A while back, I posted commentary comparing 1968 with 2018 in terms of politics, culture, media coverage and the like. (There's something about 50-year anniversaries that just demands comment.)
Today, let's spend a few minutes comparing the upcoming 2020 presidential race with the 1968 and 1972 presidential races. What does 2020 have in common with those two elections? Well, from the Democrats' perspective, there's a choice between nominating an ostensibly moderate candidate or a hard-left radical.
As I pointed out in the ’68 Vs. ’18 blog, unrest roiled American society 50 years ago just as it does today. The 1960s protests had a lot to do with civil rights, anti-Vietnam War sentiment and overall radicalism (sex-n-drugs-n-rock-n-roll libertine lifestyles). There were riots, campus demonstrations in which students took over entire buildings, and even some bombings, thanks to extremist terror groups such as the Weathermen.
Today, we have rampant urban homelessness (spurred in part by the flood of illegal immigrants); Antifa thugs raising hell in various cities, despite many of them coming from middle-class and wealthy backgrounds; and occasional mass shootings usually perpetrated by alienated, angry and mentally ill men. Old boundaries have broken down or are showing signs of decay -- gay marriage and the alphabet soup of transgendered sexuality come to mind. Democrats are more concerned about plastic straws polluting our cities than syringes used by junkies.
Just as happened 50 years ago, the Democrat Party features left-wing nut-jobs running for president who want to shake things up in the most extreme ways. Barack Obama is to today’s leftist Dems as Lyndon Johnson was to the George McGovern & Eugene McCarthy wing of the Democrats in the late 1960s-early 1970s. LBJ's Great Society and Obama's "fundamental transformation" of America, including Obamacare, racial politics, and a drastic weakening of the military, didn't go far enough. The hard-core leftists just keep moving the goalposts and demanding more.
Peacenik Hubert Humphrey was the “moderate” in 1968, and he managed to secure the nomination. Richard Nixon defeated him in a close election, 31.78 million to 31.27 million votes, with George Wallace picking up 9.9 million votes.
I'm sure there must have been Democrat true believers in 1969-72 who thought, "If only we had nominated a more progressive candidate, we could've beaten that bastard Nixon."
The Democrat Party, then as now having too many emotional, irrational people who live in a fantasy world and see what they want to see rather than deal with reality, nominated George McGovern in 1972. The Vietnam War was still going on, the hippie movement was winding down, and most of the race riots were a few years behind us. The unemployment rate was a respectable 5.3 percent; inflation about 3.5 percent, and GDP a whopping 5 percent. But rumblings were starting from the Watergate break-in, which had occurred just a few months before the election. Nixon might have been vulnerable.
However, the Democrats of that era, like many of them today, did not believe in incrementalism or making modest, steady progress. It was an all-or-nothing proposition. They entered the ring with McGovern, then Nixon came out from the opposite corner and cold-cocked him. McGovern was down for the count, as Tricky Dick won 49 states and about 47 million votes to McGovern's 29 million.
Today, with Twitter and other social media supercharging the left's extremism, support from naive millennials and a compliant, obsequious news media that serves as the pom-pom team for the Democrats, radicals like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are faring well in the Democrat nominating process. Other fringe crackpots like Pete Buttigieg, Andrew Yang and Robert Francis O'Rourke are still competing, each one trying to out-extreme the next one.
Their fantasies include insane and ridiculous proposals like banning fossil fuels and air travel, spending $30 trillion on a green new deal (or whatever they call it), opening the immigration floodgates and offering free health insurance to illegal immigrants. Not a word about military preparedness or the recklessness of piling on mountains of additional debt.
It's funny, but the Democrats frequently claim that conservatives are anti-science and susceptible to religious beliefs (progressives typically mock and are disdainful toward orthodox spirituality). But it's the Democrats who are clueless about science, physics and engineering when one examines their plans for such things as electric vehicles, wind turbines, an end to fracking and offshore oil drilling. They also stupidly fail to realize that even if Americans eliminated all of our CO2 emissions, China, India, Brazil, Vietnam and many other countries would still continue emitting dozens of times more CO2 than we ever have.
To name just a few "inconvenient truths," mining the minerals for electric car batteries burns lots fo fossil fuels. So does producing windmill turbines. And it's difficult to efficiently transport electricity generated from wind turbines or solar panels to the geographic areas where it's needed. I could go on, but why bother?
I sense that the Democrats know Joe Biden is perceived as too old, too feeble and not very sharp mentally. They are likely to nominate Warren, whose bash-the-rich and anti-fossil fuels schtick plays well among the millennials, the elites living in the coastal areas and liberals employed by universities or bloated government agencies.
But here's an unsolicited caveat (not that leftists would pay any attention to anything I have to say): African American support for Warren, Sanders and Buttigieg is minuscule. The blacks' favorite candidate is Biden, since he loyally served as Barack Obama's VP. If they perceive the Democrats have thrown ol' Joe under the bus, they may stay home en masse come election day, or vote for another candidate. If the Democrat nominee doesn't get a strong turnout from blacks, that candidate is sunk.
We're all aware of Trump's frequent self-inflicted wounds, and the Republicans' ineptitude at messaging. Ironically, the Trump re-election campaign's biggest weapon may have nothing to do with its own efforts. Simply put, it's the arrogance, delusion and love of left-wing politics that have engulfed the Democrat Party. The sunshine of reality may well be blotted out by emotion, feelings, rage and wishful thinking.
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