Nixonland: America's Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon 1965-72

by Rick Perlstein

Their liberal champions developed a distaste for them. One of the ways it manifested itself was in matters of style. The liberal capitalism that had created this mass middle class created, in its wake, a mass culture of consumption. And the liberals whose New Deal created this mass middle class were more and more turning their attention to critiquing the degraded mass culture of cheap sensation and plastic gadgets and politicians who seemed to cater to this lowest common denominator—public-relations-driven politicians who catered to only the basest and most sentimental emotions in men. Who resembled in certain formal respects—didn’t they?—the fascists who’d won power most effectively with, as Adolf Hitler bragged, a radio microphone. Now came the boob tube, “a vast wasteland,” as Adlai Stevenson’s administrative assistant Newton Minow would later say, when he became FCC chair. A working class that was no longer poor, but seemed so much poorer in spirit. And its tribunes: men like…Richard Nixon.