After social media interactions with idealistic young people
who disparage President Biden and who appear to be planning to sit out the 2024
election rather than vote for the man they consider, at best, the lesser of two
evils, I’m going back to blogging to look at some recent elections where
idealists, sometimes with the best of intentions, have allowed evil to prevail.
In the nearly sixty years since Lyndon Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater and “movement
conservatism” in a landslide, the extreme right has made not just a comeback, but
in some years a near-takeover, and this year it aims to make that takeover
complete. But it can’t do so without the help of the idealists.
In too many of the elections since 1964, we’ve seen the
triumph of money and the Republican Right. Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George
W. Bush, and worst of all, Donald Trump have prevailed in part because idealistic
people refused to vote for candidates they considered the lesser of two evils.
Yes, all these Republican winners cheated to win: Nixon, by sending Anna Chennault
to sabotage the Paris peace talks; Reagan, whose campaign persuaded the Iranian
authorities not to release the hostages before the election; Bush, whose
“Brooks Brothers Riot” shut down the recount in Miami; and Trump, who may not
have “colluded” with the Russians, but publicly invited them to interfere with
the campaign, which, of course, they did.
And the Democratic losers made their share of mistakes:
Hubert Humphrey waited too long to break with Lyndon Johnson on the Vietnam
War; Jimmy Carter cut off grain exports to the Soviet Union, throwing the
Midwest into a recession; Al Gore put a historic first—naming a Jew, Joe Liebermann, as his
running mate—ahead of campaign strategy, along with refusing Bill Clinton’s
help; and Hillary Clinton slighted Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania in her
campaign, along with making that “basket of deplorables” remark.
But even with the Republican cheating and Democratic bungling,
all the presidents who did so much to turn the U.S. government over to the
moneyed elites and the multinational corporations would have lost without help from
the idealists.
Let’s start with 1968. Lyndon Johnson, who after becoming
president after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, achieved things that had
seemed impossible, beginning with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, followed by Voting
Rights Act, Medicare, and Medicaid, all signed in 1965. But just a month after
Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act,
the first presidential election I got seriously involved
with. I turned 16 the day Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy announced his
candidacy. I was two years away from having to register for the draft, and there
seemed no end to the Vietnam War. Lawrence O’Donnell, in Playing With Fire: The
1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics, puts it
succinctly: ‘[T]he 1968 presidential election would be about nothing less than
life and death. In the nuclear age, all presidential elections were, by
implication at least, about life and death because the commander in chief had
the power to start World War III in minutes by launching nuclear missiles. But
the 1968 election was going to be about the life and death of people we knew.”
O’Donnell continues:
I was in high school in 1968, and I
never heard my brothers and their college-age friends talk about career
planning. They only talked about how to deal with the draft and Vietnam. There
was no long-term planning, no career hopes and dreams. Life was a short-term
game for many young men in 1968. It was as if they were prisoners who would
only begin to think about life on the outside when they got outside. Their
prison was in their pocket, the draft registration card that controlled their
lives and blocked their hopes and dreams.
(O'Donnell, Lawrence. Playing with Fire: The 1968 Election
and the Transformation of American Politics (pp. 10-11). Penguin Publishing
Group. Kindle Edition.)
While I didn’t have that card in my pocket, it was just a
matter of time. I was an enthusiastic McCarthy backer—I sold “McCarthy’s
Million” buttons to my Cedar Falls (Iowa) high school classmates. But after Robert
F. Kennedy’s assassination and the disastrous 1968 Democratic Convention, I
knew that the choice was between Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon, and that
Humphrey was a lot more likely to get us out of Vietnam.
A lot of idealistic McCarthy supporters sat this one out or
voted third-party. While South Dakota Senator George McGovern, who, after Robert
Kennedy’s assassination, became a stand-in for him at the convention, endorsed
Humphrey, McCarthy sat on his hands, even after September 30, when Humphrey broke
with Johnson on the war. McCarthy finally issued a tepid endorsement of Humphrey
on October 29. Nixon won the election by about one percent of the popular vote,
though he did much better in the Electoral College.
Julian E. Zelizer, a political historian at Princeton
University, wrote in Politico on April 21, 2016:
Crucial to Nixon’s victory was that
he won states like California, Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, and New Jersey—all
states where McCarthy had a strong following—by just a few points. Though
counterfactuals are impossible to prove, it is clear that McCarthy’s active
support might have created a different outcome. Humphrey believed it. “A united
party working in my behalf,” he noted in his memoirs, “might have changed the
electoral outcome. Those states could have been won. … Particularly in
California, had McCarthy campaigned early and hard for me and the Democratic
Party, he might have turned it.” McCarthy adamantly denied the charge, joking
that if Humphrey had been victorious “they probably would have said it was
really clever of McCarthy to hold me off.”
While Zelizer admits that he
can’t prove McCarthy’s aloofness elected Nixon, he writes that ‘…’certainly
McCarthy’s refusal to help give credibility to the Humphrey campaign within the
New Left did not help Humphrey’s candidacy. And the feud also had long-term
effects: The Republican Party was able to use the divisions within the
Democratic Party to build a powerful and lasting conservative coalition.”
But we can’t just blame it on
McCarthy, whose erratic behavior during the summer and early fall of 1968 should
have been a sign that he wasn’t the leader we expected him to be back on March
12, when he had nearly beaten Lyndon Johnson in the popular vote and trounced
him in the delegate count. (The upset, plus Robert Kennedy’s entry into the
race, persuaded Johnson to bow out of the presidential race on March 31.) Virtually
everyone who had finished high school had taken civics class and should have
understood that it was either Humphrey or Nixon. And with the racist George
Wallace’s third party run depriving Nixon of electoral votes in the Deep South,
Humphrey had a far better chance than he might have. But, of course, he didn’t
win. Nixon did, with the help of thousands of idealists.
And with Nixon, we had four more
years of war in Southeast Asia, 20,000 more American dead, and surely hundred
of thousands more Asians killed.