Acid, Amnesty, Abortion and Amnesia

by digby

Maha discusses “The Story of 1972” today and does something quite innovative. She pulls up Richard Nixon’s acceptance speech and reminds everyone what he was really running against that year: acid, amnesty and abortion — as well as “law and order” which was George Wallace’s racist war cry in 1968 and stood the Republicans in good stead for a generation of race baiting.

The first issue Nixon launched into was not Vietnam, but quotas. He was speaking out against Affirmative Action. He spoke of “millions who have been driven out of their home in the Democratic Party” — this was a nod to the old white supremacist Dixiecrats who were leaving the Democratic Party because of its stand in favor of civil rights (the famous Southern Strategy). McGovern had proposed a guaranteed minimum income for the nation’s poor that was widely regarded as radical and flaky and (in popular lore) amounted to taking tax money away from white people and giving it to blacks. Nixon warned that McGovern’s policies would raise taxes and also add millions of people to welfare roles — another racially charged issue. Then Nixon took on one of his favorite issues, crime. If you remember those years you’ll remember that Nixon was always going on about “lawnorder.” This was another issue with racial overtones, but it was also a swipe at the “permissiveness” of the counterculture and the more violent segments of the antiwar and Black Power movements.

Finally, toward the end, he addressed Vietnam:

Peace is too important for partisanship. There have been five Presidents in my political lifetime–Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson.

They had differences on some issues, but they were united in their belief that where the security of America or the peace of the world is involved we are not Republicans, we are not Democrats. We are Americans, first, last, and always.

These five Presidents were united in their total opposition to isolation for America and in their belief that the interests of the United States and the interests of world peace require that America be strong enough and intelligent enough to assume the responsibilities of leadership in the world.

They were united in the conviction that the United States should have a defense second to none in the world.

They were all men who hated war and were dedicated to peace.

But not one of these five men, and no President in our history, believed that America should ask an enemy for peace on terms that would betray our allies and destroy respect for the United States all over the world.

As your President, I pledge that I shall always uphold that proud bipartisan tradition. Standing in this Convention Hall 4 years ago, I pledged to seek an honorable end to the war in Vietnam. We have made great progress toward that end. We have brought over half a million men home, and more will be coming home. We have ended America’s ground combat role. No draftees are being sent to Vietnam. We have reduced our casualties by 98 percent. We have gone the extra mile, in fact we have gone tens of thousands of miles trying to seek a negotiated settlement of the war. We have offered a cease-fire, a total withdrawal of all American forces, an exchange of all prisoners of war, internationally supervised free elections with the Communists participating in the elections and in the supervision.

Not exactly “stay the course,” is it? And Nixon doesn’t argue that McGovern’s withdrawal proposal amounted to being weak on national security. Instead, he argued that it would be ignoble and a betrayal of our allies: “[I]t will discourage our friends abroad and it will encourage our enemies to engage in aggression.”

I actually think that the most apropos quote comes from Nixon’s acceptance speech in 1968, (courtesy commenter km):

And this great group of Americans – the forgotten Americans and others – know that the great question Americans must answer by their votes in November is this: Whether we will continue for four more years the policies of the last five years.

And this is their answer, and this is my answer to that question: When the strongest nation in the world can be tied up for four years in a war in Vietnam with no end in sight, when the richest nation in the world can’t manage its own economy, when the nation with the greatest tradition of the rule of law is plagued by unprecedented lawlessness, when a nation that has been known for a century for equality of opportunity is torn by unprecedented racial violence, and when the President of the United States cannot travel abroad or to any major city at home without fear of a hostile demonstration – then it’s time for new leadership for the United States of America.

Ned Lamont could substitute Iraq for Vietnam and give that quote almost verbatim. If there’s any 60’s era analogy to be seen in this election (and it’s really a stretch) it’s with the Republicans who split that year between the George Wallace racists in the south and Nixon who ran on a peace platform. Joe Lieberman is angling to be this year’s George Wallace (in more ways than one.) Lucky for us the party is very united. The only people who seem to be ready to follow him are hysterical beltway wags.

I will repeat this, even though it’s boring. Aside from the realighnment of the southern states that began in 1964, the world underwent a huge social cataclysm that included a sexual revolution, equal rights for despised minorities and women and a new form of popular culture that spoke in codes and underground language that those not in know couldn’t understand. It wasn’t just in America. It happened all over the world to one degree or another. The basic fabric of society was being challenged and turned upside down in every way from technology to family. That kind of major change is shocking and frightening at first and many people naturally look for ways to try to slow it down. One of those ways in a democratic society is to elect a conservative government.

It didn’t actually work very well on that count. The culture continued to change quickly and with a surprisingly small amount of lasting discombobulation. Our society is a very different place than it was in 1960 and is a much better place for more than half the population, at least. Humans are surprisingly adaptable and perhaps America, with its immigrant history of personal reinvention is more adaptable than most. But it came at a big political price for the Democratic Party.

That bill has now been paid in full. The conservatives have successfully exploited racial and sexual fears and resentment for more than a generation in order to gain power. They got it, they blew it and this country can no longer afford to wallow in the battles of 40 years ago. It’s a new day and a new set of challenges. The Republicans have shown they are incompetent to deal with those challenges. It’s time for both sides to get over the “acid amnesty and abortion” nonsense and look to the future.

Right now the extremist radical position is to stay the course in Iraq and just keep blindly flailing at terrorism with no real idea of how to tackle it on a long term basis. Consider this: George W. Bush turned the office of State Department undersecretary for public diplomacy into a patronage job and appointed one of his second rate office wives at a time when this country’s greatest challenge is to win a war of ideas. He’s kept Don Rumsfeld in charge of the war effort even as we have been watching him slowly unravel before our very eyes. Americans are hated by a majority of the world’s inhabitants now. There is no Democrat in the country who would have done that.

Phantom hippies are the least of our problems. Is it too much to ask that the media not fall for Karl Rove’s manufactured spin for just one minute and recognize that this nation’s foreign policy is being run by incompetent political hacks and neocon fanatics at a time of maximum danger? It’s fun to take these little trips down memory lane and all, but really, we have serious issues to deal with and the current government is doing a terrible job of it. Perhaps we could take our eyes off the rear view mirror for a minute or two and deal with the fleet of mack trucks that are coming right at us.

Update: Here’s a wonderful essay on this topic from a diarist on DKOS (who also happens to be a historian):

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.

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