Politics & Power Quote by Earl Butz

The line lands like a shrug with a knife hidden inside it: Nixon didn’t just govern; he became a social position. Earl Butz, a blunt Midwestern administrator who served in Republican circles, frames opposition to Nixon not as moral judgment or political disagreement but as fashion - “popular,” a fad, a status marker. That word choice is the tell. It’s meant to delegitimize critics by recasting their outrage as performative taste, the kind of stance you adopt to belong.

The subtext is defensive and disciplinary. If hating Nixon was “popular,” then maybe Watergate-era condemnation was less about abuses of power and more about cocktail-party conformity, media herd behavior, campus energy, the thrill of booing the villain. Butz isn’t arguing Nixon was innocent; he’s implying the crowd was suspect. It’s a classic move from inside power: treat accountability as trend, and you soften the sting of the charge.

Context matters because Nixon’s unpopularity was not an abstract vibe. It was a rolling accumulation: Vietnam, secrecy, enemies lists, the texture of paranoia culminating in a scandal that rewired Americans’ expectations of executive ethics. By the mid-1970s, disillusionment had its own cultural infrastructure - late-night comedy, investigative journalism, a public newly fluent in the language of “cover-up.” Butz’s remark tries to turn that infrastructure into mere peer pressure.

Its intent, then, is reputational triage: rescue the tribe by suggesting the tribe’s target was chosen by trend, not truth. In doing so, it accidentally concedes Nixon’s central cultural fact: he was so polarizing that opposition became an identity.