Journal of the Plague Year: Why This Is, and Is Not, Like 1968

In January 1968, the North Vietnamese army launched the Tet Offensive, a campaign the profoundly and permanently undermined the American public's confidence in the Vietnam war.  Over 16,000 American soldiers would die in Vietnam over the course of 1968.  In April, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.  In the spring of 1968, riots swept American cities.  In June, Bobby Kennedy, who was almost surely going to be the Democratic nominee for President in the fall, was assassinated.  Ultimately, in November, former Vice President Richard Nixon, a Republican, defeated then-current Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

Given these facts, it is natural to look to 1968 as a model for 2020.  And, those that do that tend to think that this analogy would favor the Republican, Donald Trump.  But I think that is facile.  Yes, there are many parallels between 1968 and 2020, but those parallels point as much against Trump as they point toward him.  And there are some important discontinuities, almost all of which point against Trump.

Let's begin with the biggest discontinuity between 1968 and 2020--the economy.  In 1968, the unemployment rate in the U.S. was 3.4%, and the GDP growth rate was 4.9%--both very solid metrics.  Yesterday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced an unemployment rate of 13.3%, and then immediately "revised" that estimate to 16.3%.  Meanwhile, GDP has declined by 4.8% in 2020.  Those numbers may, and I think to some degree will, get better by November.  But they are still incredibly terrible.  If you look at sitting Presidents who lost re-election in the last 100 years (Hoover in 1932, Ford in 1976, Carter in 1980, Bush Sr. in 1992), the unemployment rate and GDP growth numbers in their election years was 23.6%/-12.9%, 7.8%/5.4%, 7.2%/-0.3%, and 7.4%/3.5%, respectively.  If the numbers in November are in the Ford/Bush Sr. range, then it's potentially survivable for Trump (2012 was 7.9%/2.2%, and Obama won); "well, we're in better shape than 1932!" is not.  And we have a whole long way to go before Trump can even sniff Ford/Bush Sr. numbers.  Lots of smart people will talk about why we should not hold the President accountable for economic problems, and there is an argument that it this particular economic problem is almost uniquely not the President's fault.  Those are nice theoretical arguments, but they don't matter politically.  If the economy sucks, the President will pay for it on Election Day.  And the economy is likely to really, almost historically, suck for Trump. 

   

So, I think there is a chance that none of this will matter.  But let's look at the tone and messaging of 1968 compared to 2020.  Most people people know that Nixon in 1968 ran on "law and order," as Trump will certainly do.  But I think it is important to understand how people understood that pitch in 1968.  It's hard, perhaps impossible, to avoid looking at Nixon through the lens of 1974--the Watergate break-ins and the tapes showing his racism and crudity and paranoia.  And, of course, that was Nixon--after all, he said and did those things.  And the Nixon campaign did run on and through the "Southern Strategy" of code-words and dog-whistles on race that became de rigeur in Republican political strategy beginning with Reagan in 1980.  But keep in mind that the Democratic Party had been offically anti-segregationist for a grand total of 4 years at the time of the '68 election.  Prior to that, while not exactly woke, the Republican Party was the party of racial justice and civil rights, to the extent either party could hold that mantle.  And Nixon had been the Vice President during the Eisenhower administration, who sent the army in to enforce the desegregation of Little Rock, Arkansas's schools.  As it turned out, the Southern Strategy was both the present and the future of the Republican Party as of Nixon's election in 1968, but I don't think that was obvious at the time.  You could in 1968, I think, make a good faith case that Nixon was trying to straddle the fence between the Eisenhower moderate civil rights position and the segregationist views of the "disaffected Democrats" from the South and elsewhere.

No such ambiguity exists in 2020.  Trump is the candidate of racial discrimination and hatred, with not much in the way of pretense or coding.  In many ways, Trump has moved beyond the Southern Strategy, and thus is really more like the other Presidential candidate of 1968, George Wallace, you ran on an overtly segregationist platform and carried five states in the Deep South.  That message has purchase in American life, without question, but it requires you to drink the medicine of racism straight, without any comforting chasers.  And the signs suggest that there are not enough people willing to do that to win a Presidential election in America; more on that later.

Nixon was also running as the familiar face, one that people recognized, but one who had been outside of government for the last eight years.  When Nixon talked about establishing order and contrasting himself with the chaos of the existing administration, that message was a message of change from the status quo.  By contrast, Trump is the sitting President--all of the chaos that he presumably promises to crack down upon are things that happened on his watch.  Trump is forced to argue that he will save America from the chaos he created, which is simply a less effective message than promising to save America from the chaos someone else created.  Remember, many of the worst crack-downs in 1968 were done by Democratic mayors--Mayor Richard Daley in Chicago comes to mind--so Nixon could credibly claim the "left" or "progressive" side of those issues and promise to restore order and reign in out of control local actors running a muck.

In 2020, it is Biden, not Trump, who is the familiar, recognized face that has been outside of the government and promising to restore sanity.  If anything, Biden sits closer to the Nixon place than Trump, at least structurally.  Biden does have the Humphrey problem of being shackled to blundering Democratic mayors and other leaders--if it were me, I would cut them off at the knees and call on a bunch of them to resign for their leadership failures (de Blasio in New York City, maybe Garcetti in LA, if God is Good the useless and embarrassing Andrew Ginther here in Columbus, etc.)  But he is positioned to say that removing the current occupant of the White House will lower tensions on their own accord.  And, in many ways, that's far more credible coming from Biden than it was from Nixon.  In protests relating to racial justice, Biden comes in as the Vice President for the first ever African-American President, and while we can pick apart elements of Obama's record during his eight years, that counts for a lot.

But I think the real key when looking at 1968 and 2020 together can be found in another one of Nixon's catch-phrases--"The Silent Majority."  The notion behind "the Silent Majority" was that the center of gravity of the country was located in ordinary people in small and medium sized communities.  These people were not seen, were not heard, and were often ignored by elites, media members, and political leaders.  If anyone took the time to ask them what they thought, they would tell you that they disapproved of where the country was going, disapproved of the change in values and ideals that had sprung up in recent years.  But they were not willing to sit silently by and let everything be swept away.  

It was a powerful image, and Nixon tapped into it powerfully.  It is still a powerful image.  The problem for Trump is that the nature and composition of the Silent Majority has changed.  The Silent Majority now looks like this:

 

IN Columbus Ohio

This 83 year old woman comes out of her home and holds a sign that says “Defend black voices” as the marchers walk by and cheer for her. “I’m so proud of you young people, she says.

THIS IS AN ALLY!

You go grandma 🥺😭❤✊🏾pic.twitter.com/QZ1xpKm7ii

— StanceGrounded (@_SJPeace_) June 6, 2020

I'm pretty sure I know this woman, and I know this spot.  I lived on the edge of the German Village neighborhood in Columbus for about 6 years, and she lived about two blocks down the street toward the park.  German Village is a classic was rich--then abandoned--then gentrified neighborhood.  While it is near to some poorer neighborhoods, it is certainly not one itself.  If you want to go looking for people who want order, who want things to be kept the way they are, then German Village might be a place to begin looking.  And, yet, here we are.

In 1968, the Silent Majority was all white, had no particular interest in racial reconciliation, believed the cops were on their side, and wanted someone to come in and bust heads and make it all go away.  Those people still exist, in disturbingly large numbers.  But they are not the majority anymore.  The new Silent Majority are people who believe in racial equality (if in some cases imperfectly, or even grudgingly), who want a President who doesn't tweet out insane conspiracy theories or gas protesters for a photo op, who think the cops are out of control.  The Silent Majority is now not all white (fun fact--George Bush Sr. won 60% of the white vote in 1988 and carried 41 states; Mitt Romney won 59% of the white vote in 2012 and lost).  And they sure as hell are not down with sending military forces to put down what have been, especially in the last few days, almost entirely peaceful protests.  

As we speak, a group of once (and, I think they would say, future) Republican operatives are running a series of anti-Trump ads under the banner of "The Lincoln Project."  These ads are unflinching--the most recent one I saw called Trump a traitor and a coward.  This, too, is a manifestation of the Silent Majority.  While courage has been in vanishingly short supply among Republican office holders, something like the Lincoln Project shows that where we are is far, far over the line for the middle of the distribution curve of the American electorate.  

As much as leftists and Bernie-stans don't want to hear this, the candidate of the modern Silent Majority, and of this moment, is Joe Biden.  He's an old guy, and he's about as woke as most of his Silent Majority is.  He, and they, are not enthused about your socialist revolution, and are not sure about every one of the demands on someone's list.  But they don't like what they are seeing, and they are going to do something to bring things back to some semblance of normalcy.  

None of this means the outcome here in inevitable.  Republican politics, at least since 1968, has been premised on the belief that their views and values represented the natural equilibrium in American life, disturbed occasionally by spasms of left-flavored insanity.  That this is not true, and more importantly has been demonstrated to be not true by the reaction to the last few days, is going to provoke a reaction in those circles.  Many of them, and I think Trump is in this respect only an avatar of a broader moment, may decide to forgo democracy instead of accepting a status as a political minority.  Bloodshed, on an extensive and heartbreaking scale, may be coming.

But, barring that outcome, electorally I think the result of 2020 will in fact be a lot like 1968, with similar dynamics.  The familiar figure promising to embody the values of the Silent Majority will beat the figure associated with the present chaos and unrest.  And that would mean Joe Biden would be the President come January 2021.