I don’t want to get into what’s going on in the Mideast, in terms of which side is right, or at least less wrong than the other. Neither do I want to get into whether the U.S. should be supporting Israel, because we are supporting Israel and that circumstance is unlikely to change between now and the election. But I’m gravely concerned the conflict may turn out to spoil the upcoming election in favor of Trump, just as the Vietnam War may have done in favor of Nixon.
I was ten in 1968 so I didn’t really understand what was going on at the time. However, in hindsight my understanding is that the Democrats had a popular antiwar candidate in Robert F. Kennedy, and he might have won in November had he lived long enough to do so. So eventually the Dems nominated Hubert Humphrey, who as sitting VP stood in the shade of LBJ and an unpopular war. Despite Humphrey’s (and LBJ’s for that matter) solid record on civil rights and social welfare, U.S. involvement in Vietnam overshadowed those positive factors, and cost Humphrey enough votes to hand the election over to Nixon.
Except for Jimmy Carter’s single term we had Republican presidents from 1968 to 1992, and I sometimes wonder if this is where the U.S. diverged from the other prosperous democracies in matters of domestic policy. For example, we are the only country in the group without universal healthcare. From about 1964 to early 1968, it seems as if the U.S. was on a trend toward greater emphasis on social welfare, and I can’t help wonder if we would have implemented universal healthcare in the 1970s, if only the Dems had held on to the White House. It doesn’t seem that outlandish an idea to me. But we all know how things worked out, and by the 1980s, anything the government did was a problem, as somebody said at the time. Our national vision of what government could and should do, of the things which government must do because they are too big to be equitably managed by the free market, shriveled. Bill Clinton, the first Democratic president to serve two full terms since Harry Truman, was in some ways more like an old school Republican (think Eisenhower).
What might have been. Left leaning voters refusing to vote for Humphrey to protest the Vietnam conflict was all well and good, but ISTM the long term cost to progressive domestic policy has been enormous.
To be perfectly clear, I’m not claiming that everything I just wrote is justified by the facts. I have no credentials in 20th Century American history. I can say only that this seems plausible to me, and I want to know what other people think.
Flash forward to October 2024. We’re looking down the barrel of Project 2025, a road map to turn this country into a Christian state. Trump disavows any connection to this, and he might even be telling the truth as he manages to understand it. But even without P2025, the prospect of Trump 47 is frightening enough, not least because his pet SCOTUS has pretty much given him legal immunity for anything he might care to do. And speaking of the Supreme Court, whoever wins the election is likely to fill at least one vacancy during the next presidential term. From a liberal or progressive point of view, could anyone be worse than Clarence Thomas, currently the oldest member? Sure they could. We’ve seen it already.
And while all this is unfolding, they talk about baby killers. “They” are the people protesting the Mideast conflict to the exclusion or all other things, and the baby-killer reference harks back to the old anti-LBJ chant. They see Trump and Harris as baby-killers in a red or blue hat respectively. They plan to abstain from voting, or to vote third party to “protest”. If they’re of voting age now, then they should be at least old enough to understand what a disaster Trump 45 was. And that Trump 47 will be at least as bad, even without the potential nightmare authoritarian scenarios that we hear about. Even without all that, I certainly don’t want to see Trump in a position to spend four more years doing what he did the last time around. But I have never been able to convince the antiwar side that maybe, just maybe, domestic policy actually is 1000x more important to the average voter than a war thousands of miles away, even if we are inextricably involved in it and contributing to it.
I have often felt that the progressive left tends to hyperfocus on America’s foreign conflicts while seemingly oblivious to domestic inequities. Of course that varies with the person and the news outlet. Jacobin is solid on covering domestic controversies, but every episode I’ve ever seen of Democracy Now has focused almost entirely on wars abroad. I also have to acknowledge the Occupy and BLM protests as having a domestic focus. But right now, the far left is all about Israel, Hamas, and Gaza.
So what say you? Is the peace vote (or non-vote), going to sink Harris? Or are the numbers not big enough to make a difference?