Becoming "Beautiful Winners"

If our present-day "New Right" is to succeed, we have much to learn about political courage from the "Old."

Jonathan Richie serves as the lead press secretary for the Texas Office of the Attorney General and formerly worked as the senior reporter for The Dallas Express covering Texas politics. He graduated with an undergraduate degree in Classics from Houston Christian University and holds a master’s in History from Liberty University. You can find him on Twitter (or X) @JRichieTX.

For Pat Buchanan, the idyllic Key Biscayne off the coast from Miami could not have differed more from the Nixon administration’s death throes. The story is familiar. After winning reelection with forty-nine states, President Richard Nixon abdicated his position on August 9, 1974, due to the fallout of the Watergate scandal. Buchanan, despite his fiery multi-hour testimony before Congress without the aid of an attorney, had escaped the political proscriptions and was neither thrown in prison nor forced to retire from public life.  

This was little comfort to Buchanan as he sat on a beach in 1975, watching the undeniable conservative mandate given to Nixon subverted and destroyed by President Gerald Ford’s weak leadership and the Democrat Congress. Why was it, he asked, that conservative votes so often turn into liberal victories? His simple answer is as true today as it was then: we are far too often afraid of the fight. 

“Conservatives should seek out, not avoid, political conflict with liberals of both parties, on issues, domestic and foreign. We have nothing to lose by confrontation politics,” Buchanan wrote in his first book after Watergate. “The nation is a divided country; but it was not divided by conservatives; and it should not be our business to compromise our principles, to silence our complaints, or to abandon our point of view to ‘bring us together.’”¹

Based on his observations during the Nixon years, upon gaining power many Republicans were “less interested in the daily, bitter and bruising confrontations with the bureaucracy and press — which a conservative domestic policy necessarily entails — than in winning plaudits as ‘progressives’ with ‘bold new programs’ of their own.”² Because Republicans failed to realize that the Left views the political conflict as mortal combat, they would compromise and cave in.

Too many people who want strong conservative policies enacted do not want to sacrifice generally quiet lives and good repute within polite society — which are so often destroyed. The other side uses such all-out tactics because fundamentally, “What [they] seek is not reform, but power,” Buchanan noted. “They are social revolutionaries.”³ For the Left, politics is not some game, debate competition, or even a significantly important portion of one’s life. For them, it is life itself. There is no higher calling.

And so, the Right keeps losing ground and the Left keeps marching forward. Nearly fifty years ago, as the effects of Watergate rippled across the country, the situation appeared hopeless. Buchanan rejected such defeatism, however, writing that “Despite the seeming inevitability of their triumph, the liberal establishment is not invincible; it is soft at the core.”⁴

If conservatives would only put up a dogged fight, they would find the Left, like the schoolyard bully, to be more bark than bite. “Nothing would advance his cause more than to abandon this struthious posture of benign neutrality, for one of active belligerency,” Buchanan urged. The man of the Right “cannot win unless he recognizes he is in a fight, a political and ideological conflict. And his refusal to participate does not mean the struggle ends, but that he will lose.”⁵ 

Unfortunately, however, we have seen from experience that many within the Grand Old Party are content to surrender the field whenever the battle begins. To disagree and reject the daily demands of the Left would go against those hallowed “liberal” principles of “tolerance” and “freedom” so cherished by the Founding Fathers, they complain.

In this manner, Americans have seen their institutions and laws perverted to evil ends so radically contrary to the popular will and political heritage that the country today is unrecognizable from what it once was. Despite this, many in the supposedly conservative political sphere fail to have the fighting faith their ancestors did or the martial spirit necessary to retake lost ground. 

“What the West lacks so evidently and needs so desperately is the resolution, the will, the spirit of sacrifice in the defense of its civilization,” the post-Watergate Buchanan concluded.⁶ But who will fight this fight? Buchanan envisioned a King Solomon; a Charles Martel; a George Washington. “To effect a political counter-revolution in the capital — to which younger conservatives are committed — there is no substitute for a principled and dedicated Man of the Right in the Oval Office. Such a figure is the indispensable element of a conservative counter-revolution.”⁷

For a while, Buchanan had thought that man was Richard Nixon — and for a while that was the case. 

Before Nixon was president, he would have agreed with Buchanan’s assessment that those on the Right needed to get over their fear of rough-and-tumble politics. Shortly after losing the 1960 election to John F. Kennedy, the former vice president retreated to California to write his first book — Six Crises. Reflecting on several of the major political battles he had fought, Nixon provided key insights into the strategies he used to uncover communist spy rings in the Alger Hiss case, survive anti-American mobs in South America, and face down Soviet leaders behind the Iron Curtain.  

Throughout these experiences, Nixon championed that bold action, grounded in America’s distinct religious, political, and moral heritage, would defeat the forces arrayed against the nation. In his day it was the “international Communist conspiracy,” but the lessons apply to today’s globalist Left just the same. 

When he was attacked in Peru by anti-American mobs roused to anger by Communist agitators, Nixon laid out his overarching strategy. “Among the tactics I had found effective in dealing with similar, although less hazardous situations, were these: take the offensive; show no fear; do the unexpected; but do nothing rash.”⁸

Moreover, Nixon also noted that in order to act boldly conservatives needed to move beyond being merely an opposition party. “Certainly more is needed than a purely negative militant ‘anti-Communism.’”⁹ Conservatives and traditionalists cannot win by merely reacting whenever the Left’s schemes disturb the status quo. We have to actively advance a positive vision. 

In 1960, Nixon suggested that vision must include the belief that “every nation has a right to be independent, that individual freedom and human rights are grounded in religious faith and because they come from God cannot be taken away by men.” These tenets, once decided, “must be combined with a crusading zeal, not just to hold our own but to change the world … and win the battle for freedom.”¹⁰

Like Buchanan would a decade later, Nixon recognized that for conservatives to win, they had to counterattack. “You cannot win a battle in any area of life merely by defending yourself.”¹¹ At some point, the Right would have to sally forth from their homes, schools, businesses, and churches to drive the barbarian host away. Without this, the men behind the walls would eventually starve, surrender, and suffer defeat.

The Left, Nixon said, was “out to win the world. … We, too, must play to win. Too often what we try to do is play not to lose. What we must do is to act like Americans and not put our tails between our legs and run every time some Communist bully tries to bluff us.’”¹² Would that more of our allegedly conservative leaders hold such conviction.

For younger conservatives born in the waning days of the last century or the being of our current millennium, the only political leadership we can recall was one of retreat — a party of “beautiful losers.” What has been conserved? More importantly, what has been restored? The America we long for is one we never knew, and in many cases, one foreign to our parents as well. This reality makes it all the more important for the rising conservative generation to study the lessons of the Old Right.

Fundamentally though, the battle will not be won between the library shelves but on the field of action. Nixon and Buchanan would apply their lessons in ’68 and ’74, forging the great Silent Majority. More recently, the dauntless courage of Donald Trump has shown just how desperate the American people are for a man who will fight.

However, the liberal establishment will lie, cheat, steal, manipulate, and intimidate in hopes that the Right abandons the field. While this has been Republican custom for decades, experience shows that if we stand firm and advance unwaveringly the other side will break ranks and scurry away.

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1. Patrick Buchanan, Conservative Votes, Liberal Victories: Why the Right Has Failed (New York: Quadrangle, 1975), 8.

2. Ibid., 18.

3. Ibid., 43.

4. Ibid., 44.

5. Ibid., 48.

6. Ibid., 162.

7. Ibid., 166.

8. Richard Nixon, Six Crises (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1962), 201.

9. Ibid., 68.

10. Ibid., 68.

11. Ibid., 83.

12. Ibid., 207.