Nixon latched onto southern racism in particular to turn the white voters against the Democrats and in favor of the Republicans. The south had traditionally voted Democrat but that changed under Nixon’s campaigning. But whites in the south were horrified by Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights legislation including the Voting Rights which had insulated the whites from losing power as a result of blacks voting against white interests. The whites wanted to maintain their hegemony as they do to this day in America. From their perspective, the less black voters the better. Sounds a lot like the modern Republicans doesn’t it?

In 1970 American workers upset at the anti-war protesters started beating the protesters with their hard hats as part of what rick Perlstein in the filmThe Brain Washing of my Dad, called “a marauding army.”[1] . As Perlstein said, “Rather than excoriating these essentially vigilantes, Richard Nixon invited the Peter Brennan the leader of the construction trades to the White House where Nixon was presented with a ceremonial hard hat. Nixon did not try to stop the vigilantism, he tried to use it for his own benefit. And he did that masterfully.  Again, it sounds a lot like Donald Trump.

In the process Nixon was creating what George Lakoff  called “conservative populism.”  He persuaded a large part of the working class “to vote against their economic interest in order to vote on the moral issues.” Just like modern Republicans do with the culture war. Of course, Conservative politicians have been doing this ever since. They could not persuade working people to vote for their platforms that obviously supported the wealthy at their expense, so he got them to vote for him on moral grounds, or what we now might call cultural grounds. This includes voting on the basis of sexual identity, anti-woke, and things like that.

That was how Nixon contributed to moving America further to the right. And Trump has joined the movement. And guess what the strategy works.