Yet Nixon never went away. Active in politics from the 1940s to the 1970s, he was the most successful politician of the postwar period. He channeled Middle America’s shift away from the Democratic Party, building the electoral coalition that delivered Republican landslides up until 1992.

After his death in 1994, Nixon lived on in the mind of boomers as the embodiment of perfidy and villainy. His shadows loomed over everything from politics to popular culture. Matt Groening, the creator of the widely successful shows The Simpsons and Futurama, used the latter to portray Nixon as a fascistic supervillain who had taken over planet Earth. “If you had told me in the ‘70s that I was going to be able to make fun of Richard Nixon 30 years later, I would’ve been so happy,” Groening once said.

Further releases of his presidential tapes in the early 2000s helped, revealing Nixon’s colorful commentary on the sexual proclivities of San Francisco’s upper class and the Bohemian Grove. (“It’s just terrible. I won’t shake hands with anybody from San Francisco.”) For boomer progressives, Nixon came to represent what had gone wrong in America after the country soured on the Democratic Party in the late 1960s. He embodied all the sexist, racist, and homophobic sins of refractory Middle Americans. 

This assault also affected boomer conservatives. An earlier generation of Republicans had admired Nixon. Ronald Reagan had a regular correspondence with him, even after he resigned in 1974. Bob Dole broke down into tears at Nixon’s funeral while delivering his eulogy. But their successors were more akin to Groening than Reagan. Republican leaders became ashamed to have heroes with Nixon’s confrontational, populist streak, even during the very years when their voters were looking for precisely that kind of figure.

Ten years after Donald Trump accepted the nomination of the Republican Party, the yearning for Nixon’s ethos of indefatigable, brass-knuckle politics shows no signs of waning. The most popular archival footage captures Nixon’s pugilistic style of politics and his refusal to ever give up. One viral video the Richard Nixon Foundation has produced begins with his 1962 gubernatorial loss and Time magazine declaring that Nixon’s political career was over, “barring a miracle.” The rest of the montage is a crescendo recounting his comeback.

The love for Nixon’s aesthetic of resilience in the face of adversity aligns with another shift in American conservatism. Younger conservatives are more right-wing than their elders. If older conservatives were scandalized by Nixon’s hidden bigotry about the Bohemian Grove, younger conservatives see his candid comments as a refreshing sign of authenticity.

Nixon’s frankness on the tapes also aligns with what younger conservatives believe. The decades that saw the boomer generation gain hegemony over American life witnessed ever-increasing support for homosexuality. That’s no longer true. Thanks to the demands of transgender activists to submit private parts to the scalpel, views on the morality of homosexuality have shifted. Since 2022, the share of Republicans who say gay or lesbian relations are morally acceptable has fallen by 21 points; among independents, it has dropped by 8 points. Nixon’s comments on the Bohemian Grove, once written off as reactionary, now seem avant-garde — or, as the kids say, “based.”

Foreign policy realism has long been regarded as one of Nixon’s most important legacies, and the times lend a fresh urgency to appreciating this side of him. As in the 1970s, the 2020s see the United States running up against the limits of its powers. A more nationalist Right is preoccupied by imbalances in military, monetary, trade, and technological matters that do not favor the U.S. The country must negotiate in circumstances of imperial overstretch and get allies to do more.

“No longer can considerations of friendship justify carrying so heavy a share of the common burdens,” Nixon’s treasury secretary, John Connally, declared in May 1971 in a speech in Munich. JD Vance, Marco Rubio, or Scott Bessent could have delivered the same line.

However, the beating heart of Nixon rehabilitation comes from the new revelations about Watergate. The scandal once served as the definitive, damning example of presidential abuse of power. We now know better.

The journalist and editor of Harper’s Magazine, Jim Hougan, knocked the first hole in the official story of Watergate in his 1984 book Secret Agenda. He showed how the CIA had provided material support and infiltrated the infamous “Plumbers,” setting in motion the chain of events that led to the unit’s discovery. Hougan saw the national security agencies pursuing their own interests and spying on the elected leader of the American government. Watergate was part of a larger duel with the national security agencies in which the president lost.

New details of this duel continue to emerge. In 2005, the identity of Woodward’s source “Deep Throat” was revealed not to be a conscientious whistleblower dismayed at Nixon’s wrongdoings but the associate director of the FBI, Mark Felt, who was furious at being passed over for promotion when his mentor, J. Edgar Hoover, died. Felt leaked to Woodward to subvert the FBI’s new leadership and the White House.

And just last year, journalist James Rosen drew more light on what is known as the “Moorer-Radford Affair.” From November 1970 to December 1971, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, led by Adm. Thomas Moorer, ran a spy ring against Nixon. Yeoman Charles Radford stole classified documents from the National Security Council and passed them on to the Joint Chiefs. The purpose of this ring was to destabilize Nixon’s big foreign policy initiatives, including his withdrawal from Vietnam and his diplomatic breakthrough with China. The Plumbers uncovered this wartime espionage against the commander in chief. But Nixon opted to cover up the scandal to avoid embarrassing the military. His successors followed suit. Rosen discovered that during the Ford administration, deputy national security adviser Brent Scowcroft had found out about the espionage. But he ordered the relevant testimony sealed and classified.

In the past few years, Nixon’s former defense lawyer, Geoff Shepard, has also shattered the myth of legal and judicial righteousness, another edifice in the post-Watergate consensus. Rightly described by the Wall Street Journal as “the main architect of modern Watergate revisionism,” Shepard exposed the scale of prosecutorial misconduct by the Watergate Special Prosecution Force. They were hunting for Nixon’s scalp, breaking the rules to do so. The trial judge overseeing their case, John Sirica, met secretly with the prosecutors to lay out their plan.

Many conservatives were never comfortable with the post-Watergate consensus. But they focused on challenging the power of the homogenous media apparatus of network television. Nixon’s adviser, Roger Ailes, founded Fox News in 1996 as an alternative.

But as the 21st century marches on, the media, like other institutions, are increasingly mistrusted. The revelations of Hougan, Rosen, and Shepard are perfectly timed to tap into a broader collapse of trust.

Watergate connects with the younger American Right because the institutions involved in this scandal are the same institutions that have become discredited during the last two decades. Legacy media is regarded as little better than the mouthpiece of a corrupt uniparty. Thanks to the Edward Snowden leaks and forever wars, military and intelligence agencies are viewed as out-of-control actors. The legal profession represents a cesspool of partisan lawfare.

Right-wing mistrust in the military’s top brass, the intelligence agencies, the legal profession, and the legacy media also increased exponentially during the drama of Trump’s first term. After 2016, legal activists, national security officials, and media melded in what Attorney General William Barr called a “praetorian mentality.” Believing themselves to be guardians of a political consensus that Trump defied, they broke the rules and the law to try to remove a duly elected president from office. So determined were Trump’s adversaries to repeat the Watergate template for forcing a president out of office that they successfully petitioned a judge to unseal material from the Watergate Special Prosecution Force’s grand jury, normally sealed in perpetuity.

For the younger, newer Right, drawing parallels between Russiagate and Watergate is essential. It reveals how the balance of power falls in the American state that grew up during the Cold War and the war on terror. The parchment paper of the Constitution remains, but it is ignored and defied by networks working inside and outside of government. These networks — the deep state — weaponize the apparatus of government to pursue their own interests. A president must acquiesce or incur their ire. As Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) put it in early 2017: “You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

Nixon, for his part, had ambitious plans to reform the intelligence agencies and the administrative state in his second term. As he put it in his memoirs, his plans were “going to be quite a shock to the establishment, but it is the only way, and probably the last time, that we can get government under control before it gets so big that it submerges the individual completely and destroys the dynamism which makes the American system what it is.” But Watergate put a stop to all that.

If Watergate was a victory for the unelected bureaucrats of the deep state at the expense of the elected leader, this enables us to look at post-Watergate reforms with fresh eyes. For many, Watergate’s exposure of the imperial president produced a salutary series of legislation that weakened executive power. In 1973, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution. In 1974, Congress passed the Budget and Impoundment Control Act, ending presidential discretion over spending money allocated by Congress. Presidential powers were further revised by the National Emergencies Act of 1976 and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 — both passed in part because Congress feared that presidents might use emergency declarations in malign ways. Then, in 1978, came the Inspector General Act, the Civil Service Reform Act, and the Ethics in Government Act, which gave statutory weight to the special prosecutor template used during Watergate. It created the office of independent prosecutors.

As political scientist John Marini argued (also the author of an important article on the bureaucratic conflict underlying Watergate), this package of legislation created an “imperial congress.” The Great Society programs of the 1960s extended the responsibilities of the executive branch. But the post-Watergate solution was for Congress to weaken the capacity of the one elected official best poised to oversee and administer those new responsibilities: the president. Watergate legitimized the transfer of presidential powers into the hands of administrative agencies, judges, contractors, and NGOs tasked with carrying those responsibilities out. The upshot was to weaken the president while reinforcing an alliance between Congress and the federal bureaucracy. The function of the Democratic Party has been to shield the spending habits of this alliance and use lawfare to target presidential administrations that try to challenge that alliance.

Understandably, this post-Watergate legislation has vexed Republican presidents. Reagan launched a constitutional challenge against the Ethics in Government Act and independent prosecutors. The act survived this challenge in 1988. It was only after independent prosecutors were used against Bill Clinton that Democrats saw the act’s dangers and agreed to let it die in 2000.

Conservatives after Reagan often accepted the rationale underwriting the post-Watergate consensus. But younger conservatives want to confront it. If unaccountable bureaucracy rather than an imperial presidency poses the real danger to constitutional government, then this energizes those who want to recover the president’s traditional Article 2 powers. That’s been a top priority of the second Trump administration, as well as a controversial one.

But even though “imperial president” accusations and “No Kings” protests excite academics and older activists, these attempts to shame conservatives into compliance with the Left are losing their effect. The administration’s priority also isn’t that radical. Recovering the “unitary executive” aligns with what legal conservatism has pursued for years. It is telling that when it comes to Article 2 cases that challenge the obstacles to presidential control over administrative agencies, the Trump administration nearly always wins its litigation. Its agenda is compatible with the conventional conservatism of the Roberts Court.

Nixon’s rehabilitation inspires contemporary efforts on the New Right to rein in the national security bureaucracy and the administrative state. Christopher Rufo, for example, draws from Marini to make his own case for the relevance of the Nixon presidency and analyze how American government went awry. But Rufo and others like him do not offer unconditional praise of Nixon’s domestic agenda. This is for good reason.

In confronting the full institutional apparatus of DEI initiatives, the New Right is dedicated to restoring colorblind constitutionalism. Nixon was not so dedicated. Under his orders, affirmative action grew. Title IX, an expansion of antidiscrimination law, was cheerfully signed into law. Contrary to leftist caricatures, Nixon was a liberal on civil rights. He accelerated the civil rights revolution, cementing the administrative apparatus that has produced the asymmetrical standards of justice that Americans experience today.

FOUR THINGS VANCE SAYS HE HAS IN COMMON WITH NIXON 

Here, Reagan’s own record in office is better. Like Nixon, he lacked a congressional majority. But unlike Nixon and unlike most future Republicans, he tried to stop civil rights laws from encroaching further upon American liberties. In Grove City v. Bell in 1985, the Supreme Court limited the reach of Title IX compliance to the specific program or activity covered by the federal grant, not the whole institution. Grove City v. Bell infuriated civil rights activists, who pushed the Civil Rights Restoration Act through Congress in 1988. Reagan vetoed it, but his veto was overridden. When the Trump administration rolls back affirmative action and DEI, it draws more from Reagan than Nixon.

Constrained by Congress, Nixon lacked the inclination and the infrastructure to deliver a domestic conservative agenda to counteract the Great Society expansions of the 1960s. Frustrations with the tendency of the Nixon and Ford administrations to gravitate toward conventional liberal positions led to the first “New Right” of the 1970s, building a new institutional foundation that could staff future administrations, displace the establishment, and hurt the Left. The second “New Right” of the 2020s is in a similar position. The time of a party establishment that compromised with the Left on diversity, equity, and much else besides is passing. But the Left is as powerful as ever. What the New Right needs from Nixon is not his policy agenda but his art of politics — his courage, combative spirit, and determination never to quit.

Nathan Pinkoski is a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America.