Astral Codex Ten

Nixon

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Nixon

Article

Nixon is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 9 times across 9 issues between March 12, 2021 and October 23, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Nixon’s new club, the Orthogonians, was for the strivers”; “he makes Nixon look trustworthy”; ""only Nixon can go to China” sense”. It most often appears alongside Trump, France, United States.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 9
  • Issue count: 9
  • First seen: March 12, 2021
  • Last seen: October 23, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Richard Nixon Vs. Cool
March 12, 2021 · Original source
In Rick Perlstein's excellent "Nixonland", he says that Richard Nixon had exactly this idea in college, and managed to make it work pretty well. He also ties this in to Nixon's future success at building a Republican "silent majority" coalition of anti-hippie reaction vs. the latte-sipping NYT-reading 70s liberal "consensus". If I may quote at length:
“As a schoolboy he hadn't a single close friend, preferring to cloister himself up in the former church's bell tower, reading, hating to ride the school bus because he thought the other children smelled bad. At Whittier, a fine Quaker college of regional reputation unknown anywhere else, he embarked upon what might have been his most humiliating job of all: learning to be a backslapping hail-fellow-well-met. ("I had the impression he would even practice his inflection when he said 'hello,'" a reporter later observed.) The seventeen-year-old blossomed when he realized himself no longer alone in his outsiderdom: the student body was run, socially, by a circle of swells who called themselves the Franklins, and the remainder of the student body, a historian noted, "seemed resigned to its exclusion." So this most unfraternal of youth organized the remnant into a fraternity of his own. Franklins were well-rounded, graceful, moved smoothly, talked slickly. Nixon's new club, the Orthogonians, was for the strivers, those not to the manner born, the commuter students like him. He persuaded his fellows that reveling in one's unpolish was a nobility of its own. Franklins were never photographed save in black tie. Orthogonians worse shirtsleeves. "Beans, brains, and brawn" was their motto. He told them *orthogonian*—basically, "at right angles"—meant "upright," "straight shooter." Also, their enemies might have added, all elbows.
“The Orthogonians' base was among Whittier's athletes. On the surface, jocks seem natural Franklins, the Big Men on Campus. But Nixon always had a gift for looking under social surfaces to see and exploit the subterranean truths that roiled underneath. It was an eminently Nixonian insight: that on every sports team there are only a couple of stars, and that if you want to win the loyalty of the team for yourself, the surest, if least glamorous, strategy is to concentrate on the nonspectacular—silent—majority. The ones who labor quietly, sometimes resentfully, in the quarterback's shadow: the linemen, the guards, the punter. Nixon himself was exemplarily nonspectacular: the 150-pounder was the team's tackle dummy, kept on squad by a loving, tough, and fatherly coach who appreciated Nixon's unceasing grit and team spirit—nursing hurt players, cheering on the listless, even organizing his own team dinners, entertaining the guests on the piano, perhaps favoring them with the Orthogonian theme song. It was his own composition.
Your Book Review: The Years Of Lyndon Johnson
May 07, 2021 · Original source
I could speculate about diffuse, inchoate things. But let's get specific. Suppose LBJ is found frozen in the Arctic ice, is brought back to life (à la Captain America), and runs for president again. (He only was elected once before, so the 22nd Amendment would not prevent him.) Would you vote for him? If you think of LBJ fighting for civil rights, he seems like a second Lincoln. If you consider how LBJ lied about the Vietnam War, he makes Nixon look trustworthy.
Book Review: Modi - A Political Biography
September 14, 2021 · Original source
So how did Modi become famous enough to use the position as a springboard to national power? For one thing, he was genuine in his commitment to cut red tape and unwind India's socialist legacy, which made him seem like the only person with a real alternative to the status quo. For another (his preferred explanation), the constant nationwide media attacks on him kept his name in the news: it felt like the elites were saying he was the guy they were afraid of, and everyone who wanted a guy the elites were afraid of was all too happy to take them at their word. For another (Modi self-servingly claims), the media's constant attempts to tar him as far-right gave him a mandate to actually be pretty moderate and (when needed) pro-Muslim, in the "only Nixon can go to China" sense. Finally, he had a reputation as the least corrupt person in Indian government - something his biography, religious views, and sense of personal austerity helped back up. His time in Gujarat was mostly unmarked by corruption scandals, and he made the right noises about fighting corruption in his underlings. This was a special draw after an especially corrupt Congress administration.
Your Book Review: The Outlier
July 08, 2022 · Original source
Despite the fact that his gubernatorial campaign was premised entirely on obscuring his actual beliefs, he opens his presidential campaign with the slogan “I’ll never lie to you.” He runs an Obama-esque campaign, emphasizing his personal background and outsider status rather than any specific accomplishments. By the time he wins the primary, he has a huge polling lead over the incumbent president, Gerald Ford, who’s unpopular thanks to his recent pardon of Richard Nixon and the memory of that time he slipped and fell down the stairs of Air Force One.
Inline links: that time he slipped and fell down the stairs of Air Force One
The politically easy move for Carter would be to drag out the negotiations until the canal becomes the next president’s problem, just as Johnson, Nixon, and Ford all did before him. But for better or for worse, Carter almost never does the politically easy thing. “It’s obvious we cheated the Panamanians out of their canal,” he says, and he negotiates a treaty in which ownership of the canal is turned over to Panama, in exchange for the U.S.’s right to militarily ensure its “neutral operation.” It’s a clever diplomatic solution—Panama gets nominal ownership while we retain all the benefits ownership provides—but the American public hates it. To the average voter, it feels like we’re just giving some random country “our” canal.
Reading this book, I kept imagining the alternate history in which Reagan succeeds in his 1976 primary challenge to Gerald Ford, which he lost narrowly in real life. Since Reagan is a much more talented politician than Ford, and isn’t tainted by Ford’s association with Nixon, he almost certainly picks up a couple points of the vote and beats Carter. Then he ends up presiding over stagflation and takes the blame for the poor economy. He loses in 1980 to Ted Kennedy, who ushers in a decade of liberal dominance until his presidency implodes in scandal amidst the revelation of his many drunken affairs.
Your Book Review: The Society Of The Spectacle
July 22, 2022 · Original source
Debord in France, 1954 Published in 1967, The Society of the Spectacle is his magnum opus and lasting legacy. It unfolds in staccato bursts, almost like a book of aphorisms. The writing is pithy and poetic, albeit with the occasional lapse into the meandering, circular prose so typical of critical theory. This makes it extremely readable, particularly for a work of political philosophy. One downside of his style is that he tends to state his points in just-so fashion. We’ll have to do some of the legwork for him to flesh things out. Strap in, boys - we’ve got a bumpy road ahead of us. I. A More Perfect Union The spectacle is never outright defined; or rather, the entire book is a series of definitions, each approaching from a different angle. What Debord describes is really a combination of two things; the total triumph of capitalism, and the rise of mass media. It might seem strange for Debord to declare capitalism victorious at the height of the Cold War. The Soviet Union was very much a superpower, and Nixon had yet to go to China. But as a real Marxist, he had already arrived at what would become the historical consensus - communism, as practiced, was merely an inferior cousin to its free market foes. Unsurprisingly, capitalism is the best system for the accumulation of capital. And despite their pretensions, communist societies had the same goals as every modern nation - wealth, prosperity, innovation, and growth. In Debord’s reading of history, “the bourgeoisie is the only revolutionary class that has ever won; and it is also the only class for which the development of the economy was both the cause and the consequence of its taking control of society.” The revolutions of the previous centuries were economic in nature, replacing kings with merchant princes. As a result, all societies began to judge themselves in almost purely economic terms, regardless of their ideological leanings. [2] Media developed symbiotically with capitalism, and together these twin forces changed the world. Twentieth-century forms of media were one-way communications. The owners of society were also the owners of the media, and the messaging reflected this power dynamic. Long before the general public became disillusioned with the news, Debord was woke to the fact that ‘the free press’ was largely a myth. He saw the shaping of the narrative firsthand, and well knew the ability of the media to amplify or ignore as convenient. As the spectacle conquered the earth, it took on different forms. Debord differentiated between the concentrated, diffuse, and integrated modes of the spectacle: Communism and fascism were the primary examples of the concentrated spectacle, with totalitarian control of the economy and the media centralized in the hands of the State.
Inline links: The Society of the Spectacle
From Nostradamus To Fukuyama
September 28, 2022 · Original source
But partly it’s because the world is so much worse than we’re used to, that it’s hard not to wilt when confronted with the badness of even something quite a bit better than normal. I think Obama was a better-than-average president. But if someone predicted “Oh yeah, Obama, great guy” - well, I mean, he did drone-bomb a lot of children. He failed to close Guantanamo, failed to end mass incarceration, failed to make significant progress on the climate, and had an important journalistic organization call his administration the most closed, anti-transparency, and hostile to investigation presidency since Nixon. By his own admission, he messed up his handling of the Libyan revolt so badly that the country is now controlled by warlords and re-instituting slavery. I’m not trying to attack Obama here! Probably some of these things are exaggerations others aren’t really his fault. This is my point! It sounds kind of hollow when I say that! Even good presidents will have a lot of things going on that are so bad that it feels cruel or hollow to say they were good.
Inline links: call his administration, messed up his handling
Sorry, I Still Think I Am Right About The Media Very Rarely Lying
December 29, 2022 · Original source
The US branch of St. Hubertus was founded at Bohemian Grove, a secret society of elites (past members include Nixon, Reagan, Kissinger, and Hearst) who meet in a private redwood forest near San Francisco and do undisclosed things there.
Dictator Book Club: Putin
August 03, 2023 · Original source
Reading this has made me seek out concerns about the FBI more, which led me to articles like Why We Can’t Trust The FBI and FBI Helps Ukraine Censor Twitter Users. I absolutely believe the FBI is spreading fear of terrorism for their own gain, often crosses the line between monitoring extremists and entrapping/provoking them, and is part of the general censorship apparatus. But even their enemies don’t accuse them of the tiniest fraction of what Putin and his security services were doing. I’ve also been trying to pay more attention to ways that the administration uses the courts and Justice Department to go after their enemies; although this is a time-honored dictatorship tactic, I think the allegations against Trump are mostly fair and there aren’t a lot of other, unfair ones I know about. I do think it’s a valid question whether, even if the allegations against Trump are fair, we ought not to make them, as part of a norm of making it hard to investigate enemies of the regime. But I’m not sure there has ever been such a norm - the investigations of Nixon and Clinton went further, on less serious charges.
Inline links: Why We Can’t Trust The FBI, FBI Helps Ukraine Censor Twitter Users
Secrets Of The Median Voter Theorem
October 23, 2024 · Original source
In 1964, LBJ beat Goldwater 61-39. In 1972, Nixon beat McGovern 61-37. Even as recently as 1984, Reagan beat Mondale 59-41. But we already know that partisanship was weaker in those days. The Median Voter Theorem only works if you can reduce everything to a single straight line. If voters don’t care about the right-left spectrum, they might judge based on criteria like “Reagan is more charismatic”, and then if everyone agrees that he’s charismatic you can get 59-41 or 90-10 or whatever numbers you want. In the old days, partisanship was too weak for the Median Voter Theorem to hold. Now it’s strong enough to matter, but there’s enough primary effect and “collusion” that parties don’t race towards the center, instead only trying to maintain equal distance from the center. But we may still find this surprising. The parties - especially the Republican Party - don’t feel like masterminds executing a complicated dance where they determine the exact amount of extremism the voters can tolerate. And what about non-partisan factors? Do they figure in? If some people dislike Trump because he committed 10,000 felonies and an attempted coup, do the Democrats enter that into their calculations and veer slightly further left? If Biden is demented, do the Republicans enter that into their calculations and veer slightly further right? If so, how come when Biden was replaced with the less-demented Kamala and the Democrats’ betting odds went way up, Trump didn’t change any of his positions AFAICT? The stats show that the past few elections, adjusted for electoral vote advantage, have all been around 49-51. But it doesn’t seem like the parties are working as hard as they would have to be to do it on purpose. Is it just a coincidence? Is there some deeper thermostat independent of the platforms and candidates of the moment? I’m not sure. But I do think we can say with confidence that the reason elections are almost never 80-20 or 99-1 is something like Median Voter Theorem. III. Okay, so the parties have to be in the middle. But which part of the parties? In the middle of what? Do parties target the median popular voter, or the median electoral voter? It must be the latter. We saw above that elections get closer, rather than further, from 50-50 after you adjust for the GOP electoral advantage. Also, this is obviously what you would do if you were at all sensible. You even see evidence of parties doing this; for example, lots of people talk about how the “tipping point state” for this election is Pennsylvania, so both candidates are investing lots of resources there. That’s classic Median Voter Theorem! Here’s a harder question. If you want to control the Presidency, you should target the median electoral voter. If you want to control the House of Representatives, then to a first approximation you should target the median popular voter, since House Districts mostly reflect population. If you want to control the Senate, you should target a different median voter entirely, since the Senate gives small states even more of an advantage than the Electoral College does. Parties want to control all three of these things, so who should they target? Ideally, Presidential candidates would target the median Presidential voter, Senate candidates the median Senate voter, etc. But it may not be this easy. Voters may work off a gestalt impression of where “the party” stands. In theory, the Republican candidate for Governor in California could appeal to the median Californian; in practice, Republicans almost never win in California because Californians hate the national Republican Party. So parties may have to target one of these goals to the exclusion of the others. There’s rarely a united House/Senate platform (Gingrich’s Contract With America possibly excepted). So probably both parties target the Presidency. If we assume small states tend conservative, then the median House voter should be further left, and the median Senate voter further right, than the median Presidential voter. If parties have to run a unified platform, and they optimize this platform to win the Presidency, we should expect to see Democrats win the House and Republicans win the Senate more often than chance. Is this right? Add on the two recent Congresses not shown, and since the Clinton era, Democrats have controlled 4/13 Houses and 6/13 Senates, the opposite of my prediction. I think there’s not enough data for this to mean anything, and continue to think there might be a slight inherent Median Voter Theorem fueled tendency for Democrats to win the House (possibly counterbalanced by other things like who has gerrymandered more successfully). IV. Suppose something happens to give one party an advantage. Maybe DC, Puerto Rico, and Guam all become states, giving the Democrats six extra guaranteed Senators and some extra electoral votes. Which of these do we expect: It’s very hard to have 54 Senate seats. Therefore, Democrats would control the Senate almost all the time, with a somewhat lesser but still probably decisive permanent Presidential advantage.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!nsjv!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3ee3413b-b877-452c-9728-eb10f611b4d6_8888x7887.png