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Republicans Turned on Nixon. Here's Why They Won't Turn on Trump.
Republicans Turned on Nixon. Here’s Why They Won’t Turn on Trump.
As was not the case in 1974, Republicans now have counterfactual media that allows or compels them to ignore blatant lawbreaking.
by Harold Meyerson
October 1, 2019
snip//
So why the difference between 2019 and 1974? Why no Republican demands to investigate Trump? What changed the Republican Party over those 45 years? Nixon, after all, relied on tribal enmity no less than Trump. Nixon’s campaigns railed against Democrats, whom it mushed together with radicals, crazy kids, militant blacks, and hippies. His 1972 campaign turned George McGovern, his Democratic opponent, into the candidate of acid, amnesty, and abortion. His history of red-baiting went all the way back to his initial 1946 run for Congress, when he linked the liberal Democratic incumbent he unseated, Jerry Voorhis, to the Communist Party, which Voorhis opposed. And as president, Nixon and his vice president Spiro Agnew went after the “liberal media”—specifically, the Times, the Post, and CBS—claiming they distorted the news and secretly sought to bring America down. Nixon was a vastly more intelligent pol (and man) than Trump, but he built his career on the fear and loathing he stoked within his base for his political adversaries.
Nonetheless, Nixon’s tribe bowed to the evidence and deserted him at the end—all of the Republican electeds, and probably most of the rank and file.
So why the difference now? What enables Republicans to deny, ignore, or not care about the evidence—not just in the Ukrainian affair but the little kids in cages and the thousand other shocks to which Trump has subjected the nation? That denial, ignorance, and indifference extends well beyond the case of Donald Trump, to such other notable realities as planet-threatening climate change. How did the “ism” that Republicans scorn the most become empiricism?
There are a host of explanations for why and how Republicans have cocooned themselves from reality, not least the realignment of Southern whites into the GOP, which pushed the party to embrace a much more hard-right politics that drove many moderates into the Democrats’ ranks. But the rise of right-wing mass media may well be the most important factor differentiating ’19 from ’74. In 1974, right-wing media remained on the fringe, save in portions of the white South. Most Americans came to understand Watergate from the newscasts of the three national television networks, and from the hearings those networks aired. There was no counterfactual counternarrative coming from Fox News, as there was no Fox News. There were right-wing radio commentators, but few if any were national: Father Coughlin was gone and Rush Limbaugh had yet to arrive. Rupert Murdoch had only recently relocated to Britain from Australia (to which, if we had an immigration policy that penalized the truly evil, he would be instantly deported). If Trump is polling at twice Nixon’s final-days level, and if congressional Republicans still sing Trump’s praises for fear of estranging their counterfactually oriented base, Fox and its ilk are substantially to blame.
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https://prospect.org/impeachment/republicans-turned-on-nixon-trump-impeachment-media/
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