Increasingly, I’ve been observing increasing parallels between the election of 1972 and 2008. The crises in those eras, while different at home have a strong similarity- a foreign war with no conclusive end in sight- Viet Nam in ‘72, and the Iraq-Afghanistan war in 2008.
In both elections, the wars created rifts in our population that bled into our domestic problems and differences. In both, those rifts split long before the elections themselves, were evidenced in earlier elections, but the ‘72-’08 elections became the culmination of enormous shifts in the country’s essential political thoughts and political outlook.
And, importantly, the same generation of voters was heavily involved in both.
When I enlisted in the Navy in 1965 at age 21, I wasn’t very political. If anything, I was a typical Idaho kid, conservative in nature, but uninvolved and disconnected with politics in general. I was too young to vote in 1964, and in 1968, I was in the service and didn’t know what I believed politically, though by then, I had come to oppose the war. I received my abstentee ballot while cruising off the shores of Africa, and after studying it and realizing I didn’t know a damn thing about any of the candidates, made the ballot into a paper airplane and sailed it over the side of my ship.
During my service, I gradually saw the Viet Nam war as a loser. By the time I was discharged, my view was the same as a lot of the kids I served with. And like most of them, I simply went home. I wasn’t spat on, or disparaged in any way for my military service, as most vets weren’t. I just came home. That was in May, 1969. By the end of June, I realized that the country no longer supported the war while waiting for some parts at a farm machine store. A couple of old Mormon farmers were in the store, waiting as I was, and discussing the war. Neither of them wanted any more of it, and I realized then, that if two old conservative farmers wanted out, Viet Nam was a lost cause.
The kids had been against the war widely for years before then. The draft, which had been in place since the Korean War, with all it’s exemptions, was ruinously corrupt, and very draconian- if a kid didn’t have an exemption when he got his induction notice, he had very limited ways of avoiding being drafted- the only ways to avoid service were to fail the pre-induction physical, get an exemption before the physical, go on the run and stay one jump ahead of the local draft board, or enlist.
As the years went on, this system met ever greater resistance and protest. The March on Washington, in 1967, was the first of the huge marches that showed just how big the resistance was. The kids weren’t quiet about it, either… ‘Hell No! We Won’t Go!’ became the chant for a generation who looked to the Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, to put an end to the war and the unfair draft. The fury over the war grew in size, scope, and generational opposition after 1967, and the older people, the ones Nixon called the Silent Majority, found the anti-war movement unseemly.
These folks didn’t like any of the huge social changes that were going on at the same time worse than they didn’t like the war. Some of them clung to patriotism, some didn’t, but in general, they didn’t like the dope smoking long-haired hippy kids and their hedonistic ways. As children of the Great Depression, they couldn’t understand what the kids were so mad about, especially when it was their kids who were growing their hair long.
The Silent Majority wanted things to go back to where they were just a few years earlier. Some of them wanted the country to go back to being apartide again, especially in the South, where The Democratic party watched some of it’s Southern states desert after splitting off from the main party. The Democrats lost their conservative base with the Civil Rights laws Johnson got passed.
By 1968, the Democrats began losing the center as well. Johnson, a populist and strong liberal, had passed all of Kennedy’s most liberal agenda into law and had seen all his civil rights laws reach passage. He accomplished almost everything his supporters wanted to the full, even though he lost the South doing it. That he became so despised by both parties, and by the voters, confused and saddened him, and he had enough. He realized he wouldn’t win and called it quits.
1968 was the flaming year when everything blew up. ‘Nam went bad, got bigger and dirtier, politicians and civic leaders were assassinated, the Democratic convention turned into a riot squelched by a Democratic mayor, and it looked like no one was on the job, tending the store in Washington. New Nixon, out of the scene for 8 years, came back with an easy task- all he had to do was promise to stop the war and the civil disorder. Law and Order was what the people wanted, and what Nixon guaranteed. The Republicans presented a united front against the fractured Democrats, who nominated Johnson’s equally liberal V.P. Hubert Humphrey as a compromise candidate. Humphrey was as old guard as Johnson, and as connected in the halls of Congress, but the kids didn’t like him.
The kids were colorful, noisy as hell, insulting, and often radical. There weren’t very many activists in their total numbers, and most of the young in general either liked them or not, in degrees. As the activists become more radical, the support for them grew steadily less among their peers. But they pulled off a mesmerizing side show with the convention riots, which led to another year’s worth of attention with the trials that followed.
By early 1971, the anti-war movement was at it’s strongest and largest. Nixon had widened the war, and the lottery draft system had done away with the deferments. For the first time, college kids were getting drafted alongside blue-collar kids with deferments, and none liked it. The Kent State massacre, in May of 1970, created an even deeper divide, even as it shocked everyone as much as the deaths in 1968.
Sipro Agnew, Nixon’s V.P., was the mouthpiece of the administration, and preached the politics of division to the confused political center. The Democrats began losing their ideals, their footing, and their financial support. And all was lost quickly, as Congress still had large Democratic majorities in both houses.
By 1972, The party implosion was complete. George McGovern, the candidate who should have been nominated in 1968, was weakened by his choice of Tom Eagleton, who had gotten electroshock treatments for depression 10 years earlier. He withdrew, was replaced by Sargeant Shriver, a Kennedy brother-in-law, but the damge was done. McGovern was never able to find and promote a single powerful reason to vote Democrat, and Nixon won re-election.
The Viet Nam war eventually ended, badly. The protestors gave up politics and went on with their lives. The first economic tremors of what was to come showed up in 1974, with the oil embargo. The draft was stopped, the military was cut back deeply. But the divisions remained in both the young and older voters. The division was to calcify into the young as they aged, and faced one recession after another into and throughout the ’80s and ’90s. The country swung rightward.
Since the 2008 election is still fresh on most folk’s minds, I don’t think I have to go into such great detail, but the comparisons are obvious. The party that was in a long minority, the Republicans, had taken over Congress. With George W.Bush, they had their perfect leader, a man who strongly believed the most conservative principles of the party and advanced them, Like Johnson, he widened a war, but he also started another on a different front, and got stuck in the tar pit on both of them. Although politically less skilled than Johnson, Bush had a V.P. and a Chief of Staff who more than made up with their skills, and Bush had the same big business support that Johnson enjoyed.
Until the perfect storm of 2008, when the economy collapsed under his watch. Bush was just as surprised as Hoover, but Hoover had the misfortune to have the Great Depression hit on the first year of his single term, and Bush had the luck to have the second Great Depression hit at the end of his second.
His party was left in the same great disarray as the Democrats were after the Johnson presidency. The mid-terms of 2006 were the equivalent of the 1968 election except that in ‘68, a new President was elected along with a large Republican congressional minority. The tide began to turn in ‘06, but it came in in 2008.
Now, the generation who was split and scarred by Viet Nam were the Silent Majority, only much less silent and much less centered. The Tea Party movement took it’s rule book from the protesters of the 60’s, and like them, they have only one thing they are protesting- the unexpected, sudden election of a man they didn’t see coming, and a majority of congressional members who were swept in with him. As with Nixon, the political fight became a struggle for the Big Middle, the Silent Majority, who are the moderate center that is slow to move very far one way or the other.
Like the Democrats of the early 70’s, the Republicans have lost their ability to persuade the Big Middle. The Democrats of the 70’s tried, and failed, to bring back the progressive populism that had sustained them for so long all through the 80’s and 90’s. It took a war and an economic collapse for the progressives to regain popularity with the Big Middle. It took a big swing to the far left for them to lose the Big Middle in 1972.
The Tea Party message is much more muddled than the war protester’s was. All their talk of Constitution and Liberty are abstracts that are more palatable to the Big Middle than their racist impulses, and their desire to turn back the clock to when things were swell for them. Since the consequences of not bailing out the banks never happened, they believe that TARP and the other bail-outs were never needed in the first place.
Like the protesters, the Tea Party is low in active numbers, higher in sympathetic followers, but not large enough to tip the scales away from the centrist Big Middle.
The Republicans are in similar disarray to the Democrats of 1972. They are trying to find where their base is by going more conservative, just as the Democrats tried to go more liberal, and it isn’t working any better for them than it did for the Democrats.
As the Democrats once longed for another Kennedy, who brought a new brightness to the party, the Republicans now yearn for another Reagan, who was a similar dominant personality. Like the Democrats, none has emerged for the Republicans. And just saying ‘Hell, No!’ to the opposing agenda didn’t work any better for the Democrats of 1972.
Like the war protesters, I expect the Tea Party will eventually yell itself out and fade away after getting enormous attention from the news of the day. Their attempts to sway the Big Middle lack the numbers to really become powerful, and their agenda is too vague to attract the essential centrist and patient body of the Big Middle.
Back in 1969, I heard the Big Middle’s voice in those farmers waiting for their parts. I can’t hear those voices this time. The Democratic progressivism is bound to be tempered and weakened by the Big Middle, but I haven’t heard the voices that are quietly discussing the desire to return to the 2000 decade. The tide has come in as slowly as it went out.
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I’ve been advised by Jim Sathe (I point to his advice time after time, so when do you think I’ll actually take it?) that it’s not worth tangling with these people, life is too precious and short and our time is better spent on those who are not closed minded, who are willing to meet in the middle at times even as they swing opposite at others. In order to do that, I would need to unfriend a few people who are giving me fits.
