Donald Trump’s surge is being fueled by a huge “silent majority,” the same group of influential voters who swept Richard M. Nixon to re-election in the biggest blowout win in U.S. history, according to the author of a remarkable new biography.
Democratic strategist Douglas E. Schoen’s “The Nixon Effect,” which makes the case that the disgraced former president was “the most important American politician of the postwar era,” declares that Trump could ride the 1972 Nixon model to the Oval Office.
“He is the living expression of the silent majority,” Schoen wrote. “He’s a political force. He has upended our politics. If you don’t believe me, ask Jeb Bush,” Schoen wrote.
In an interview, he said the “silent majority” today “is different, they’re angrier now.” And he said that Trump, more than challenger Sen. Ted Cruz, has figured them out. “Trump has managed to operate in a way to mobilize a constituency that I think is more more reminiscent of Richard Nixon … than Cruz, who is a hard-nosed ideologue,” Schoen said.
“The Nixon Effect,” published by Encounter Books, is remarkable not just because it looks through the muck of Watergate and the Vietnam War to uncover Nixon’s influence on presidential politics, but also because Schoen also claims that the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama failed because they didn’t follow the Nixon model of governing from the center and giving voters what they wanted.
“Who would have dreamed that America, desperate for leadership after two failed presidencies, would one day be nostalgic for an old campaign theme — ‘Richard Nixon: Now more than ever!'” he wrote.
Schoen charts Nixon’s divisive history, the so-called “southern strategy” and “silent majority.” He gives Nixon credit for planting the seed to what is now a blue-red national divide on politics.
But Nixon also tracked to the middle when needed, proving he wasn’t an ideologue, and fostered liberal issues such as civil rights and the environment. In fact, Schoen calls Nixon “America’s last liberal.”
Ironic? “Few presidents have run more provocative, polarizing campaigns, yet few presidents have achieved more centrist, mainstream policy goals. It is a paradox worthy of Nixon himself,” Schoen wrote in the book provided in advance to the Washington Examiner.
Schoen has been mulling the book since the 1970s, and his research on Nixon came in handy when he was a White House adviser to former President Bill Clinton, who famously met with Nixon early in his first year. At the time, Clinton had given up his centrist campaign to become a liberal president, and after meeting with Nixon, moved back to the center.
Schoen said it saved Clinton and he gives Nixon some credit, calling Clinton “Nixon’s political heir.”
The ‘color line’ is shifting as Latinos identify as white
The long-accepted Census Bureau prediction that whites will be a minority in 2044 is being sharply challenged by an unusual source: the AFL-CIO.
The labor federation, which has opened a new push for racial unity, is circulating a new report on race that says the declining white population is about to receive a big boost from Latinos who are increasingly counting themselves as white.
“This is a story about a dynamic social category, not a fixed biological one, and we are likely in the midst of another rapid expansion in who counts as white,” said the report done for the union by Ian Haney Lopez, a University of California Berkeley law professor.
Like Italians, Poles and Jews before them, he found, “those who can now claim a white identity increasingly include light-skinned Latinos, East Asians and South Asians.”
But it’s the growing Hispanic population that matters, Lopez found. “If the Census counts these white Hispanics, then the white population is expected to grow to 72 percent. Recall, the country is 62 percent white today. Instead of being in a period of contraction, we may be in the midst of a surge in the ‘white’ population.”
American charity doubles Britain’s
Americans are a charitable group, in fact the most generous in the world, according to the new Almanac of American Philanthropy.
In a first-of-its-kind survey, the Almanac found that Americans out-donate Britain and Canada two-to-one and nations such as Italy and Germany 20-to-one. What’s more, more than half of every income class except those earning less than $25,000 donate to charity.
The much-maligned top 1 percent in the U.S. economy fork over one-third of all donations made. Even in death. “The wealthiest 1.4 percent of Americans are responsible for 86 percent of the charitable donations made at death,” said the survey conducted by Public Opinion research.
Americans also have high hopes for charities, choosing them over government agencies to solve the nation’s social problems, by a margin of 47 percent to 32 percent. And as a result, they want to protect tax deductions for charity, 66 percent to 21 percent.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected].
