Thoughts on “Real Peace” (1983)
I don't know enough about Richard Nixon the man to tell how truthful he's being in Real Peace. Perhaps, some day, I'll listen to the Nixon tapes—I've heard that they're likely to be entertaining.
Richard Nixon in Real Peace 'gets it' on a lot of the dynamics that I talk about, and he manages to put them into 'down-to-Earth' terms. This was instructive, because it puts into stark contrast the reason that I don't do the same.
There is a top layer of meaning in the text, with mechanical relationships between concepts like Communism, negotiating with world leaders, and so on. Nixon presents small amounts of simple evidence (relatively basic, obvious examples), and provides analogies suitable for everyday life, with a sprinkling of conservative snark at the end of some paragraphs. The problem is that if the reader does not have life experiences close enough to that of Nixon's intended audience, or a personality similar enough to Nixon himself, it is not obvious that the things he is saying (rightly or wrongly) are not merely 'conservative grumpiness,' and thus the entire book can easily be written off by such a reader.
Nixon does not provide a supportive layer underneath the top layer. From many years of arguments and discussions, I have found that it doesn't matter whether I think the top layer is obvious. It is better to first explain the underlying mid-level premises so that the top-level conclusion follows naturally—regardless of whether it is ultimately accepted or not, without this the conclusion will have a tendency to bounce off as 'unreasonable.' Getting the counter-party to recognize the disagreement as reasonable is almost as important as convincing them that the conclusion is true.
Naturally, this would have made the book a lot longer. It also might have made the book worse in whatever its objectives were at the time—it seems written for a more general American readership.
This also helped to clarify how self-identified Communists could read so many books while remaining Communist (and not in the almost-Daoist “everything is destroyed by its own contradictions” sense). Depending on one's own layer of interpretation, it would be easy to misread this book, flag everything Nixon says as false, including things he says that are true, and end up more confused than when one started.
Richard Nixon in Real Peace somehow comes off as some sort of film noir protagonist—or at least, what I imagine that one would be like. It's difficult to put into words why this is.
How can a man be President and also be a gumshoe? Well, for one thing, the Presidency is an office, and the President is just a man who occupies that office. For another, eventually a man will stop being President.
And when a man is President, he's wrestling with foreign governments, political movements, social trends, and so on—all things that are much bigger than one man.
At first glance, it might seem strange that Tumblr people (generally queer and left-leaning) would enjoy joking about Nixon. From this book, though, it becomes easier to see why, but still difficult to put into words. In any case, Nixon is history, and cannot hurt them anymore (whether he would have or not). The finality of history is, I think, some of the attraction of it—history has already happened, so it's easier to know who was right, and who was wrong. The present, by contrast, often hangs on unresolved questions, in part because they are unresolved.
AI writing about Nixon makes him sound like quite the character.
As kontextmaschine liked to say, “#same as it ever was:”
As a former U.S. President, Nixon complains about other NATO member countries needing to do more.
Nixon complains about the libs celebrating left-wing revolutionaries.
Nixon mentions corruption, and poorly conceived or poorly managed programs in Latin America.
Nixon also notes the immense importance of oil as a strategic resource for Europe and Japan, as well as implying the importance of other resources in developing countries for maintaining the developed countries. He also emphasizes, as is also the case today, that the United States needs these resources less than Europe and Japan, do.
With the resources (and especially oil) we see a material constraint impose moral ones. It's no wonder Nixon apparently wanted a program to build 1,000 nuclear reactors. The resource dependency limits the ability not to mess around in the Middle East as a region.
Like many on the contemporary right, Nixon also seems to like Japan—and why shouldn't he? From an American perspective, the Japanese diligently do their jobs and they don't cause problems, and as for the Japanese themselves, as per Zeihan, they probably realized that the American world order is a fantastic deal where they get to buy as much iron, oil, and cobalt as their factories can pay for, without having to fight for it.
To use an example of the style that Nixon himself might have used, the United States spent 20 years in Afghanistan and failed to develop it into an enduring democracy. It was taken back over by the Taliban as soon as we left.
Nixon wrote, “instant democracy is neither possible nor desirable for much of the Third World,” that is, he isn't saying that democracy is fundamentally impossible to develop in third world countries, but he is saying that there are preconditions necessary for democracy to flourish.
Was the American government (a) too idealistic, operating on a baked-down version of our national mythology, (b) too cynical, knowing operations in Afghanistan wouldn't work but not caring, (c) too incompetent, or (d) too poorly organized, and with no one in a position of authority to untie the knot?
To the degree that it's (a), it would be one of the great tragedies of the Trump Era, and indeed the post-2000 era more broadly.
As for Nixon, at one point in the book, he praises Donald Rumsfeld (among a list of others) as a competent operator. I wonder what he would have said had he somehow lived in good health until 2009.
There seemed a bit of a revival in interest in Nixon among some of the Twitter/X right in the early 2020s. (turrible_tao seems to have been, and still is, a big fan.)
This makes a lot of sense for them.
Donald Trump, the current President, is a loud populist, not an intellectual. (They all voted for him, of course, but some of these guys actually read books. They know why Trump's demeanor rubs some people the wrong way.)
The second term of Obama brought the identitarian turn, which they all hate.
George W. Bush is responsible for the messes in Iraq and Afghanistan. That he's become somehow "respectable" to cable news channels just makes it worse.
Bill Clinton, of course, is a Democrat. (They don't hate Bill Clinton, but there's no point in celebrating a Democrat.)
Reagan did an immigration amnesty.
Eisenhower was simply too long ago, and in any case, we don't make war heroes like that in this country anymore.
Who better, from that perspective, than smart, bookish, paranoid Nixon? Still an American, and still an Americanist, for those who aren't post-American. turrible_tao argued that without Nixon, the Republican brand would not have been set up for Reagan. On the other hand, they seem much less interested in Kissinger.
For Millenials, whose formative political experience was watching the United States go to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the idea of a President who wasn't quite so enamored of, and quite so optimistic about, the power of democracy to transform undeveloped countries, might seem appealing.
As for myself, when I was young, I didn't expect to have much of an opinion about Richard Nixon one way or the other. I interpreted a lot more about politics from my high school history classes than my classmates apparently did.
I have a lot more experimentation to do.
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