"We Continue to Live in the Wake of Mid- to Late-60s Developments"

"It's easy to look back at the Johnson administration, with the benefit of hindsight, and see little possibility for the revitalization of the New Deal coalition. But it's important to remember just what a moment of political sea change the mid-1960s was. With the exit of the Dixiecrats, the Democratic Party was in the midst of a profound transformation wherein its base did substantively shift. That [Bayard] Rustin saw an opening for the civil rights and organized labor coalition to take a driving seat within the party was not that fanciful, yet it was treated that way by a curious number of people on the Left then and still on the Left today. It's worth asking why that was and is. His critics on the Left are fine pillorying Rustin for his comments on anti-war protest tactics. But where are the similar condemnations of the New Left for sitting out the fight for the Freedom Budget for All Americans, arguably the last off-ramp from an imminent neoliberalism?"

Damage Magazine runs Benjamin Y. Fong's introduction to the new book Rustin's Challenge.

"In the Early '70s, No One Could Have Predicted That a Combination of Social Upheaval, Economic Crisis, and Political Talent Was About to Usher in a Brand-New Economic Era"

"Three main theories have emerged, each with its own account of how we got here and what it might take to change course. One theory holds that the story is fundamentally about the white backlash to civil-rights legislation. Another pins more blame on the Democratic Party's cultural elitism. And the third focuses on the role of global crises beyond any political party's control. Each theory is incomplete on its own. Taken together, they go a long way toward making sense of the political and economic uncertainty we're living through."

Rogé Karma at The Atlantic asks, "Why did America abandon the New Deal so decisively? And why did so many voters and politicians embrace the free-market consensus that replaced it?"

"Because of Sex"

"When Smith introduced the amendment to Title VII, he read this spoof letter from a woman complaining that there are more women than men where she lives, and arguing, 'Doesn't every woman have the right to a husband?' Everyone was laughing—what a huge joke, how silly the idea of women's equality is … Griffiths stood up and said, If we needed some proof for the necessity of this amendment, this chamber just gave it to us. Pretty much silenced the place."

Rebecca Onion at Slate interviews Christina Wolbrecht about the outlawing of sex discrimination in the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

"Geography Was Far More Predictive of Voting Coalitions on the Civil Rights [Act] Than Party Affiliation"

"In this case, it becomes clear that Democrats in the north and the south were more likely to vote for the bill than Republicans in the north and south respectively. This difference in both houses is statistically significant with over 95% confidence. It just so happened southerners made up a larger percentage of the Democratic than Republican caucus, which created the initial impression than Republicans were more in favor of the act.
"Nearly 100% of Union state Democrats supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act compared to 85% of Republicans. None of the southern Republicans voted for the bill, while a small percentage of southern Democrats did."

In a 2013 Guardian article, Harry J. Enten answers the question, "Were Republicans really the party of Civil Rights in the 1960s?" 

"What in God's Name Has Happened to the Republican Party?"

"Rockefeller's speech on extremism was intended to take full advantage of the television spotlight. Its official purpose was to plead for an amendment to the platform, proposed by Pennsylvania Sen. Hugh Scott, denouncing 'extremist' groups. But the Goldwater forces knew it was a veiled attack on their candidate. The third-term senator had the support of the virulent anticommunist John Birch Society, which he refused to distance himself from, even though its leader had accused Eisenhower of treason and being a communist agent.
"Melvin Laird, a congressman from Wisconsin and future secretary of defense who was running the show for Goldwater, thwarted Rockefeller by asking that the platform be read into the record before the governor spoke. The platform was 8,500 words. It took 90 minutes. Rockefeller was pushed out of primetime."

In a 2016 article, John Dickerson at Slate tells the story of the failed Republican "Stop Goldwater" efforts in 1964.

"Burning Conviction, Solidarity, Euphoria"

"Since 1968, America has gone off in a different direction than I had hoped: Reagan, Nixon, and Trump are not the kind of leaders we had in mind back then. In 1968, I would have settled for nothing less than socialism. Twenty-five years after that, something like a European welfare state would have made me happy. Today, just having a reliable subway system appears utopian. The French Revolution, however violent, uprooted the monarchy. The Russian Revolution, however perverse, produced an experiment, albeit a failed one, in economic planning. 1968 not only failed to achieve most of its goals, it set politics off in the wrong direction."

Alan Wolfe at The New Republic looks back fifty years.

A Ripple of Hope

"Some of those lofty plans had the most basic of beginnings. David Gergen—an adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton—once told NPR about an anecdote Goodwin recalled about that famous tagline.
"Gergen said that 'when he worked for Lyndon Johnson,' Goodwin recalled 'Johnson calling him to the swimming pool and instructing him to take his clothes off and get in the pool with Johnson.
"'And Johnson came over to him like a great whale, and looked at him and said, "I need a slogan."'"
"Noting the link between big ideas and branding, Gergen added, 'And that's how they came up with the Great Society.'"

Bill Chappell at NPR remembers Richard Goodwin, as the presidential speechwriter and advisor dies at age 86.

"The Effort to Enact Robust Gun-Control Laws in the Nineteen-Sixties Quickly Revealed America’s Racial Fault Lines"

"The Kennedys' home-town paper, the Boston Globe, hoped that the N.R.A. would get 'its first real comeuppance' in the slain reverend's wake. But the N.R.A. has only gained political strength since then. It has weakened elements of the Gun Control Act of 1968, and generally blocked the passage of major gun-control legislation for decades. In the fifty years since, the number of civilians who have died from firearms in the U.S. has exceeded the number of Americans who have been killed in uniform during all the wars in the nation’s history. In 2017, the Journal of the American Medical Association declared gun violence a 'health crisis.' Meanwhile, donations to the N.R.A. tripled after the Parkland school shooting."

Rich Benjamin at The New Yorker looks at politics, race, and firearms fifty years after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Liberals Have Never Soared So High Again"

"The American taste for individualism will continue to frustrate the hopes of liberals and their sometime leftist allies. But the classic paradox that political scientists Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril identified during the heyday of the Great Society still holds: Most Americans are 'ideological conservatives but operational liberals.' Americans hate 'big government,' but they adore state and federal spending—as long as it benefits them and anyone else they regard as deserving that aid: particularly senior citizens, children, and veterans."

Michael Kazin at the New Republic reviews Joshua Zeitz's Building the Great Society: Inside Lyndon Johnson's White House.

"What Happened, Why It Happened and How to Prevent It from Happening Again"

"A new study that builds on the Kerner Report's work was released this week. Healing Our Divided Society: Investing in America Fifty Years After the Kerner Report was co-edited by Fred Harris (the sole surviving member of the original Commission) and Alan Curtis, CEO of the Milton Eisenhower Foundation. It notes that poverty has increased and so has the inequality gap between white America and Americans who are black, brown and Native American. The gains children of color made when efforts continued to desegregate schools in the 60s began to reverse by 1988. Court decisions that loosened oversight of previously de facto segregated schools resulted in a huge change: In 1988, almost half of all students of color went to majority-white schools. Today that number has plummeted to 20 percent. Poverty is such a problem, the study concluded, that if it is not mitigated, America's very democracy is threatened.
"'I was 37 when I served on the (Kerner) Commission,' Harris told NPR. 'Whoever thought that 50 years later, we'd still be talking about the same things? That's kinda sad.'"

Karen Grigsby Bates at NPR finds that fifty years later America is even more "separate and unequal."

And Alice George at Smithsonian also looks at the report.

"Policies Are Only as Good or Strong as the Governing Coalition That Holds Power"

"Worst of all, President Obama continued to underestimate the ferocity of the new generation of Republicans who were practicing a new style of confrontationist, smash-mouth politics that left little room for compromise with the other party. They were aided by a conservative media universe where reason-based arguments depending on facts and analysis were secondary or irrelevant, as spin, hyperbole, and partisan slander were the weapons of choice. While President Obama was playing chess, more and more congressional Republicans were playing tackle football."

Julian E. Zelizer at The Atlantic writes that the "threat to [Obama's] legacy is becoming clearer by the day."

"Vindicated in the Long Run"

"Salisbury told a congressional committee after his trip. 'The people have a feeling of the mass participation in this war.' In short, although the bombing was aimed, in part, at strengthening the morale of America’s ally in Sài Gòn, it was having an unintended parallel effect in the North.
"Salisbury's image of the undaunted North Vietnamese was ahead of its time, and would become deeply embedded in the popular memory of the war. He found an overwhelming sense of confidence at all levels of North Vietnamese society. 'From our point of view,' Premier Phạm Văn Đồng told him, 'it is a sacred war for independence, freedom, life. It stands for everything, this war, for this generation and for future generations. That's why we are determined to fight this war and win this war. Our victory stems from this very resoluteness.'"

Joe Renouard at History News Network revisits Harrison E. Salisbury's Behind the Lines--Hanoi from 1967.

"The Biracial Appeal Was Strong"

"Kennedy's unusual coalition may have been related to his willingness to fight for the underdog, but also to avoid political correctness. He was a champion of civil rights but also an opponent of racial preferences. He was deeply concerned about the racial and economic injustices that sparked riots, but also was a sharp critic of lawlessness. 'Though a man of growing compassion,' Matthews writes, 'he believed in law and order and didn’t hesitate to employ the phrase.' Liberals appreciated his opposition to the Vietnam War, but hard hats knew that he didn't want to let wealthy college students off the hook with draft deferments. What made Robert Kennedy unique, wrote Jack Newfield, in words Matthews quotes, 'was that he felt the same empathy for white workingmen and women that he felt for blacks, Latinos and Native Americans.'"

Richard D. Kahlenberg at the New Republic reviews Chris Matthews's Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit.

Against the Rocks of a Lifetime

"But each generation must be as forgetful as the last—50 years later, we've barely begun to reckon with the implications of these uprisings, let alone address their root causes. So often, the reactions to these conflicts follow a woefully familiar script: paramilitary policing that only exacerbates the turmoil, sensationalistic media coverage that distorts public understanding, followed at last by a feckless government reports that says much of what the black community already knows and does little of what it needs.

"'The headline hasn’t much changed since 1967 in terms of how we remember those riots,' Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a professor of history, race, and public policy at Harvard, said in an interview. 'The critique from the black community is seen as illegitimate in most arenas of American life, so the longer-term response has been the explicit or veiled message that society was not to blame.'"

Noah Remnick at The Atlantic looks back on the Newark Riot of 1967.

"What Legally Meant Was Very Different at the Turn of the Last Century, Compared to What It Means Now"

"So now four countries—Mexico, India, China, and the Philippines—max out every year, said Ngai. And depending on the visa category that a person applies for, the wait can be 10, 20, even 30 years. But if you're coming from a low-immigration country such as New Zealand, she said, you might not wait at all.
"When people who want to limit immigration to the U.S. say that immigrants should 'go to the back of the line and wait their turn,' said Domenic Vitiello, a Penn professor who teaches a course called the Immigrant City, they often fail to acknowledge there really is no single line to which everyone has equal access."

Michael Matza at The Philadelphia Inquirer talks with historians of immigration.

"Now We Know Nixon Lied"

"But Nixon had a pipeline to Saigon, where the South Vietnamese president, Nguyen Van Thieu, feared that Johnson would sell him out. If Thieu would stall the talks, Nixon could portray Johnson's actions as a cheap political trick. The conduit was Anna Chennault, a Republican doyenne and Nixon fund-raiser, and a member of the pro-nationalist China lobby, with connections across Asia.
"'! Keep Anna Chennault working on' South Vietnam, Haldeman scrawled, recording Nixon's orders. 'Any other way to monkey wrench it? Anything RN can do.'"

John A. Farrell in The New York Times discusses notes written by H. R. Haldeman about Vietnam in 1968 that establish that Richard "Nixon directed his campaign's efforts to scuttle the peace talks."

And Jason Daley in a 2017 Smithsonian article and Colin Schultz in a 2013 Smithsonian article cite other evidence.

"Story of a Smoldering Grudge"

"The public has embraced the notion that the greatest crime of the 20th century must have been the product of an equally grandiose conspiracy.
"But none of these conspiracy theories hold up when the events of the six months before Nov. 22, 1963, are carefully studied.  Oswald was no coldhearted professional assassin under orders.  The real answer to the reasons he took aim are to be found in his frustrations and obsessions."

James Reston, Jr., speculates in the Los Angeles Times that Texas Governor John Connally was Lee Harvey Oswald's target in Dallas.

"The Conservative Movement Is Fundamentally Broken"

"Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He himself was not especially racist—he believed it was wrong, on free market grounds, for the federal government to force private businesses to desegregate. But this 'principled' stance identified the GOP with the pro-segregation camp in everyone’s eyes, while the Democrats under Lyndon Johnson became the champions of anti-racism.

This had a double effect, Roy says. First, it forced black voters out of the GOP. Second, it invited in white racists who had previously been Democrats. Even though many Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act in Congress, the post-Goldwater party became the party of aggrieved whites.

"'The fact is, today, the Republican coalition has inherited the people who opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964—the Southern Democrats who are now Republicans,' Roy says. 'Conservatives and Republicans have not come to terms with that problem.'"

Zack Beauchamp at Vox talks with Avik Roy about the decline of the Republican Party.

As does Molly Ball at The Atlantic.

And Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann explain how the Republican Party produced Donald Trump.

Here's to the Year of Richard Nixon

Julian E. Zelizer at The Atlantic and Jonathan Chait at New York wonder if 2016 is becoming 1968.

"Could Be an Occasion for Celebration"

"Such assurances did not sway conservative critics of the reform, but a last-minute change in the legislative language did alleviate their fears of a massive African and Asian influx. The original version of the 1965 Act, cosponsored by Senator Philip Hart of Michigan and Representative Emmanuel Celler of New York, both liberal Democrats, favored those immigrants whose skills were 'especially advantageous' to the United States. Conservatives, led by Representative Michael Feighan, an Ohio Democrat, managed to change those priorities, giving visa preferences instead to foreigners who were seeking to join their families in the United States. Feighan, who chaired the House Immigration subcommittee, argued that a family-unification preference in immigration law would establish, in the words of a glowing profile in the American Legion magazine, 'a naturally operating national-origins system,' because it would favor immigration from the northern and western European countries that at the time dominated the U.S. population.
"Feighan and others were wrong."

Tom Gjelten in The Atlantic marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Immigration and Nationality Act.