History Repeats Itself-First as a Tragedy, Then as a Farce
I was born at the very end of 1959, so I began my life under the administration of Dwight Eisenhower. President Eisenhower presided over 8 years of unprecedented peace and prosperity. He ended the stalemate in Korean War, thoroughly overhauled the Defense Department, did not intervene in Vietnam as the French collapsed at Dien Bien Phu, and he responded with cool pragmatism to the following crises:
- 1956-Suez
- 1956-Hungary
- 1957-Sputnik
- 1957-Little Rock
- 1958-Lebanon
The one major mistake Eisenhower made was to authorize a U-2 flight over the Soviet Union on 1 May, 1960, just days before a four power summit between the UK, France, the United States and the USSR was set to begin in Paris. The U-2 was shot down, and Eisenhower initially lied to the US and the world by saying that the flight was a weather mission that had strayed into Soviet airspace. When Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev produced wreckage of the U-2 and a live pilot, Francis Gary Powers, Eisenhower’s lie was exposed, and his credibility, which was his brand, took a serious hit.
I was too young to remember any of these events, but by the time I turned 8 in 1967, the country was a far different nation than the one Eisenhower presided over. As 1967 morphed into 1968, and we had current events at the beginning of day in my second grade classroom, I got to learn about the following:
- The capture of USS Pueblo by the North Koreans
- The Tet Offensive
- President Johnson deciding not to seek re-election
- The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King
- The assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy
- The great riot at the Democratic Convention in Chicago
- John Carlos and Tommy Thompson raising their fists at the Mexico Olympics
I want to focus on the King assassination, because that event was one I truly witnessed. My family was living in an apartment just off Rhode Island Avenue in Washington, DC when King was murdered on Thursday, 4 April 1968. The next day I went to school, but I got sick with tonsilitis and my mom had to come pick me up. It took us a while to get to my pediatrician’s office, since Washington, like a hundred other cities, was experiencing mass rioting over King’s murder. We made it home safely, and I collapsed into my bed, burning with fever and a sore throat.
I was asleep the next morning when I heard a steady rumbling from outside of our apartment building, followed by my younger brother yelling, “oh, cool! Army trucks!” I got up, went to the window that overlooked Rhode Island Avenue, and saw a steady procession of Army trucks and APCs heading south on Rhode Island Avenue. Turning on the television we learned that President Johnson had called up Army troops to take up positions around the Capitol and other Federal buildings to prevent them from being damaged by the rioting, which was still ongoing.
My brother and I thought that this was cool, but when I began studying government and political science in college ten years later, I learned that adults thought that this was horrifying. For the first time since the Civil War a president had to order troops into the nation’s capital to quell an uprising. 1968 was also the third year of cities going up in flames as African-Americans, fed up with endless poverty and a lack of economic mobility, resorted to the worst option of all: violence.
Enter Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon. The man who lost the 1960 presidential election to John Kennedy, and who then went on to lose the 1962 California gubernatorial race. The man who was considered political road kill by the pundits of the day. Well, the road kill had one association that was gold plated in 1968: association with a beloved president who had governed at a time when cities weren’t burning, the country wasn’t mired in a stalemated war 12,000 miles away, and peace was the normal order. Nixon served as Eisenhower’s Vice President for eight years, and as one shock after another rocked the nation in 1968, one can imagine people casting nostalgic eyes to the 1950s, when things seemed so much better. Nixon represented a return to normalcy and order, and it was order that regular Americans craved the most of all as 1968 churned on. Nixon campaigned on law and order, a “secret plan” to end the war in Vietnam, and a sign that he claimed he saw being held by a little girl: “Bring us together.”
Nixon was not the kind of politician you would want to have a beer with. He was not empathetic, and he didn’t inspire you to reach for greater things. Hell, even Eisenhower frequently remarked that Nixon didn’t have any close friends and seemed to lack any sense of connection to others. But 1968 was a rather unique year, and Nixon brought out a nostalgic yearning for happier times, enabling him to win the nomination and ultimately the presidency that November.
As we deal with the coronavirus epidemic, escalating tension with Iran and China, and a president who seems more concerned with tweeting than governing, I can understand the yearning for the nostalgia of the Obama years. Lord knows those years had their own troubles (recovering from the 2008 financial disaster, a bitter fight over the Affordable Care Act, continued combat in North Africa and Southwest Asia), but they were dreamlike compared to what we’re experiencing now. Uncertainty is the order of the day in 2020, and it’s unnerving.
Enter Joe Biden
Joe Biden, like Richard Nixon, isn’t inspiring. Unlike Nixon, Biden has plenty of empathy, which will be very welcome on the 2020 campaign trail as we lurch from one crisis to another (there’s no telling what’s beyond this pandemic and civil unrest). Biden doesn’t inspire the blind fervor that is rampant among Sanders’s followers, but like Nixon, he’s associated with a far calmer and more stable time. Biden also serves as an antidote to those who’ve been clamoring for years that we need an outsider in the White House to “shake things up.” We’ve run the experiment since 20 January 2017, and I think we can honestly say that the outsider thing really isn’t good, especially when multiple crises hit the body politic. When a former 4 star Marine Corps General and Secretary of Defense calls a sitting president a “danger to the Constitution and the Republic”, you know you trouble.
As far as Biden’s connection with African American voters goes, I think this is a combination of nostalgia, a return of loyalty, and pragmatism. The nostalgia is what a large percentage of voters are longing for, but nostalgia for the Obama years is particularly strong and poignant among African American voters, especially older African American voters. Those who are old enough to remember the struggles of the civil rights era felt an enormous sense of pride in America when Obama won in 2008. Now they’ve witnessed a resurgence of racism and to them it feels as if everything King and others accomplished is being destroyed.
The return of loyalty goes to Biden’s acceptance of Obama’s invitation to be his running mate in 2008. Biden had enormous seniority in the Senate, and since the Democrats took control of that chamber in the 2006 mid term elections, Biden was sacrificing Senatorial power and privilege for what could have been a losing campaign. A lot of people, including me, genuinely felt that an Obama candidacy was risky. When the Jeremiah Wright controversy erupted, I thought that Obama was done. I was wrong, and Biden was right to realize that Obama could win.
While every election is different, each one has echoes from the past. 2020 has echoes from 1968, which was the last year of mass turmoil to infect the body politic. Biden is the safety valve centrist Democrats, never Trumpers and those who stayed home in 2016 are looking for in this year of upheaval.