About last night in Philadelphia: Part II, Bernie Sanders Is Not Eugene McCarthy, Thank Goodness

Bernie Sanders 2016

Eugene McCarthy 1968

In my last blog post, I explained why the allegation that the 2016 Democratic Convention was rigged is way off base -- and that the last rigged Democratic Convention was nearly half a century ago, in 1968.

There is another big difference between 1968 and 2016.  And that difference is attributable to Bernie Sanders’ wise understanding of the consequences of failing to close ranks within the Democratic Party. I suspect that a number of his supporters may not be aware of the historical precedent.  They should be.

In 1968, Senator Eugene McCarthy got into the race because no one else was challenging President Johnson’s re-nomination (due to the Vietnam War).  McCarthy was understandably upset at the failure of the Convention to nominate him, even though he received a plurality of the popular vote in the 14 primaries -- and his and Senator Kennedy’s popular votes were 70% of the total.  It was perfectly reasonable to conclude that the Convention was rigged by the Establishment. (A man quite enamored with himself, McCarthy likely also saw it as a wound to his pride.)

In 1964, McCarthy had been seen as a possible vice presidential running mate for LBJ and he had had been a long-time political ally of his fellow Minnesotan, Vice President Humphrey.  But after the Convention, he only gave tepid support to Humphrey – and did not campaign at all for the Humphrey/Muskie ticket.

This decision by McCarthy had grave consequences.

There was a three-way general election race in 1968: Humphrey, Richard Nixon, and segregationist George Wallace. In the middle of the Vietnam War and protests against it, and in the midst of several years of periodic riots in the streets of American cities, the country had far more reason to be divided then than in 2016.

McCarthy abandoned the field, and many of his supporters did so, as well. The result: Nixon defeated Humphrey by a razor thin margin of 0.7 % of the popular vote.  

Source:  http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/showelection.php?year=1968

As a consequence, the Viet Nam War, which Humphrey would have pulled out of, dragged on for another 7 years. The efforts of the War on Poverty were either reversed or died on the vine. The Warren Supreme Court was replaced by the Burger Court and later the Rehnquist Court. The political "success" of Nixon's Southern Strategy set the table for the rightward shift of the Republican Party that has culminated in what now is the Trump/Pence/Cruz Party.

I remember well 1968, the first year I was eligible to vote. I supported Kennedy, but had no problem voting for Humphrey in November – the consequences of a Nixon Presidency were quite predictable, as far as I was concerned.  But I was more of a history and political junkie than most. 

This history is surely known by Senator Sanders, who was 26 years old in 1968.  Indeed, I would not be surprised if he was one of the activists who did not vote for Humphrey because the Vice President was not ideologically “pure.”  But Bernie Sanders clearly learned from history.  Indeed, the dangers of a Trump/Pence government in 2016 are even more obvious than those posed by a Nixon/Agnew government in 1968. 

So Bernie knows this history and its relevance to the current moment.  With that knowledge, he now shows that he is not doomed to repeat the sad history of 1968. 

Bernie's followers all need to recognize the wisdom of the elder they have thus far so enthusiastically followed.

About last night in Philadelphia: Part I, The Last Rigged Convention was in 1968

Senator Abe Ribicoff squaring off against Mayor Richard Daley at the "rigged" Democratic Convention in 1968

The last "rigged" Democratic Convention was nearly a half century ago, in 1968.  

In 1968, only 14 states had primary elections.  Anti-war candidate Senator Eugene McCarthy won pluralities or majorities in six; Senator Robert Kennedy in four (including California); President Lyndon Johnson (or his surrogates) in four.  

In the wake of the assassination of Senator Kennedy on June 4, the night of the last primaries, the Party Establishment rallied around Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Johnson having dropped out of the race the end of March. In the primary states, 70% voted for either McCarthy or Kennedy.

George McGovern, who had not been running, was the inheritor of the delegates won by Kennedy in the primary states; those delegates did not approach a majority. Nor did the Kennedy/McGovern delegates combined with the Eugene McCarthy delegates add up to a majority of delegates, even though, together, 70% of the primary voters chose either Kennedy or McCarthy. Why?  Because the vast majority of delegates back then were chosen in closed processes that often were effectively decided long before the campaign began. Humphrey got the nomination because the Establishment closed ranks around him. Now that was a rigged convention.
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Source:  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries,_1968

In the wake of the 1968 debacle, the Democratic Party radically changed its delegate selection rules, requiring that the processes be timely (they could not begin until the calendar year of the election) and open -- either primary elections or well-publicized caucuses.  See 1972 discussion in the D.C. Circuit decision in Brown v. O'Brien  While the Establishment took one last try at subverting the new rules in 1972, that attempt failed, although the chaos caused by the attempt doomed the Democratic ticket that year. See discussion in my earlier blog post.  Since that time, there has been no serious dispute as to the validity of the results as presented at the Convention.  2016 is no different.  While there might have been a problem if Hillary Clinton failed to win a majority of the pledged delegates, that did not happen. 

So the story line of a "rigged" convention is bogus.

What is significant for 2016 is an understanding of what Eugene McCarthy, who received 39% of the popular vote in the primaries, did after the 1968 convention.  That will be the subject of my next blog post.

Sometimes we should listen to musicians!

        My good friend since second grade, Richie Reiter, posted what I believe to be a cogent analysis of the current situation. https://www.facebook.com/reiterjazz/posts/10154578417465995

 Just goes to show that well-informed artists are probably the best commentators going.

       There are a lot of comments on Richie’s post, a couple of which I want to respond to at length.  Rather than writing too much as a comment, I am going to just link this blog.  My comments  follow the text of Richie’s post.

Richard Reiter

After WWII, everyone assumed WWIII would be the nuclear holocaust. I don't think so. I think WWIII has started and it could last 100 years. Radical Islamic terrorism is WWIII and it's not just going to go away by water boarding someone. There are deep forces at work here: the upheaval in Middle Eastern countries that have long suppressed freedom and opportunity leaving young men enraged without much hope, looking for a scapegoat; the internet that sucks in suicidal mentally disturbed men and women around the globe; the availability of weapons to anyone.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Americans were horrified and confused. We realized that life had changed and we had to rally. A huge factor in our success was our technology -- we developed weapons and built them in VAST numbers; we broke enemy codes. Today we need to take a deep breath and adapt to this new war. Technology will probably be the main element in our success: surveillance of enemy communications, detecting weapons…And recognizing that we're in a global war. Paris should never have allowed vehicles in the area where masses of people were celebrating France's biggest patriotic celebration.

While this bizarre radical Islamic WWIII is horrible, remember that the odds of a particular person's being harmed by a terrorist are small. So we need to keep living our lives and creating LOVE, the best antidote for hate.

Ira Allen Good analysis, Rich, but by and large Islamic terrorists are neither poor, poorly educated, nor deranged. And terrorism has been a tactic at least since the American revolution. So something else is at work.

My response to Ira Allen: I think you overstate here.  ISIS, like past anarcho-revolutionary movements, is made up of members of the disaffected upper classes (like Osama Bin Laden) and, for want of a better phrase, I would call the New Lumpenproletariat.

 (Those in the 21^st Century lumpenproletariat are different from the 19^th and 20^th Century versions in that while they may not have been pushed below the traditional working class, they are displaced in a way that makes them feel that they may not be productive or that their former positions as respected members of society are threatened.) 

What typically happens is that the upper class revolutionaries who initially fund and/or inspire the movements out of ideological or pathological inspirations, use the lumpenproletariat as cannon fodder.  Of course, without the lumpenproletariat, the upper class revolutionaries cannot accomplish very much.  The upper class revolutionaries do not and cannot create the lumpenproletariat.  The latter, which includes now some people seemingly from middle class backgrounds, are created by other forces.  This is where Richie has it right.  The forces of technological change, globalization, and the destabilization of traditions (including traditions we may think are barbaric or unfair) have created increasingly frustrated people upon whom the demagogues coming from any religion or no religion can and do prey. This dynamic is not unlike the collapse of German society in the 1920s and early 1930s that enabled Hitler and the Nazis to come to power. 

One might call this social trend a Revolution of Declining Expectations on the part of those who began to feel comfortable in the wake of World War II and the decline of formal colonialism, only to fall backwards for reasons that could only dimly comprehend.  This is the soil that enabled ISIS to form (helped considerably by the total destruction of Iraqi society by the ill-considered Bush/Cheney War); it is also the soil that is fertile for right-wing European parties during the last several decades and for Trumpism. They are angry that their expectations have declined, and are desperate to find ways to reverse the trend.

Rich Szabo And Obama and Hillary want to let more into our country.

Joe Lupis Quite right. I know we are not politically compatible, however, don't you think our president should be doing more to neutralize these folks?

My response Rich Szabo and Joe Lupis: Not very many immigrants from the horror of the Middle East are actually coming into the country, and those who are are being checked.  Of the handful of Muslim mass killers in the U.S. after 9/11, I believe that only one (the wife of the San Bernadino county employee who began the shooting rampage there) was not born here.  Blocking all immigration would do more harm than good, giving ISIS the kind of “us against them” propaganda ISIS desires to help their recruitment.  

Second, what more should we do to “neutralize these folks”?  We are already drone bombing all over the Islamic world, maybe even creating more terrorists than we kill.  And we seem to already be watching home-grown terrorists pretty closely.  We could do better, and I think that is the direction the Obama Administration is taking.  By being careful to not alienate the entire Muslim community in America, we are in a better position to identify terrorists and to make it less likely that more will be created. 

Third, it bears remembering that the Oklahoma City federal building bomber Timothy McVeigh and the Charleston Mother Emanuel Church shooter Dylan Roof were white Christians who were part of the New Lumpenproletariat.  In the long run, we, here in the United States, may be at greater risk from more white Christian McVeighs or Roofs than from terrorists who cloak their evil in Islam. 

The Party of Lincoln Is Now the Party of Donald Trump and Tony Perkins

FRC Founder James Dobson, Donald Trump and Tony Perkins

The Party of Lincoln is now clearly the melding of the Party of Trump (and  his mentor Roy Cohn) and the Party of Tony Perkins (whose early political connections were to David Duke). In other words, the Party of Meanness, Selfishness, Hate, Fear and Ignorance.

Trump, who just recently asserted that he would be "much better for the gays" than Hillary Clinton, is perfectly happy to run on a platform dripping with the full panoply  of homophobic and other right-wing social doctrines pressed by the most extreme members of the Republican Party, led by Tony Perkins, who is president of the Family Research Council (FRC), which justifiably has been labeled a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. (No matter that Trump has been on  both sides of just about every issue pressed by the FRC. 

And Perkins, in turn, is perfectly happy to support as his Party’s standard-bearer a thrice-married skirt-chasing narcissistic, mean-spirited billionaire who has never held a position of public trust, for whom the truth is irrelevant (including bogus and clearly racist allegations attacking President Obama’s eligibility for the Presidency), who routinely cheats those with whom he does business, has lived a life that makes a mockery of Republican-vaunted “family values,” and has no sense at all of the reasons for the greatness of the American Experiment.  Check out the video testimony at https://www.facebook.com/historiansondonaldtrump/

These elements of the Modern (post-1964) Republican Party -- Meanness, Selfishness, Hate, Fear, and Ignorance -- all have been present ever since the Party decided to use opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as the basis for its anti-black Southern Strategy in the 1968 election.  Still, until now, those elements have always coexisted with at least some semblance decency and good faith.  Indeed, my first vote for the Senate was for Republican Charles "Mac" Mathias in Maryland in 1968.  But Republican politicians like Senator Mathias increasingly have vanished from the scene.   Speaker Paul Ryan, trying to channel the late Congressman Jack Kemp, at times has been an example of the effort to at least appear to be, in President Bush I’s words, a “kinder and gentler” conservative presence, however wrongheaded his Ayn Rand economic policies are.  And the Bush Family at least tried to project a modicum of decency even when pushing disastrous policies like the post 9/11 Iraq War; President Bush II made a strong effort to stem Islamophobia after 9/11. 

But there is no shred of decency apparent in Donald Trump.  And that personality combined with platform positions that are even more mean-spirited than those of recent Republican platform takes the Party into the nether reaches of politics.  The Bushes at least have the decency to opt-out of the Party this year.  Ryan, McConnell, et al. someday will have to answer for their political cowardice.

Many Trump voters will vote for him more out of Fear and Ignorance than out of Meanness, Selfishness, and Hate.  But the byproduct of Fear and Ignorance is too often Meanness, Selfishness, and Hate.  Even if Trump is beaten soundly in November, we still will have to deal with the legacy of the division sown by his campaign.

The Hypocrisy of the Chamber of Commerce

U.S. Chamber of Commerce Headquarters, across Lafayette Park from the White House

Recently, Thomas Donohue, President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post, headlined Trump and Clinton are both wrong about trade. He asserts that Donald Trump's and Hillary Clinton's "anti-trade rhetoric [appealing] to popular anger and a nationalist mood" ignores the fact that trade is "good for the country. It is vital for our economy."

True.

Donohue goes on to say that it "is also true that some workers have been displaced by trade, and they should be given the help they need to compete and succeed in the 21st-century economy."

Also true.

But where has the U.S. Chamber of Commerce been for the last quarter century since the enactment of NAFTA? It has opposed Democratic measures to help the workers who the Chamber now recognizes need help. Since the Democrats have controlled both the Congress and the White House for only four years since the end of the Carter Administration in January 1981 -- due, in significant part to the Chamber's opposition to all things Democratic -- Donohue's statement now is disingenuous. The Chamber should have thought of this years ago. Actually, it sort of did by putting these banners on its headquarters:

But banners are not policies, and the Chamber's policies have been consistently anti-worker. So I am skeptical that the Chamber now really means to help those workers who are hurt during the inevitable transitions to a globalized, technologically advanced economy. The Chamber follows the Ayn Rand philosopy of Speaker Paul Ryan. And it has not shown it is willing to change.

The festering, unaddressed needs of those left behind by technological change and globalization -- people who were going to be in bad economic shape whether or not we had trade deals -- are now coming home to roost. The failure of the American Establishment to deal with those needs has created a situation in which demagogic appeals (principally from the incipient Republican nominee for President) could destroy needed trade arrangements without actually helping the condition of the workers who, often justifiably, feel that they have been abandoned by the economic elites of our country.

The hypocrisy of the Chamber of Commerce and other economic plutocrats is now clear.

It is the job of Hillary Clinton (and Elizabeth Warren, as her Veep, I hope) to call out the hypocrisy and make real help for American workers who have been left behind a centerpiece of the campaign. The Democratic Party needs to zero in on this issue.