The crowd puffs, rocks, explodes with a euphoric wrath — happy with dream-visions of revenge on all the rebel children, a cosmic spanking when George takes over. It is a great parental tantrum —
Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes, 1970
For some time now US commentators have been drawing comparisons between the protest movements of the Vietnam War era and their impacts on the 1968 election that saw Richard Nixon elected president, and the growing campus outrage against Israel’s mass slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. Will these protests drive American voters into the arms of an authoritarian like Trump — as they did, the implication is, to Richard Nixon 56 years ago?
It’s an interesting question, though it relies on a serious overhyping of current protests on US campuses, which are far smaller and decidedly non-violent compared to the massive and often violent protest movement of the 1960s, not to mention the traditional portrait of Nixon as a right-wing ogre of Watergate and Alger Hiss fame. Moreover, the same arguments were made about why Trump would win in 2020.
As some better-informed observers, including Nick Bryant here, have observed, an equally interesting figure in 1968 for today’s purposes isn’t Nixon, but George Wallace.
Wallace, the long-time governor (and even first gentleman) of Alabama, who won five southern states as a presidential candidate in 1968, has a complicated legacy because of a late-life conversion to born-again Christianity that saw him denounce his earlier racism in his last term in office.
But as governor in the 1960s and 1970s, he was famous for trying to block desegregation — he’s the one who declared “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” — and ran blatantly racist attack ads against opponents. In his third-party presidential bid in 1968, he threatened to run over protesters, derided hippies as lazy and filthy, cultivated support from extremist groups and savaged liberals and intellectuals.
One of the best books about 1968 is Garry Wills’ Nixon Agonistes, a not-unsympathetic portrait of a painfully complicated man and the meritocracy that produced him in mid-century America. But Wills’ accounts of 1968, and of Wallace, are shiver-inducing in their similarity to Trump and his supporters — and if anything, Wallace looks more civilized than Trump.
Wallace’s appeal, Wills wrote back in 1970, was fundamentally nihilist. He “offered neither palliative nor real cure; just a chance to scream into the darkness. It was a kind of perverse exercise in honesty — a proclamation that the darkness is there.”
A nihilist vote is something new in America, the home of boosters … this man, this symbol, despite his lack of any real party, or organisation, of staff, of funds, of roots, of respectability, nonetheless captured over 13% of the national vote. The Wallace voter felt that “the system is breaking down” — that it could no longer protect the citizen (perhaps did not want to), that the citizen was alone and vulnerable, of no concern to the courts, the pointyheads, the diplomats. So throw them out, with their bicycles, briefcases, umbrellas. Tear them down.
Nixon agreed, having told Wills on the campaign trail “there is an awful mood abroad — a desire to just blow everything up. There must be a new vision of America’s role if we are to shake ourselves out of this nihilism.”
Exacerbating this sense was a perceived inability to communicate — or trust in communication. Wallace accused the media of demeaning his supporters as racists — although, unlike Trump, he distinguished between the “hard-workin’ reporters” at his rallies, and their editors, urging supporters not to take out their anger on those present.
“The very process of discourse was misted over, poisoned, with distrust,” wrote Wills. “There was not only “the credibility gap” in Washington, but a wide resentment toward the vehicles of what must be bad news, or false news.” There was “a basic sense of futility in attempts to communicate. What one said would be distorted; what one heard had been confected. We had miles of cables, batteries of cameras, bouquets of microphones under every nose. And we could not talk to each other.”
Nixon’s pose was as the civilized centrist — Eisenhower’s vice president, remember — who understood, even shared, the anger of the right but wouldn’t give into its darker, racist instincts. In fact, he was cannily learning the lessons of the Wallace campaign and beginning the process of turning the southern Republican.
But in office, by modern standards, Nixon was a moderate, even progressive domestic leader. Despite his paranoia, genocidal impulses in South East Asia and affection for dirty tricks, he pursued price freezes, Keynesianism, environmental regulation, hiring of minorities, desegregation and even expanded welfare (Nixon’s Democrat adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan is another figure of interest to Wills) — not to mention embracing communist China. Nixon would struggle to find a home in today’s Democratic party, let alone the GOP.
If Wallace was a scream into the darkness, Trump is the darkness. There’s no Nixon to channel the nihilistic rage in a less destructive direction, only Joe Biden trying to convince voters that the system isn’t broken down, that it is working for them, that they are important, through an economic agenda based on blue-collar jobs and hostility to free trade.
But the lingering question is that prompted by Wills more than 50 years ago: how do you reason with a scream into the darkness?
Is Donald Trump the new Nixon? Or could he be something even worse? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
