Did The 26th Amendment Fail, Part 4
How The Left’s Reaction to Watergate May Have Played A Part in The Rise of Republicanism Until the End of the 20th Century
When Nixon resigned the Presidency in August of 1974 many Republicans, including its most conservative members, thought the party was dead. Not long after the disastrous midterms that November Abraham Viguerie, a major conservative fundraiser approached Ronald Reagan and asked him to run as the leader of a third conservative party. Reagan considered it seriously for nearly a month before turning Viguerie down, convinced that the Republican brand was not dead. Not long after he would mount a primary challenge to the new President Gerald Ford.
For the Democrats Nixon’s disgrace gave them an opening that even a seasoned operative like Walter Mondale had not thought possible in the aftermath of the 1972 election. In his biography he remembered saying to Ted Kennedy that if Nixon could seize the momentum he had now the Democrats would never get the White House back. Four years later he was sworn in as Vice President.
While the 1976 election rarely gets the same credit for the repudiation of the incumbent party that 1968 does, it was in many ways, just as remarkable. In 1972 Richard Nixon had won over sixty percent of the popular vote and 49 of 50 states. George McGovern had only gotten 37.5 percent of the popular vote and carried just Massachusetts and DC. Four years later Jimmy Carter won the Presidency with 50 percent of the popular vote and 297 electoral votes to Gerald Ford’s 240. He received just over 40.8 million votes to McGovern’s 29 million, a nearly twelve million vote gain from four years earlier.
Furthermore Carter had managed recoveries in areas of the country that had not gone Democratic in years. He carried Georgia, Arkansas, South Carolina, and Alabama none of which had gone Democratic since 1964 and Mississippi, which hadn’t gone Democratic since 1960. With the exception of Virginia he was the first Democrat to essentially manage a clean sweep of the South since FDR. He seemed to be building the same coalition that had led JFK to victory in 1960. And yet in a foreshadowing of things to come, he received almost no credit for it from the media or the left.
In many ways Jimmy Carter had more right to the anti-establishment branch than McGovern in 1972 and McCarthy in 1968: he was a governor rather than a Washington insider as both men were when they ran insurgent campaigns. Yet the left never took to Carter the way they did either of those men with the same passion.
Some of it may have been due to his approach: Carter famously ran as an outsider, running against Washington. This approach was more mainstream in the aftermath of both Vietnam and Watergate and the most successful Presidential runs during 1976 were built on it. They were all across the spectrum: George Wallace was running on the far right of the Democratic party; Jerry Brown was running on the left and Reagan was running against ‘the buddy system of Washington’ in order to explain his primary challenge of Ford. But with the exception of Brown, a man whose beliefs were so extreme he had been nicknamed ‘Governor Moonbeam’, the left basically rejected all of them. In large part this was because men like Carter were arguing not so much for tearing the system down, as had been the centerpiece of McCarthy’s run and the foundation of McGovern’s coalition, but rather reform.
And as opposed to the jeremiads of McGovern, both Carter and Reagan were warm and cheerful in their campaigning. Carter’s campaign strategy was pleasant and kind throughout every part of his run for President and his grin became nearly as famous as the man himself. “My name is Jimmy Carter and I’m running for President,” was so self-effacing that it won over many people.
That may be in part what irked the left. Unlike McGovern who had pinned his hopes for the Presidency on the vague idea of ‘consolidating the left’ Carter approach was completely different. He was just as organized as McGovern’s campaign but he decided not to pick and choose his primaries, but most critically, to run in all of them. To that end, he chose to be fuzzy on the issues in a way that irked the media but won over the voters — something they never got over. Carter knew the only way a man who was identified as ‘Jimmy Who?” when he announced his run for President was to win over as many people as possible. That meant in the north, the south, the right and then maybe the left.
This approach was a huge success: Carter managed to win over the primary voters and his growing momentum managed to overcome the bosses and liberal elites doubt about. When he won the Ohio primary on June 8th, Richard Daley the last boss remaining, threw his support to Carter and effectively made sure there would be no fight at the convention that could divide the party. As opposed to the previous two conventions the 1976 Democratic convention was one of party unity and showed signs of progress among the party as Barbara Jordan, the first African-American woman elected to the House since 1901 gave the keynote address. The Democratic Party was no longer the same party it had been even eight years ago.
But by and large all of this did little to inspire love for Carter among the left’s coalition. In 1976 that turnout dropped to 42.6 percent among 18–21 year old votes. And that in itself was a symbol of how the left chose to view Nixon’s resignation. And that is they began to do what they have essentially been doing ever since: rewriting history.
In the Lost Cause of the counterculture, all of the demonstrations and all of their efforts had failed because the country had chosen Richard Nixon twice despite their warnings. The fact that they had spent as much time initially marching against Johnson, the decision for McCarthy’s campaign, everything they had done in the aftermath, including their decision to never get behind Humphrey was ignored. Similarly was any personal failures on the part of George McGovern who clearly would have won had the nation known the truth about Watergate. (In reality any realistic chance McGovern might have had to beat Nixon ended on May 15th when the attempt on Wallace eliminated any possibility for him to run as a third party candidate — something that Nixon’s campaign acknowledged and McGovern had been counting on as a key to his victory in the general election.)
This narrative would not have stood up to close scrutiny had it not been for Nixon’s administration and all of the revelations that had come out of it, starting with the Pentagon Papers, extending into Watergate and the constant revelations of the White House recordings where each new release was greeted by the political media with the same anticipation that a Taylor Swift recording is today. What is different is how the Movement — not just the 18–21 years old but the majority of the movement — chose to react. In the aftermath of Watergate a record number of people chose to run for Congress for the first time and 87 were elected in what has become known as ‘the class of ’74.” They agreed that the institution of government had been damaged and ran for office in an attempt to repair it. The movement’s reaction by and large was to take the approach that government was irrevocably broken and to collectively withdraw from the political scene, like Achilles into their tents.
This was a natural reaction after the last decade. The difference was that the left used the myth of the Lost Cause to argue that the institutions not only broken, but they were always going to broken and always had been. In short, it was a rigged system and only a sucker would get involved. And by and large they have spent the next half-century making sure their version of events became the prevailing one.
This was mainly scene in the work of so many academics such as Howard Zinn, who chose to write ‘The People’s History of the United States’ which turned out to be as cherry-picked a version of history as the one in history books and just as big a seller. Other intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky and Lewis Lapham involved a similar pattern in their writings: in Lapham’s case it involved becoming editing Harper’s for the better part of thirty years.
Nor was this kind of writing devoted solely to academic studies. So much of the fictional writing from this generation from sources as diverse as John Irving and William Goldman show the evidence of this longing for the 1960s. Much of Stephen King’s fiction during his period until well into the end of the century shows as many protagonists dealing with the trauma of that decade’s failures. Johnny Smith met his girlfriend in The Dead Zone when they were campaigning for Eugene McCarthy together. Bobbi Anderson and James Gardener in The Tommyknockers are former 1960s radical who have spent much of the last decade protesting nuclear power plants. The title story in Hearts of Atlantis is told from the perspective of a college student who dropped out and went to Chicago and has spent the last thirty years wondering if he sold out. A malaise from that decade seems to make his troubled protagonists more willing to accept the supernatural then usual and many of them seem to prefer that idea of alien invasion to the norm.
Others went to Hollywood and expressed their emotions in other ways. Oliver Stone came back from Vietnam and won Oscars for directing Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, two parts of his Vietnam trilogy. His JFK argues the country has been formally corrupted from within and the investigation into his assassination basically becomes a polemic on the establishment’s corruption, a theme that is prevalent in his follow-up Nixon. Eventually he himself embraced a far more leftist version of events producing a documentary series for Showtime called Untold History of the United States which essentially regurgitates so many of the left’s cherry picking of history to make America the villain in everything. Michael Moore, who was just a teenager when the movement ended, is very much a child of it and has spent the better part of thirty years making polemics disguises as documentaries, each showing different flaws in America that make it irredeemable in his eyes.
It’s worth pointing out that while much of this decries the American way and particularly corporations and capitalism, all of these people and their contemporaries have become very rich denouncing the evils of that system. To paraphrase H.L. Mencken no one has ever lost money by decrying everything about America. There is in fact a cottage industry on these kinds of books and movies that has been booming since the 1990s and apparently seems recession proof. What’s maddening about this is for all the supposed intelligence and intellect about all of these books and films, they essentially have no new arguments that have not been made before, and in fact they were not even original when they were coined. Nothing in The 1619 Project is different from what was written by James Baldwin which is turn was no different from the kinds of writing we find in Marcus Garvey and indeed all the way back to William Lloyd Garrison.
The method is always the same. The leftist author, usually young or a minority, looks into the historical record and finds something they didn’t find in their history books growing up. They read these stories and take it as not a sin of omission but rather the idea that the power-that-be (never defined) have been lying to them and by extension the country by keeping these stories hidden from the public. They then construct a narrative that ‘proves’ the failings of an institution and by extension, use it to show the failings of America. They focus on every imperfection as an irrevocable betrayal and proof of what they believe.
And their message remains fundamentally unchanged. America is a failed state because it was founded in white supremacy and misogyny. As a result all of the good things that have come out of America or in the West in general either don’t count or are irrevocably stained as a result. In this reading America is not a democracy because democracy itself is a lie. The freedoms that we have been granted in the Constitution are not actual freedoms or rights. (The fact that they are using the rights of freedom of speech and of the press to express them is ignored in these narratives.) And every single part of our society is so broken beyond repair that there is nothing anyone, not as individual or as collective, can ever do to make it better, certainly not participate in the democratic process.
If you’re thinking this isn’t exactly a call to revolution, you’re right. And it’s never been particularly popular beyond a certain audience. The consequences may very well be one that is beyond its reach. From 1968 to 2004, with a brief exception in 1992, voter turnout steadily dropped reaching a low of 48 percent in 1996 when Clinton won reelection over Bob Dole. In that election, 18–21 years old turnout reached an all-time low at just under 34 percent.
Correlation does not necessarily indicate causation but during that same period the Republicans won the Presidency seven times out of ten. If one is to believe the argument of Jesse Helms that Republicans win when fewer people vote, then the Republican revolution happened in large part because of this indifference of the American electorate. It certainly wasn’t helped by the increasing insistence among the left that there was no difference between the two parties. They acknowledged that the Republican party was by far the worst abuser of this — the left especially hated Reagan and W. — but that never seemed to make the Democratic alternatives any better in their eyes. This might have seemed hard to believe especially considering how much of an enemy Reagan was to the liberal orthodoxy even before he was running for President but they never seemed to care that much. In 1980 Eugene McCarthy, out of the Senate since 1970, endorsed Reagan for President despite the fact his old colleague from the Senate Walter Mondale was Carter’s Vice President. McCarthy had run on a third party ticket himself in 1976 but had not even garnered barely .5 percent of the popular vote.
This disparity also suggests why, certainly in the 20th century, third parties that were fundamentally right-wing in their messaging were more successful than those that were fundamentally left-wing in theirs. For all of the horrible racism at the core of all right-wing political parties in our nation’s history, their message had a basic simplicity at its core that its base understood. They knew exactly who the enemy was and that by voting for either Strom Thurmond or George Wallace, you were taking a stand against the powers-that-be.
Left-wing third party movements, starting with the Great Depression and continuing until the end of the 20th century, argued about the flaws in the institution but could not never give a concrete name to ‘the Other’ the way wing the right wing had. The right-wing’s platforms were based on racial superiority while the left’s are based on intellectual superiority and are always harder to define, even to the members of that party. Furthermore, as horrible as the minds behind the Dixiecrats and the American Independence Party were, they at least had a concrete strategy behind the runs of Thurmond or Wallace. They hoped to draw away enough votes to force the race into the Electoral College and then serve as kingmaker. By contrast left-wing parties, whether they be Henry Wallace’s Progressive or John Anderson’s third party run in 1980, have no real strategy behind them.
There is also the question of the makeup of the voters for each party. Right wing political parties were by and large focused on the working man in a way that left-wing parties were generally not. Wallace’s party strongest support came fundamentally from intellectual and Hollywood and Anderson’s supporters were basically considered ‘the Brie and Chablis type’. They were the kind of people who could afford to have a principles in a way that most of us can’t.
That may be why in the 1948 election Strom Thurmond managed to carry slightly more votes as a Dixiecrat who was running exclusively in thirteen states than Wallace did in 46. Thurmond managed to win four states and 39 electoral votes with his 1.18 million votes. Of the 1.15 million votes Wallace received 700,000 — nearly two-thirds of his total — came from New York and California — which couldn’t more clearly indicate the kinds of people who voted for Wallace.
One of the delusions that the left continues to suffer from is that there are more of them out there then they think. This could not have been made clearer in Ralph Nader’s run for the Presidency in 2000. He made little illusion that his campaign was to do anything more than to ‘send a message’ (George Wallace’s campaign slogan in 1972). His goals were only slightly more concrete: to get the Green Party to qualify for five percent so that it could receive more access in future elections.
Nader spent his entire run — and indeed the aftermath of the 2000 election -demonstrated that for all his intelligence he seemed to lack common sense. He insisted there was no difference between George W. Bush and Al Gore on any issue, including the environment. He even argued that Reagan’s presidency had been a good thing for the environment because it had led to increased activism among that community and increased membership in societies to do it. The fact that Reagan had spent his first run for Presidency arguing trees caused pollution and that his administrations embrace of corporation had done much damage to the ecosystem was something that many people pointing out but Nader chose to ignore. And despite saying he would not run as a spoiler, he actively campaigned in many swing states — including Florida.
In its opening sequence of Farenheith 9/11 Michael Moore goes to great detail as to how Florida was fundamentally stolen from Al Gore by everyone from the state’s governor to Katherine Harris to the Supreme Court. Yet curiously he doesn’t mention that Nader got nearly 100,000 votes in Florida — nearly five times Pat Buchanan’s total, for the record — in a state that W would carry by 537 votes. It also leaves out the fact that Republicans were more than willing to run ads for Nader in some states. Indeed his own nephew acknowledges the whole reason he ran in swing states was “Because we want to punish the Democrats, we want to hurt them, wound them.” Indeed many post-mortems of 2000 believe that Nader chose to go against his own rule of campaigning in states where he could get the five percent necessary and insisted on going to Florida and Pennsylvania.
Indeed Nader believed that the Democratic Party had drifted too far to the right and that while he thought George W. Bush was a bumbling Texas governor it was entirely Al Gore’s fault for not being able to beat him. This itself demonstrates the lack of common sense on Nader’s part that we see by and large with the left far more than the right.
After McGovern’s landslide defeat in 1972 the Democratic Party decided — realistically — that McGovern’s platform and approach was too radical for the voters. The voters had sent them a message and they were determined to hear it. But the left, in that naval gazing way they see things, didn’t see it that way. During this period the word ‘neoliberal was coined, for all intents an academic term to say, “we didn’t leave the Democrats, the Democrats left us”. By this argument, keeping with the academic thinking of the left, by trying to win elections and get people to vote for them, the Democrats had betrayed the cause of liberalism which because they weren’t running for office was more important to them then winning elections. This way of thinking often caused them to turn on their own: Gary Hart, one of George McGovern’s campaign managers, was labeled a neo-liberal by the time he was running for President himself.
In the twisting thinking of the left once is supposed to run to the left and then once elected, move not to the center to govern but to keep moving left. That this goes against all political dogma is irrelevant to the left who believe all of the decisions that politicians should make must be done purely on a moral ground, regardless of the political or economic realities. Whether or not the electorate wants what the leftist vision of society (which they have never revealed but know very well America is betraying) and it is the obligation of every elected official to establish it whether the public wants it or not. The President, of course, has the ability to do regardless of separation of powers or checks and balances and even beyond the executive branch — he can establish universal health care or pass climate legislation simply by willing into being. And the only reason no one has ever completely enacted this ambitious agenda (which they all somehow know even though the left hasn’t revealed it) is because both parties are in the pocket of the corporate interests and want to keep the people down.
This is the implication behind almost all of the left’s writing and activism for the last half-century. Basically while the conservative movement was founding various conservative institutions, winning over the corporate interests, gerrymandering and redistricting maps, founding news networks to spread their gospel and getting conservatives to run for offices at every single level of the government, the left has basically been writing books denouncing the system, marching against the system and not participating in the electoral system at all. In essence the right has spent the last half century involved in every part of the political process in their activities while the left has spent that same period in everything but the political process. That they see no connection between this and the country moving right speaks to their overall lack of common sense which they seem to think has nothing to do with their intelligence.
And they accept no responsibility for the country’s drift to the right. Nader’s 2000 run for the Presidency earned him 2.75 percent of all votes cast — and very little difference, percentagewise, from what Henry Wallace received in 1948. In the autopsy of the 2000 election many sources — including his own campaign — considered his role a key factor in Bush’s election. Nader critically doesn’t. Nor is their any sign he bears any responsibility for the chaos that would follow in the years to come. In the aftermath of the 2016 election Nader has written several books. One of them To The Ramparts bears the subtitle: ‘How Bush and Obama paved the way for the Trump Presidency” Given that the book also deals with that there was no difference between Clinton and Bush, you can imagine sees no connection between his own role and everything that has followed. He clearly shows no remorse and like so many leftists no contradiction in his decision to call Trump’s abuses worse. He continues to demonstrate massive intelligence but no common sense.
In the next article I will deal with the parallels between Bernie Sanders’s run for the Presidency in 2016 and the campaigns of McCarthy and McGovern and how it has done as much damage to the Democratic Party as the rise of Donald Trump.