"Let the People Rule"?

"'The whole Trump phenomenon isn't because of our reforms,' he says. 'It's not just our fault, I think.' GOP gerrymandering and changes to state primaries happened on their own, he notes. He also points to many other new factors involved, including social media, generational change and Covid. He adds that in the years since Trump has entered politics, the former president has succeeded in co-opting the GOP establishment: 'If the Republican Party had superdelegates today, they would be on his side.'"

Michael Hirsh at Politico asks, "Did a Young Democratic Activist in 1968 Pave the Way for Donald Trump?"

"Can Anyone Imagine FDR Uttering Such Words?"

"If in the 1980s, as Alan Ehrenhalt wrote, Democrats 'lost the agenda to President Reagan just as surely as Republicans lost it to Roosevelt in the 1930s,' part of the reason had to with their backing off of their vision of governance and public spending as positive goods. It was not just conservatives such as Reagan, but high-profile Democrats who, as Pat Buchanan wrote in 1983, maintained 'that the ideas of the New Deal do not apply to the 1980s.' In foreswearing the relevance of the New Deal tradition, Democrats made a fatal error. Not only did they underestimate the ways in which that tradition remained relevant. Just as importantly, they conceded that what Muskie called 'common sense criticism of government' meant suspicion of the basic functions of the state. The Democrats had good reason to examine and critique the liberal tradition, which brought them defeat in 1968 and 1972."

Lawrence B. Glickman at Boston Review criticizes 1970s Democrats who weakened "their connection to government as an enabler of liberty [and] helped normalize conservative political rhetoric."

"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 Job Guarantee Threatens Corporate Power, While an Income Guarantee Subsidizes It"

"Over the last month, progressives have been celebrating the legislation recently introduced by Senator Cory Booker, calling for a pilot job guarantee in 15 cities and regions, co-sponsored by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand. But this bill preempts universal job guarantee legislation being drawn up by Bernie Sanders and rejects even the limited job guarantee advocated by the Center for American Progress, suggesting that Democratic leaders still do not understand the severity of the problem. Those excited by the idea ought to remember, too, that it was liberals, not conservatives, who have killed job guarantee bills in the past."

Peter-Christian Aigner and Michael Brenes at The New Republic traces the "Long, Tortured History of the Job Guarantee."

"Maybe Liberals Need to Keep Trying"

"Yet one of the lessons of the history I've just recounted is that liberals drove themselves into a dead end that nobody saw coming in 1948. The sense of superior moral standing that liberals derived from defending the rights of the marginalized often blinded them to the effect of their policies on white Americans (and at times on the marginalized themselves). This is hardly a new insight; the neoconservatives built a movement on it. Yet it seems piercingly relevant today. Donald Trump can speak the unfiltered language of George Wallace because so many white Americans feel victimized the way Wallace voters did 50 years ago. The fact that your racism is sincerely felt does not, of course, make you any the less a racist; but Trump voters also may have reason to feel that something precious is being taken from them. Maybe it behooves today's Democrats to take those grievances more seriously than they're inclined to. Maybe, to take one example, our current system of immigration, which delivers a wonderfully diverse world to cosmopolites and cheap workers to employers, is a raw deal for working-class whites."

James S. Traub at The Atlantic uses the career of Hubert Humphrey to trace the post-World War II history of the Democratic Party.

Jamelle Bouie at Slate disagrees with Traub.

"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.

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.

"A Pivotal Moment That Helped Fracture the Civil Rights Movement’s Tenuous Unity and Spur Black Political Radicalism"

"The black radical politics of the 1960s and subsequent decades had roots long before 1964. But it was amplified by the events of that summer, precisely at the moment when a new generation of young activists and intellectuals like Carmichael were coming into their own, and those events sent them in a direction far beyond the nonviolent political vision outlined by King a year earlier during the March on Washington."


Peniel E. Joseph in The New York Times looks back at Freedom Summer.

"Always Getting On with the Business of Being a ­Participant-Observer to History"

"Through the decades, on issue after issue, Schlesinger's liberal values and intellectual clarity stood him in good stead—his implacable hostility to Communism and McCarthyism, his skepticism about the invasion of Cuba, his opposition to the war in Vietnam, his prescience about presidential abuses of power, his critique of multiculturalism, his fear of a quagmire in Afghanistan. But he had a major blind spot, which started with his nearly uncritical devotion to the Kennedys (their intelligence, their style, their will to power) but didn't end there. The world of 'the liberals' was social as well as political—sparkling dinner parties at Hickory Hill, lunches at the Century Club, summers on the Cape. Robert McNamara, being a Kennedy man, was granted membership, and upon his departure from the Pentagon in 1967, at the height of the war for which McNamara bore so much blame, Schlesinger wrote, 'You have been one of the greatest public servants in American history, and your departure from the government is an incalculable loss to this nation.' But for Lyndon Johnson, the vulgar and uneducated Texan, whose liberal achievements on race and poverty far surpassed Kennedy's, the Schlesinger of these letters has utter contempt."

George Packer in The New York Times reviews Andrew Schlesinger and Stephen Schlesinger's The Letters of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

"To Walk Forthrightly into the Bright Sunshine of Human Rights"

"The motion carried. The Southerners walked out and ran Strom Thurmond for president. When Harry S. Truman won nonetheless, Democrats were on their way to becoming the party of civil rights. Hubert Humphrey catalyzed that change."

Rick Perlstein in The New York Times salutes Hubert Humphrey upon the Happy Warrior's one-hundredth birthday.

"I Shall Not Seek, and I Will Not Accept"

"At the apartment, Johnson, Humphrey and I took seats in the vice president's small study. Handing the speech to Humphrey, Johnson said he wanted Humphrey's comments. Reading through the main text, Humphrey was his usual ebullient self, with many positive comments. Then came the 'I will not seek' peroration. Humphrey became short of breath, as if he was having an anxiety attack. He looked up, speechless. Johnson admonished Humphrey not to say anything because the decision to make the announcement wasn't final. Humphrey's eyes moistened. Then, perhaps thinking of his failed 1960 campaign for the Democratic nomination against John F. Kennedy and of Robert Kennedy's recent entry into the '68 race, Humphrey said, 'There's no way I can beat the Kennedys.'"

In the Los Angeles Times, Johnson Administration member James R. Jones recalls LBJ's decision forty years ago to drop out of the 1968 presidential campaign.

Race or Counterculture?

"The key moment in the History Channel's '1968 with Tom Brokaw' comes when Brokaw interviews my onetime colleague, the historian Alan Brinkley. Brokaw prompts Brinkley, 'The left went too far, excessive in its behavior on a daily basis?' Brinkley replies, obligingly, 'Well, there were excesses on the left, needless to say--' and then: Wham! Down comes the editor's digital X-Acto knife. We don't hear the end of that sentence, nor do we hear any real historical analysis in the rest of Brokaw's two-hour film, whose secret subtitle is 'How Hippies Ruined America.'"

In The New Republic, Eric Rauchway disputes Tom Brokaw's account of the impact of the 1960s on the Democratic Party.