Someone, maybe Carl von Clausewitz, supposedly said a country should never go to war unless it intended to win.
Since WWII, the US has dabbled in a series of military incursions that failed to win a decisive victory, and often simply aggravated the security situation in the target country. Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Syria are the latest examples of that flawed policy. Tommy Frank’s Iraq invasion plan and James Mattis’ Afghanistan “Surge” strategy are prime examples of the corruption of the strategy process; in neither country did the US ever describe a specific, achievable goal, nor an action plan to overcome the constraints to achieving the goal. And with Syria, the US simply dispensed with any attempt at a strategy.
During the Vietnam War, the “hawks” argued that the US had to intervene to protect the homeland. Remember politicians arguing that if we didn’t stop the Viet Cong in Vietnam, we would end up having to fight them on the beaches of Santa Monica? That absurd mentality has prevailed onward from the Vietnam War – and we know how that war ended.
As to Afghanistan, the US has never come to grips with the country’s culture and the continued “Great Game,” now cynically played by Iran, Russia, Pakistan and India, with the US impotent to influence the situation. So, if the US really withdraws, Afghanistan’s neighbors will continue to pick over its bones, but will the Taliban ever attack the US?
The Democratic Party which existed in 1968 was headed for big changes which split off so many white people that the Party has never returned to the one that nominated and elected Kennedy. It came at a time when the Republican Party was eager to recover from the debacle of Goldwater’s campaign. Conservative Southern whites just could not accept the end of Jim Crow. This split the Democratic Party and led to disagreement which ended with most Southern white Democrats leaving the Party, first to support Wallace and finally to join the Republican Party. The war just added to the disagreement with conservatives supporting it with a love it (America) or leave attitude and liberals demanding peace and an end to it. By the end of 1972, the split was complete and the Democratic Party was no longer like the one that FDR established.
4
How else to explain the ability of history’s ultimate outsider, Donald Trump, to become the 2016 Republican nominee despite the near unanimous opposition of established party leaders?
Vietnam may be the favorite calling card for this discussion but really look at Johnson's desegregation and voting rights legislation, and there is the source of the white flight to the right and 2 generations' retribution for desegregation. Nothing in American political culture can alter this alignment, except maybe another draft. and body bags coming home to the angry white right.
3
"“But what do you do? You read about some massacre in Darfur, or some school bus gets blown up, and you go 'oh, my god, the horror' and then you turn the page and finish your eggs from the free range chickens, because what can you do? It's overwhelming.”"
Character Boris Yellnikoff, from the film Whatever Works
It's all about the war machine. Go to any museum; it's the history of civilizations, the commonality across time and continents. It’s the worship of the golden idol – the one thing all the gods warned against. 'Put no other gods before me.' Somehow, though, it's the one rule by which it just seems impossible or undesirable to abide.
What's different now? Other than scale, probably nothing. We need the war machine economically. Everything else flows from it. Little kids on the classroom floor at Sandy Hook are no different than little kids eviscerated in Syria or starved to death in Yemen. For good or ill, we don't even act like it's for some greater good now. It's the cost of doing business. We're all collateral damage.
Now we've got the choleric golden calf thrashing about in his White House stall, trampling his handlers, splintering the planking, soiling the manger from which he eats.
And we go back to finishing our eggs from the free range chickens. Because what can you do? It is overwhelming.
5
Love this comment, itsmildeyes. I hope it gets a lot more recommendations and becomes a NYT pick.
1
The 2nd amendment ends "but no one religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person."
This was the gist of Cassius Clay (aka Muhammad Ali) vs the USA.
The USA is where it is now because the majority of White America rejects the real 2nd amendment and allowed the Supreme Court to avoid the 2nd amendment 50 years ago.
Ali prevailed because a Supreme Court justice read the writings of Elijah Mohammed. The Supreme court went from 6-3 against Clay to 8-0 for Clay and baselessly based their decision on the 1st amendment while the country waited for Scalia and the other GOP and NRA lawyers to completely pervert the 2nd amendment.
America has Trump as President because it failed to confront the truth 50 years ago.
America is a nation because it said over 200 years ago it is not the King or even Parliament that determines moral behaviour. The 2nd amendment incurred the wrath of the mob 225 years ago as it does now. It is only its perversion by Scalia and the GOP and NRA lawyers that has swung the mob to support a 180 degree shift in the 2nd amendment as it is interpreted to protect the strong to the detriment of the weak.
1
The old Democracy in the South was lost because of Civil Rights. This was a good thing. LBJ's commitments in Vietnam were a reaction to the simple fact that southern votes form the swing vote in national elections. LBJ could embrace the new Democracy or he could walk away from Nam. He could not do both.
Personally, I think the Civil Rights Act had a lot more to do with changing the Democratic and Republican parties than the Vietnam War. The Dixiecrats became Republicans, and the party of Lincoln became the party of George Wallace.
5
The Democrats made other blunders in the 1970s. For example, making abortion a litmus test for being Democrat. The abortion opponents didn't go away -- they went Republican instead. Just a few years ago feminists were still fuming about Democrats who wouldn't support adding abortion funding to Obamacare -- at a time when Democrats desperately needed to hold onto voters.
3
The article doesn't mention the effects on "conscription". After the war the draft was abolished to ensure that young people's lives would no longer be warped and endangered by some politician's decision to go to war. Beyond that point military enrollment has mainly consisted of conservatives that valued "military virtues" and poor men needing the money. Meanwhile wealthy liberals avoided it like the plague. It was impossible for the Democratic Party to contain both.
5
I think the draft was abolished to make sure that in the future, when a group of rich old white guys decided to go to war, there would be no mass protests from young, middle class white kids to get in their way. And, my goodness, how well that has worked!
3
I like to remind people that the first step in the collapse of the ancient Roman Republic was when they ended their draft instead of reforming anything else about their government.
McGovern's candidacy is something we can point to when our kids ask: "What did you do when the United States was napalming Vietnamese villages, when we were burning them to save them, when we were supporting a series of dictators?" We ORGANIZED.
1
The comments section is the best thing to happen to American journalism in 50 years. Thoughtful, educated responses. I read a lot of them and learned but the one point I disagree with is what JFK would/would not have done.
No one knows or can really say.
His re-election was not certain, the anti-communist faction was strong and he put 16,000 men in a place Ike essentially ignored for eight years. Perhaps he was trying to draw down but things in Vietnam were changing by the hour because JFK's administration allowing the head of state to be overthrown caused a mess.
LBJ once said 'everyone is going around quoting Kennedy on everything,' meaning he was being second guessed to death. The bottom line is American arrogance got us into a fix because we could easily do what the French army could not. Well, that thinking was wrong.
1
Eventually the US public may catch on to the idea that we are less than 5% of the world population, centered in one quarter of the global suface. We cannot and need not rule the other 3/4 of the globe on other continents. Trying to do so only brings rage to others and grief to ourselves (as well as to others). Enough of this folly!
4
It wasn’t Vietnam that broke the Democratic Party. The civil rights movement did it.
2
Many people know the real 2nd amendment and understand the the last great challenge to the 2nd amendment was Cassius Clay (aka Muhammad Ali) vs the USA. Americans are the best educated people on the planet and many understand that the second amendment is about the right of the scrupulously religious from militia (full time government troops) service.From my conversations with those who came to Montreal to avoid service I was under the impression that most white Americans find the REAL 2nd amendment unAmerican.
The 2nd amendment which Scalia said gave people the right to own guns said people had the right to say NO on moral and ethical grounds to their government.
Jordan Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist who is condemned by both left and right because of his scientific theories and his inability to lie about what he sees to curry favour.
It is 2018 and we still prefer to believe what we want to believe and we call that reason. It is as true for left and right , it is true for humanity.
Professor Peterson's 12 rules for life explains using the scientific method why we believe what we believe and my 70 years echo his observations.
In Cassius Clay vs The USA we learn how a 6-3 decision against Ali became an 8-0 decision for Ali on the basis of the 1st amendment while the 2nd amendment directly addresses conscription.
Liberals and conservatives are wired differently and we have different political languages.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5RCmu-HuTg&t=1989s
1
The Democratic Party was already broken prior to major escalation of American involvement in Vietnam from 1965. The party was an unwieldy and ultimately unworkable coalition of "Sweden and South Africa" as some people have put it. In other words, you had true believers in social democracy and racial equality in the same party as stalwart defenders of racial segregation and white supremacy.
When "affirmative action was white" during the New Deal years of the 1930s, the coalition held together and young southern segregationist Democrats like Lyndon Johnson (in Congress from 1937) were all in and totally on board. By the 1960s, the coalition was dead as northern Democrats began pressing for the end of Jim Crow in the South.
Johnson, by then president, concluded that belligerence in Vietnam was the policy he would have to pursue to hold the Democratic coalition together. Southern Democrats (with some exceptions like Al Gore Sr. and Fulbright) were among the strongest supporters of basically treating the Vietnamese communists like a recalcitrant Native American tribe that needed to be wiped out. And so the carpet bombing proceeded.
But LBJ tried to hold together a party that was already broken, and he knew this as a white native of Texas. He saw the future when he said: "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
6
Clearly what is broken is the primary system. Lower voter turnout made up of extremes in both parties produces the division in Congress. Combine extremism and unfettered campaign spending, and the results are quite destructive. The middle ground has been replaced by ideologues.
I often wonder what our country would look like today, had aHubert Humphrey won instead of Nixon.
Extremism and unfiltered money in politics must end. The greatest threat to our democracy is the unlimited dark money that fuels the deep chasm that exists between the median income of elected leaders to the median income of the average American.
The money-interests of the few drowns out the voices of the many. Free speech is no longer free.
Wake up America, Vietnam didn't destroy the Democratic Party, the inability to find the future Humphreys, Churches, Phil Harts, and so many average good-standing Americans to represent the common interests is what has destroyed our politics today. And the money required to run for elective office.
3
so true. people keep asking 'when will 45 be impeached?'. likely never, and certainly not before the last republican primary is held. incumbents are terrified of speaking out against the depredations of 45, lest they have a trumpista run against them in the primary. you will note the only republicans speaking out against the white house are those not running again.
1
The Vietnam War was not that special. Mostly a manifestation of America's ongoing history of war-making under the false banner of defending democracy. Sounds nice but has hardly ever really applied to the nation's actions, even as a basis for entering WW 2
1
Up to the Korean War, wars were usually declared by Congress and thus could be roughly considered the will of the people. Nowadays Presidents think they can go to war whenever they feel like it. Vietnam (along with Korea) changed all the rules. Yes, it was special.
1
Mr. Nelson's contention--that President Johnson's decision to send 600,000 troops to fight in Vietnam was simply continuing President Kennedy's policy--is a blatant right-wing, militarist distortion of history.
President Kennedy signed an order to withdraw 1,000 of the 16,000 "advisors," as the first part of a planned total withdrawal of US forces from Vietnam, on October 11, 1963, a few weeks before his murder.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff were already furious at JFK, for his refusing to follow their advice and invade Cuba during the missile crisis. He did not trust them or the CIA and did not plan to follow their advice to massively escalate the war.
In addition, Kennedy removed US missiles from Turkey that threatened Russia and negotiated with the USSR and passed in the Senate a treaty banning above ground nuclear weapons testing. Though under intense pressure from his first day in office to launch a major land war in Asia, he instead negotiated a coalition settlement in Laos.
President Johnson lied to the public in 1968, running as the peace candidate, while secretly promising the military that they would get their big war.
3
I agree with the commenters who cite southern civil-rights fallout as a prior and more seminal moment that hobbles the Democrats to this day. The author's take on Vietnam and its political implications are valid enough, but the Civil Rights Act is too big an elephant to omit, so to speak.
10
As you said, you were only 10.
Your narrative is flawed, starting with Roosevelt's liberal side and the omission of Henry A. Wallace, the extremely liberal VP and VP candidate in 1944 who had the support of 67% of the party to Truman's 2%. It is said that Wallace was Roosevelt's continuing choice.The bosses fixed that, and their ignorant candidate, Truman, became the next president. They ran him. Would Roosevelt have dropped the bomb? Or just threatened to --while getting the Soviets in to win the war? On his dying day, Roosevelt minimized the Stalinist threat to Churchill. Truman presided over the beginning of the Red Threat. It was Truman who changed the party. Clinton was a Truman revanchist. Truman was one of the worst presidents of the 20th century.
And your depiction of what Kennedy would have done about the war is highly questionable. Bobby Kennedy said he planned to pull out. Why wasn't HE polled by Johnson? Perhaps because Johnson wanted to do the exact opposite of what a Kennedy would do.
And Humphrey, a liberal, followed Johnson on the war and split the liberals.
McGovern didn't have the support of the DNC, just the people, and both are necessary--money talks in America. And he had the drag of VP candidate Eagleton's depression, which was a terrible disgrace.
5
Eagleton's depression was a disgrace?
As for Truman, I can't think too ill of a president who vetoed the Taft-Hartley bill (a Republican Congress overrode his veto), and overcame the racism of his Missouri upbringing to desegregate the military and defend African Americans against a wave of lynchings. Henry Wallace ran against Truman, and so did Strom Thurmond.
1
Harry Truman was the first U.S. President to advance the cause of civil rights through his de-segregation of the military. He was the first U.S. President to push for national health insurance (the AMA, in a truly regrettable stance, led the counter-push which shot this down). His stance against Communism did preserve the prospects for democratic forms of government in numerous countries which would have otherwise succumbed to Communism, under which democracy would have never developed (ask yourself why Communists have NEVER won at the ballot box in a country with a democratic form of government). And (now I'm really going to step in it) I do believe that his decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan in the summer of 1945 did ultimately save the lives of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops and over 1 million Japanese troops and civilians who would have otherwise died in a U.S. invasion of Japan in the fall of 1945/spring of 1946.
Truman is routinely ranked as one of the 10 best Presidents in U.S. history. I say that his high standing is well-deserved.
2
There was no right answer to the question of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, only a question of ends and means.
A much clearer moral question is whether to be horrified by this military act. I say one should be, and I hope that President Truman issued the order reluctantly.
Otherwise I agree with you, Rick.
The AMA also led the fight during the Kennedy years against the program now known as Medicare. It was enough to make me detest them for a long time, even if they did lend their expertise to the doctor shows on TV.
1
There is no explanation as to why Donald Trump was elected. It is the most absurd event of the 19th and 20th centuries combined. The only other absurdity that comes close is the election and re-election of George W Bush.
10
Trump was elected by abortion opponents who resented having been locked out of the political process for 40 years.
1
The Nixon/Kissinger 1973 Peace Accords with North Viet Nam required that all U.S. troops be out by July, 1973, and that all military aide funding end in 1974. We continued to fund RVN with $700 million/yr (a huge amount then) in non military aide.
We left the South with a very well equipped Army and Air Force (4th best in the world).
One of the best analyses on the consequences of the Vietnam War. It's legacy is helping to kill American democracy today.
1
Wars will undermine any political party when they are entered into based on lies, public deception and the absence of sufficient thought into discerning the real national interest. There were plenty of reasons to stay out of Vietnam years before the U.S. was mired in it. And, we now know that invading Iraq was based upon either bad intel or the lack of wanting to know before blundering into it. As for Afghanistan, this citizen is tired of hearing that we have to stay on and on because of terrorists. Perhaps the U.S. ought to consider whether our support for oppressive Mid-East governments for decades (post-WWII) contributes to the birth and growth of groups that see the U.S. as contributing to the plight of the oppressed. The U.S. is, fundamentally, bad at trying to objectively assess problems in other countries.
3
Kennedy was wrong, LBJ was wrong, Nixon was wrong, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Kissinger, both Bushes, Obama, Hillary & Trump, all wrong, wrong, wrong.
In the age of MAD we have one main, sane prerogative in this world: Stop with the warmongering & militarism.
The USA exports 33% of the world's weapons of war. War is a business not a rational political philosophy or policy. Military-industrial war-profiteering needs to stop.
WW2 is 'won', Vietnam is over (notwithstanding the vast reparations the USA owes to Vietnam for the atrocity), Iraq & Afghanistan are 'lost causes' (notwithstanding the reparations owed for our atrocities there as well).
We know now what war means, what it fails to achieve in the post WW2 era, & we know what happens to civilians in warzones.
We need to pull the plug on global militarism.
17
Isn't it paradoxical that the party rules were changed in 1972 to dilute the strength of southern Democrats, yet from 1972 to 2008, almost half a century, the only two Democratic presidents were southerners?
The other key fact not mentioned in the article is those changes by McGovern and Fraser to party rules also made it easier for women, people of color and youth to actually run for public office.
Today, the core of the Democratic base consists of women, people of color and youth.
4
Southern Democrats controlled Congress. That is ultimately where the power rests. Those southern democrats make up today's GOP. Law & Order.....
2
The southern Democrats who were "diluted" in 1972 were racists who maintained power by rigging elections. The later presidents were non-racists, the product of political reforms. Being "Southern" was not really the issue.
1
Being "Southern" in terms of national acceptability WAS still important if you were a Democrat, racist or not.
1
In the end, both parties learned a hard lesson. Unfortunately, there are still millions of conservative voters who won't hesitate to vote for a pro-war Republican. The more things change...
5
College students, whose numbers had swelled to 7.5 million from 2.1 million in 1952, became increasingly alarmed that the draft soon would extend to them.
The role of demographics in the decision to make war is almost never acknowledged, yet the outbreak of war is invariably coincident with a population spike putting exceptional pressure on domestic resources as was the case in '30's Europe, '60's, '90's and 2017's America. The inference is depressing, yet no less essential to come to terms with for all of that.
The split in the Democratic Party was only temporary in 1968. Had it not been for the perfidy of candidate Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, Hubert Humphrey would have won, and ended the war a lot sooner. A longer-term effect, which was not entirely good, was the McGovern Commission reforms, which shifted power to nominate candidates from the professionals to the people. With the defeat of the American effort in Vietnam and the waning of the Cold War, the people wanted to curtail American involvement in foreign wars.
Trump won in 2016, because the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were fought by the sons of working people, who were also being hurt by the financialization of the economy. Even should Trump be impeached or defeated, their discontent will remain.
2
"The party lost interest in using American power, and spent the next generation trying to constrain it. Democratic Congresses voted to hem in Nixon’s war-making power by enacting the War Powers Resolution and forbade President Gerald Ford to continue to supply arms to the government of South Vietnam, which quickly fell to the Communists.
They hamstrung President Ronald Reagan’s efforts to roll back Communist advances in Central America and did their best to impose a 'nuclear freeze' on America’s arsenal. They opposed President George H. W. Bush’s Gulf war."
All the above are what Democrats have traditionally stood for and advocated. Clinton was a Rockefeller Republican, politically and philosophically. Wars should be a last resort, not a knee-jerk reaction.
Beating war drums is simply admitting have nothing of value to say, stand for or support.
USN 1967 - 71
Viet Nam 1968
5
Sorry to disagree with you but Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as well as Harry Truman were Democrats. John F. Kennedy was a Democrat. All four of them were involved in wars. Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt were also racists. That is the history of the Democratic party.
1
Denis Mets, Woodrow Wilson was a Southern conservative Democrat and the US did enter WWI under his leadership. Franklin Roosevelt was the first of the entered WWII only after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Harry Truman responded to the anti-communist fervor of the Cold War and the public's reaction to the communist insurgency in Greece by entering the Korean War. The Bay of Pigs action was begun under Eisenhower. Kennedy took meaningful steps to reform the CIA in response to the Bay of Pigs. US intervention in Vietnam was begun under the Eisenhower administration and had continually escalated from 1954 until Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. Eisenhower intervened in Guatemala. During the Cold War, every candidate had to be fervently anti-communist to be elected. Johnson was no exception. As the author of this piece argues, Johnson had little interest in Vietnam and relied on a cadre of advisors to wage an anti-communist crusade.
The comparative role of the parties in imperialist foreign military adventures can be better understood by examining the role of Republican presidents in the era between Wilson and Roosevelt. Consider the US occupations of the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Nicaragua as well as US intervention in Honduras, Haiti and Panama as well as the role of the US in the Philippines. These all were Republican efforts and have much more in common with the Bush wars in Afghanistan and Iraq than Vietnam and Korea.
1
You forgot to mention how Nixon, as a still private citizen before he was elected, interfered in the peace talks in Vietnam at jsut the moment that the truce was to be signed in order to prolong the war. That was cynical Nixon's ploy to gain votes - make it look like LBJ and the Dems are warmongers.
It worked. And thousands more of our country's young adults died in a needless republican-extended war (Just like W started in Iraq!) And history, as well as our country, were made poorer because of Nixon's crimes.
16
Vietnam did indeed contribute to the decline of the Democratic Party, but the Civil Rights movement may have done even more damage. Without the "Solid South" Democrats were at a loss as to how to win a national election.
And, the weak candidates that followed the 1968 debacle didn't help either.
7
In my opinion, the Vietnam War was the second of three things which did indeed break the Democratic Party as it had existed, and politically thrived, since the Great Depression. The first of those things was the civil rights legislation of the mid-'60s which put the South in play for the Republicans for the first time since Reconstruction.
The third of these things came later, in the form of Ronald Reagan. Jimmy Carter got enough of the New Deal coalition back together, esp. in the South, to win in 1976. Reagan broke that coalition once and for all, by putting large parts of the South out of the Democrats' reach to this day and by mobilizing significant blue-collar support in the Rust Belt and elsewhere, in the form of the "Reagan Democrat." His success in attracting support from traditionally Democratic constituencies (he won Massachusetts and New York twice each, for cryin' out loud) created sufficiently long coat-tails for George H. Bush to win the presidency, for essentially Reagan's "third term," in a 1988 landslide.
The Reagan presidency put the New Deal-era Democratic Party down for good. The Democrats decided that they had to change, and have adopted a more conservative approach to policy ever since. They simply don't believe as strongly as they used to in the mantra of government as a force for good. Their faith in the ability of government to solve this country's problems is simply not as strong as it used to be. That's a testament to Ronald Reagan.
6
The people of Nicaragua overthrew the brutal US backed dictator Somoza and the popular Sandinista government came to power. The US raised an army of counter-revolutionary mercenaries (the "Contras") who engaged in a campaign of terror--sabotage, rapes and murders--against this small nation, trying to overthrow the popular regime.
In response, the US Congress, including Democrats and Republicans, passed the Bollen Amendment--prohibiting any further US aid to these Contra cutthroats. In a blatantly criminal disregard of the law, however, the Reagan Administration went ahead funding the Contra armies anyway--putting together rogue, far right element of the US military (led by Colonel Ollie North) and international fascists.
Eventually of course they sold American missiles to Iran, our supposed deadly enemy, to fund their dirty war, and then were caught doing so. Thus the "Iran-Contra" Scandal, not a conspiracy theory, but in fact a conspiracy, reported in detail in the official Tower Commission Report, published in February 1987.
This is the real story of the events Mr. Nelson glibly describes as "how the Democrats hamstrung President Reagan's efforts to roll back Communist advance in Central America"!
The PBS Ken Burns saga on Viet Nam showed how the "best and brightest" of the Kennedy/Johnson era to have led us astray from the normal Democratic Party orientation.
Today's "best and brightest" are globalists who have forgotten half of the U.S. population and calling that "great".
Who is the Democratic Party today? I hope a new populist democratic politians (on all levels) will once again believe FDR, and even his "Republican" cousin Teddy, and force the "best and brightest" to become real leaders of all the people and let everyone know they care about each and every one of us, rich and poor.
7
To accomplish those goals, the "best and brightest" must first somehow be lured back into real government service...emphasis on service. But that requires appealing to more than a desire to advance one's personal brand and financial interests. Which raises the question where one might look for such individuals in our current post-service society.
1
The Democrats dilemma following Vietnam was how to favor "strength" (meaning military action, when required) while presenting themselves as a party of peace, less engagement in military adventures. They needed, or thought they did, to placate the awakened peace advocates in and around their party while still asserting that America had a useful role through military strength.
They failed in this effort, as they have failed on many issues in the following 50 years. They try to split the difference and wind up being a political party that basically stands for nothing. They don't know how to portray themselves as a party that would occasionally endorse the use of force while still being a party dedicated more to peaceful means over warfare.
Just as now the Republicans face the decision of when, and how, to cut themselves off from the Trump and left over tea party, Democrats could not decide whether to eject the so called peaceniks or embrace them, satisfying no one. They wind up appearing to many people to be the party of weakness, which never, ever plays well with the vast majority of voters. The Democrats support the military with huge appropriations year after year and, in the main, do not try to rein in military actions, but they get no credit for their stance because the Republicans have stuck them with the label "weak".
At some point, any political party moving forward has to decide what it stands for and declare it, loud and clear. The Democrats are afraid to do this.
11
Ah...Other than Vietnam, Foreign Wars haven't played much role in our presidential elections....and neither has foreign policy, except in the minds of academics, such as this author.
1
Remember what they said about Woodrow Wilson in 1916 - "He kept us out of war."
Until he got us into war in 1917.
2
This is because the wars were fought overseas, and Americans could not be drafted into participating in them. The wars swallowed up billions of dollars, but that was easy to hide. So American voters didn't care.
This question is answered easily by the rules of the Republican nomination process:
"How else to explain the ability of history’s ultimate outsider, Donald Trump, to become the 2016 Republican nominee despite the near unanimous opposition of established party leaders?"
In most states, the Republicans operate by a "winner takes all" system whereby someone can win ALL of the delegates from that state by getting a plurality of the votes, not a majority. This is how Trump won. In the early primaries, he would typically get somewhere around 30% of the total vote, but because of the Republican rules, he would get all of the delegates. He could win by losing.
This system served the modest efforts by Republicans to democratize their nomination process because it heavily favored an establishment candidate or someone who could easily outshine others in the early primaries. In 2016, it backfired. Trump looked like a winner when he wasn't actually winning and the appearance of strength helped to drive the other, weaker candidates from the nomination process.
There is a lesson in this that will not be lost on future candidates, As long as the rules stay the same, the message is hit the other candidates hard and fast, knock 'em silly, then knock off on the one or two remaining candidates.
Trump became the nominee because the Republicans failed, intentionally, to actually make the nomination process faithful to democratic ideals.
7
The author makes a valuable point: that delegate selection rules really matter. But among the half-truths and logical leaps, does he really think that McGovern's 1972 nomination was the result of antiwar people "outshouting" party leaders? Wasn't it "outvoting" in the Democratic primaries? Big difference.
8
Any discussion of the 1968 election and the subsequent history of presidential elections (including Donald Trump's 2016 victory) that makes zero reference to civil rights, race, George Wallace, the Republican southern strategy, etc. is. ahem, incomplete.
25
Democrats have always played a major role in leading our country into disaster.
Democrats pushed through the draft in 1917 against Republican objections.
Democrats started the Vietnam war based on a lie.
Democrat Hillary Clinton supported the Iraq invasion and has never retracted her support for Bush.
Democrats overthrew Qaddafi in 2011. Since that time migrants have poured into Europe from the failed state of Libya, undermining European support for liberal values.
6
The Democrats were in the wilderness for many years after they chose McGovern in 1972. I suspect that the Republicans will be there as well for a long time after January 20, 2021. Just as the old Democratic coalition broke, the Republican coalition is breaking as we speak.
8
To suggest that Democrats abjured confidence in "American involvement in the world" after 1972 thus leading it to its demise, or to Donald Trump, is simply ludicrous.
The Vietnam war broke the liberal movement when Union member whites watched affluent college students burn their draft cards. No matter what you really think of a war, you still take domestic opposition personally when it's your kid fighting it. It also didn't help that affluent liberal lawyers used busing to enforce desegregation orders - a burden that mostly fell on already stressed white working class neighborhoods. They intuited correctly that Democrats, saturated even to this day in self-indulgent identity politics, no longer cared about them. Then they became prey to the weirdly racist New Dealism of Richard Nixon until they stopped being politically relevant in the 90s.
"Anti-war" youth voted overwhelmingly for Nixon in 72' and they've been voting Republican ever since. They were never really pacifists, they just didn't want to be drafted. That explains the apparent irony of the war-mongering, draft-dodging boomers - Clinton x 2, GW Bush & Trump. The youth of 72' dominate politics and economy today and have brought with them their contempt for institutional life and received authority. We had the "choice" of a corrupt Clinton and a psychotic Trump precisely because of the political sclerosis that is the hallmark of that generation.
9
Yes, it seemed as though Prof Nelson joined the war mongering of both parties with that statement.
us army 1969-1971/california jd
1
There was the Vietnam war and then there was the bold championing of civil rights by LBJ. The democrats lost two generation of white votes in the south. This is a problem that persists to this day. The white man has a visceral hatred of the democrats in the south. A hatred that the millennial generation will hopefully set right.
11
The good news about the Vietnam War (which the Vietnamese call the American War) is that its aftermath has kept thousands of US academics employed counting the numbers of angels on the heads of their particular pins. Unfortunately, that's the only good news.
The bad news is that 58,000 American warriors were killed, and around 1.5 million Vietnamese, military & civilian were killed--and the North Vietnamese, and their allies, the Viet Cong, won the war anyway.
In the United States, the war led to the abdication of Lyndon Johnson, the ruination of Hubert Humphrey's career, the political disappearances of George McGovern & Eugene McCarthy, the crippling of Henry Kissinger's reputation and the resignation of Richard Nixon. It also led to the creation of a mercenary army, a first for the United States in more than 100 years, which, in turn, led to where we are now--losing every unofficial war we fight (e.g., Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria).
I understand that scholars needs subjects, as leeches need blood, and I also understand that when it comes to Vietnam all the good subjects are taken. But to devote this many words to how the Democratic Party changed its method for choosing candidates as if that were a serious outcome of the war is to trivialize the second bloodiest hinge in American history.
32
Speaking as one of those academicians (retired, in my case) you hold in such low repute, I have to note that post-1968 changes in nominating procedures are reverberating still. Polarized politics, the exaggerated weight of small unrepresentative "base" constituencies, the weakened role of party gatekeepers -- all that and more contributed in very important ways to, among other things, the rise of Donald Trump, among other things.
There's a very good literature on that and other effects of the post-68 changes, if you'd care to have a look at it -- ?
11
"58 thousand American warriors were......" I doubt only a few serving in Nam thought of themselves or referred to themselves as warriors. You probably use the term warfighter to describe a volunteer soldier today.
Another effect of the war that often isn't discussed: Sir Arthur Clarke was once asked why none of the technological marvels that he predicted came to pass. He said that at the time of the predictions, he thought American wealth would be devoted to scientific and technological advances. Instead, it was squandered in a losing war in Vietnam. Economists call this "opportunity costs", which is very tame way of putting it.
It is not true that the Democratic Congress forbade President Gerald Ford to continue to supply arms to the government of South Vietnam. The flow of American munitions to South Vietnam was still going on, fully authorized by Congress, as Communist forces closed in on Saigon in April 1975.
I believe there was about $100 million worth of military aid still in the pipeline, approved by Congress but not yet delivered, when Saigon fell.
5
Here is one account. It's Lauren Zanolli's What Happened When Democrats in Congress Cut Off Funding for the Vietnam War?
[After Nixon's resignation] Congress cut funding to South Vietnam for the upcoming fiscal year from a proposed 1.26 billion to 700 million dollars. These two events prompted Hanoi to make an all-out effort to conquer the South.
.....The drastic reduction of American aid to South Vietnam caused a sharp decline in morale, as well as an increase in governmental corruption and a crackdown on domestic political dissent. The South Vietnamese army was severely under-funded, greatly outnumbered, and lacked the support of the American allies with whom they were accustomed to fighting.
[The SVN retreat] increased internal opposition toward [Pres. Thieu] and spurred a chaotic mass exodus of civilians and soldiers that clogged the dilapidated roads to the coast. So many refugees died along the way that the migration along Highway 7B was alternatively described by journalists as the “convoy of tears” and the “convoy of death.”
Assistant Secretary of State Richard Armitage compared the American withdrawal to “a pregnant lady, abandoned by her lover to face her fate." Historian Lewis Fanning went so far as to say that “it was not the Hanoi communists who won the war, but rather the American Congress that lost it."
Whitewash that!
2
Notice the difference between reducing aid and cutting off all aid. $700 million was not what Ford had wanted to give South Vietnam, but it wasn't nothing. It was comparable to the level of military aid China and the Soviet Union were giving to Hanoi.
In 1975, the ARVN was not getting enough artillery ammunition from the US, and the Communist forces were not getting enough artillery ammunition from China and the Soviet Union. The difference was that the Communist forces in South Vietnam were able to fill in their shortfall by capturing thousands of tons of American-manufactured ammunition from the ARVN.
1
Ed:
Even if all that were true, and no one denies that the NVN had a formidably effective military, none of it alters the brutal fact that Congress stabbed our ally in the back.
The cut-off of military aid not only wrought tremendous harm to the military readiness of ARVN. Symbolically too the action was profoundly damaging. The message it sent was read the same way in Hanoi and in Saigon -- as the unmistakable determination of the US to wash its hands of its erstwhile ally.
The least we could have done was give our allies the arms they needed so long as they had the will to fight the war. We could have done far more -- Nixon & Kissinger had effectively won the war until Congress snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
I don't think the stain can ever be washed away.
"an animating premise of Democratic liberalism was that the federal government has the ability to solve virtually any problem it chooses to take on, domestic or foreign."
This is not true. Democrats and liberals believe that problems can be solved by the application of human reason.
23
The author skips over - perhaps intentionally- how the Democratic Party responded to the people's candidate McGovern's loss in '72. Vowing to never again allow the riff-raff (like me, a 20-y.o. anti-war McGovern delegate to the state convention) control the nomination, it instituted Super Delegates, to keep a lid on the nominating process. Although Hillary won the nomination last round without needing the Super Delegates, the format & the thumb on the scale by party insiders created deep divisions within the party. Worse, it tainted Hillary at the very moment when the voters were looking for an outsider. Creation of Super Delegates is the kind of seemingly-small decision that can shape history.
49
Agreed. Incredibly, center-right Democrats continue to argue that McGovern's loss almost 50 years ago, during an incredibly tumultuous and unpredictable era, precludes any chances of success for anti-war, pro-social justice progressive Democrats.
Since that time, Democratic Party bosses have become quite adept at crushing popular, progressive movements within the party. And so now we see the Democratic party nearly irrelevant at the state and local level - and at the national level in all three branches of government.
13
They threw me out of the party, too, actually before I even got to vote (my first was against Jack Kemp, for Congress, in 1974). Then the Democratic Leadership Council, with Al Gore and the Clintons among its leaders, made sure that corporations were welcome in the Democratic Party, and you and I weren't. Except for a few minutes at the ballot box, of course, whenever a corporate Democrat was in trouble, like Hillary Clinton recently. Then, if they lose, it's the fault of the expelled Democrats for not being enthusiastic enough!
2
It's true that Kennedy's cache of foreign policy advisors were a disaster--but JFK was not their captive. The Bay of Pigs gave him a more nuanced view of American power. Since Vietnam which should have informed us for a hundred years, we've had Iraq 2 and ongoing catastrophe. Vietnam did keep us and Reagan out of Central America (which hasn't succumbed to Communism) but now we have John Bolton. The Democratic party has a reasonable fear of the abuse of American military power. The Republican party seems to have learned nothing.
13
The Vietnam war destroyed the American left, which was split between the interests of labor and those who opposed the war on moral grounds.
The American Left opposed US entry into World War I and paid a steep price for it; a war that was started by- and benefited the bankers and big business and nobody else. With the Vietnam war, organized labor embarrassed itself in its haste to scramble to the side of the war makers; it had become another corrupt Mafia-riddled vested interest. Both the labor bosses and the rank-and-file felt there was too much to lose by appearing to be unpatriotic; they stood off to the side and wrung their hands as the war consumed hundreds of thousands of young Americans. As penalty for cowardice, labor was quickly castrated by big business and by the 1980’s had become a shadow.
Meanwhile, the anti-war Left was reduced to a single issue advocacy group aiming to end the war. It wasn't against war in general, as such it was easily marginalized; advocates were 'liberals' and insiders; dirty hippies and pacifists, etc. It didn’t matter history was at their backs and that the establishment had failed. Without the war, there was no point to the advocacy, it was path-dependent; even as the right was deprived of its victory by the Vietnamese, the end of the war deprived the left of what had become its reason to be.
Fast forward, there is no real 'left' in America only a Potemkin version fixated upon faddish trivialities with no moral foundation.
17
Hardly the AFL-CIO's proudest moment as it sanctioned mass slaughter of its members' kids, and working-class kids in general, in the war. Perhaps members made a bit more money from war production; as the old saying used to go "War is good business - invest your son!" If memory serves, though, the United Auto Workers and a few other unions were holdouts within the AFL-CIO who opposed the war.
1
Steve:
One fallacy in an otherwise thoughtful post: labor rank-and-file supported the Vietnam war by robust majorities until the bitter end. I was there and I saw it.
In my opinion, labor would still have maintained an alliance with the New Left, had the New Left not actively rejected them. But maybe it was hopeless.
3
I wonder if Mr. Nelson has spoken to many of the people who were actually around in 1968. Because his op-ed certainly doesn't describe what I remember.
10
There was one exception in 1960 to JFK's hawkishness: the small islands off the coast of China. Nixon was the "hawk" on that question; Kennedy maintained that Quemoy, Matsu and the Pescadores were militarily indefensible. If Kennedy had lived, perhaps his realism on the islands could have led to a similar realism on Vietnam.
Or perhaps war protesters might have chanted, "Hey, hey, JFK, how many kids did you kill today?"
4
Rolling Thunder, Lyndon Johnson's bombing of North Vietnam, was not "the largest sustained air campaign in the history of warfare." The American bombing campaign against Communist forces in South Vietnam did not have a single name, but it dwarfed Rolling Thunder--more tons of bombs per year, for more years, and more nearly continuous within those years, adding up to well over four times the total bomb tonnage of Rolling Thunder.
3
Readers should know that the B-52 bombing in SVN was called Arc Light. The Rolling Thunder bombing of NVN was operational while I was "in-country" from 1968-69. The bombing of the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos was dubbed Barrel Roll. I saw the teletype traffic about all three "campaigns" while working in the huge communications center at Phu Lam. The "White House" was an addressee in each message.
1
Bill P:
It is interesting that the White House was in the teletype loop on all three campaigns. That tallies with what I recall about LBJ having personally stayed up late into the night vetting the bombing targets. As a French officer said of the charge of the Light Brigade, "It's magnificent, but that isn't how you fight a war."
LBJ's micromanagement of the war suggests why the war bogged down.
Ed Moise's figures for the tonnage of bombs dropped by our forces are irrelevant for the same reason. No matter how many tons you drop on a bamboo hut in a jungle clearing, you're not going to win a war that way. Nixon brought victory within our grasp with a bombing campaign that likely didn't drop as many bombs, but dropped them on high value targets.
1
The Kennedy people were feeling humiliated over the Bay of Pigs fiasco and so they doubled down on Vietnam in order to display "credible force". Why didn't they invade Cuba for real? They could have won that war in three days. Why Vietnam instead? It is incomprehensible. My only explanation is that there were too many upper class men from Harvard at the White House. Group think is particularly dangerous when the group consider themselves without question the smartest people in the universe. They were actually far from the smartest people anywhere.
7
An alarming lesson from history: the reason the missiles were in Cuba was in case the U.S. had invaded Cuba for real. And as far as we know, they would have worked perfectly at hitting U.S. cities if they'd been launched. "Credible force" would have to come against a country with no known nuclear missiles.
1
Thanks for one of the most intelligent essays in the series. You fell a lot of myths.
You also brought back unwanted memories of why I became a lifelong Republican. In one of the most infamous acts of treachery in US history, Democrats betrayed the Vietnamese allies who had fought and died alongside GI's in Vietnam. "Democratic Congresses ... forbade President Gerald Ford to continue to supply arms to the government of South Vietnam, which quickly fell to the Communists". Realizing that it was pointless to offer any further resistance to the North -- which was lavishly armed by the Soviet Union -- the ARVN eventually disintegrated.
In a recent comment, Roger Soiset describes the fate of our allies in the aftermath of this American perfidy: "An estimated 50,000 were executed, 1.5 million spent up to 17 years in brutal "re-education" camps where as many as 10% died, and an estimated 2.5 million left (of which another 50,000 at least died getting out)." An untold number also died trying to flee in small craft on the high seas by drowning or at the hands of pirates who raped and murdered and pillaged them.
Every time I recall this infamy, the shame of it all still makes the back of my neck prickle. As a people, we need to establish a national day of shame or atonement to commemorate this terrible crime.
6
It is useless to argue with an irredentist, and as an old man, I suspect this is especially true for an aged irredentist. Ah well, where angels fear to tread. I just can’t help myself.
Our “allies” in Vietnam were largely fascist worms, typical of the tinhorns we supported in the 1950s and 60s. They claimed to be “anti-communists.” Having lost distant relatives in the USSR, I was, I confess, allured by some of those worms for a time, before judgment and conscience intervened. They deserved to be “stabbed in the back.” (Didn’t some other anti-communist like that phrase?) And their atrocities presaged those of the VC, NVA, and NV. All that could have been avoided had we not empowered those worms. Our support of them was a national shame.
An even greater shame was our commitment of soldiers to kill and die for nothing (except their comrades). Like the south in the civil war, we were meant to lose. Five kids from my tiny country high school died there, all for nothing. We can never know if any of them knew all that, but I suspect that at least some of them did.
1
Given Nixon's thin win, had Humphrey put that little daylight between himself and Johnson a few weeks earlier, I felt at the time and still believe, he would have won.
4
Yes, voters don't like wars, and candidates promise to avoid them or end them, and then renege on their promise once in office.
8
Voters don't like wars? Are you kidding? Why did polls show that 75% of all those anti-war the American people supported our invasion of Iraq, even though the nation had never attacked us? Why the anti-communist hysteria that drove us into Vietnam?Why did it take so long to admit the truth about Vietnam and get out? Why do we continue to arm ourselves to the teeth, spending more on arms than the rest of the world put together? We love war. But we want short wars. Gloriously triumphant wars. And the old glory days seem gone. But wait, wait until the polls show how many Americans will supporlt an invasion of Iran.
29
Laura's husband Bob: From a letter to my mother dated October 23, 1968 from a hilltop in Vietnam: "I finally got my absentee ballot. I got two of them. It only took me a few minutes to make my decisions and put the ballot in the mail. If Nixon wins it's not my fault. I thought of a write-in vote for McCarthy but nixed the idea because he stands no chance of winning anyway and it would be helping Nixon."
Fifty years ago today my younger brother Rick and I got inducted into the army. I was just over a week shy of 22 and Rick was 20. He was called for his army physical in June of 1967 and I had mine in January of 1968. We were living in Bayside, Queens and had our physicals at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, NY. I wonder how unusual it was back in the 60's for brothers to be drafted on the same day. Couldn't find anything conclusive on the internet. It's certainly nothing to brag about it. I'm just curious.
Our being taken together does seem a bit strange considering our age differences and the approximately 7 months between our physicals. I'm not saying that it was a bad thing. At least I had a friend to help get me through this new experience.
5
In the '68 election, Humphrey told the truth: victory was impossible, since China would send in 3 million troops if the US began to win, but losing was unacceptable, since the dominoes would fall and a Communist invasion of the US would be the final result, so there was no option but to continue to continue.
Nixon said he had a 'secret plan' for a quick, unconditional victory on the order of WWII. Even those who were almost certain Nixon was lying figured a slender chance was better than the Humphrey certainty.
So another 5 years of a useless war and many more needless deaths followed by the eviction of the US from Vietnam, a Vietnam united under the Communists, and the US forced to accept the Communist victory, something that could have been achieved without the loss of any American or Vietnamese lives.
6
I won’t engage a harangue about the misstatements in this piece and so I will say the following only, that in spite of his disdain for Dick Daley RFK had his support and as of the night he was assassinated he would have won the nomination because Humphrey could not bring himself to renounce LBJ. I worked for RFK in Chicago and was in Grant Park during the convention, and can say it was my experience that Humphrey absolutely lost the anti-war movement and then lost union support to Nixon on his “peace with honor” platform while demonizing anti-war supporters as either Viet Cong operatives, Muscovite operatives or fellow travelers of one or both. Humphrey was weak and muted and smug by the convention, unmoved by the calamity inside his Party and so hapless as a candidate even though Nixon’s history and persona made millions gag, especially when he tried to unbutton his personality as if he could find the charisma of a Kennedy. The nomination would have been a brawl but nobody brawled better than RFK and nobody made deals better simply by using Kennedy inevitability as a persuasion. His promise to end the war on Inauguration Day touched minds and hearts at their cores. Nixon sloganeering proved better than Humphrey’s gravelly smiling platitudes but only because Bobby was dead. The deaths of MLK and RFK and that earlier of Walter Reuther eviscerated the anti-war movement. I voted for Eldridge Cleaver to prove the point. Most of the anti-war activists didn’t vote at all.
44
RFK's assassination was a tragedy, but his winning the nomination was far from a certainty. He had momentum, but LBJ/HHH had most of the support of Democratic Party insiders, who still controlled the bulk of the delegates.
Daley's support would have been a big plus for him, and RFK's ability to campaign effectively might have won over enough of the insiders. But personal connections, particularly among senators, counted much more then.
Even for some liberals (as defined then) the legislative accomplishments in civil rights and social welfare that LBJ and HHH achieved were monumental. It was not easy for them to ignore that.
As for voting for Eldredge Cleaver instead of Humphrey when Nixon (and just maybe Wallace) were the alternatives, well, I understand it. Those were revolutionary times.
But your decision and that of many others resulted in an election in which the majority that voted, voted for a change in course from the Great Society. I don't think it was a good one.
4
MLK & RFK died in 1968. Walter Reuther died in 1970.
1
I'm sorry for your loss, bemused by your citing an RFK "promise to end the war on Inauguration Day," disappointed by your near-harangue against Hubert Humphrey, who was an accomplished progressive on race and economics and world peace when Bobby Kennedy was working for Joe McCarthy. (Yes, Bobby "grew," and yes, being Vice-President as we became mired in Vietnam put HHH in the Big Muddy.)
In 1968, the stubbornly self-righteous helped Anna Chennault and George Wallace and Archie Bunkers to elect Richard Nixon. In 2016, the stubbornly self-righteous helped Vladimir Putin and Steve Bannon and "the base" to elect Donald Trump. But they "proved [some] point."
5
The legacy of Vietnam explains many things about our recent history but there are too many other factors at play. You ask "how else to explain" Trump? Come on. Start with the anachronism of the Electoral College. Remember, she won by more than three-million votes. And the Russian hack? Comey? 24/7 Benghazi-Benghazi-Benghazii? Let's not forget the cultural wars: feminism; reproductive freedom; sexual identity; race. All these issues are routinely exploited to divide and conquer. I am almost 70. I turned draft age in 1966. Vietnam was the elephant in the room no one could ignore. Some of us marched in the streets. Some of my buddies marched into rice paddies in Indochina and didn't return. I've seen the countless threads of Vietnam woven into the fabric of our culture ever since. But as that conflagration grows threadbare it explains less and less of our culture. The corrupting influence of money in politics explains far more to my mind. I ask you, how else do you explain the willful ignorance about global climate and ecosystem destabilization in the face of irrefutable scientific evidence? Money in politics and corporate hegemony over the mass media to miscommunicate that scientific evidence and allow business as usual explains far more than the fading memories of Vietnam.
80
Right on!
I lucked out with #164 in my draft year lottery.
East End, I love your comment. Hitting the recommend button is not enough.
We have become the "idiot nation" that Mr. Degan so thoroughly describes on his blog. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead
1
An interesting alternative version of American foreign policy over the last 50 years, coupled with an analysis of its impact on domestic politics. Nelson depicts President Johnson as virtually a puppet of Kennedy's advisers, deepening American involvement in Vietnam because they told him that's what his predecessor would have done. Even in 1968, the president shifted his policy because the so-called "wise men" informed him of the necessity of such a change. I think anyone familiar with Johnson's personality and his love of power would challenge this portrait of him as a passive tool in the hands of his advisers.
The author also implies that the Democrats' shift to a more open system for choosing its presidential nominee jeopardized the party's electoral future and ultimately paved the way for the rise of Trump. One could just as easily argue that the old elite-dominated system helped ensnare the US in the Vietnam war by ignoring the more cautious instincts of the party faithful. As Nelson points out, the party establishment tended to favor a more aggressive foreign policy than did the voters.
In any case, the argument that presidential candidates in a free society should owe their selection to party bosses rather than to the rank and file sounds somewhat peculiar. A more democratic process does enable more candidates to contend for the nomination, hardly a bad change. Trump's rise, moreover, stemmed from the corruption of the GOP, not from too much democracy.
34
The one factor weighing on LBJ's mind, which is not often written about, was his fear that, if South Vietnam were overrun, the Democrats would face a political situation similar to that following the communist victory in China in 1949--the attacks for "losing" China, the charges of being "soft" on communism, the career wrecked and the rise of a Joe McCarthy. Any Democrat in office from 1949-54 remembered those days with dread.
As for the nominating process, at least at this point, it is a fact that the Democratic nominees chosen under the old system were for the most part both stronger leaders and candidates with more popular appeal than many of the Democratic nominees chosen since 1972.
7
An article in Foreign Affairs, the authoritative voice of the Establishment on foreign policy, recently pointed out that the general public has historically always been much more reluctant than foreign policy "experts" and political leaders in getting involved militarily overseas. The author saw this as a problem; I don't.
4
For most of it's history the Democratic Party has been fairly conservative, despite the "liberal" epithet being hurled at it constantly.
Take the long view and the period of Liberal dominance is pretty short. Harry Truman was put on the 1944 ticket by southern conservatives as they know FDR was unlikely to survive a 4th term and they did not want Henry Wallace- a real Progressive- to ascend to the White House. The post war period under Wallace would have been much different than under Truman.
Only with the passage of time will people to be able to see exactly how sharp a deviation the Roosevelt Era was from the norms of the Democratic Party.
9
It is an interesting idea to compare the 1972 and 2016 elections. Excluding the personalities of the candidates, Secretary Clinton’s proposals were almost Nixonian. President Trump’s supporters, if they considered it, may have thought themselves a version of Senator McGovern’s followers. Probably the Secretary’s people expected a victory on par with President Nixon’s in 1972. The difference was Secretary Clinton was no Richard Nixon in running a campaign. He would have disposed of Donald Trump fairly quickly.
12
I think this comparison is mostly backwards. McGovern's followers were (more) idealistic and educated on the issues. Nixon's included both well-off conservatives and people for whom a anti-foreign Southern strategy fit their prejudices. The latter "Archie Bunkers" are Trump's people. Hillary Clinton was a junior member of the staff that worked to impeach Richard Nixon; to contend that "her proposals were almost Nixonian" is a long stretch.
1
David in Toledo: the left still loves that analogy but anyone old enough to be an "Archie Bunker" (Greatest Generation) is dead or nearly so. The youngest WWII vets are now over 90, if alive at all. They have not been a serious factor in politics since the early 00s.
Nope, it was baby boomers who elected Trump and rejected Hillary.
2