Letters to the Editor
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@jebldmm
That said - "the most left-wing since Nixon" requires some explanation for those of us whose only memory of Nixon is that the damned Watergate hearing pre-empted our regular afternoon cartoons. Is this supposed to be snark? The rest of the paragraph reads as if it's serious, but I was under the impression that Nixon was pretty conservative.
It's weird, I know, given his image as the American Antichrist, but Nixon really was the last liberal American president. It probably wasn't something he wanted to be, but to outflank the still-active Left in this country back then, he enacted all manner of progressive legislation -- and there were still New Dealers in Congress back then, who knew how to legislate, could bring good bills through Congress. The New Right hadn't fully consolidated their hold on the GOP back then; they didn't really begin picking up steam until Reagan.
It's a sad state of how the Right came to dominate political discourse in this country that everybody since Nixon has governed to his right, and any discussion of "liberal" versus "conservative" is as relative as how those words are thrown around in the Supreme Court.