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

by Rick Perlstein

Theorists such as Fred Dutton, in Changing Sources of Power, argued that the people who resonated to this message were America’s ascendant political coalition: newly enfranchised students, highly educated professionals, dispossessed minorities, women coming into feminist consciousness. Even the Wallace surge fit into the theory: his followers were a subspecies of the alienated American, angry because they were shut out from the Establishment. Dutton insisted that “some of the younger voters who were for Wallace in ’68 were concerned less with his racial connotations than his stance as a fighter and his role as the most anti-establishment candidate available that year.” Speaking to those yearning for reform was not just a matter of right. The new path to power for the ambitious politician, Dutton argued, “the growing edge of the present,” was the rising “coalition of conscience and decency.”