I’d seen parts off Tom Brokaw’s “1968” on the History Channel, enough to catch the shots of the Chicago riots outside the Democratic Convention and, of course, the black-and-white footage of people dancing around in San Francisco. But I didnt’ see enough to catch the overall insinuation:
He shows the electoral map of 1968, saying if you add Nixon’s states to those won by George Wallace, you get something a bit like George W. Bush’s wins from 2000 and 2004. Nixon plus Wallace equals the modern Republican coalition, Brokaw says.
So far, so good: but then Brokaw tries to explain what brought this coalition together. He says, “Southern working-class whites deserted” the Democrats. Why? Brokaw goes to Nixon speechwriter and unbiased scholar Patrick J. Buchanan, who explains these voters were “Reagan Democrats … they were driven out [of the Democratic Party] by what those kids and the rioters and the demonstrators and the denunciators were doin’ in the 1960s.”
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Brokaw swallows, uncritically, Buchanan’s line: that the protesters were “overprivileged kids [who] didn’t have any support in middle America.” For Brokaw, the clash happened between Americans of “working-class background” and college kids of, he diplomatically says, “different backgrounds.” He uses sociology worthy of David Brooks: there were “many Americas”–”one [in South Dakota], where the casualties of a controversial war were honored and mourned. And … my new home in California, where the antiwar resistance and rebellion was fueling a massive cultural change.”
Rauchway treats this argument with contempt, pointing out that the Civil Rights Act off 1964 probably had as much or more to do with the Democrats’ loss of the South. Which is obviously true; even LBJ himself is rumored to have said, after singing the legislation, that “We’ve lost the South for a generation.”
At the same time, though, I think Rauchway is maybe a little too blanket in his dismissal of the argument. It’s definitely true that the working-class constituency of the Democratic Party didn’t look too kindly upon the shaggy college kids in the street:
The Hard Hat Riot was a riot which occurred on May 8, 1970, near the intersection of Wall Street and Broad Street and at New York City Hall. The riot occurred about noon when about 200 construction workers mobilized by the New York State AFL-CIO attacked about 1,000 high school and college students and others protesting the Kent State shootings, the American invasion of Cambodia and the Vietnam War.
The AFL-CIO wasn’t and isn’t exactly renowned for its support of Republican candidates.
And that’s but one example. What we forget, of course, is that the war in Vietnam was a Democratic, even liberal undertaking. This was really liberalism at war with itself, and it’s hard to imagine from our current vantage point in history - the idea that the Democratic Party had held sway for a generation (from 1932 to 1968 Republicans held the White House for a grand total of 8 years, Ike’s two terms, and dominated Congress). But this, I think, is what happens in an era of dominance; the extremists begin pushing harder and harder because the movement or ideology isn’t moving as quickly as they’d like. We’ve seen the exact same thing with conservatism in recent years; a generation of hegemony tends to breed discontent amongst the true believers. And as they push in the directions of the margins, others bail for the center.
I think you have to say it was race and the hippies. Both were aspects of a counterculture that objected to the views and values of the mainstream. We say now that those views and values should have been challenged - even conservatives concur on race. But during 1968, it must have seemed as if the country was being torn apart. And I suspect that for most Middle Americans, they didn’t have to look too hard to see who they thought was doing the tearing.
