On the campaign trail in 1968, a bold memo by a young aide, “Middle America and the New Republican Majority,” started circulating among the Nixon strategists. It argued for a new strategy to fight the Democrats on their own turf, to turn Democratic causes into existential threats, to present their vision of progress as a promise of collapse. Nixon himself was not naturally inclined to turn politics into a conflict of visions, but he saw how Reagan gained from the approach and decided to steal it. It worked, not only against Reagan in the primary but, more importantly, against his Democratic opponent, Hubert Humphrey.
The strategy reached a kind of formal perfection in a famous ad in which the Nixon campaign displayed a motley collection of shouting protesters, burning buildings, and bloodied faces. The music was straight out of a horror movie, with dissonant chord clusters played at uneven intervals over a snare drum. And then Nixon: “I pledge to you, we shall have order in the United States.”
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