"Nixonland": Uber Allis, Interruptus, or Finis?

It's been an interesting few days.

I've been on vacation—two weeks in London, England (I may have more to say about that when I return to regular blogging on Monday), then two weeks, of which the present week is the second, spent working on the proposal for my next book. Not much longer than a week ago, I received an invitation from to fly out to Los Angeles to report on what Election Day looked like from the neighborhood of Watts—the site of the epochal 1965 riot which, according to my Nixonland, kicked off the chain of events that led to, well, Nixonland: as I defined it,

the America where two separate and irreconcilable sets of apocalyptic fears co-exist in the minds of two separate and irreconcilable groups of Americans. The first group, enemies of Richard Nixon... take it as an axiom that if Richard Nixon and the values associated with him triumphed, America itself might end. The second group...believed, with Nixon, that if the enemies of Richard Nixon triumphed--the Alger Hisses and Helen Gahagan Douglases, the Herblocks and hippies, the George McGoverns and all the rest--America might end.... "Nixonland" is what happens when these two groups try to occupy a country together. By the end of the 1960s, Nixonland came to encompass the entire political culture of the United States.

So there I was, straight outta Compton (the Willow Tree In off Central and Artesia—free continental breakfast!), chasing around South Central Los Angeles on city buses, importuning strangers about the meaning for them of this most historical of days. (I end up concluding that a surging civic engagement and profoundly Obama-ite good will and optimism is being tempered there by an impressively mature sense of the just how long and hard the road to truly transformative change will be in these United States.)

Meanwhile, my phone is ringing off the hook (to the extent that a cell phone has a hook), Monday, yesterday, and today.

This, that, and the other magazine, newspaper, and web site seeks to retain me for an essay on the dénouement of "Nixonland." Political reporters seek pithy bromides on whether and how the Republican coalition has gone off the rails. Friends, acquaintances, readers, flood my inbox for conclusive conclusions. Which is, of course, flattering, and plenty fun (Insistently schooling the reporter from the Philadelphia Inquirer, over somewhat baffled protestations—because, you know, America is always and forever a center right nation!!!!!—that yesterday's debacle for the Republicans had little to do ultimately with the accident of George W. Bush, or the accident of Sara Palin, but was all about the systematic failings of the theory and practice of conservatism, and that the Republican Party will be in the howling wilderness until it reckons with the fact—practically felt better than sex.) But ultimately, the whole business has made me feel a bit uncomfortable.

I'm a historian. To the extent that my musings add value to the vast offerings of political punditry this or any year it is because I've taken the time to slow waaayyyyy down and study, to use one of Richard Nixon's favorite phrases, The Long View. And the long view undermines any conclusion about the awesome results yesterday except that there are no easy conclusions.

Realignment? Liberal epoch? They said that in 1964. And two years later, in 1966, due largely to unforeseen developments for which the Watts riots were Ground Zero, Ronald Reagan was governor of the nation's largest state, 47 liberals were turned out of the House of Repreenatives, and if these weren't enough to turn back the Great Society an over-extended American neo-imperium proved impossible to control, and a faraway guerilla war that was supposed to be easy to end responsibly proved very, very, very hard.

A redemptive figure pledging hope, leading a damaged and disillusioned nation out of a cesspool of crises by promising a newly conciliatory brand of pure and honest-anti-politics? Well, make no mistake, as a politician Jimmy Carter is no Barack Obama, and his election in 1976 brought no dancing in the streets that I'm aware of, but it's easy to forget that the goodwill toward him upon his ascension was profound, even in the elite media, and that the structural position of the Republican Party in Congress was almost unimaginably in tatters. Following the sterling performance of the Democrats (shades of our 2006) in the 1974 elections, and Carter's apparently triumphant performance in the opening months of his term (his approval rating in April of 1977 was 75 percent), Sean Wilentz has pointed out, "it looked as if the country had found the leader it had been searching for since Richard Nixon's downfall." The political scientist Everett Carl Ladd crunched the numbers and argued that the Republican Party would probably go out of business. It was published in 1978, the year an unanticipated tax revolt drove the best Republican year in decades, prelude to the Age of Reagan.

Only one conclusion: it's shoulder to the wheel time. The opportunity is once-in-a-lifetime. And there are no guarantees. History is a cunning master. Hope, but verify.