During the spring and summer, primary elections were held as the political parties considered their options for nominees. By the time the Republican National Convention began in Miami, the delegate counts were such that there was still no clear nominee. The leading candidates were Nixon, Reagan, and Nelson Rockefeller.
The media watched closely as the time for the first balloting neared. William F. Buckley offered analysis and commentary on the ABC network for primetime television. Although Reagan and Rockefeller worked energetically, the momentum among the delegates seemed to favor Nixon. But no candidate had the required number of delegates until shortly before the balloting.
Which ideas did the candidates represent? Rockefeller appealed to the wing of the Republican Party which can be labeled as “moderate” or “left-wing,” depending on who’s doing the labeling. Reagan and Nixon were ideologically similar to each other, to the extent that Reagan supported Nixon’s foreign policies in the early 1970s, and Nixon supported Reagan candidacy in 1980. The two conferred with each other when one of them was president.
Explaining Nixon on live TV, Buckley said:
This country has had the most phenomenal success of any country in the world in graduating people from poverty into affluence, and that graduation has been the result of economic and private activity, not government activity.
Buckley added: “Under the circumstances,” Nixon “wants to maintain those wellsprings of action.” According to Buckley, Nixon sees that giving people the freedom to act is the best way to create social mobility — a chance to move up — and therefore the best way to address issues like poverty and race relations.
The standard response to this view, then and now, is to point to inequality. In the twenty-first century, it has become common to focus on equity instead of equality, but few ordinary Americans, and even fewer in the media and in academia, can accurately express the distinction between the two concepts. In 1968, the word ‘equality’ was the operative word for such discussions.
Buckley presents the view that a government which usually refrains from intervention and regulation and a government which hesitates to create, fund, and sustain programs in response to social problems is the type of government which offers the best solutions to the problem of poverty. It offers chances and opportunities; it offers social mobility. But the standard response again points out that the result of Buckley’s proposal will not be equality. Under Buckley’s system, some people will have more and some will have less.
Buckley suggests that the goal is not equal status, but rather equal opportunity: This is the meaning of the twenty-first century’s distinction between ‘equality’ and ‘equity’ in political rhetoric.
Given equal opportunities, one person might decide to study engineering and another person might decide to study poetry. The engineer will probably earn more money than the person who analyzes poetry. Inequality is the result of unrestrained choices. In Buckley’s words:
Unless you have the freedom to be unequal there is no such thing as freedom. Every single person who owns a Ford car today is considered, by terms of international statistics, as being especially privileged. My point is that he worked to achieve it and that we ought to encourage a system which permits people like you and people like Mr. Smith and people like the technicians in this room to make progress. The fact that they make more progress than other people is not their fault nor is it the fault of other people. It’s the fault of freedom, but this I judge to be a price that we ought to be willing to pay in order to indulge the great animating force of progress in the world.
Having given the standard account of how a free society with a limited government creates opportunity for upward social mobility for those in the lower classes, Buckley turned to the general mood of the time. The year 1968 has been well documented for its chaos: student protests on university campuses, riots in cities, passionate and conflicting opinions about the Vietnam War and about race relations, increasing drug use, crime in the large cities, and other matters.
When asked what the presumptive nominee should say about the unstable ambience of the year, Buckley said:
I think the strongest line he could take is to face the people of the United States and say, “The reason, the principal reason, for the discontent of our time is because you have become encouraged by a demagogy of the left to believe that the federal government is going to take care of your life for you.” The answer is the federal government (a) can’t (b) shouldn’t (c) won’t. Under the circumstances look primarily to your own resources — spiritual, economic, and philosophical — and don’t look to the government to do it because the government is going to fail you.
Implicitly or explicitly, the notion was promulgated that the government is there to help people and there to solve problems. Having integrated this notion into their thinking and conception of life, people are radically disappointed when they discover that the government can’t, shouldn’t, and won’t fill the roles and complete the tasks which this notion assigns to it. This notion has been insinuated so pervasively that people assume in perhaps an almost subconscious way. Despite clear evidence that government is incapable of managing society, some people continue to insist that it do so.
So far, Buckley had described Nixon, who was not yet the party’s official nominee. The question poses itself: Is Buckley’s description accurate? Buckley’s description of Nixon seems quite similar to Buckley’s description of Buckley. Was this all wishful thinking? Was Buckley perceiving Nixon accurately? What would Nixon do and say if nominated? What would Nixon do and say if elected?
Buckley was offering analysis and commentary during the Republican National Convention in August 1968. His description of Nixon at that time contained a degree of ideological purity and consistency which one might expect in an abstraction, but not in a living flesh-and-blood candidate, who had to include in his calculations both the sometimes self-contradictory desires of the voters and the complexity of national and international circumstances.
In point of fact, the convention selected Nixon to be the nominee, and the voters chose Nixon. Buckley backed Nixon, mainly because Nixon was preferable to Hubert Humphrey, the nominee of the Democratic Party.
After the Republican National Convention, the Democrats had nominated Humphrey at their convention in Chicago in August 1968. He was committed to keeping the United States in the Vietnam War. The war was becoming increasingly unpopular, and the Democrats chose to take a pro-war stance. There was significant anti-war sentiment, even within the Democratic Party.
With Nixon, the Republicans had an anti-war candidate. One of his standard slogans during the campaign was: “I pledge to you that we shall have an honorable end to the war in Vietnam.”
Humphrey would work to continue the war; Nixon would work to end it. In fact, he did end the Vietnam War, and ended the military draft.
In other ways, however, Nixon did not perform as Buckley hoped.
Buckley considered Nixon too much of a pragmatist or opportunist rather than a pure free-market ideologist. Nixon’s “wage and price controls” in 1971 was a clear violation of free market principles. Buckley opposed the controls fiercely.
Nixon created the EPA, and embraced the “Philadelphia Plan” which was an early version of affirmative action. Buckley saw this as an abandonment of the principle of limited government, and felt that Nixon lacked convictions.
Despite these and other disappointments with Nixon, Buckley endorsed him in 1968, and again in 1972, as a tactical move against other candidates.
