Michael Kazin, The New York Times, Aug. 24, 2018; article contains additional photographs
Mr. Kazin is a co-editor of Dissent and a professor of history at Georgetown.
The issues that drove protesters to Chicago in 1968 are still motivating our partisan divide, 50 years later.
Image from article, with caption: Police engaging demonstrators near the Conrad Hilton Hotel on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue August 28th during the Democratic National Convention.
On the evening of Aug. 26, 1968, I was arrested on a street corner in Chicago for a dubious crime: protesting a political event. This was, of course, the Democratic National Convention, which was about to nominate as its presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey, the vice president, who had staunchly supported the decision to send half a million troops to pursue a deeply immoral and doomed mission in Vietnam.
I joined hundreds of others in jail that night. Many of us at the time felt we had a duty to oppose the war, and we certainly felt the historical weight of the moment. But I don’t think any of us expected that the conflict — not just over the war, but over two visions for American society — would still be raging, half a century later.
The day I was released, a confrontation between helmeted police and nonviolent demonstrators erupted in front of the Hilton hotel in downtown Chicago. It was shown live on TV for a full 17 minutes. Viewers saw police brutally attacking men and women with mace and clubs. The video, replayed over the next few days, shocked and angered millions who opposed the war.
But pollsters soon found that twice as many Americans sided with the police as sided with the protesters. Whatever their views on the intervention in Indochina, a majority seemed to believe that the young, allegedly unpatriotic troublemakers had it coming. Mayor Richard Daley thundered, in defense of his men in blue, that his administration and the people of Chicago “would never permit a lawless, violent group of terrorists to menace the lives of millions of people, destroy the purpose of a national political convention and take over the streets.”
In many ways, the civil war fought out in Mayor Daley’s city that summer has never really ended. The ugly 2016 campaign and Donald Trump’s embattled administration are only the latest episodes in a long conflict fought on several fronts — cultural, social and political. This “discord” is hardly “unprecedented,” as journalists and some political scientists have claimed. Nor has the United States recently “lost a sense of common purpose” and a “sense of common narrative,” as former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told CNN this spring.
Not only do Americans continue to debate, often angrily, about when and how the police should use violence against unarmed civilians. Liberals and leftists still battle with conservatives over most of the other big issues that roiled the nation back then: affirmative action, the right to abortion, freedom for gays and lesbians, curbs on corporate power, environmental protection, the politics of academia — and rulings by the Supreme Court that cheer one camp and infuriate the other.
Of course, the identities and targets of the combatants have shifted over the years. Now it’s progressives who accuse the Supreme Court of making decisions based on ideology rather than law. And who could have imagined that liberal Democrats would be defending the F.B.I., while conservative Republicans denounce it?
But the harsh divisions among Americans in 1968 have largely endured. They are rooted in profound disagreements based on culture and creeds that are impervious to compromise. If one thinks abortion is murder or that L.G.B.T.Q. people deserve every right that heterosexuals have, the very idea of finding a middle ground is abhorrent. The mutual hostility between religious conservatives and liberals — and nonbelievers — that emerged in the 1960s also fuels these seemingly irreconcilable differences. Each side is convinced it represents a majority — and a moral one at that.
In addition, the alienation of rural white Americans from cosmopolitan urban dwellers has only increased since big cities became entry points of immigrants from all over the world. The family reunifications made possible by the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 helped create today’s polyglot big cities.
The absence of a stable partisan majority also keeps our domestic conflicts on a persistent burn. Richard Nixon’s victory in 1968 and his landslide re-election four years later tore apart the New Deal coalition that had dominated national politics, with barely a pause, since the early 1930s. Of the 11 presidential contests from 1976 to 2016, Republicans have won six and Democrats five. But on just four occasions has the Republican victor gained a plurality of the popular vote.
Control of one or both houses of Congress has swung back and forth too. In 1951, the eminent political scientist Samuel Lubell observed that the Democrats were like the sun, the Republicans the moon. “It is within the majority party that the issues of any particular period are fought out,” he explained, “while the minority party shines in reflected radiance of the heat thus generated.” But for the past half-century, the major parties have been more akin to asteroids that occasionally collide but whose gyrations move neither of them much closer to the center of the political solar system.
Since the late 1960s, officeholders have sought to gain an advantage for their side by stoking the fires of conflict. This has been a consistent habit more on the right than among liberals. “Dividing the American people has been my main contribution to the national political scene,” acknowledged Spiro Agnew, who served as Nixon’s vice president until he resigned in disgrace in 1973. “I not only plead guilty to this charge, but I am somewhat flattered by it.” During his first term in Congress a few years later, Newt Gingrich accused Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill of placing “Communist propaganda” in his office. Last June, Eric Trump emulated these predecessors as well as his own father when he told Sean Hannity on Fox that Washington Democrats are “not even people.”
Until recently, prominent Democrats tended to avoid responding with incendiary statements of their own. Presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama all sought to win over independent voters with promises to make bipartisan agreements and transcend the bitter fights of the 1960s. Most Americans first heard of Mr. Obama when he famously declared at the 2004 Democratic convention, “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America.” During Mr. Obama’s presidency, his chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities undertook a “Civility Tour” to resist what he called “polarizing attitudes” that “can jeopardize social cohesion and even public safety.”
But such conciliatory rhetoric seems naïve when a Republican president spews belligerence before most Americans have finished their breakfast. Progressive activists and Democrats in Congress both routinely refer to President Trump as a “fascist,” a “tyrant” and a witting stooge of President Vladimir Putin of Russia. And after Michael Cohen incriminated Mr. Trump in court this week, they are also calling him a “crook.” Conservatives, of course, return the fire with talk of a “deep state” conspiracy to overturn the will of the voters. As this year’s midterm election draws closer, the language will burn even hotter.
As a New Leftist in 1968, I did not worry that Americans were fighting one another on the streets of Chicago and around the nation. I only wanted to figure out how my side could come out on top. Now, as a professor, I teach the virtues of empathizing with one’s adversaries, of understanding why those with whom you vehemently disagree think what they think and do what they do. But as a historian, I also know that civil wars, even cultural ones, seldom end with settlements that please both sides. Until the left or the right wins a lasting victory, America will remain a society rent in two.
Michael Kazin is a co-editor of Dissent and a professor of history at Georgetown. His most recent book is “War Against War: The American Fight for Peace, 1914-1918.”
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