AMERICA

Mr Nixon's real Americans

WILLIAM JANEWAY

New York—A new pragmatic politics is in operation in the United States. The old pragmatic politics—according to myth, dis- tinctively American—embodied the 'How to' approach to public affairs. It focused on the solution of specific problems and fled from entanglement in questions of theory or prin- ciple. The new pragmatic politics is one step further removed from principle. It is 'How to' oriented, as well; but its focus is on how to avoid having to deal even with specific problems. Its outstandingly successful prac- titioner to date is Richard Nixon.

The lessons of the 1960s have been learned by this President. Kennedy's New Frontier rhetoric and Johnson's stumbling (pre-Viet- nam) steps towards the Great Society are each to be eschewed. There is no catchy slogan for the Nixon Administration—the `New Federalism' has as much appeal as any other '-ism' has had in America. Rather, the overriding concern is with politics, not as means, but as end-in-itself. The purpose of politics is to get elected and then, in America's re-enactment of the later Roman Republic, to stay elected: that is, to avoid the respective fates of Mr Nixon's predecessors —assassination and abdication.

Mr Nixon has faced three interrelated problems on the road to 1972 (and the opportunity to preside over America's bi-

centennial in July 1976). The first was how to defuse the explosive heritage he took over from Lon Vietnam, the cities and inflation. The second was how to deal with

the opposition. The third was how to identify and develop a majority constituency of his own. The relevant measure of his success thus far is his sustained and extraordinarily high standing in the polls.

In Vietnam, Nixon has seemed to operate by 'Aitken's Law'. Senator Aiken, the dovish senior Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, suggested some years ago that the way to win the war was to declare that it had been 'won' and get out.

The `Vietnamisation' campaign amounts virtually to that. The further one is from Vietnam—so one is told—the more effective 'Vietnamisation' appears to be. until by the time one is an infinite distance away (say,

in one of the 'war rooms' scattered around Washington), it stands out as the most bril- liant strategic operation since Lend-Lease stopped Hitler on the Eastern Front with

Russian bodies. So far, there appears to be an optimal distance, located in Middle America, where the political effectiveness of `Vietnamisation' is maximally realised and its military effectiveness minimally relevant.

`Vietnamisation' has taken the war off the President's back for the time being, even if (as some point out) it has to date meant merely the progressive 'Vietnamisation' of Laos and Cambodia. Hard-headed political calculation has taken 'the problems of the cities' off his back—to the extent that this term is contemporary code for racial injus- tice and pollution-for-profit. These are the concern, respectively, of the blacks and the kids. The calculation, in direct discourse, is: `the kids don't vote, and the blacks don't vote for us.'

Inflation is the one issue which the Presi- dent has not defused. Predictably, it is the one area where he has relied on expert, tech- nical advice. The experts have told him that it is possible to tie the American economy down, without disruption, for three years of slow growth, thus gradually eliminating inflation without creating politically serious unemployment. The trouble is that disrup-

tion is already here in the form of wide- spread insolvency and selective depression.

One major brokerage house in Wall Street has already gone bust and Lockheed Aircraft, the leading Defence Department contractor

in 1969, has declared itself to be on the verge of bankruptcy if $650 million of emergency aid is not forthcoming. (This

exercise has provoked the comment that the military-industrial complex is more a Freudian than a capitalist concept.) Tight money and rising prices, moreover, have provoked a depression in residential con- struction. despite enormous backed-up de- mands: this year. on a per capita basis, the United States will build less than one-half the houses Britain will build.

As regards the economy, the Administra- tion looks like achieving the worst of both worlds: enough of a threat to employment to

scare every union into going for every possible wage increase, while prices continue

up and money (at whatever nominal rates are posted) remains practically unobtainable. Inflation and rising (though still historically low) unemployment would seem to be ample liabilities for any President, but here Mr Nixon had good fortune on his side. Most of those who are hurt by inflation and

threatened by unemployment are with him in refusing both to 'cut and run' from Viet-

nam and to give special consideration to the blacks. The vocal opposition from the young and the blacks, furthermore, is not economically oriented. And the respectable opposition of the regular Democratic party, attuned to capitalising on Republican mis- management of the economy, has been de- moralised as a national force.

Which comes to the President's second problem: the opposition. Here Mr Nixon's good fortune becomes outright good luck. The Kennedy wing of the Democratic party —the only segment with the financial re- sources to wage a national campaign—went off that bridge on Martha's Vineyard last summer and has yet to resurface. (The first waves in this quarter are being made by Sargent Shriver, whose imminent return from Paris presages a campaign for the Governorship of Maryland.) As for poten- tial leaders and incumbent Democratic office-holders generally, the President enjoys the services of his Attorney General, John Mitchell, who is a very effective political operator indeed.

Mitchell's ineptness at recommending Supreme Court Justices bears no relation whatsoever to the no-holds-barred manner in which the resources of the Justice Depart- ment are being used in the service of the new pragmatic politics. Democrats running in this Congressional election year are re- duced to relying on traditional Republican fumbling at the state and local level and to hoping either for a thorough going re- play of Republican unemployment or for a re-escalation in Vietnam. The former is being denied them by the uncontrollable demand for goods and services in the economy. The latter will be denied them as long as the 'other side' in Vietnam permits the President to succeed in his repeatedly ex- pressed determination that Vietnam will not become Nixon's War'.

With the Democrats in disarray, the Pre- sident has had ample opportunity to cul- tivate his own constituency. In the current jargon, this is the 'Sun Belt' and the 'Bible Belt'. Geographically, this means the southern United States from Los Angeles through Texas to Miami and up to Virginia (the Sun Belt) and the 'heartland of America'—the cities, towns, and suburbs of Middle America (the Bible Belt). During the 1968 campaign, Nixon's potential backing was succinctly defined as 'the un-poor, the un-young, and the un-black'. That is to say: the 'silent majority'.

One feeling is shared by all in Nixon's constituency, the desire to be left alone: by the Federal government, which tells them how to run their schools and businesses; by the Vietnamese, who get their sons killed; by the blacks, who threaten their homogeneous neighbourhoods and carry with them the violence of the central city; by their own children, who disturb their cushioned con- sciences. To these people the President has extended, above all, symbolic status. They are the real Americans, the ones who matter. He has even given them some particular rewards. For the South he has provided two home-grown Supreme Court nominees and a go-slow on school integration; for business backers he has provided a degree of import protection; for parents he has come out four-square against an assault on de facto school segregation and has reduced the national service intake.

The President's success has been strictly political. The war continues, the cities col- lapse in their own refuse, the economy runs out of control, the disaffected young move from cannabis to heroin or be/mb-building. A joke indicates the threat that Nixon lives under: the word is that Agnew may decide to keep Nixon as his running-mate in 1972. For the Vice President has been even more successful than the President in addressing the great television audience out there in media's Middle America. The threat to Nixon's ability to hold the centre of the screen and to keep those troublesome issues off the air does not come from the regular Democrats or the new left. It comes from the no-nonsense, 'know-nothing' right, whose attitudes Agnew projects.

The President's cultivation of his con- stituency is commensurate with the fear that if not he, then George Wallace or another will be doing the job. The shift to the right in American politics does not mean satis- faction with the status quo. Not when Middle America's status quo includes con- tinuing war, ongoing integration, rising prices, sky-rocketing crime rates, and the like. It has been Nixon's genius during these fourteen months to make the status quo seem a more comfortable condition than any alternative. He has thirty-two months to go.