In Nixonland all the deals are rotten,
The Wall Street boys are not forgotten
Giveaway, giveaway, giveaway . . .
The TVA . . .

Well I've read two-thirds of this thing and there's still 250 pages to go (not counting footnotes). I need a SciFi break or something. The book is very good. Especially if you didn't follow politics in the period, you should definitely buy it. But I wish Rick Perlstein had written a different book. In fact, I can think of several different stories he could tell with more or less the same research.

After a while, I think I get the point. The youth of America were revolting, Republicans exploited this, and the Democratic Party's presidential efforts foundered. Was I revolting? Yeah, kinda, sometimes. I meant well, mostly. At any rate, this story could have been told in less space.

More interesting to me, and where Perlstein shows very keen insight, is in the contours of right-wing political tricknology. There are so many parallels with subsequent history, right up to today. Only part of it is exploitation of political divisions among Democrats and radicalization on the left. There's a lot of it in Nixonland, along with other stuff of lesser import. So that's one book I wish he had written.

A second story well introduced in Nixonland is how right-wing terrorism, some of it state-sponsored, preceded the feeble, isolated, demented expressions of violence on the left. It's crazy when you think about it, this hand-wringing about the excesses of the Weather People and the Black Panthers, in light of the homicidal mayhem directed against movements dedicated to non-violence for civil rights and against the draft.

What goes against the grain of the book is a third story: how activism and protest advanced the causes of peace, social justice and welfare. This gets buried when one concentrates on how the most alienating manifestations of left activism freaked out the straights. At moments the author seems to get lost in his depiction of the perceptions of the bourgeois mass. For instance, at one point he says something like "6,000 hotheads besieged the Oakland draft board." There is nothing about what they did. Does RP think they were hotheads? Who were they? Some angry Quakers or the Symbionese Liberation Army? We don't find out.

It is natural that radicalization foments a reaction on the right. This is not in and of itself an indictment of radicalism. Some radicalization was founded on ignorance and assorted pathologies. We see a lot of that in Nixonland, in fact hardly any other kind. At the same time, the radicalism of the student movement prepared the way for the huge middle class anti-war movement that was to follow. So too did hard-asses of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee soften up the ground for more popular African-American movements, such as the welfare rights movement.

Democratic presidential efforts crashed and burned, but Democratic strength in Congress held up for quite some time, even in the face of Dixiecrat defections. A lot of useful legislation was passed under pressure from below during the Nixon and Ford administrations. The greatest wave of social spending U.S. history happened in the 70s, and the U.S. military was successfully expelled from Southeast Asia, where it had no business being. Calls for use of nuclear weapons and other genocidal measures were rejected. And finally, the policy of conscription has been more or less permanently discredited, putting a useful constraint on military adventurism. It wasn't all bad.

The sad fact of contemporary politics is the dislocation of the center. Thoroughly pedestrian liberalism -- not least in the 'blogosphere' -- is stigmatized as far left. We should be so lucky. McCain gets away with posing as some kind of centrist figure, despite his avowed conservatism -- in his heart, you know he's not right. And the neo-fascist crazies are respectable. Liberals harbor an irrational aversion to radical thoughts, to systematic criticism of the particular version of capitalism with which we in the U.S. have been blessed. Unfortunately, the story of Nixonland is more a symptom of this malady than a cure.