Left-wing Idealists and the Triumph of the Right, Part 1: How Idealists Helped Nixon

 

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.