By Fraser Hammond

Note: The following article was written in the days immediately prior to last week’s election but deals with longer term issues of culture and demographic shifts. A short addendum was added just before publication addressing the outcome.

After opening introductions by the host Dr. Oliver Charbonneau of Glasgow and the three panelists (Dr. Clodagh Harrington of De Montfort University, Dr. Patrick Andelic of Northumbria University and Dr. Mark McLay of UofG), Dr. Charbonneau asked the others for their opinions on possible historical precedents to the impending US Presidential Election, referencing the 1968 election and comparisons between Trump’s ‘American Carnage’ inauguration speech and the social upheaval of the ‘60s. Against the context of the renewed Black Lives Matter protests following the death of George Floyd, civil unrest and violence across America’s cities, the comparison seems apt. All three panelists however, seemed to view the comparison to the 1968 election as erroneous. 

Dr. McLay pointed out that every election, as soon as it becomes contentious, gets compared to 1968 as it is viewed as ‘the pinnacle of all drama’ and that ‘technically I don’t see the historical comparison to this election.’ Instead he suggested that if the polls are correct and the Democratic Party wins in a landslide, then people will point to 1980 when Ronald Raegan defeated incumbent Jimmy Carter with a remarkable Electoral College vote of 489-49 and carrying all but six states. He qualified that by pointing out that ‘Joe Biden is no Ronald Raegan’, in that he is not an ideological candidate in the sense that he is a centrist Democrat so doesn’t represent that seismic ideological shift to the Right that occurred in 1980.

Dr. Harrington, agreed with the 1980 comparison in the sense that Trump, on paper, can be seen as ‘running as an outsider’ as Raegan did, to shake up the status quo or to ‘drain the swamp’ in his own words. Dr. Andelic concurred with 1980 being an interesting comparison but ideological shifts in the electorate at large are not meaningfully recognisable until years, even decades after.  Ultimately though, all three agreed that there are no true comparisons in that there has never been a candidate quite like Trump. It seems, to this literature student at least, that the closest representations to Trump have come from fiction. See President Lindbergh in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004) or even Charles Foster Kane in Orson Welles’s landmark film, Citizen Kane (1941). I would suggest that the blurring of fact and fiction is not irrelevant in discussions of President Donald Trump’s first term and re-election campaign. 

I’d like to return to the comparison to 1968 though, not because there are any direct comparisons between the two elections as all three candidates agreed, but to suggest that the ubiquity of constant political and cultural comparisons to ‘the ‘60s’ are representative of the fact that in a larger sense, the cultural divides that emerged in that decade, are still very much relevant. The divide between ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ in America, and western society in general, still contends with  issues of racial inequality, sexual freedom, recreational drug use, and the right of women to have free access to abortion. The Neoconservative reaction in the ‘80s and ‘90s were ideologically framed as rolling back the advancements made in all these areas. Essentially, the political and cultural arguments in America can be crudely divided into those who viewed the ‘60s as a decade of liberation and progress, and those who viewed them as the disintegration and degradation of the moral fabric of society.

Dr. Harrington’s story about the 2008 election is illustrative of the continuing, central importance that the ‘60s still holds in America. She relayed the story told to her by Time Magazine London Bureau chief, Catherine Mayer, who described her ‘Self hating American father’ leaving his home in the ‘60s as a protest at U.S. foreign policy, specifically the war in Vietnam, and moving to London. Dr. Harrington continued: ‘On election night in 2008, when it became clear that Obama’s victory was secure, her dad, bearing in mind he was eighty years old at the time, climbed onto the roof of his London house and unfurled an American flag he’d kept for decades.’ The pride that her father felt at the election of the fist African-American President seems to have represented a kind of redemption of American morality that had been so stained, in his eyes, by the Vietnam War.

This continuing Culture War as it has been referred to constantly in America since the early ‘90s ^[1] remains the political and cultural dividing line between two sides, liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican, where ideology and ‘world view’^[2] on the economic validity of a market economy is actually very consistent. The continuing importance of Roe vs Wade, a Supreme Court case that originated in the ‘60s, to both sides, is further evidence of the ‘60s being at the root of political considerations today, especially in the context of Trump being able to confirm three ideologically conservative Supreme Court Justices in his first term. The court is now 6-3 in favour of conservative Justices and this may have massive implications for the future of women’s right to choose if Roe vs Wade is overturned. 

This move to the Right in the judiciary is set against the background of the steady move to the Left of the majority of Americans^[3]. Returning to the Round Table discussion, Dr. McLay pointed out that the Republican Party has won the popular vote only once since 1988. If Trump loses, as the polls suggest he will, that would mean the Republicans will have only won the popular vote once in eight elections. Unable to expand and diversify themselves, Dr. McLay characterised the Republicans as the party of ‘Older, whiter men.’ The only strategy that seems to have been employed to push back against this is gerrymandering and voter suppression. The largest county in Texas, Harris County, with a population of over 4 million, had ONE single drop off point for early voting and footage of long lines of, mainly Black voters in the South, have become common sight on television news channels here in the UK and in the U.S. All of which suggests to me that this situation is only moving one way and to the inevitable constitutional crises of Republican government being almost by definition, minority rule. 

Dr. McLay suggested that ‘conservatism has hit the wall in the same way that liberalism hit the wall at the end of the 1970s’. He pointed out that the generational divide reinforces this shift and that Millennials and Gen. Z now make up a larger plurality of possible voters than The Silent Generation (born roughly between 1928 and 1945) and Baby Boomers (1945-1964) combined. The problem being that the cohort of these older generations vote in significantly larger numbers than the younger.

Bill Clinton was the first Baby Boomer president and child of the ‘60s who definitely brought a  level of ‘60s cultural kudos to his Presidency, from playing saxophone on-stage with Fleetwood Mac, to smoking grass (but not inhaling!) at Oxford when he was a Rhodes Scholar there in the ‘60s. He also seems to have taken the idea of ‘Free Love’ espoused by that generation to heart too: as Crosby. Stills & Nash famously sang, ‘Love the One You’re With’. It is the Neoconservative revolution, symbolised by Newt Gingrich and the Republican’s taking back control of Congress in 1994, that has since framed this debate around whether the ‘60s were a period of liberation or a period where American values suffered a series of moral and ethical blows that need to be fought against. Sociologist Ben Agger describes the conservative push back against the politics of the ‘60s in his book The Sixties at 40:

The Right blames the sixties for all that is wrong and uses this blaming to push back the significant gains of civil rights and equal opportunity achieved in that decade.^[4]

The ‘60s activist and co-author of the Port Huron Statement Todd Gitlin remarked in the ‘90s that ‘while the Right has been busy taking the White House, the Left has been marching on the English Dept.’^[5] It is clear to Gitlin at least, that the frame of the ideological debate in America has been pulled continuously to the Right since the ‘60s and that the schism between American culture and political life has resulted in a rule of conservative minority.

This current Presidential campaign has seemed very light on policy and heavy on personality and Culture War. The hold that the ‘60s has on the cultural and political life of American’s remains powerful and until the younger generations use their vote to the same extent as those older generations, it will remain the centre of ideological discourse. To quote one of the central protagonists of that era, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’ His fellow Civil Rights leader, Representative John Lewis, who sadly died this year in July, famously said that, ‘democracy is not a state, it is an act and each generation must do its part… … use your power to make a difference in our society, make some “good trouble.”’^[6]

P.S.

Biden seems to have won the election though not by the landslide that the polls suggested. The Senate will probably remain in Republican hands and that may stymy the progressive hopes of any future Biden administration. However, the percentage of young voters rejecting Trump and voting for Biden was considerable^[7] and the thousands of young people filmed dancing in the streets of American cities in the last few days suggests that Dr. King and John Lewis are correct. It’s up to young people to lean into that arc and continue to make some ‘good trouble’.

Biographical Note

Fraser Hammond is a final year, part-time PhD student in the Andrew Hook School of American Studies at Glasgow and in the (slow) process of writing up his thesis. His interests include ‘60s Counterculture, Postmodernism, The history of the American Left, Bob Dylan, ‘90s cinema, geeking out about guitars and walking his Basset Hound, Ladybird. Fraser can be found on Twitter @FraserHammond.

Footnotes

^[1] For interesting further reading on generational divide and Culture Wars see James Davidson Hunter’s Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, Paul Taylor’s The Next America and Todd Gitlin’s The Twilight of Common Dreams.

^[2] Leo Marx, in a 1986 essay makes the distinction between ‘ideology’ and ‘world view’ where both socialists and capitalists differ in ideology, but share the ‘world view’ that society should be ordered around a market economy of production. Obviously, who owns those means of production is where the ideologies diverge.

^[3] See the following for public opinion tracking left for topics such as Universal Healthcare, Gun Control and Drug Legalisation. https://www.kff.org/slideshow/public-opinion-on-single-payer-national-health-plans-and-expanding-access-to-medicare-coverage/

https://news.gallup.com/poll/1645/guns.aspx

https://www.drugpolicy.org/press-release/2014/04/new-pew-poll-confirms-americans-ready-end-war-drugs

^[4] Ben Agger, The Sixties at 40 Leaders and Activists Remember and Look Forward, London: Paradigm Publishers, 2009 p 2

^[5] Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked By Culture Wars, New York, Metropolitan Books, 1995, p 1

^[6] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/18/john-lewis-obituary

^[7] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/05/us-election-demographics-race-gender-age-biden-trump

Bibliography.

Ben Agger. The Sixties at 40: Leaders and Activists Remember & Look Forward, London, Paradigm Publishers, 2009.

Bryant, Miranda. 5th November 2020, ‘US voter demographics: election 2020 ended up looking a lot like 2016’ https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/05/us-election-demographics-race-gender-age-biden-trump[Accessed 9th November 2020]

Carson, Michael. 18th July 2020, ‘John Lewis Obituary’ https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/18/john-lewis-obituary [Accessed 9th November 2020]

Davison Hunter, James. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, New York, Basic Books Publishing, 1991.

Gitlin, Todd. The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars, New York, Metropolitan Books, 1995.

Lyons, Paul. New Left, New Right and the Legacy of the Sixties, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1996.

Marx, Leo. ‘Pastoralism in America’, Ideology and Classic American Literature, (Ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen) Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Taylor, Paul. The Next America, New York, Public Affairs, 1991.

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