Yes, 2024 Is Like 1968--But Much More Dangerous
Joe Biden has to be tougher than Hubert Humphrey was
For about 24 hours the week before last I was a media sensation. Everyone wanted to know whether the 2024 Democratic convention was likely to recapitulate the calamity of 1968, which I had described in minute detail in True Believer, my recent biography of Hubert Humphrey. Is the Gaza war going to be Biden’s Vietnam? Does Biden need to distance himself decisively from the protests with a “Sister Souljah moment” (a 1992 rather than 1968 analogy)? My answer to those questions was “yes, possibly,” “no” and “no.” But all that was a little bit of a distraction: the central point, as I had written in a piece in The Wall Street Journal, is that today’s Democratic party is almost as fragmented as it was in 1968, and that Biden, like Humphrey, has to worry far more about losing votes to his right than to his left. He’s hemorrhaging non-white working-class voters, not young progressives.
But the more I think about it, the more a fundamental difference impresses itself on me–the difference in stakes. The Richard Nixon of 1968 was not the Richard Nixon of 1972, much less of Watergate and the enemies’ list. He was a moderate who, like Eisenhower in 1952 (and unlike Goldwater in 1964), promised no decisive break with the welfare state as he found it. As vice-president he had been a leading, if very measured, voice for civil rights. He did, it’s true, campaign on “law and order,” but not at all in the strident language of George Wallace (or of his own running mate, Spiro Agnew). Nixon promised to pursue President Johnson’s Vietnam policy of raising the military pressure in order to bring Hanoi to the negotiating table. Even after supposedly breaking with Johnson on Vietnam late in the campaign, Humphrey was only a notch to Nixon’s left.
Nixon was a status quo candidate; it was Wallace, far to his right, who promised disruption. Conservative Democrats and independents could switch to Nixon, and leftists could stay home, without fundamentally changing the direction of the country. Despite Nixon’s old reputation as a vicious Red-baiter, democracy and civil liberties were not on the ballot. Nixon had, after all, lost the 1960 election by a whisker, but had not seized on very real irregularities–i.e., cheating–in both Illinois and Texas to demand a recount or contest the outcome. One didn’t do or say such things at that time; and Nixon didn’t.
This year, of course, the stakes are almost infinite. The only real analogy to 2024 is 2020, when the nation knew very well what Donald Trump was capable of, and chose instead the Democrats’ uninspiring but dependable standard-bearer. Now we know that if Trump wins he will not only try to overturn all of Biden’s accomplishments but fill the ranks of government with zealots and unprincipled hacks who will help him remove the braces and screws that hold our liberal institutions together.
Because the health and even survival of our liberal institutions may hang in the balance, the only secure way to preserve our democracy is to re-elect Joe Biden. That being so, we need to avoid anything that subtracts from that goal, be it ever so virtuous and true and important. If you had said to the kids demonstrating in Grant Park in 1968 that they should knock off the antics lest they get Nixon elected, they would have shrugged and said, “Big deal.” They would have been wrong, but not very wrong. I’m sure the Gaza demonstrators will be no more inclined to listen to that pragmatic voice, but in this case the political consequences could be catastrophic.
And that goes for the rest of us. I believe, as I’m sure most of you reading this do, in the need for drastic action on the climate. But when the folks at PEW asked Americans what issues they believe should be a top priority for the president and Congress, climate change came in 18th. (“Strengthening the economy” came in first by a mile.) I don’t want Joe Biden to cater to my beliefs on climate; I want him to find a language that champions his (quite impressive) record on climate without enraging working-class voters who believe that the right to drive a gas-powered car is somewhere in the Constitution. To be clear: those voters are objectively wrong about the climate, but they will determine whether or not we have any chance of addressing the problem.
It might have been reasonable in 2012, when Barack Obama was running for re-election against the anodyne Mitt Romney, to demand that Obama stop deporting so many immigrants in order to mollify conservatives. Maybe Obama could have taken the small risk of doing the right thing. That risk is intolerable today. Biden has, belatedly, adopted some very ugly policies on immigration that have begun to stanch the flow of people across the Southern border. That, by the way, is exactly what Germany and other European states did in 2016 when the huge flow of refugees from the Middle East began to destabilize their domestic politics.
Perhaps the greatest irony to arise from this existential moment is that Biden needs to defend democracy by not talking about it too very much. He has said, again and again, that this election is about the protection of democracy. Most Americans agree with him; but they are as likely to consider the President a threat to democracy as its custodian. More Americans believe that returning Donald Trump to the White House will strengthen democracy than believe that re-electing Biden will do so. Among independents, Biden is regarded as a greater threat to democracy than Trump. This is not just wrong, but insane. Perhaps Biden can make more Americans see the light of day. But he needs to recognize that right now virtually all of his supporters, but virtually none of his non-supporters, share his views on democracy.
In 1968, Humphrey’s right-of-center advisors told him that his big problem wasn’t Vietnam, it was law and order. In fact it was Vietnam and law and order. He needed to draw the poison that the war was infusing in the party and the nation; but he also, and perhaps even more urgently, needed to tell working-class voters that he understood their fears about crime and chaos. He managed, finally, to break with LBJ on the war; but he simply couldn’t bring himself to do so when it came to the violence at home. “Law and order” kept coming out “order and justice.” It is to Humphrey’s great credit as a liberal idealist that he could not violate his own convictions even when he understood the political value of doing so. We should be grateful if Joe Biden proves to be less tender-hearted.