And did you catch this?
From a recent column on the presidential campaign by the liberal columnist Jonathan Alter:
"Every election of the past four decades has turned on the tension between hope and fear. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson won by using fear that Barry Goldwater would blow up the world. In 1968, Richard Nixon used code words like "law and order" to exploit racial fears as part of his "Southern strategy."
I'm OK with Alter's take on 1964--but not 1968. He's wrong, though again we see here mainly an echo of the typical, accepted liberal narrative of recent history (you know how it goes--conservatives are greedy racists, who gain power only by exploiting the greed, fears, resentments, and especially the racism of the average Joe). But here it's wrong. Richard Nixon didn't talk about "law and order" in 1968 in order to exploit racial fears. Instead, he spoke to real concerns of the "silent majority."
Don't forget the state of things then. By 1968, over 500,000 American soldiers were in Vietnam (far more than are currently in Iraq). There was a significant antiwar movement, and many in that movement didn't necessarily play by the rules or observe the law. They burned their draft cards. They took over buildings on college campuses and stopped classes. In 1967 thousands of marchers disrupted activities at a military induction center in Oakland, and torched their draft cards in San Francisco. Over 100,000 antiwar protesters marched in New York City and in Washington D.C.; there, antiwar radical leader Abbie Hoffmann tried to get the crowd, through mental telepathy, to levitate the Pentagon off the ground. In 1968 radical protesters stopped classes for weeks at Columbia University; and riots doing a great deal of damage in a number of cities ensued after the assassination of Martin Luther King.
People were being killed. A great deal of destruction was being done. Radicals in print and on TV and radio justified this kind of lawbreaking. What Nixon was talking about wasn't, for the most part, having to do with racial fears. Rather, it had to do with radicalism, violence, and law-breaking, and a pledge to stop it. It resonated with millions of Americans. Because Nixon had a point.
