The first and most decisive difference has to do with who started these respective wars. Now, obviously, American involvement in Vietnam dated back to at least the 1950's, but it was Lyndon Johnson who was responsible for the major escalation that produced the war as we remember it. Lyndon Johnson, it should go without saying, was a Democrat. Now who started the war in Iraq and what is his party affiliation? If you answered George Bush and Republican you have, at most, demonstrated that you are breathing. The implications of this difference are quite profound.
At the start of 1960's, the left looked to the Democratic Party as its natural ally. (Leftist had never held any illusions that the Republicans had anything useful to offer on either domestic or foreign policy.) Yet because it was the Democrats who had started the war, the left felt extremely alienated from the American political system. They had no one else to turn to carry their water, so they turned their backs on the system altogether.
Actually, this alienation dated all the way back to the 1964 Democratic Party convention in Atlantic City. Johnson refused to seat the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party delegation in favor of the segregationist regular Democrats. He was trying to placate the South as best he could after having signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for fear that they (the South) would (as they did) bolt the Democratic Party in the Fall elections. After having experienced the horrors of Freedom Summer, however, New Left activists were in no mood to compromise with what they viewed as evil. There was no "choosing the lesser of two evils" for the New Left. This attitude then carried over into their response to the war in Vietnam. We should, for instance, recall one of the most popular chants of the period: "Hey, Hey, LBJ. How many kids have you killed today?"
This response on the part of the New Left was understandable, and in some measure justified. But its was premised on the belief that conservatism was forever going to be a non-factor in American politics. Johnson, after all, had won in a landslide victory in 1964 over Barry Goldwater. Liberalism seemed to be the consensus and would remain so indefinitely. In such circumstances, the Left's fight was not with conservatism but with liberalism which they hoped to either discredit or move leftward. In fact, their sobriquet for their opponents was the "Liberal-Labor Establishment." Little did they realize that a conservative revival was just around the corner, in part attributable to the New Left's own actions.
Besides the left's dismissal of the importance of conservatism as a factor in American politics, there is another aspect of the Democratic hegemony we should consider. While the Republican Party had never had any appeal for the left, the Democratic Party had at one time seemed like a reasonable vehicle for achieving a leftist agenda. This hope dated all the way back to the 1930's when Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal signaled a shift in the Democratic Party toward a social democratic agenda. The Communists, for instance, under orders from Moscow, allied themselves with the Democratic Party in what was called the Popular Front. Even after the onset of the Red Scare in the late 40's and the expulsion of Communists from public life, much of the anti-Communist left continued to hold onto the hope that they could move the Democratic Party leftward and make it a truly ideological party. Walter Reuther, President of the United Auto Workers Union, was a prominent exponent of this philosophy. (Interestingly, Reuther was also a leading actor in trying to get the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party to not force a confrontation in Atlantic City.)
By 1968 the New Left had given up all hope in the Democratic Party, and, because they had no where else to turn, they had given up hope for America as well. Not all on left followed this path, but a significant portion did. They embraced an ideology of Third Worldism that celebrated people of color and their struggles against imperialism. This included not just the North Vietnamese, but African Americans, who were conceptualized as an internally colonized people, and Palestinians, along with much of the rest of the non-white world. They began calling the U.S. "Amerika" or, more explicitly, "Amerikkka" and some even started burning American flags. It is this memory that the right wing keeps invoking in their charges that liberal are traitors. (As Norman Thomas commented at the time, anti-war activist should have concentrated on "wash[ing] the flag, not burn[ing] it.)
Contrast this with the current situation. It was the left's ideological enemies who began the Iraq war, not their hoped for allies. Whatever hopes Progressives hold for ending this war lie with the Democratic Party. Hence we see not a call for ideological purity, but for pragmatic action to empower the Democratic Party to achieve at least some of the Progressive agenda. We also see, in conjunction with the Republican Party's attack on our most sacred rights as Americans, a passionate defense of American traditions and institutions, not a repudiation of them. Even a cursory examination of Progressive rhetoric these days reveals that they are constantly invoking the tropes of Americanism in their defense of the Constitution and their opposition to the war. What a difference from the 1960's! It is the left these days that appears most committed to the U.S. and its traditions, while the right wing wallows in a cult of personality little different from the glorification of monarchy and divine right.
We see, then, at least two differences between the 60's and now: the left's pragmatic embrace of the Democratic Party in place of its previous rejectionist stance; and its reliance on tropes of Americanism and patriotism as opposed to its previous alienation. But this is hardly the end of the differences.
One of the things that most puzzles me about all this talk about 1968 is that the events of that year were not what turned many Americans against Democrats. Nor was it the case that Americans turned against Democrats for their anti-war position, but for their seeming embrace of the counter-culture.
By 1968 a majority of American had already turned against the war. Anti-war sentiment was not confined to the radical fringe. Yet what did Democrats offer voters in the fall? Hubert Humphrey, Vice President for the war-monger-in-chief. Humphrey, as much as he might try to distance himself from Johnson's failed policies could not credibly repudiate them altogether. Meanwhile, George Wallace was busy siphoning off many votes that might otherwise have gone to the Democratic party, not because of his position on the war, but his position on race. And Richard Nixon claimed he had a secret plan to end the war while running on a "law and order" platform: i.e. anti-hippy and anti-black. Though the war was important, social and racial issues were even more so in wake of the anti-war protests, the urban rioting, Woodstock and Altamont. And when it came to the war, the Republican alternative was not one of escalation or even "staying the course," but ending the war.
This brings us then to 1972. It is McGovern that Republicans have been running against for the last 30 years. (I remember seeing a cover for National Review once - I can't remember the year, but I think it was 1988 - that depicted the delegates to the Democratic convention as a bunch of hippies, bra-burning feminists, anti-war activists, Black Panthers, and so forth.) Was it McGovern's anti-war position that really inflamed the electorate, though? No! Americans were thoroughly fed up with Vietnam and wanted out. Kissinger himself, right before the election, famously announced that he thought peace was at hand. It was not the anti-war position of the Democrats that turned Americans off. They themselves were against the war.
Rather, as Todd Gitlin has ironically observed, opposition to the anti-war movement rose in tandem with opposition to the war. Much of this opposition was driven by the anti-Americanism, both real and perceived, of the anti-war movement. In part, it was also driven by class resentments as working-class people, who could not afford to send their children to college, saw the sheltered and pampered children of the middle-class safely protesting the war and America from university campuses while their own children were dying in the jungles of Nam. Lastly we need to keep in mind the counter-culture (the hippies). While millions of Americans may have been listening to Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, even large numbers were listening to Merl Haggard's "Okie from Mskokie." While the Woodstock generation gets the all the attention, millions of Americans wanted nothing to do with sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. The Republican version of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), was a vital organization before SDS even got off the ground. YAFers even played a large role in securing the 1964 Republican nomination for Barry Goldwater.
This is where McGovern comes in. By 1972 Democratic Party rules had greatly changed (a legacy of the 1964 fiasco involving the MDFP) opening up the party to many new entrants: Blacks, women, the young, etc. Many of these people had been involved in the anti-war, civil rights, and feminist movements. There had been a reproachment between the left and the Democratic Party since 1968. The Democrats had already embraced the Civil Rights movement by 1964. Now they were associated, unjustifiably, with Black Panthers, Feminazis (an anachronism I know), tree huggers and hippies. It was not McGovern's anti-war stance, per se, that alienated Americans so much as the association of dovishness with the counter culture and anti-Americanism.
Again, compare this with today. Where, for instance, are we to find the counter-culture? Are the Dixie Chicks the newest incarnation of Joan Baez? Puhlease. Can there even be a counter culture in this day and age when American culture has become so diverse? (A positive legacy of the 1960's.) The closest thing we have to a "counter culture" are goths whose defining attribute seems to be nihilism, not activism. Even the self-identified anarchists seem more interested in street theater than genuine political involvement. And whatever colorful diversity may be on display at anti-war protests - hardly a prominent feature - is invisible to most Americans since the main stream media doesn't even bother to report on such protests. Protest itself has been mainstreamed as a legacy of the 1960's. (Doonesbury ran a hilarious cartoon during the 1980's showing anti-apartheid protesters coordinating with the police, providing them a list of the people that wanted to be arrested in front of the South African embassy for that day's activities.) The social and cultural revolution of the 1960's is no longer new and has been accepted by a majority of Americans as a fact of life. (Except, of course, by the Rush Limbaughs and Anne Coulters of the right.) In short, the association between the "counter culture" and the anti-war movement has been broken. And since Americans were most upset about the counter culture, their ability to sympathize with anti-war sentiment is no longer a source of cognitive dissonance.
Overall, the punditocracy's understanding of history is shallow at best, mendacious at worst. As much as Vietnam and Iraq may resemble each other militarily, the domestic situations are not at all comparable. Fears that Democrats are going to repeat the "mistakes of 68" are totally ludicrous. If anything, it is the right's current embrace of warmongering and class warfare that threatens to do to them what happened to the Democrats over the last 30 years: discredit Republicans for the next generation.
Permalink | 32 comments