2020 Trump aims to be 1968 Nixon
Will ‘law and order’ appeal work again?
We are in a perfect avalanche. Racist violence on the part of police in Minneapolis and Louisville and vigilantes in southeast Georgia have metastasized into national revolt and backlash. Malevolence and incapacity at the White House have worsened a pandemic nowhere near wrapping up. Economic catastrophe and consequent hunger are facts of life for tens of millions of Americans. The whole is more, and worse, than the sum of the virulent parts.
The momentum of chaos, violence and polarization is all the more ominous in an election year, when a significant chunk of the country hopes to extend for four more years the government that brought this to pass. Thoughts inevitably return to the dreadful year 1968, when on top of white backlash, a miserable war was raging toward American defeat; the greatest civil rights leader of the 20th century, Martin Luther King Jr., was assassinated in Memphis; and the political leader most likely to lead a movement for national recovery — Sen. Robert Kennedy — was assassinated in Los Angeles.
Analogies between 1968 and 2020 are not perfect. For one thing, America’s war today, ripping the nation apart, is wholly internal, not expeditionary. For a second, America’s world dominance is no longer a wasting asset — it is no longer an asset at all. It has vanished. Third, in 1968 the Great Society had screeched to a halt and not even President Lyndon B. Johnson was still touting his slogan, whereas today’s chaos takes place under a president who promised to “Make America Great Again” and yet, as most of the country sees plainly, he is presiding over shambles. The question to which there is yet no answer is whether President Donald Trump can parlay his ineptitude and national panic into another term.
Fatally damaged leader
In 1968, Johnson understood that his leadership was fatally damaged, and declined to seek four more years. The vice president to whom he tried to bequeath his waning position as the Democratic Party leader was the once crusading Hubert Humphrey who, as the historian Rick Perlstein reminds us, in 1966 responded to a wave of uprisings in American cities with the unguarded statement that if he had to live in the slums, “I think you’d have more trouble than you have had already because I’ve got enough spark left in me to lead a mighty good revolt.”
Humphrey squandered much of his once liberal aura by refusing to break with Johnson over the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War. Johnson’s intractable war-mindedness broke the Democratic Party and brought on primary challenges first from Eugene McCarthy and then from Robert F. Kennedy. Humphrey’s attachment to the war cost him dearly on the left.
Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden today must stand for racial justice and peaceful protest without appearing to sanction urban violence, but the baggage he carries — the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, the Iraq War vote — is not nearly as heavy as what Humphrey had to carry. Correspondingly, the challenge Biden faces from the left has little of the scale and intensity that left Humphrey in the lurch.
In 1968, Richard Nixon handily mobilized law-and-order sentiment against urban disorder by pinning all the insurgencies, troubles and miseries on Democratic leadership. In 2020, Trump would love to follow suit. Like Nixon, he calls himself “your president of law and order” and blames Democrats for all troubles everywhere: Democratic governors for failing to stop the coronavirus pandemic and Democratic mayors for failing to pacify the cities.
The trouble is that since 2017, the president has not been Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. No one but Trump leads the dominant political party. He runs against conditions that he himself has wrought. He has to run against himself. He has pulled many neat tricks during his ruinous political career, but however vast and ugly his repertoire, this is the trick that might very well be beyond him.
Tragic pessimism borne out
Cheery prophecy has never been my game. In 1968, I was a 25-year-old writer for the underground press and a freelance radical with a tragic sense that nothing good was in the cards, pessimistic about the chances that the New Left, with which I had been associated since age 17, was going to recover a clear and practical vision for progress as the world fell apart. That tragic sense was realistic, borne out in assassinations, war and rampaging inequality.
As it turned out, the best of America also came through, though in fits and starts: White supremacy was rolled back, women’s equality stepped up, gay rights recognized, the right to be different honored and humanity held responsible, at least in theory, for the fate of the natural world.
In 2020, I’m a 77-year-old university professor with a deeper and, if anything, more tragic sense that humanity is at a watershed and that unless we renew our relations with our better angels, the worse is yet to come.
Is a new reconstruction possible? For all our perilous conditions, this year offers a promise of what the year 1968, with its dashed hopes and bitter disappointments, denied us: a promise that out of chaos a single humanity can emerge to overcome viciousness and stupidity. This depends not on fate, but most immediately on millions of decisions as near as November about who can lead America out of chaos and toward decency.