It Happened Here Again

It’s election day in America.

The Republican Party is running a presidential candidate who lost a closely-contested election in a previous cycle to an Irish Catholic who ran on the promise of restoring the American spirit. He is explicitly campaigning on white grievance, capitalising on voter unease surrounding American diversity. He engages in shuttle diplomacy to maintain an international crisis that is sapping the administration’s energy and popularity.

The Democrats are running the incumbent vice president. They didn’t initially intend to; the president chose not to run for re-election earlier this year, following a nosedive in popularity amidst various foreign conflicts and quagmires to which he appears to have no answer. Amidst anti-war protests, the party nominates a happy warrior in Chicago. The president is shuffled off into an early political grave.

The economy is good, but not great. Inflation has been a simmering issue for voters, although a recession has yet to materialise. Despite its domestic achievements, the Democratic Party struggles to communicate its successes to the general public. There’s a swell of left-wing anger at the party establishment, but it’s minor, in the grand scheme of things. The election’s not going to be decided on that turf. Through September and October, the election seems close. The Democrats gain hope. It’s on a knife-edge. Every state counts. All those lovely, meaningless cliches.

The Republican wins. And it’s not close, not really. Disbelief turns to despair turns to recrimination. The liberal segment of American society has its confidence shattered in a single night. All the progress of the last few years…gone. It was just a mirage all along.

That’s one telling of the story of 2024. But it could also be the story of 1968. Comparisons between Trump and Nixon are trite at this point; they were an easy way to get some column inches from the summer of 2016 through to the pandemic. And I’ll admit that some of my own historical parallels are…woollier than they perhaps ought to be.

But, as the final votes are counted, and as I sit in front of my laptop digesting the aftermath of that endless, depressing, God-awful day, I think the comparison to 1968 bears some fruit. Granted, I’m not the only one to make it; more than a few wags have highlighted the commonalities between Biden and LBJ, like those I’ve outlined above. But this time, this time, it was supposed to be different.

The party was united. More so, I’d like to point out, than it ever was behind Biden. Or even behind Clinton. Upon declaring her candidacy in July, Harris earned the endorsement of every single Democrat in Congress, bar eight. In the span of two weeks, Democrats went from suicidal to bearish about their chances in November. The convention in Chicago, unlike in 1968, was a festival of joy and unity. It was brat summer. Her VP pick was an instant political rockstar. She trashed Trump at the debate. Repeatedly. For ninety minutes straight.

But then the smoke cleared, and she lost. And it wasn’t close. Not really.

What then, was the problem? After 2016, the post-mortem was clear; Hillary Clinton was unpopular, and failed to unite the party after an unexpectedly divisive primary. Now, the lessons are murkier. Already, the recriminations have begun. Should Biden have dropped out earlier, and allowed a wider range of candidates to compete for the nomination? Would Harris have won if she’d run further to the left? Or further to the right? Should her outreach have focused more on new media?

I don’t pretend to have the answers to these questions, but for my money, I don’t think any of them are the ones we should be asking. In 2016, it was clear that Democrats dropped the ball, and that voters weren’t fully aware of the dangers Trump posed to American democracy and society. That was evident in the fact he won with a lower share of the vote than Romney got in 2012. But in 2024, with the evidence of January 6 and the openly, brazenly fascistic campaign Republicans won, he secured a majority of the vote. Yes, Biden’s unpopularity and lingering anger at inflation hurt Democrats. But let’s not allow that to obscure the facts: America wanted to buy what Trump was selling.

The polls pointed to this. Tariffs are popular. Increasing deportations is popular. Limiting abortion access is unpopular, but in a a rare moment of self-discipline, Trump managed to hedge a position that enabled a critical mass of voters to support him, despite the GOP’s monomaniacal focus on restricting women’s freedoms. In 2016, we could take comfort in the fact that the Democratic Party was broadly in line with the popular will. In 2024, I’m not so sure.

Which brings me back to 1968. Popular history suggests Vietnam cost the Democrats dearly, but recent scholarship indicates that cultural factors, most significantly white backlash against LBJ’s drive for racial equality, drove Nixon’s win that year. Nixon’s explicit appeals to this sentiment rapidly hastened the process of bringing culturally conservative white voters into the Republican base, a process which continues to hurt Democrats today.

What’s more concerning about the 1968 parallel, I think, is its implications for the future. From FDR to LBJ, America could be considered to be moving in a liberal direction; government action drove the largest expansion of wealth in world history, and ensured broad prosperity and rising standards for a comfortable proportion of the country’s population. But Nixon’s victory signalled the beginning of a conservative moment. After Johnson, no Democrat won a significant majority of the popular and electoral votes until Obama. Nixon’s appeal to white grievance worked. Republican domination of the White House, and the conservative governance strategy that accompanied it, endured until the first decade of this century.

Fast-forward to the present day, and I believe we have come to the end of the most recent liberal moment in American politics. From around 2006, Democrats consolidated a broad national coalition including upwardly-mobile white voters, Hispanics, and African Americans of all ages. This drove them to win the popular vote in every election from 2008 to 2020, and to maintain Senate seats and governorships in states as different from each other as Vermont and West Virginia. But that coalition crumbled on November 5, just as the New Deal coalition crumbled before it, just as cultural divisions became the most salient marker of political identity.

This only bodes well for the Republican Party, which is institutionally the strongest its been since at least the 1920s. Even when Nixon or Reagan captured the presidency, Democrats maintained control of at least one chamber of Congress. But with regional polarisation, it’s become almost impossible for them to do so anymore. Gone are the days when Democrats were competitive across the broad range of the South and flyover states. In the House, Southern Democrats are now confined to districts with high numbers of Black voters. In the Senate, the average state is several points more Republican than the nation. The Democrats are at a national disadvantage because of the nature of their coalition, and have been for a few years now. 2024 is, in my view, the moment that problem came home to roost.

There’s another problem too; in the 2020s, race is an increasingly weaker predictor of electoral support. Trump ran up the score with Hispanic voters, despite saying that Latin American immigration poisons America’s bloodstream. In the final weeks of the campaign, organisers sounded the alarm about Harris’ weaknesses with young Black men. The numbers aren’t in on that one yet, but I have a suspicion about what they’ll tell us. Coupled with Republicans’ increasing hold on non-college educated whites, the coalition that powered Democrats to victory in 2008, 2012, and 2020 is becoming thinner and thinner.

And so while the presidential election resembles that of fifty-six years ago, things are much nastier for Democrats down the ballot. Even in a favourable national environment, I can’t see Democrats retaking the Senate anytime soon. Where are the Democratic pickups going to come from? North Carolina? Ohio? Come on.

The other, and far more disconcerting, difference with 1968 is the nature of the president elected. Yes, Nixon and Trump share a view of the presidency as the supreme arbiter of executive authority in the nation, intense personal and political insecurities, and a less-than-passing familiarity with what we lesser mortals refer to as ‘the truth’.

But Nixon, for all his flaws, wasn’t as dangerous as Donald Trump. Remember, Nixon gave up his power and walked away from politics (albeit only when there were no other options open to him). When articles for Nixon’s impeachment were being drafted in the summer of 1974, Republican House leader John Jacob Rhodes said he would support impeaching the president. In the wake of what was then considered the lowest point in the dignity of the presidency, Nixon’s party abandoned him. It’s hard to imagine that now.

Actually, fuck euphemism. That’s not going to happen now. When Trump decides to use the military against protestors, or when he deploys the National Guard to round up undocumented migrants, or when he and Attorney General Rudy Giuliani announce the DOJ is going to investigate Nancy Pelosi for High Crimes Against the Supreme Leader, the Republican Party isn’t just going to look the other way, they’ll cheerlead it. We know this to be true. Trump ordered, let’s be clear, ordered thousands of his supporters to invade the US Capitol and overturn the 2020 election, and Republican leaders did nothing. And even those who bleated pathetically that maybe he’d gone too far on that day supported him this year. With the vindication of the voters, they won’t bother bleating again.

We are about to enter the darkest period in America’s history. Trump’s previous administration, staffed as it was by RNC stiffs, was as right-wing as the Bush years, but somehow managed to be even less competent. This time around, they’re not going to let the opportunity slip through their fingers. Trump will stuff the executive branch with as many white supremacists, Christian nationalists, and misogynist gremlins as the Heritage Foundation can get their hands on. And this time they won’t be grifters, out for a quick buck from hanging around the dumbest president in history. They’ll be true believers, out to get as much of their hateful policy as they can onto the desk of the dumbest president in history. And he’ll sign off on all of it, because the truth is he’s a true believer too.