Donald Trump did not invent the cultural wars, nor was he the first right-wing politician to take advantage of them.

The author Rick Perlstein  was interviewed in the film The Brain Washing of my Dad in which he said “the  brilliance of Nixon was to bend a politics of deference to money and autocracy and frame it to a kind ofcultural populism.” Nixon’s idea, according to Perlstein, was “the real snobs are not the people who hire and fire, but the people who decide cultural trends.” Nixon early on, realized the importance of culture wars, though that expression was not to my knowledge used by him.

George Lakoff is the author of the book, Don’t Think of an Elephant! The Essential Guide for Progressives.  He was also interviewed in the film about Richard Nixon. In 1964 the Republican Party candidate for president, Barry Goldwater got smoked.  Lakoff said, “conservative” was a dirty word. Nixon started running for the presidency in 1967 and he knew he had a problem. How to get around the apparent despising of conservatives? How could he change the Americans who wanted to be liberals?

Specifically, he wanted to get working people to vote for him, rather than a Democrat. Many veterans saw the anti-war movement in the US as a betrayal of their service and unpatriotic to the country. Nixon was hostile to protesters. He also opposed women who were railing against societal norms that forced them to stay at home and raise children. Their movement was called. “Women’s Liberation,” and Nixon hated that too.  So did many others.

Nixon argued for traditional family values to attract working men who felt threatened by what they saw as radical feminism.  Women would try to upend their privileges and take their jobs. Which was, of course, was completely true.

Nixon capitalized on fears of whites that they would lose their hegemony to uppity blacks. He elicited fear and loathing among whites. He ran in favor of law and order, which was often a dog whistle for whites who felt most criminals were black. He latched onto white bias, often of a silent implicit kind of bias. Again, he concentrated on white fears. There is nothing quite like fear to bring out the vote.

Donald Trump used similar tactics in order to twice get elected president of the United States.  Many think those tactics were crucial to getting Trump elected both times. Winning the cultural wars can be a winning statetgy.