The G.O.P.’s Journey From the Liberal Days of Nixon

The following is an excerpt from an article in 

The New York Times
Wednesday, September 05, 2012

The G.O.P.’s Journey From the Liberal Days of Nixon

By EDUARDO PORTER

To hear Republicans on the campaign trail, the United States could not have elected a more left-wing president than Barack Obama, one more hostile to business or more eager to expand government power. Left-wing Democrats, I’m sure, would disagree. If they had their druthers, they would probably make a more liberal, more pro-big government choice. Somebody, perhaps, like Richard Nixon.

That’s right. The Nixon administration not only supported the Clean Air Act and affirmative action, it also gave us the Environmental Protection Agency, one of the agencies the business community most detests, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to police working conditions. Herbert Stein, chief economic adviser during the administrations of Nixon and Gerald Ford, once remarked: “Probably more new regulation was imposed on the economy during the Nixon administration than in any other presidency since the New Deal.”

Nixon bolstered Social Security benefits. He introduced a minimum tax on the wealthy and championed a guaranteed minimum income for the poor. He even proposed health reform that would require employers to buy health insurance for all their employees and subsidize those who couldn’t afford it. That failed because of Democratic opposition. Today, Republicans would probably shoot it down.

Historians might protest that it is crazy to brand Nixon a lefty. He was rabidly anti-communist. If anything, they might argue, his seemingly left-leaning policies underscore how uninterested he was in the economy and how far he would go to buy popularity with public money.

Still, Nixon’s initiatives would never pass muster in the Republican Party of today, focused as it is on cutting taxes and public spending. His decisions not to try to undo big government programs passed by Lyndon Johnson’s Democratic administration underscores how much the political center has moved.

The difference between then and now is that Nixon — like most mainstream Republicans — accepted that government had a role to play guaranteeing Americans’ economic well-being. That consensus cracked around the time of Ronald Reagan’s inaugural speech in 1981. “Government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem,” the president intoned. And the country’s political center set off on a long rightward migration.

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