The New Yorker: Lessons from the Election of 1968

[teach1st]

Another recap of the 1968 elections. I found it interesting reading on this cold afternoon, and I had a hard time choosing what to excerpt.

Lessons from the Election of 1968
New Yorker, January 8, 2018, By Louis Menand

Objects in the rearview mirror often really are closer than they appear. It’s not that far from Wallace to Trump. The focus on Presidential elections makes it hard to see that from one election to the next pretty much the same people are voting, and most people do not change much over time. The Presidency is a beach ball bouncing along the surface, the winner an artifact of the circumstance that there are usually only two candidates to choose between. “Public opinion,” or the forces that move it, runs below the surface, and has a much slower tempo.

In “Deeply Divided,” a 2014 study, the political scientists Doug McAdam and Karina Kloos argue that since 1960 our politics has been driven by two movements: the civil-rights movement and what they call a “countermovement,” which could be broadly described as anti-integrationist. It includes racists, but it also includes many white Americans who acknowledge the principle of racial equality but resist involuntary race-mixing, people who accept and even defend de facto segregation. “The collapse of the postwar consensus,” McAdam and Kloos maintain, was not because of Vietnam; it “had everything to do with race.”

White voters abandoned the Democratic Party. In 1968, Humphrey got thirty-eight per cent of the white vote. In 1972, George McGovern got thirty-two per cent. In 1980, Jimmy Carter, a white Southerner, got thirty-six per cent. In 2016, Hillary Clinton, running against the toxic nitwit who is now the face of our politics, received thirty-seven per cent.

One thing that surprised analysts about Wallace voters was how young they were. To most observers during the campaign, it looked as though Wallace was appealing to older voters who were uncomfortable with social change or were unwilling to abandon old prejudices. These observers assumed that the United States would age out of those attitudes as the new day of tolerance and equality brightened. I’m sure we white Massachusetts liberals believed something like that. We thought that racial injustice and American exceptionalism were on history’s dust heap, only given a last breath by the election of Nixon in a crazy and fluky election year. We thought the gains of mid-century liberalism were lasting.

More

[frazzled]

1. Much more from this long article

and Louis Menand is one of my favorite writers. Here are two other sections worth discussing:

In close elections, such as those of 1960, 1968, and 1976, the vote is essentially the equivalent of flipping a coin. If the voting had happened a week earlier or a week later or on a rainy day, the outcome might have been reversed. But we interpret the result as though it reflected the national intention, a collective decision by the people to rally behind R., and repudiate D. Even when the winner receives fewer votes than the loser, as in 2000 and 2016, we talk about the national mood and direction almost entirely in terms of the winning candidate, and as though the person more voters preferred had vanished, his or her positions barely worth reporting on.

Millions more Americans voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and in 2012 and for Hillary Clinton in 2016 than voted for Donald Trump, but the Trump voter is now the protagonist of the national narrative. People talk about how Americans want to roll back globalization—even though most Americans who voted appear to want no such thing. The United States is one of the few democracies that does not have a coalition government, and a winner-take-all electoral system breeds a winner-take-all punditry.

People who write and argue about politics are ideologues. They hold a coherent set of positions that they identify as liberal or conservative (or some variant, like libertarian or leftist). But, to millions of voters, those terms mean almost nothing. These voters do not think in ideological terms, and their positions on the issues are often inconsistent and lacking in coherence. Given the option, they will sometimes identify as moderates or centrists, but this tells us very little about how they will vote.
The fact that voters are often responding to nonideological cues helps to explain the apparent volatility of the electorate from race to race. In 1964, for example, running against Goldwater, a conservative from Arizona, Johnson carried the neighboring state of California with fifty-nine per cent of the vote. Two years later, running as a conservative who had prominently backed Goldwater in 1964, Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California with almost fifty-eight per cent of the vote. In the 1968 Presidential election, forty per cent of the people who had voted for Johnson in 1964 voted for Nixon, even though Nixon’s opponent was Johnson’s own Vice-President. What cues were these voters responding to?

The first extract speaks to my frustration over the media (and general) narrative (even here) that obsesses about the Trump voter and over the incessant ponderings about the mood of the nation. The nation does not approve of the majority Republican or Trump policies; the majority of the nation did not vote for Trump. The Republicans and Trump in no way reflect the "mood of the nation."

The second extract reaffirms my long-held feeling that you can analyze your way into the ground over elections, but such analysis is mostly bullshit: elections are not logical, and voters are not logical. It's a crapshoot.

And finally, the extract from the OP, confirms my belief that race subtends almost everything in our elections and politics. It explains a lot more than anything else. And that is why I was tempted to write this morning (though thought better of it) that this is why an Elizabeth Warren candidacy is unlikely to succeed. In the first place, she'd have to win the primaries, and her resume and biography in no way speak to the racial issues that Democrats outside the northern and western large cities are looking at (this was also Bernie Sanders' downfall in the primaries—minority voters are looking for someone who has walked their walk, and whom they recognize as such). And if she should manage to bypass that hurdle, the opposite would obtain in a general election: the same split of white and minority voters would obtain as in the past: the same 32-37% for the Democrat. (Though massive anti-Trump sentiment might (no pun) trump this truism for once.)

[zipplewrath]

2. Voters are not logical

This is sadly true, and of both parties, as well as various independents and third party types. What most voters are doing is often voting "against" something. It is almost always and "emotional" choice, and they often don't even really know most of the positions of their candidate. It's why hypocrisy wins in this country, most people aren't really listening so they don't see/hear it, and don't care when it is pointed out. To a great degree civil rights have moved forward in this country despite the majority, not because of it. Thinking thoughtful people move it forward and make it "acceptable" to the majority. Unfortunately, we have yet to figure out how to achieve this on economic and foreign policy.

[Nitram]

3. "The collapse of the postwar consensus, McAdam and Kloos maintain, was not because of Vietnam...

...it “had everything to do with race.”

Based on how the events of 1968 affected the political and social views of my parents, I'd say this is right on the money.They started out as progressives and ended up right-wing Fox viewers.