Similarities
So it’s Tuesday, exactly one week before the Presidential Election of 2020. It’s hard to imagine: four years since the last election. The shock and disappointment of November 2016 seems so close. But here we are, days away from what is clearly a pivotal moment in American history.
There’s an old Mark Twain expression: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes”. The historic and political themes in American life come back, focused in different ways, but similar in their content. The election we face in the next few days is no different.
I was twelve years old in the last election that was nearly as divisive. In 1968 there was one trauma after another, and it wasn’t much of a surprise that Nixon won. We suffered the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy and then the debacle of the Democratic Convention in Chicago (Now on Netflix – The Trial of the Chicago 7). The eventual Democratic nominee Vice President Hubert Humphrey was a “pro-war” (Vietnam) Democrat and there really didn’t seem to be much difference between his policies and Nixon’s. Nixon squeaked into the White House. We didn’t know what would happen.
I was sitting in my seventh grade math class (second row from the window, two seats from the front) when the announcement came over the PA system. (By the way, the election results were so close it took until the next day to announce the winner). The halls of Van Buren Junior High School resounded with cheers. Kettering, Ohio, a Dayton suburb, was Nixon country. I put my head down on my desk. Four years seemed like an eternity.
Secret Plan
We didn’t know that Nixon’s “secret peace plan” was, in today’s parlance, to “double-down” on Vietnam. Within months we were expanding the war, across borders into Laos and Cambodia. It turned out that Nixon’s “ peace plan” was to fight the war to the bitter end.
It didn’t work, and the war still raged four years later as the Democratic Party nominated a “peace” candidate, Senator George McGovern. McGovern was no pacifist; he was a World War II bomber pilot. But the “moment” where Americans were ready to end the war was over, lost in the social upheaval of the protests, civil unrest and the “tune in, turn on and drop out” generation. Nixon proclaimed his “Law and Order” candidacy, and somehow painted McGovern’s South Dakota pragmatism as “the radical left”. Nixon won an overwhelming victory.
That was 1972. I was now sixteen, a junior at Wyoming High School near Cincinnati. I struggled to understand how the nation could survive “Four More Years” of Richard Nixon. It wasn’t just about the war: it was an entire attitude. The “silent majority” gave license to suppress many of our citizens. It seemed the nation I loved had just “been fooled again” (couldn’t miss the Who reference).
But it wasn’t four more years. Nixon was gone before I left for college in the summer of 1974. President Gerald Ford proclaimed, “Our long national nightmare is over” referring to Watergate, and the last troops left Vietnam in 1975. But I would be a twenty-year old junior staffer for the Carter/Mondale campaign in 1976 before I actually felt we overcame the failures of 1968, and elected Democrat Carter as President.
Differences
So here we are today, on the cusp of 2020. It’s not 1968: there is a clear difference between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. No one can claim they are “the same” in the way we looked at Nixon and Humphrey. And the reality was, Humphrey would have ended the war sooner, once he was out of the shadow of Lyndon Johnson. So there was a difference then too.
And it’s not 1972 either. Try as he might, Donald Trump has not been able to brand Joe Biden, the moderate from Delaware, as a “radical” leftist. Not only do the real “leftists” know better, but so does the rest of the nation. Democrats had that choice, and Bernie wasn’t nominated. Joe Biden is “oil on the waters” (though he’ll “transition away from oil”), a calming force in our 2020 world of upheaval. It’s what I think America wants, the Buddhist “Middle Path” of American political ideology. I guess we’ll see.
Our War Today
It wasn’t just the Vietnam War that drove the 1968 election; it was the demands for social change. The Chicago Seven marched against Vietnam, but they echoed the tactics of the Civil Rights movement. Martin Luther King died protesting the need for Black people to be treated as economic as well as political equals. It’s not so different: today Black Live Matters demands that people of color be seen as equal in the eyes of law enforcement, as well as the supposedly “blind folded” legal process.
So while COVID is our “Vietnam” and the central issue of our time, we should not ignore all of the other issues that would be at the front were it not for the pandemic. Our nation was divided long before the virus was introduced. The social and racial infections were already here.
Our political leaders found the courage to stand up and stop Richard Nixon in 1974. But today’s leaders have already proven they don’t have that same fortitude to stand up to Donald Trump’s acknowledged illegalities. So it’s up to us, the voters, to do what our elected leaders could not. We will change the course of American history next week, one way or another. I believe in the courage and wisdom of the American voter. For the sake of the nation, let’s hope I’m right.
