Carson Burch ’27 is considering a government major. He likes reading about historical and current events, as well as dinosaurs. Contact him at ceburch@wm.edu.
The views expressed in the article are the author’s own.
Over winter break, I managed to start reading my newest book: Rick Perlstein’s “Nixonland.” The book details the political history of the United States from the mid-to-late 1960s to early 1970s, and as I read it, I realized something: while there are key differences from our own political era, there are also many similarities, and applying the lessons of history may help us better understand and navigate our current historical moment.
The main similarity would be political polarization. The fact that America is a deeply divided nation is known to everyone these days, and it was also so in the 1960s. During that era, the counterculture which emerged in opposition to the Vietnam War, and which supported values such as free love, found itself opposed by older, ex-GI Americans who saw this mentality as a threat to traditional American values. Much like today, this counterculture also manifested itself in acts of political violence; today we see such instances as the grotesque spectacles of Jan. 6, 2021 or Charlie Kirk’s assassination, while 1968 alone saw the killings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and campus uprisings and rioting outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
The division of the American body politic also enabled a new class of politicians to take power by playing to the resentment of squares against hippies. Perlstein refers to this as the division between Franklins (upper/upper-middle class professionals educated at elite colleges) and Orthogonians (the non-college-educated working and middle class) after the main social groupings at Nixon’s Whittier College, with the latter disdaining all of the social change supported by the former and electing Nixon due to their resentments.
This too can be seen in our politics today, with the gap between the college-educated and the non-college educated rapidly becoming a key predictor of political affiliation. This trend has helped define the Trump era and is key to understanding his political success.
Once in office, both Trump and Nixon defined their administrations by lawlessness. Today there is much talk about lawfare and the Department of Justice’s efforts to prosecute Trump enemies such as former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (and William and Mary alum!) James Comey ’82 or New York Attorney General Letitia James. Nixon also made use of the federal bureaucracy to attack his opponents; he threatened to have the IRS audit them and had intelligence agencies spy on New Left groups at home.
Even the way these presidents sometimes justified their lawlessness is similar, too. When asked by David Frost in an interview about the legality of his actions undertaken to protect national security, Nixon replied, “When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.” Trump has made similar statements, posting on his social media feed that “he who saves his country does not violate any law” — a quote attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte.
What can these parallels teach us about our own era? The Vietnam War era is certainly not the same as today. For one thing, news diets at that time consisted largely of newspapers and four TV networks, while today’s more fragmented media ecosystem helps shield politicians from accountability by guaranteeing that their bases can live in alternate realities (something like the fallout of the Watergate scandal could not happen in today’s world). However, I personally arrived at three core takeaways that I believe this history can teach us.
The first is that, while things can improve, that process will take time and dedication. Although our country did eventually put the chaos of the late ’60s and ’70s behind it, there was still a two-decade period where many Americans felt the country was “going to hell in a handbasket” (my mother remembers my grandfather constantly using that phrase around that time) for reasons both valid (like anxiety about rising crime) and invalid (like hatred for integration). Putting this cultural epoch behind us will require dedication. If anything, it will require more since the issues which define our time (such as polarization) can arguably be traced back to the tensions of the ‘60s which were exacerbated in subsequent decades.
The second lesson is that hatred is a far more powerful mover of political behavior than it may at first seem — and has deleterious social consequences. Contempt for “the other side” played a big role in mobilizing the political movements which defined the Nixon years, to the point where many Americans said that the students shot at Kent State deserved it. In our time, our culture’s epidemic of political violence is the natural conclusion of similar resentments, and it has reached heights not seen since the days when movements like the Weather Underground dominated the news with acts of domestic terrorism.
The final lesson is that there will be no return to the way things were before all this chaos. The 1960s permanently shattered the New Deal coalition and the American consensus that previously existed in Washington, paving the way for the rise of Reaganite conservatism. I similarly suspect that the movements which are coming to dominate our time, such as democratic socialism or Trumpism, will leave a lasting influence, for better or for worse. The New Left and the New Right did much the same.
The optimist could see in these lessons the fact that we overcame the problems of the 1960s and 1970s with time and argue that our modern era will pass. However, the pessimist in me is inclined to see something different. My intuition tells me that things will get worse before they get better, if they improve at all, and that polarization will remain perhaps the defining element of our political culture for the foreseeable future. I’m not even sure there will be an end; as stated earlier, the political culture of the 1960s laid the foundations of our own.
If an escape from Trumpland is possible, don’t expect it anytime soon. You’ll be disappointed.
