Professor of history Kevin Boyle recently published an op-ed in the New York Times about Richard Nixon and his political impact on America today.
In the article, Boyle argues that the residual effects of Nixon’s policies, especially regarding policing and race, are mainly to blame for the divide in this country. He claims that “until Nixon’s version of law and order is purged from American public life, we’re going to remain locked into the nation he built on its appeal, its future shaped, as so much of its past has been, by its racism and its fear.”
“Nixon’s version of law and order has endured, through Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs, George H.W. Bush’s Crime Control Act of 1990 and Bill Clinton’s crime bill to broken windows, stop-and-frisk and the inexorable rise in mass incarceration,” Boyle writes. “Nothing matters more, though, than shattering Nixon’s fusion of race, crime and fear.”
Professor Boyle is also the author of The Shattering: America in the 1960s, which describes the United States’ postwar conflicts and their ramifications on the nation today. His other books include The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945-1968; Muddy Boots and Ragged Aprons: Images of Working-Class Detroit, 1900-1930 (with Victoria Getis); Organized Labor and American Politics, 1894-1994; and Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age.
Read more in the New York Times article, “We Are Living in Richard Nixon’s America. Escaping It Won’t Be Easy.”