Theodore White was a brilliant writer
because despite being an old school liberal he remained objective. As I've
written indirectly in previous articles White believed that what he referred to
as 'The Liberal Theology' – the philosophy involving governing during the Great
Society combined with the antiwar movement led to a formation of the left which
he referred to as The Movement. He summed up their philosophy simply in his
1972 volume of Making of the President:
"a: War is bad -and the American
military was almost, if not quite a criminal institution, wasteful and
profligate of life and treasure, patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels,
and the adventure in Vietnam immoral.
b) Black is good – and the demands of
blacks on the general society must become, in the revision of priorities that
would follow after the war, priority number one
c) since money comes easily under the
modern managed economy, the believe that Money Solves All Problems is the
rhetoric of hope…
Thus, out of such thinking, there
developed in the years between 1968 and 1972 a formless but very powerful
action group within the Democratic Party that can only be called The Movement…
Like so much regarding Theodore White
its striking how much of the basic tenets of nearly half a century ago are
still relevant today. Everything that White wrote about in 1972, with certain
details changed for time, be considered doctrine of the left wing thinking of
the Democrats today.
White was more than willing to admire
their strengths particularly in regards to African-Americans as well as the
cause of what women in politics. But he was also very clear of their weakness
and one of their biggest true today as it was fifty years ago was about 'big
city life':
The old Liberal Idea of the sixties
had provoked many experimental approaches to city problems, most had been
passed into legislation – and most had failed…By the early 1970s it was clear
that the Liberal-inspired ideas of the Great Society had failed the cities;
they had been based on a political misreading of how those cities functioned,
and what communities in those cities needed for community survival. What had
actually happened in the great cities of America in the 1960s, and was
continuing to happen as America entered the seventies, mocked all the billions
of dollars spent on programs to 'save' them,
All the programs had been advanced by
Democratic thinkers practicing the best doctrine of the day but theologians
put doctrine above experience. The Movement insisted on more of the same
for the seventies – and in the big cities, where the Democrats get their core
votes, more of the same frightened too many of the communities who were being
driven from their home.
In the revisionism thinking of the
left today this has been phrased as 'white flight' and dismissed under the
label of racism, just as White said was gospel among the left as early as the
1960s. To this day the overwhelming majority of progressive thinkers still
embrace the Liberal Doctrine and choose to argue whites fleeing the city and
voting Republican as 'proof' of that fact and therefore absolves them of
looking closer at their flaws. What was clear as the seventies began was that
the Movement was hoping to use this as a force for political power.
White wrote that it was difficult in
1970, particularly for the Democrats, to see how the country was changing. He
correctly points out the rise of the New South during that period and how
moderates were winning the fight there. He also points out several major
spokesmen for the peace movement were winning critical governors Democratic
primaries. Jessie Unruh in California, Sander Levin in Michigan, John Gilligan
in Ohio, Patrick Lucey is Wisconsin and Milton Shapp in Pennsylvania. Unruh would be trounced by the incumbent
Governor Ronald Reagan and Levin would
lose to William Milliken but the other three candidates did win election. There
were also peace candidates winning in notable Congressional primaries – in
Manhattan, Berkley, Denver and Newton-Cambridge.
He also points out how the forces of
this movement could do in states whose conventions and politics rested on the
caucus system. Critical was one in Oklahoma in which an anti-war county
chairman packed his convention with anti-war activists:
His convention wrote a party platform
calling for legalized abortion, a timetable for withdrawal from Vietnam and
reduced penalties for possession of marijuana. One candidate warned that they
were murdering candidates for the Senate and the House in the hawk and bible
state. Replied a liberal candidate "Any candidate we murder, let him be
murdered."
More than any other statement in
White's book this makes it clear how little the Movement cared about winning
elected office rather than making a point.
It was clear the Movement held
tremendous weight within the party itself but as White points out the average
voter was not swept away. In 1970 the Movement would sweep over the Washington
state convention and endorse a primary challenger to Henry Jackson, one of the
most conservative Democrats in the Senate. Jackson would win his primary with
84 percent of the vote and then crush his Republican opponent by nearly five to
one in the general election. And as for the most colorful members of the new
theology won primaries but their votes totals in the general fell off. Bella
Abzug and Ronald Dellums would win election to the House and be faces among the
far left of the party for the decade to come. But Robert Drinian in the
Massachusetts fifth would only win by two points in tight three way race. Craig
Barnes the Democratic nominee in the first would lose in the general to Mike
McKevitt the first time, flipping the district to the Republicans. And in
Connecticut Reverend Joseph Duffey had led an insurgent campaign to primary the
Democrat Thomas Dodd. Dodd would run as an independent as a result Lowell
Weicker would be elected to the Senate – a position he'd hold for the next
eighteen years.
"The new politics," White
wrote, "could mobilize for caucuses and win primaries within the party –
but it lost force in the strangest of ways, whenever it penetrated the hearts
of the cities. He adds:
The Liberal Theology drew new lines –
men of morality must take over the party, politics was too important to be left
to the craftsmen of accommodation. The theologians saw no riddle in the
contrary dictates of morality and reality. Life must conform to the highest
principles – what was morally right, they felt, must be politically sound."
I underlined those last two words because
it is incredibly clear to outside observers that today the Bernie Sanders-AOC wing of the Democratic
party agrees with that theology one hundred percent. They believe that this is
absolutely true and underperformance, if not outright rejection, from the
voters has done nothing to diminish their certainty.
And its worth a reminder of what happened when George McGovern tried to
harness The Movement to become President of the United States.
Both the implosion of the Nixon
Presidency and multiple academics (many of whom are left-wing) have done much
to rehabilitate McGovern's failed candidacy that it is worth remembering many
of the failures at the time which White himself recorded. They reveal many
ironies that those who choose to see McGovern as a martyr or prophet overlook.
The first is the most surprising. It
is well known that after the 1968 convention McGovern himself sponsored a
commission that would draft new reforms for the Democratic nominating process
four years later and that have been part of any nominating process going
forward. Many have suggested McGovern rigged the game so that he could get the
nomination four years later and that is utter nonsense.
What is ironic is that these reforms
were meant to allow the voters more of a choice when it came to nominating
their candidate for President then they'd had before. And as the primary votes
demonstrated very clearly they did not want George McGovern.
Much of this was due to McGovern's
strategy which meant only competing in a certain number of primaries and
leaving many of the others to other candidates. But it doesn't change the fact
that as late as May 15th McGovern was running a distant third in the
overall count of primary voters, more than 1.1 million votes behind George
Wallace and nearly half a million votes behind Hubert Humphrey. (Wallace would
withdraw after the attempt on his life on May 15th.) And by the time
the primary process was over McGovern still had earned exactly 25 percent of
all primary voters which was still behind Humphrey.
And when it came to competing in the
states that would be electoral prizes McGovern's track record was worse. He
basically left Illinois to Edmund Muskie, finished third in Pennsylvania behind
Humphrey and Wallace, lost Ohio in a close vote to Humphrey, finished a distant
third to Wallace in Michigan (it was a crossover state and Wallace received
nearly 800,000 votes) and barely contested Texas which Wallace won easily. By
New York the race was over and his victory counted for little. Only in
California did he win a competitive primary and he did in the aftermath of a
series of debates in which Humphrey skewered him so badly that his once
insurmountable polling lead turned out to be less than five points – and did
enough damage to him nationally that his campaign never recovered.
McGovern's campaign was successful for
much the same reason Goldwater's was eight years earlier: his organizers has
spent the last year and a half doing great work at a caucus and state level
getting all delegates to committed to him so that none of the other candidates
knew what was happening until it was too late. Wallace admitted it was
impressive that he'd managed to get the most votes but only had 324 delegates
pledged to him by May 15 while McGovern, who had far fewer votes, had 560. In
other words the game was just as rigged as four years ago: the only difference
was it was the Left doing it rather than the establishment.
McGovern's beliefs were very much the
theology of the left. He had in a sense always been a Progressive: he'd worked
for Henry Wallace as a young man and had been a delegate to his Progressive
Party Convention in 1948, a convention that in hindsight might well have been a
model for what McGovern's own convention turned out to be nearly a quarter of a
century later in terms of diversity, left wing viewpoints – and complete chaos
in the eyes of a viewing audience. As White put it in an interview: "In
George McGovern's mind the polarity was that of Good and Evil. He was a
virtuous man, he knew what was right and wrong."
This no doubt made him appealing to
The Movement who thought along those exact lines. But as White pointed out
after multiple interviews you came away with conversations with McGovern with
no idea what the man was thinking.
After a while, those who saw him
frequently came away wondering what George McGovern thought himself. Eugene
McCarthy made the cruelest comment. "Talking with George McGovern is like
eating a Chinese meal. An hour after its over, you wonder if you really ate
anything."
Because McGovern was the peace
candidate that was more then enough for those who organized for him, those who
followed him and those who listened to him on college campuses. McGovern said
he was in favor of all the issues that were prominent to the left at the time:
abortion, amnesty, busing of African-Americans, legalization of marijuana.
McGovern did this because he needed to mobilize these forces to win the
nomination and control of the party. But as White pointed out:
Yet what he said and spoke in the
spring months could not be limited to audiences of his choosing. On the college
campuses, within the circle of his faithful, he might be cheered as the voice
of the future ; in the tormented cities of America, however, after a decade of
similar, high-minded proposals, he sounded like the voice of the past – more of
the same, and frightening.
As White reports McGovern's candidacy
was not taken seriously until after the Massachusetts primary when he was
officially the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination. Now that he was the
candidate, the voters needed to know what McGovern stood for.
Ending the Vietnam War was by far his
strongest issue but White pointed out that McGovern's view of it frequently
made him sound like a demagogue, as bad as Nixon or Wallace at times. White
quotes him:
Our government would rather burn down
schoolhouses and schoolchildren in Asia than build schools for Americans at
home…The Nixon bombing policy on Indochina is the most barbaric action that any
country has committed since Hitler's effort to exterminate Jews in Germany…He's
playing politics with the lives of American soldiers and with American
prisoners rotting in their cells in Hanoi."
These were exactly the kind of
statements that appeal to the Left then and now, which is no doubt why that get
a pass from academics in a way that the more conservative demagogues do
not. These statements would no doubt
work on a college campus; to more conservative voters it was always going to be
a challenge. And that argument was McGovern's greatest strength as a
candidate.
One of the biggest flaws in a campaign
that had too many to count was his economics program. Designed in August of
1971, it was so broadly socialist that an eyewitness was outraged that McGovern
went along with it without even once challenging them on their findings. It was
released in a speech during the leadup to the Iowa caucuses which White
describes as 'a long loose ramble which McGovern presented not as a blueprint
but rather as suggestions or options… It proposed sweeping tax reforms that
would close all loopholes gut the rich, comfort the middle class and sustain
the poor." Two took on a life of their own: a new taxation of inheritance
which no individua would be able to receive half a million dollars in gifts
from their families during their lifetimes or after their deaths and a program
that would give a way $1000 a year to every man, woman and child. This was not
entirely unheard of but McGovern gave no idea of how he would pay for it.
Those who might be inclined could say
that ideas such as this would evolve into many aspects of the beliefs of
left-wing candidates like Bernie Sanders or Andrew Yang. But in an era far less
polarized it was universally greeted by Democrats, Republicans and all forms of
media as completely ridiculous and was an absolute gift to Republicans for rich
donors.
It was statements like this that made
the Democratic establishment certain that if McGovern was the Democratic
nominee they would be headed for electoral disaster in the fall – a prophecy
that turned out to be accurate, of course. Which meant they were determined to
do anything in their power at the Democratic Convention in Miami to stop
McGovern from getting the nomination.
George McGovern, for all his morality,
was not naïve when it came to politics. Having attended the 1968 convention as
a last-minute nominee for President, he knew the only way for him to win was to
have the party unite behind him at the convention. But that was always going to
be impossible. For even if the old guard had been willing to get behind him as
White makes very clear, McGovern's own people had no interest in it.
Their thinking on politics was not
unlike the slogans of the activists: they were here and the rest of America
would have to get used to it. This convention was about them first and everyone
else would have to bow to them. They didn't listen to the old guard, they
didn't care what the electorate watching on TV thought, they barely gave lip
service to what the candidate himself wanted. The 1972 Democratic Convention is
the clearest example of what happened when the left took over a major party –
and White makes it very clear what a shitshow it was.
He shows how the delegations had
almost none of the Democratic elected officials on the convention floor that
Democratic voters in those states had seen in previous conventions are on TV.
He shows how the delegates engaged in seating delegations that would hurt any
chance they had of winning states like Illinois a few months down the road. He
shows how the delegates pushed their choices for chairman and vice-chairman of
the McGovern campaign over the head of McGovern and the people who'd helped get
him the nomination. He shows that they voted on a platform so radical that
McGovern himself didn't agree with it – and then spent so much time and energy
clowning around by nominating Archie Bunker and Mao for Vice President that he
couldn't give his acceptance speech clarifying his views until 3 AM when the
entire country was asleep. And he illustrates that by taking out any
professionals who could successfully vet a Vice Presidential candidate it laid
the groundwork for Thomas Eagleton's candidacy which sunk any remote chance
McGovern had of winning in November.
And as White illustrates in the final
chapters the people running McGovern's campaign were completely clueless on how
to run a national campaign. I will deal with this in a later article but White
points out by September it was clear the campaign McGovern was planning had
nothing to do with his campaign planners. There was no head of the campaign per
se to take orders from, McGovern had no idea how to delegate a campaign. No one
was coordinating the themes of the campaign, its ideas, its television, its travel
plans. The headquarters itself as White illustrates became filthier, with mail
not being delivered, the Xerox machines being clogged, and obscenities being
regular shouted. No one wanted to talk to anyone who had anything to do with
politics, dismissing anyone who had a history of even being part of the JFK
campaign as being a freak.
They regularly turned down anyone who
might be able to help them in the general election. As one state Democratic
Chairman said: "They felt they owned George McGovern, they had him long
before anyone else and by God, they weren't going to share him." And that
wasn't just politicians: the headquarters was mostly white with very few black
faces and almost no women. They truly believed that McGovern winning primaries
was the same as the general. "They were angry when we pointed out what the
working man was resented was us."
They couldn't come up with a theme for their campaign until the final
months, finally focusing on the corruption and Watergate. And this just made
him look increasingly inept. By October White quotes one Democratic leader as
saying: "The only way to save the party is to lose big."
Watergate and Nixon's presidency
imploding less then two years after the election would do much to make many
members of the candidate claim that Nixon had only won because of corruption
and cheating. But as White points out as early as mid-May the Nixon campaign
was sure of victory and all they cared about was building a landslide. As White points out after the Democratic
convention Nixon had 57 percent of the vote to McGovern's 34 percent – and that
was before the Republican convention.
The McGovern campaign would later say
that a list of 600,000 donors to their campaign – considered the most
'significant legacy of it' – was lost after the campaign, with some
McGovernites arguing that new chairman Richard Strauss destroyed it in an act of
vengeance. Given the incompetence of the McGovern campaign that White lays
forth in great detail, I'm more inclined to side with Strauss when he says he
never received it. If they couldn't deliver mail within the campaign, I find it
more than believable that someone could have accidentally thrown it out after
election day, saying they wouldn't need this anymore. And more to the point, it
ignores a very real question. Having given their money to a campaign in which
Richard Nixon had won with an unprecedented 60.7 percent of the popular votes
and 49 out of fifty states why would anybody who gave money to McGovern want to
make any political donations ever again?
And considering that the campaign was radically underfunded from day
one, any Democrat worth their salt wouldn't trust them for helping fund a local
party campaign, much less a Presidential one. They got what they paid for.
The Movement, in the form it
represented, would break down in the aftermath of McGovern's defeat combined
with the end of the Vietnam War in January of 1973. Many of those who as part of it, such as
Abzug and Dellums would remain in Congress and major liberal causes for the
rest of their careers but they would be outliers as those who had been part of
it chose to return to the activism that they had been loyal to during the
previous decade.
Others from the McGovern campaign were
prominent figures in Democratic politics in the decades to come. Gary Hart,
McGovern's major campaign strategist, would win election to the Senate in
Colorado two years later. Two members of the Arkansas delegation, a young
couple named Bill and Hilary Clinton, would become active in Arkansas state
politics with Bill first winning the office of
attorney general in that state in 1976. And at that convention the
current governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter had attended and had made a play to
be McGovern's running mate.
All of them would be derided by former
McGovernites as neoliberals who sadly seem to have taken the exact message that
White would consider the greatest possible mistake: "Had they known the
truth (about Richard Nixon after Watergate, they would have turned (him) out.
In fact McGovern's own campaign workers took a very different perspective –
arguably the correct one.
Ted Van Dyk, McGovern chief
speechwriter, would actually say before election day, "The Republican
Party is the place where people go when they want to go slow, and I think they
want to go slow now." After that 49 state landslide, there's an argument
that all those Democrats who enjoyed success in the aftermath had learned that
lesson. Indeed for the rest of the 20th century and well into the
first decade of the 21st both
political parties would sharply go to the right because of the 1972 election –
the Republican Party was already heading there and the Democratic Party knew
the only way to be competitive was to whittle away from the territory the GOP
was co-opting.
Patrick Caddel, McGovern's pollster
would have a similar reaction after the election: "American is not
geography, it's an idea. Watergate fouled up that idea."
In the final chapter White sums up
what the 1972 election taught him:
The idea that prevailed was that
America should go slow. Go slow abroad, go slow in the cities, go slow with
power wherever it interfered where a child grew up, where she went to school,
or where he was sent to die…The Americans were for slowing the pace of power
and they chose Richard Nixon.
In the years that have followed many
academics from that error have made the argument that the liberal theology was
successful until the conservative revolution killed it. White – writing nearly
a decade before Reagan's election – would argue the opposite: the conservative
revolution happened because the liberal theology had failed. The struggles that
take place today may very well be happening because the Movement, either then
or now, has never accepted that message. But that is to be expected because as
we shall see in later articles, those among the Movement had language for those
who chose to give any alternate views to theirs – and McGovern's defeat had
been failed spectacularly because their candidate had failed to understand it.
