The kids call it “Nixonmaxxing,” and I invented it 30 years ago. “I think that his historical record is enjoying a bit of a renaissance, but I think deservedly so,” Vice President J.D. Vance says about Richard Nixon, who has become, as a recent Wall Street Journal headline put it, “an unlikely new icon” for young conservatives.

Maybe I can’t claim to have been the first teenage Republican to have embraced Nixon chic, but all the way back in 1996 a young Danny, irked by the banality of college application essay questions, decided to make his pitch to higher education by writing about the merits of the president who’d been taken down by Watergate. It was a way of daring colleges and universities to reject me.

It was also a way to rebel against the commodification of rebellion under America’s first boomer president, Bill Clinton. A generation of dope-smoking, draft-dodging, self-righteous hippies had become the Establishment – they were running the government, higher education and the entertainment industry, continuing to pose as outsiders as they made millions on Wall Street in the early days of post-Cold War globalization. Peaceniks were waging war as proof of their humanitarianism. Nixon was more honest. Saying “yes” to him was a way of saying “hell no!” to Pearl Jam.

That was then, but today is not so different, except that more of what used to be the conservative counterculture has been co-opted by social and economic liberalism. There’s a reason the young right is more interested in Nixon than in Ronald Reagan. The real, historical Reagan has long since been replaced by a Reagan myth........

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