Democrats for Nixon
Democrats for Nixon was a campaign to promote Democratic support for the then-incumbent Republican president Richard Nixon in the 1972 United States presidential election. The campaign was led by former Texas governor John Connally, a Democrat who was serving as United States secretary of the treasury at the time.
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The one thing that always blows my mind is how utterly clueless / indifferent the body of Americans were to what was essentially the dismantling of democracy in the States. People studying the scene could have recognised the dog-whistle nature of late 60's "GOP"* agendas and realised what was happening, much of it in reaction to the dismantling of Jim Crow laws earlier in the decade.
And of course, step by step, it's only been getting worse over the years. So the filthy consequences of selling out democracy become the new normal, and because of that fact, the populace turns a blind eye, evidently. And we all get to do the frog-boil dance.
* Quotes being used because even back then, the original GOP party of Lincoln and his subsequent progressive leaders was long, long gone.
More like powerless to do anything about it. Worker solidarity, union bargaining power, and political representation of the working class are at an all time low as a result of half a century of every billionaires's best effort at achieving exactly that.
I'm saying that they did have agency when Nixon was rising, and to a lesser degree as time went on.
I'm no expert on the period, but my sense is that a major bloc of voters were pretty freaked out by the progressiveness of the Sixties, which of course included free love and free hallucinogenics movements, along with deliberate attempts to throw off the propaganda-like nature of earlier decades. So they voted Nixon with the intention of wanting him to 'reign things in,' which I guess he kind of did to an extent via his cooperation with COINTELPRO and his targeting blacks and latinos over petty drug violations. But it was also a bait-and-switch, with the more significant action of enabling the billionaires to buy up everything and subdue the populace as you said.
Yet another example of people not learning from history, as via the robber-barons and monopolies of the previous century, which in many senses spring from the very founding of the country.