing pretence that Obama wasn’t born in the US. Whatever the circumstances of his conception and his mother’s marital status at his birth, the idea that she had traveled to Kenya to deliver him was preposterous.

5. The Watergate scandal was an FBI coup d’eat that was successful. Nixon gave the FBI the coverup, which was an example of him being worried about underlings. Howard Hunt was a CIA plant in the CREP and was informing Helms. Hillary and Obama would never make that mistake. They care nothing about underlings.

   This is lunacy. The Nixon administration had three separate offices engaging in illegal activities (or attempting to do so), one run by Gordon Liddy at the Committee to Re-elect the President, one run by Egil Krogh at the White House, and one run by Charles Colson at the White House. John Dean was in communication with all three offices. After CRP employees and contractors were arrested at the Democratic National headquarters, officials of the administration, the CRP, and one of the President’s lawyers set about rounding up cash to pay them off. The scheme blew up when the quondam chief of security at the Committee to Re-Elect the President blew the whistle on it to Judge Sirica and John Dean began in March 1973 providing information to staff prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s office.

6. Nixon was defeated by Kennedy/Johnson by vote fraud.

   That would have required stuffing a minimum of 46,000 ballots in the boxes in Texas.

7. I think the problem with your frame is as follows:

   1. During the Nixon era, there was more of a disjunction between campus discourse, magazine journalism, newspaper journalism, and Congress than is the case today. Bella Abzug or the juvenile blowhards on college campuses may have been witlessly vitriolic, but a certain decorum remained in other venues within public life.

   2. During the Reagan era, you didn’t have much campus protest. See Robert Bork on Capitol Hill, though. Per Bork, there was an abrupt and intense change in the Capitol Hill culture right around 1981 (keep in mind Bork was the Solicitor-General during the period running from 1973-77). Reagan was much more challenging to the political culture and to extant interests than Nixon or George W. Bush ever was, and rhetorically confrontational as well.

   3. Bush was not confrontational in matters of domestic policy and the severest controversy during his first 8 months in office concerned appropriations for stem-cell research (in re which he adopted a temporizing position). He was still loathed by street-level Democrats and opinion journalists. See Jonathan Chait.

   4. All of which is to say that Democrats have a mentality that’s incompatible with political competition and maintaining regime legitimacy. It doesn’t have much to do with anything their opposition is doing or is not doing.

8. My friend The Old Hippy hates Nixon, always has. I find it confusing. Nixon got us out of Vietnam, ended the draft, got us off the gold standard so we could run up deficits, signed the Clean Water Act and started the EPA. What’s not to like, from the point of view of The Old Hippy?

9. If Republicans are racists, are Black and Hispanics doing exceptionally well in states and cities controlled by Democrats with majority of inhabitants holding democrat beliefs? If not, then why blacks and Hispanics are doing just as bad in places where republicans don’t f**king exist neither do they have the power to implement their racist agendas?

10. I was very young during Vietnam and the Nixon Impeachment, but back in the day CNN and MSNBC didn’t exist. They are 24/7 get Trump.

11. I have to choose among a target rich environment to respond.

    1. Neo, Teddy White in “Making of the President 1960” related the story. He said later that he thought Nixon expected some forbearance for Watergate in return.

    2. Let me include here my distaste for the right-wing pretence that Obama wasn’t born in the US
    I don’t think any serious person believes this. The question about the long form birth certificate is about other things, like who was the father on the original.

    3. Nixon was defeated by Kennedy/Johnson by vote fraud.
    That would have required stuffing a minimum of 46,000 ballots in the boxes in Texas.

    Read Caro’s biography of Johnson. Especially “Means of Ascent.”

    This is lunacy. The Nixon administration had three separate offices engaging in illegal activities (or attempting to do so),

    Read the blog post I linked to. The New York Times all but admitted it. The issue for those with open mind is whether Nixon knew about it. My personal theory is that Dean was behind it. Pat Buchanan’s book, “Nixon’s White House Wars” has another theory. You should read it.

12. Surellin on January 3, 2019 at 3:56 pm:

    “My friend The Old Hippy hates Nixon, always has. . . . What’s not to like, from the point of view of The Old Hippy?”

    Nixon’s role in HUAC regarding Alger Hiss.
    Nixon’s campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas.
    Nixon’s cultural opposition to weed.
    Nixon’s prosecuting the Viet Nam War (until he ended it).
    Nixon’s embrace of “the silent majority” — very anti-Hippy.

13. Mike K:

    I’m quite aware of the story involving the fraudulent votes, and first heard about it many decades ago. The question is whether it’s true or not, factually speaking, in terms of the outcome of the 1960 election.

14. “this idea of fighting a president one doesn’t like by insisting that his presidency itself is illegitimate… That is what I believe is the newer element that was introduced as a result of the 2000 election: the notion of almost automatic illegitimacy for whatever reason.” neo

    I think it goes deeper than just personal dislike for a President. It’s the ideas that President promotes to which each side objects. Obama promoted and Trump now promotes ideas which are an anathema to the other side.

    I also think this factor is evolving into a POV that anyone who supports ideas disagreed with are now themselves… illegitimate.

    We are “deplorables” and even… irredeemable.

    “iredeemable: ADJECTIVE
    not able to be saved, improved, or corrected.”

    They would vote away our inalienable rights. But of course, rights which can be rescinded are not rights but privileges. Privileges are extended at the whim of the State. Such a State cannot escape becoming tyrannical.

    Yesterday, I ran into a brilliant observation, “the Left is busily sawing away at the branch upon which they sit”.

    Along with that, the Left appears incapable of grasping that inalienable rights cannot be voted away but that acting as if they have been voted away is an excellent way to get into a civil war with those who do insist that there are inalienable rights.

15. I don’t think any serious person believes this. The question about the long form birth certificate is about other things, like who was the father on the original.

    No, but there are a great many not-so-serious people in this world, and you encounter them in online fora. Obama birthers. Cruz birthers, Jindal birthers, Santorum birthers. Homebrew constitutional scholars, half of them.

    During one phase of that controversy, Ann Coulter said you can release the long form certificate, but the people complaining will just retreat to another contrived objection. I think some (Orly Taitz?) did fold their banners and go home. Then you had Sheriff Arpaio and his dubious crew of contractors, whose partisans you encounter from time to time.

    Of course you saw Barack Obama, Sr.’s name where the father was listed. They were legally married by August of 1961. Why would a youngster be walking around with Barack Obama’s name and someone else listed as his father on the long-form certificate, even if BO Sr. claiming paternity were a lie? *

    (*As for the hypothesis that Frank Marshall Davis was the father, consider. Scenario A: male student at the University of Hawaii knocks up a female student at the University of Hawaii who is six years his junior. Scenario B: A (married) local businessman who lives about 15 miles away from the Dunham family meets a newly arrived migrant to Hawaii 37 years his junior and knocks her up: an acquaintance of hers at the University is so bloody gallant (for this one brief shining moment in his life) that he contracts a bigamous marriage in order to ‘take responsibility’ for the child. The gallant fellow skips town 15 months later and acquires a long history of rutting and heavy drinking over the succeeding 19 years. Meanwhile, the dirty old coot saved from embarrassment forms an amiable friendship with the girl’s father, built around checkers and weed. People who fancy themselves the savvy guys fancy Scenario B is the more likely).

16. The divide happened long ago, when the 9th and 10th Amendments were put in a lock box and buried under the foundations of the Capitol. Basically, the divide is between those who seek highly centralized power (DC) to rule us all and those who seek to bring back the 9th and 10th to thwart the overreaching tendency of a central power to rule without any checks or balances.

    But seeing the importance of the 9th and 10th is antiquated, or so we are told.

17. Read Caro’s biography of Johnson. Especially “Means of Ascent.”

    It’s been publicly known since 1978 that Johnson’s minions stuffed the ballot boxes in 1948 in a Democratic Senate primary. The number of phony ballots filled out and names added to the register (in Jim Wells County) was 202. That’s < 0.5% of what would have been necessary in 1960 had the lawful and valid ballots given the state to Nixon.

18. The issue for those with open mind is whether Nixon knew about it.

    Knew about what? Gordon Liddy developed elaborate plans to engage in illegal espionage against figures within the Democratic Party There’s a formal presentation to John Mitchell, Jeb Stuart Magruder, and John Dean in January 1972. Mitchell tells him to scale it back. Liddy, Dean, and (IIRC) Magruder all relate this. Somehow the president is never apprised. (And, yes, there are surviving dictabelts wherein Nixon makes a brief note that Lawrence O’Brien will have to be held accountable for his business dealings with Howard Hughes). No dispute between Dean and Haldeman that payoffs to Watergate defendants were discussed in the Oval Office (and, IIRC, Dean’s version of this conversation was vindicated with the tapes; Haldeman was convicted of perjury for his account of that conversation in congressional testimony). Richard Nixon’s attorney Herbert Kalmbach is one of the fundraisers. Somehow Nixon knows nothing. John Ehrlichman is well aware (and, by all appearances, commissioned) the Colson office’s plans to firebomb the Brookings Institution, and is in the end the man who tells Colson to abort the operation. Somehow the President knows nothing. Gordon Strachan is apprised of Liddy’s activities at the Commitee to Re-Elect the President (Liddy and Dean agree). Somehow the President knows nothing. (Gordon Strachan and Lawrence Higby were H.R. Haldeman’s secretaries).

19. The number of phony ballots filled out and names added to the register (in Jim Wells County) was 202.

    You might read what I suggested. The ballot box 13 was the last .05% of the fraud.

    Art Deco, you seem to be an expert but I would suggest you read Pat Buchanan’s book.

20. I try not to get into a debate with one commenter, especially one who posts no links. Everything is on faith.

21. As one who was very politically active during the 1960 presidential campaign, I can tell you with absolute certainty that Illinois, at least, was stolen. Chicago’s votes were 99% counted when the downstate votes started coming in. Every time another county came in Republican, another box of votes would be found in Cook County. It got to be laughable. And, of course, being born there, I know why Philadelphia has the largest zombie population in the country — because in Philadelphia, the dead can vote!

22. Trump promoted exactly what chuck Schumer promoted Liberals never hated trump before, in fact they loved him. liberals hate republicans foremost, and they began to hate trump when trump made republicans popular again. Trump opposes illegal immigration, democrats opposed illegal immigration. Trump is friendly with Russia, democrats were friendly with Russia. Democrats began to oppose those ideas only when trump bought those former liberal ideas to the right.

23. I don’t agree that the birther controversy was unsubstantiated. First of all, the question of whether they were “natural-born citizens” had been raised about Barry Goldwater (born in Arizona when it was still a territory) John McCain (born in the Panama Canal Zone) and Mitt Romney (born in Mexico). Second, the whole circus started when Barry’s own book publicity stated that he was born in Kenya. Anyone who has had a book (or even sometimes an article) published, knows that the publisher never sends out a publicist to gather facts for your bio, but rather, has you send in your own short biography for the cover blurb.

    The claim that it was a publicist, and not Obama, who said he was born in Kenya, is absurd. So why shouldn’t people look into it?

    The little irony here is that the Dems told us we shouldn’t believe that Obama was born in Kenya because that was written by a publicist, but we should believe the third-rate British publicist for an Azerbaijani pop star (sic!) who wrote to Don Jr. that the Russians had dirt on Hillary.

24. Art Deco, you seem to be an expert but I would suggest you read Pat Buchanan’s book.

    Why? Buchanan’s an opinion monger, not a historian.

25. The ballot box 13 was the last .05% of the fraud.

    Really? Johnson stole 400,000 votes?

26. I don’t agree that the birther controversy was unsubstantiated. First of all, the question of whether they were “natural-born citizens” had been raised about Barry Goldwater (born in Arizona when it was still a territory) John McCain (born in the Panama Canal Zone) and Mitt Romney (born in Mexico).

    Mitt Romney was not born in Mexico, his father was. It’s a big country, so it is perhaps true that some crank complained in a newsletter that Barry Goldwater, born on what had been American soil for 60 years, was not a ‘natural born citizen’. The question in re McCain’s status was treated as a curio.

    Complaints about George Romney, Barry Goldwater, and John McCain were in regard to questions of law. The assertions about Obama were mostly disputes over fact, though the amateur tomato sandwich makers weren’t adverse to pulling constitutional principles out of their rectums (e.g. the bizarre assertion that Obama was not a citizen because his mother was a minor and could not pass on citizenship; evidently these people fancy every teen mother’s child is a resident alien).

    Second, the whole circus started when Barry’s own book publicity stated that he was born in Kenya. .

    No, the book blurb was made reference to in the course of the controversy. It didn’t start there.

    Anyone who has had a book (or even sometimes an article) published, knows that the publisher never sends out a publicist to gather facts for your bio, but rather, has you send in your own short biography for the cover blurb

    The vanity publishers you were dealing with are outliers.

    The claim that it was a publicist, and not Obama, who said he was born in Kenya, is absurd.

    It’s not absurd at all.

    So why not look into it?

    Lessee. You fancy that a pair of impecunious college students are going to engage in expensive and time-consuming international travel in order to do what? Avail themselves of the splendor of obstetric care in British East Africa? Introduce Ann Dunham to BO Sr.’s legal wife?

27. I try not to get into a debate with one commenter, especially one who posts no links. Everything is on faith.

    Both Dean and Liddy have published memoirs – monographs and serialized articles. Liddy has maintained that Dean has been lying about a half-dozen different things, but their accounts of his presentation to Mitchell and Magruder are in accord. The account in re the plan to firebomb Brookings appears in Dean’s memoir. AFAIK, Colson hasn’t disputed it.

28. Why? Buchanan’s an opinion monger, not a historian.

    Whereas you are a historian who does not have to provide links to supporting documents,. OK I got it.

    Dean’s memoir may be important to you but I think he might have been after what Larry O’Brien knew about Maureen.

    I will end the discussion here. Althouse also has a commenter who asserts everything without links.

29. Whereas you are a historian who does not have to provide links to supporting documents,. OK I got it.

    I write comments on blogs, not scholarly treatises.

30. Don’t we all but some of use try to provide evidence to support our opinions.

31. Ok, I will join the bloviation on a couple of topics:

    1. Birtherism – to me it’s really hard to get around the fact that Obama’s birth was reported at the time in the local Honolulu newspaper. However there is also the report that his literary biography supposedly said he was born in Kenya. That would not outweigh the birth notice but points up that Obama likes shall we say to tell stories about his background. Andrew McCarthy wrote a good article once pointing out, without supporting the “birther” claims, that birtherism was kind of a stand-in for the many mysteries about Obama’s upbringing.

    2. 1960 Presidential election – as Richard Saunders points out the margin in Illinois was *very* close, under 10,000 votes, and given the history of vote fraud in Chicago it is very plausible that the IL outcome was stolen. However to change the election outcome you need to flip one more state and Texas fits the bill most closely, especially given the notoriety of Johnson’s early local election where he earned the mocking nickname “Landslide Lyndon”. But the TX margin was quite a bit larger than IL and it is much more of a stretch to claim fraud altered the outcome. Unlikely but perhaps not impossible.

32. The “Two Movies” concept hit home for me.

    The first is a poorly written comedy in which the government is headed by a vulgar eighth grade narcissistic bully who has no conception of truth, sometimes fawns over ruthless dictators, and hires and fires and threatens and demeans people far more accomplished than he is.

    The second is a horror/film noir in which the colleges and universities, the media, Hollywood, schools, numerous elected officials, and much of our state and federal bureaucracies have, in the name of diversity and identity politics, undermined morality and torn apart the very political and social structures which protect our individual freedoms. When people object, they are accused of “hate speech,” doxxed, and hounded from their jobs.

33. Don’t we all but some of use try to provide evidence to support our opinions.

    I’m happy to do that, but I’m not going to give you footnotes constructed per the Chicago Manual of Style unbidden. This is an idle hobby and I’m not writing term papers for you. I’m sure your public library has a copy of Dean’s memoir and Liddy’s memoir. Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature will take you to their magazine journalism.

    All of my references were to things which were common knowledge among those reading the papers with care at the time.

34. I don’t remember much about the Nixon Presidency except for the Watergate hearings on tv and him moving us off the gold standard for our currency (which, even as a child, I thought was one of the stupidest things our government could do). My father was a Dem operative and union organizer, so I grew up around the Union Hall and spent election day handing out flyers with my parents at polling places. Hated Carter (thought he was too weak) and gleefully voted for Reagan over Mondale (much to my parents’ dismay).

    When my father entered the corporate world he got a really sour taste re: both Dems and unions, coming to realize that they did NOT care about workers, just about gaining and maintaining power. It was something I saw at twelve years old and we had frequent arguments about it.

    The media and the Democrats (but I repeat myself) hated Reagan and loved Clinton. There was actually a time when I considered Clinton to be the best Republican on the Hill, as during his triangulation days he was doing things people wanted.

    I just don’t remember the virulent hatred directed at George W. and Trump being directed at Reagan the same way. Yes, they despised him and what he stood for, but I can’t recall any assassination porn like GW and T have been subjected to.

35. and him moving us off the gold standard for our currency (which, even as a child, I thought was one of the stupidest things our government could do).

    Well, you were wrong. And the Bretton Woods system was not a classical gold standard, while we’re at it. It was a currency peg. We have a diversified economy with a large domestic market and we aren’t intensely trade-dependent. We can do quite well without a currency peg. The period from 1966 to 1971 demonstrated that currency pegs weren’t sufficient to contain inflation and the period since 1982 has demonstrated that they aren’t necessary. Milton Friedman was an inveterate advocate of floating exchange rates.

    Our last experience with a classical gold standard was the period running from 1929 to 1933. There’s a reason we don’t have one anymore. Sir Alan Walters, monetarist extraordinaire and confidant of Margaret Thatcher, had this to say in 1984 about advocates of a return to gold: ‘crackers’.

36. I just don’t remember the virulent hatred directed at George W. and Trump being directed at Reagan the same way. Yes, they despised him and what he stood for, but I can’t recall any assassination porn like GW and T have been subjected to.

    Not sure the three antagonisms were strictly comparable due to qualitative differences. Reagan was challenging to the prevailing order in Washington in a way no other post-war Republican has been. What was disconcerting about Bush Derangement Syndrome is that it was directed at a man whose policy preferences were familiar and banal and who was not confrontational in re domestic policy or, indeed, domestic discourse. See, for example, Mitch Daniels on Bush’s approach to budgetry. It was during the Bush years we learned that the Democratic Party nexus thought they owned the government and that the opposition was engaging in criminal acts by winning elections.

37. In ArtDeco we have found Artfldgrs’ doppelganger: just as arrogant and condescending but with more focus.

38. Phoenix, there may not have been “virulent hatred” a la Trump directed at Reagan but there was a boatload of sneering contempt – “dimwitted senile failed B-movie actor” etc. At the time I was voting Democrat and shared those sentiments to some degree but one of the things that started me “changing” was seeing Reagan actually carrying out what he said he was going to do.

39. Phoenix:

    People generally used to be a bit more circumspect in their hatred back in the Reagan days. Also, they didn’t have to talk about how they wanted him assassinated—it had nearly happened.

40. FWIW, I think a Neo is right. It goes back to Nixon. However, this is the earlier Alger Hiss business. As I as was told by one resident in a very NYC retirement community in Florida in the 1990s “ he (Hiss) could go on tv and admit he spied. I still wouldn’t believe him.” This after a the Venona intercepts were published clearly showing Hiss’s guilt.

41. I think part of the problem may be related to the ascendance of the Acela corridor and the coastal enclaves. As a WASP female in the South a certain amount of decorum is expected. Watching the news today it seems as if there are no standards of behavior at all…even for members of Congress.

    I can’t tell you how many times we have stopped watching shows because suddenly cursing and LBGTQ+ suddenly invaded a previously very much enjoyed show. (The most recent of these is The Orville – very Star Trek-esq until last nights episode where one character has a porn addiction and his (also male) spouse tries to kill him. Not to mention the last season where the same couple had a female child – which was politically incorrect in their society – and chose to change said child’s gender. Do we want to watch that with our pre-teen? NO!).
    Modern Family is not included in that, as part of the premise of the show happens to be the gay couple and their adoption of Lily along with all the other weird family stuff that has to be dealt with. I have gay relatives and friends. Don’t care who they choose to share their life with, just hate having the entertainment industry trying to shove acceptance of it down my throat.

    We live in the country. The kids are expected to say yes sir, no ma’am, please and thank you. There is a year-round Christmas tree in the library at school. It is a multi-ethnic community with plenty of mixed race marriages and children. (Yes, majority white.) I sometimes watch the news and wonder what world those other people live in, as I’ve never encountered that particular world…except in Memphis on Beale St.

42. om is right on is his description of ArtDeco: “arrogant and condescending. . .” It would be nice if he, she, or xie knew what he, she, or xie was talking about. A question about whether a person running for President is a “natural born citizen” is different when it’s George Romney (and you did manage to get that right!) or John McCain than when it’s Barak Obama that is the subject. Really? Wrong on the book publicity, too Art, about which you obviously know nothing. And since the blurb came out long before Obama’s presidential run, it is clear that it was the source of the birth controversy.

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