I was watching the Netflix documentary '13th' about the famous amendment to the US constitution that says no man is a slave before the law...unless he has committed a crime. Then go on to say that some elements of the American government used crime parameters after the Civil War as a way to retain a pseudo slavery/indentured system and create a caste of second class citizens which remained in place for about a century until the Civil Rights Movement during President Kennedy/LBJ administration.
Here is where they start to paint Nixon as an ultraconservative and reactionary president bent on restraining the liberalization of African Americans and keeping them subjugated by the system by announcing a War on Drugs that was just a thinly veiled race war against black and latino communities.
How accurate is this portrayal of Nixon? What was his ideological worldview on these societal issues?
The election of 1968 was a referendum on a lot of major American issues--most notably the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. The current president, Lyndon Johnson, had started off his presidency in 1963 as a popular successor to JFK but had since lost a lot of that good feeling with his perceived mishandling of the Vietnam War, and his loss of the traditionally strong Democratic South with his support of civil rights. Given his extreme lack of popularity and assumed coming loss, Johnson declined to run in the 1968 election due to the fact he was likely not going to win.
Johnson's support of the Civil Rights movement and his war on poverty had really harmed his constituency in the South, which had been known as the "Solid South" for generations due to its tendency to vote Democrat almost every presidential election. In the 1964 election, for the first time in generation, the Democrats won without the support of the South, which had gone to Republican Barry Goldwater. Previously a party that more or less ignored civil rights, the Republican Party instead used Johnson's support of civil rights against him in order to grab the support of these Southerners. This is called the "Southern Strategy" as embracing pro-segregation policy was seen as a ploy to win Southern votes for a party that had more or less never done well in the region.
This "Southern Strategy" continued into 1968 as white Americans began to really turn against the civil rights movement, and unsurprisingly against an administration that they felt hadn't done anything about it. Riots in several cities during Johnson's term had really spiked public opinion against the civil rights movement, and the phrase "law and order" began to grow in popularity, especially by Republicans. Nixon's run and win was emblematic of this phrase--his 1968 campaign was essentially a condemning of Johnson and the Democrats' administration and their handling of these two major issues.
As president, Nixon sought to make both groups happy by enforcing integration but at the same time making sure he did not lose his potential white constituency in the South. His administration's response to civil rights was much less progressive than Johnson's had been, placating to white fears of the worst that could come from school integration and busing. Nixon opposed busing personally but had it still enforced it as a policy. Nevertheless, hardly any schools desegregated during his presidency, which many attribute to his reliance on support from pro-segregationists and other white voters who were skeptical of integration in North.
The framing of Nixon as a "reactionary racist" president has plenty of placement in fact. In fact John Erlichman, one of Nixon's advisers, claimed years after the presidency that the War on Drugs policy during his administration was entirely in place to convince voters that Nixon's opponents were criminals who did drugs, and the Nixon administration used this against them:
"You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
Nixon absolutely rose to power on the shoulders of white anxieties about race and maintained popularity through the 1972 election with that same constituency, and his policies and campaigning are very much in line with this. Nixon's win and support is largely seen historically as a response to the civil rights movement in America and white American anxieties about a more integrated country.
References
Dallek, Robert: Lyndon B. Johnson: Portrait of a President
Feldman, Glenn: Painting Dixie Red: When, Where, Why and How the South Became Republican
Lisio, Donald: Hoover, Blacks, and Lily-Whites: A Study of Southern Strategies
McGirr, Lisa: Suburban Warriors: The Origin of the American New Right
Parmet, Herbert: Richard Nixon and his America