Political Realignments

There have been several major realignments in American politics since the Revolution: 1860 changed the Whigs, Democrats and Republicans; 1968 with the southern strategy that pushed the Republicans under Nixon into Wallace territory and alignment, and now perhaps 2018.

1968 was truly a momentous year (aside from our marriage): cities were burning, there were multiple assassinations of political figures; and young men were walking around with draft (death) cards in their wallets that meant they had a truly personal stake in the election's outcome. It was also the first time an American president colluded with a foreign power to influence the outcome of an election. The evidence is overwhelming that Nixon had made back-channel communications with the South Vietnamese, persuading them that they would get a better deal from him than the Democrats and they should therefore not do what they had promised the Johnson administration they would do, i.e., start negotiating at the Paris table. McCarthy was the wild card, running as an anti-establishment, anti-war candidate, it had profound implications for Johnson's decision not to run. (The Secret Service had forfidden Johnson from appearing at college campuses and the Democratic National Convention saying they could not guarantee he would not be assassinated.) Bobby Kennedy had been approached to run, but he didn't think Johnson was beatable. After he saw how well McCarthy was doing, he decided to run. All of that pushed Johnson's decision to withdraw from the race. Then came Robert Kennedy's assassination.

Ironically, terrorism (but not immigration) played prominent roles in those realignments. Terrorism has always been with us: the IRA bombings in Britain, the Red Brigade in Germany (not to mention Kristallnacht in 1938), the Wall Street bombing by Italien anachists and the Oklahoma Federal Building bombing by Timothy McVeigh in 1995 (not to mention Sam Adams and John Brown provoking mob violence, and a host of others in the last 300 years.) [The reaction to Sirhan Sirhan's (a Palestinian immigrant upset with Robert Kennedy's position on Palestine) was very different from the country's treaction to recent NY attacks.]

Those of us (I was was just finishing college in 1968) who lived through 1968 were surrounded by portents of gloom and doom. It was to be the end of the United States as cities burst into flames with riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Vietnam continued its killing fields, and faith in government disappeared.