The Spirit of ’68
1st July 2019
Severian draws some parallels.
If I were a betting man, I’d wager that the Dems’ nominating convention in 2020 will look a lot like the Chicago convention of 1968, the famous “Chicago Police Riot.” (Ahh, the power of The Media to shape The Narrative. SDS goons do everything in their power to provoke a confrontation with the authorities; when the authorities eventually crack down, all the jock-sniffers in The Media, high on the romantic self-righteousness of self-proclaimed “revolutionaries,” proclaim that it’s the cops who started the whole thing).
In case you’re not familiar with the ’68 spectacle, you had an establishment goon representing business-as-usual (Vice President Hubert Humphrey, pinch-hitting for LBJ); a ditzy “good government” Liberal riding his brother’s coattails (Robert F. Kennedy), and a goofy hippie peacenik (Eugene McCarthy). Plus George McGovern, a slightly less goofy hippie peacenik who was so bad at politics that in 1972 he ended up getting outflanked as a peacenik by the guy who was actually right at that moment running the war.
If back in my professin’ days I was teaching this stuff, I’d assign a project: Which way did The Media break? They were all in the tank for the Democrats, of course — plus ça change and all that — but there were still enough grownups in the newsroom in 1968 that the #Wokest (if you’ll forgive an anachronism) wouldn’t automatically get all the Media love. There was no way to disguise the fact that McCarthy was the hippies’ candidate. Nor was there any way to disguise the fact that Humphrey procedurally cornholed the other two via delegate selection shenanigans, a la Hillary Clinton. All of which let Richard Nixon, of all people, campaign as the only honest man on the stage. How did it play out in that long, hot, strange summer?
Sounds like a win for Trump to me.
July 1st, 2019 at 15:10
Thinking back on Chicago ’68, it does bear a striking resemblance to the current Dem offering. That was an election disaster for the Dems, but it also marked the turning point for the party. After that, the Socialists were solidly in charge of the Democratic Party. True, up until Bernie none of them would admit to their position, but anything resembling moderation was crushed. Hillary came off as more of a Stalinist than a run of the mill Socialist, but not once did she admit being a lefty.
The Dems are so far left now that Putin has become their enemy. Khrushchev would be shocked to see his mortal enemies conquered from within.