A striking difference between that two periods (Nixon v. Trump) is the culture wars. While the Democrats had a different set of spending and foreign policy priorities under Nixon, the cultural differences between mainstream Democrats and mainstream Republicans were trivial compared to the situation today. One reason Trump’s supporters are loyal to him is that they believe Democrats would destroy what little remains of traditional American values or her institutions.
I'm not sure if I can agree with that. As I recall, George McGovern was portrayed as the candidate of "acid, amnesty, and abortion". While mainstream Democrats probably weren't as keen on LSD as the slogan suggests, there was probably a significant divide between the parties over Roe v. Wade, decided in early 1973.
Hippies were a shock, but nothing like transgenders beating up women in sports, invading women's locker rooms and bathrooms, getting states to pass laws making it illegal for teachers to truthfully answer questions from parents about their brainwashing, and sending men to women's prisons for knowing the magic words "I identify as a woman" while still having beards and dangly bits.
Inflation was bad, Nixon's price controls were bad, but it didn't come with climate alarmists trying to ban fossil fuels and doubling or tripling electricity prices for no good reason.
Democrats have painted themselves into a corner. Their only saving grace is that Republicans have painted themselves into a corner too.
I think you may be underestimating (or misremembering) the degree to which people were bothered by the hippie business. As with the transgender thing today, the concern was "How will this affect our children?" Today, parents might worry that a woke school counselor will persuade their kid that it needs to undergo sex-change surgery; back then, the fear was that your kids would run off to San Francisco, get knocked up by long-haired guitarists, and proceed from an experimental puff of marijuana to OD'ing on heroin or jumping out a fourth-floor window while on LSD.
There's a huge difference between hippies as bad role models and transgender mutilation, boys in girls' locker rooms and bathrooms, and men beating up women for gold medals.
There's a huge difference in getting pre-school kids to stuff dollar bills down a drag queen's shorts and high school kids smoking a joint.
Hippies might have been more prevalent than kids thinking they need to be mutilated, but the potential consequences are a world apart. When a school board tries to cover up a trangender student raping someone's daughter, or girls get expelled for objecting to a boy in their locker room by school board mandate, that hits home far more than some student caught with a joint who hasn't hurt anybody.
How did a SCOTUS ruling a year in the future effect the '72 election? Do tell. But remember to handicap for 20/20 hindsight, an all-too common unforced error. BTW This summary is interesting and useful as a starting point for a discussion, but it's also a fairly thin gloss. For example, the '68 election result was razor thin, and given the disarray on the Dem side that peaked at the Chicago convention, Nixon's win was far from a mandate.
Most anti-abortion Catholics were Dem, and had been even before the first Catholic President, JFK. Both parties had plenty of pro- and anti- abortion activists.
Pro- and anti- War in Vietnam was the Huge culture issue by ‘68. Black Power continued to be a festering embarrassment to those wanting meritocracy, when the poor obviously were starting with big disadvantages. Unfairly, which was also called unjust (conflating non-control life unfairness with human decided injustice).
How many domestic bombings were there in the ‘67 — ‘76 years in the US? The culture wars were more intense but less polarized, and more easily smaller news on the Big 3 (CBS, NBC, ABC, 2, 4, 7 in LA).
The smallness of the news: people watched the evening news - a half hour of national, a half hour of local - and I don’t think people thought about the news after that until the morning paper arrived.
I don’t think it preoccupied.
If anything, probably the mirror complaint back then would’ve been that people too easily turned the channel and forgot the news they just heard. Hence why Norman Lear needed to make kinda-hectoring sitcoms, I guess.
I was in high school in the 80s, and a few of the boys started talking about politics. They didn’t really even talk about issues so much. Maybe a little Milton Friedman-esque. It was more that they were posturing as Young Conservatives.
This was not because they were obsessed with the news, if they watched it. Nor was it Reagan’s doing.
Rather, a show called “Family Ties” was then popular, and they were trying to be Alex P. Keatons, such was MJF’s charisma. I mentioned this one time to my husband of similar age and he had never seen “Family Ties”. I think his cool teen model was on a show named “Growing Pains”, but I never saw that.
It should be observed that Alex P. Keaton often got schooled about his beliefs, over the course of an episode. So this was more a style than substance. Nonetheless.
The Silent Majority was called that for identical reasons to MAGA disagreeing with elite leftist culture (let alone radical oppressor-oppressed ideology) today.
The difference is that as a freedom-loving person in the mold of the classical liberals who founded our country, I’d have been on the side of the left back then, but I bitterly oppose today’s illiberal cultural-Marxist left, on both social and economic issues.
It took a while for that to kick in, and began with much pain, on top of his malaise speech, the Iran fiasco, even his battle with a rabbit while canoeing. In short, he had a lousy public relations record.
I think I'm somewhat younger than Dr. Kling: old enough to remember Watergate, but too young at the time to pay much attention to it.
Dr. Kling asks why the forces brought to bear against Nixon in the 1970s don't work against Donald Trump 50 years later. The first thing that comes to my mind is Trump's devoted fan base, and his willingness to utilize that fan base in Republican primaries against anyone who crosses him in the smallest way. Half a century ago, did Nixon have a comparable cult of personality; and did he involve himself in Republican primaries to the extent that Trump does today?
I was in Grad school at UC Berkeley in the 60's. (Ph D High Energy experiment, Bevatron, looking for last particle in Gell-Mann's 8 fold way) when Nixon lost badly to Brown. Such a humiliating loss. I remember "You won't have Nixon to push around any more". No way he could ever recover. How wrong we were. Still amazing when I think back.
Btw, Good news for the students that you'll be teaching. Hope they realize how lucky they'll be.
Like Nixon, Trump confounds the commonly understood left/right divergence on domestic policy. Not as much as Nixon - whose achievements were further left than either Clinton or Obama and on par with LBJ - but Trump's populism is heavily spiced with progressive policies
"But so far the attempts to use the Watergate playbook against Mr. Trump have failed."
I can think of two more reasons. Nixon had portrayed himself as the candidate of the "silent majority", the respectable, law-abiding, hard working, moral Americans. When he was seen to be doing illegal things, cursing like a sailor, it felt like a betrayal, a "you were supposed to be like this, but you are actually like that". At least since "grab' em by the pussy", no one has thought of Trump as a goody-goody.
Also, the media--and Democratic--reaction to Clinton and Monica Lewinsky et al., was "no big deal, what matters is how good a job he's doing as president." If that was good enough for Clinton, lots of people think that's good enough for Trump.
It’s important to remember that ex-Democrat, ex-Governor, but still very racist George Wallace ran in ‘68, the last non-Dem & non-Rep to win a state (3 for Wallace) in ‘68, right after RFK & MLK jr were assassinated. Wallace took votes from LBJ’s Dem VP Humphrey, to make Nixon win. much like H Ross Perot took votes from R) Bush 41, to make Bush lose. Many still think the Green Party in 2000 took enough votes from VP Gore so that he lost.
The common enemy, commie USSR, allowed lots of folks to stay loosely united in the superiority of America, capitalist & fairly meritocratic, where most hard working guys could find jobs that could support a mortgage on a house they bought.
The FBI, thru illegal leaking of Nixon’s private, and often shameful, sometimes illegal, behavior, is similar to Obama’s weaponization of the Intel orgs to illegally spy on Trump. Who seems to be much cleaner than Nixon, or Obama, or Bill Clinton. Dem Clinton was impeached for perjury, but Dems supported a Dem who lied, where ‘73 Republicans were ashamed of Nixon. The total lack of shame, by Dems for their otherwise popular, adulterous Pres, has hugely reduced the power of shame.
The Dems, thru culture & media & academia, have long been demonizing every Republican for President: Nixon, ‘64 Goldwater, ‘76 Ford, Reagan, Bush41 & Bush43, McCain (&Palin, far better than Harris), even super nice Romney, & Trump. Since FDR+Truman, only in Reagan+Bush has the same party kept the White House for more than 8 consecutive years.
Despite China’s buildup & minor , but under-reported naval aggressions, the USA isn’t united in fear of China, nor of their cheap products, tho somewhat of the job transfer.
Never has there been fewer conservatives as professors in academia. All the richest colleges lie about being non-partisan, so as to get huge tax benefits. (Reps should require a 30% quota of Rep professors).
Unless more housing is built, so more workers have a good chance at home ownership, support for capitalism, and the current system,, will continue to decrease. And the Party in power will lose power. Tho maybe not in all cities, just some.
Most people did indeed assume that George Wallace was "still very racist". Humphrey had been vocally pro-Civil Rights since 1948. Many people who voted for Wallace because of that would never have voted for Humphrey. Wallace did not take those votes away from him. The great question is how many of those Never Humphrey voters would have gone to Nixon if Wallace hadn't run. If enough of them would have gone to Nixon instead, then Wallace's candidacy hurt Nixon more.
Given how many racist Southern Dems, like KKK Robert Byrd, who did denounce racism later, such Dems wouldn’t have voted for any Republican in 68. Even if this belief would have proven true had Wallace not run, it’s mostly opinion with factoids.
If more local Dems were elected, who had been explicit racist before ‘68, then I’d say that was evidence of continued racism. I’m pretty sure there were more Wallace plus Dems down ballot, than all other types of split ballots. Tho this might be evidence against HHH, in Nixon’s huge reelection wipeout, the split ballots were mostly R) Nixon + Dems rather than anything else. I don’t believe those LBJ Dem racists were ready for any Rep, their political identity was FDR good, Reps bad for the workers. My answer is less than 10%, in ‘68. Tho maybe 90% of those Wallace voters chose Nixon in ‘72.
I’m pretty sure there were more mixed ballots in the past, with individuals more often dominating party.
"Given how many racist Southern Dems, like KKK Robert Byrd, who did denounce racism later, such Dems wouldn’t have voted for any Republican in 68."
I'm not at all sure about that.
If Wallace hadn't run, they had four choices:
1) Vote the straight Democratic ticket, as most of them had traditionally done. But I find it hard to believe they would have voted for Humphrey.
2) Vote for no one for president, and for all the down-ballot Democrats.
3) Don't vote at all.
4) Vote for down-ballot Democrats, and hold their nose and vote for Nixon for president, as way preferable to the national Democrat. As you say, this was what many did when McGovern was the Democratic presidential nominee four years later.
I'm not sure of any of the details - ie when Wallace jumped in - but any analysis of '68 has to factor in the chaos of the moment. There has never been anything like it since 1860. Here's an interesting what-if: LBJ's FBI had Nixon dead-to-rights on his underlings meddling in the Paris peace talks. (This is well documented; audio of their phone conversation, with LBJ calling him out and telling him to back off, is in the Ken Burns Vietnam doc.) Why didn't LBJ out Nixon? There were still 2+ weeks left in the campaign, and HHR was coming on fast after a slow start. The revelation would likely have swung the election. But LBJ kept mum. Why?
Fascinating parallels. I go back and forth if getting rid of the filibuster would be good because it's already hard to get legislation passed. Yet, it acts as a check on likely bad legislation too. Thoughts?
I would require ALL legislation to pass by 2/3 vote, to force consensus, and one effect of that would be fewer grandiose bills which don't have universal support. I would also allow any individual chamber to repeal laws by 1/2 vote, but that's not as important.
One of the political problems in this country, and probably most representative democracies, is that it doesn't take a huge shift in voter preferences to change legislative whims 180°. The House only needs to flip from 50.5% to 49.5% Republican to block Trump. It should take more than such a small shift to effect such drastic changes.
What I find illogical is the requirement for 60% supermajority can be waived off by a 51% majority. This is an unstable situation and its persistence is a wonder.
This filibuster thing with its unstable feature seems uniquely American.
I'm in favor of a supermajority requirement in both houses; though instead of allowing one chamber to repeal a law by simple majority, I think I'd support automatic sunset provisions, such that every law has to be renewed after a certain span of years.
But I recognize that this wouldn't be an unalloyed benefit to the nation. Among other things, must-pass bills tend to become Christmas trees. The more votes it takes to get a measure through Congress, the more goodies that measure will need to include for states and Congressional districts.
I also support sunsetting all laws after 1.5 years. This allows time to collect and analyze a full seasonal set of data to test whether the law fulfilled expectations and had no unexpected (NOT unintended!) consequences, because if it did, then those who vote to renew are lying; they are voting for a bill which they know does not work.
The Christmas tree effect is something I'd never thought of. You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. But I believe 2/3 would still force gradual incremental steps, because if the Christmas tree effect were that powerful, it would apply now more than it does. Take Obamacare. Memory says it passed with zero Republican votes. If the Democrats couldn't add enough baubles to attract any Republican votes, they wouldn't have been able to do so with a 2/3 vote either. The only way anything would have gotten any Republican votes would have been to water it down so much that when it showed none of its expected consequences and plenty of unexpected consequences, it could not have been renewed.
I don't know about less impactful bills. And unanimous stuff like the Patriot Act would have passed anyway.
Yes, and it's not just the parties, it's Congress (because yapping about problems is easier than taking responsibility for fixing them) and the President (because executive orders don't require nearly as much planning and compromise as negotiations).
One thing that a supermajority requirement like the filibuster does is confer some stability on the system. A simple-majority standard means that a shift of just a few seats in both houses, combined with a change in the party holding the Oval Office, could lead to radical changes; and then a shift of the majorities to the other party would lead to their repeal, and an equally radical leap in the other direction.
Worse, at least from the libertarian perspective, is that the elimination of the filibuster would lead to the creation of lots of new entitlements and income-transfer programs when progressives held the majority; and, once created, an entitlement program is effectively immortal—witness the failure of the Republicans to undo the Affordable Care Act. The filibuster thus acts as a check on the expansion of government.
Not at all. The House only has simply majority and the world has not ended. Likewise most of the world is simple majority in Parliaments without even an executive to check it, they so just fine.
You are missing the point, the chambers are checks on each other, not the fillabuster which is mentioned nowhere in the Constitution. It's simply unnecessary though I wouldn't be adverse to a Constitutional amendment requiring a super majority in both chambers given our affective two party system.
I misunderstood. I thought your first sentence was saying that a simple majority in both houses would be fine because a simple majority in one house has been fine, or at least "the world has not ended".
I'm probably still confused. The second sentence one seems to say that a one chamber legislature would be fine. It's not necessary to have two chambers where "the chambers are checks on each other". "... most of the world is simple majority in Parliaments without even an executive to check it, they [d]o just fine."
That's a strong argument and one I tend to agree with. Is it a fair counter that if we want to do something like build more housing than getting rid of the filibuster could make it easier to reform a bad system? Interesting tradeoffs though
The bad system survives only because it did not need consensus of 2/3 Congress to implement such sweeping changes. If 2/3 had been required, they most likely would have had to break down their big changes into little steps, one session at a time, which would be a lot easier to undo when the first step failed.
I asked Grok once how much of the New Deal legislation would have passed if it needed 2/3 approval. I forget how much now, half maybe, but worse, a lot of it was approved on voice vote where no one knows what the real approval vote was. That's something else that has to go.
A striking difference between that two periods (Nixon v. Trump) is the culture wars. While the Democrats had a different set of spending and foreign policy priorities under Nixon, the cultural differences between mainstream Democrats and mainstream Republicans were trivial compared to the situation today. One reason Trump’s supporters are loyal to him is that they believe Democrats would destroy what little remains of traditional American values or her institutions.
I'm not sure if I can agree with that. As I recall, George McGovern was portrayed as the candidate of "acid, amnesty, and abortion". While mainstream Democrats probably weren't as keen on LSD as the slogan suggests, there was probably a significant divide between the parties over Roe v. Wade, decided in early 1973.
Hippies were a shock, but nothing like transgenders beating up women in sports, invading women's locker rooms and bathrooms, getting states to pass laws making it illegal for teachers to truthfully answer questions from parents about their brainwashing, and sending men to women's prisons for knowing the magic words "I identify as a woman" while still having beards and dangly bits.
Inflation was bad, Nixon's price controls were bad, but it didn't come with climate alarmists trying to ban fossil fuels and doubling or tripling electricity prices for no good reason.
Democrats have painted themselves into a corner. Their only saving grace is that Republicans have painted themselves into a corner too.
I think you may be underestimating (or misremembering) the degree to which people were bothered by the hippie business. As with the transgender thing today, the concern was "How will this affect our children?" Today, parents might worry that a woke school counselor will persuade their kid that it needs to undergo sex-change surgery; back then, the fear was that your kids would run off to San Francisco, get knocked up by long-haired guitarists, and proceed from an experimental puff of marijuana to OD'ing on heroin or jumping out a fourth-floor window while on LSD.
There's a huge difference between hippies as bad role models and transgender mutilation, boys in girls' locker rooms and bathrooms, and men beating up women for gold medals.
There's a huge difference in getting pre-school kids to stuff dollar bills down a drag queen's shorts and high school kids smoking a joint.
Hippies might have been more prevalent than kids thinking they need to be mutilated, but the potential consequences are a world apart. When a school board tries to cover up a trangender student raping someone's daughter, or girls get expelled for objecting to a boy in their locker room by school board mandate, that hits home far more than some student caught with a joint who hasn't hurt anybody.
Both of you are right.
Can't be. We're not arguing about whether the other's shock was real, but about which one was more of a shock.
How did a SCOTUS ruling a year in the future effect the '72 election? Do tell. But remember to handicap for 20/20 hindsight, an all-too common unforced error. BTW This summary is interesting and useful as a starting point for a discussion, but it's also a fairly thin gloss. For example, the '68 election result was razor thin, and given the disarray on the Dem side that peaked at the Chicago convention, Nixon's win was far from a mandate.
Most anti-abortion Catholics were Dem, and had been even before the first Catholic President, JFK. Both parties had plenty of pro- and anti- abortion activists.
Pro- and anti- War in Vietnam was the Huge culture issue by ‘68. Black Power continued to be a festering embarrassment to those wanting meritocracy, when the poor obviously were starting with big disadvantages. Unfairly, which was also called unjust (conflating non-control life unfairness with human decided injustice).
How many domestic bombings were there in the ‘67 — ‘76 years in the US? The culture wars were more intense but less polarized, and more easily smaller news on the Big 3 (CBS, NBC, ABC, 2, 4, 7 in LA).
The smallness of the news: people watched the evening news - a half hour of national, a half hour of local - and I don’t think people thought about the news after that until the morning paper arrived.
I don’t think it preoccupied.
If anything, probably the mirror complaint back then would’ve been that people too easily turned the channel and forgot the news they just heard. Hence why Norman Lear needed to make kinda-hectoring sitcoms, I guess.
I was in high school in the 80s, and a few of the boys started talking about politics. They didn’t really even talk about issues so much. Maybe a little Milton Friedman-esque. It was more that they were posturing as Young Conservatives.
This was not because they were obsessed with the news, if they watched it. Nor was it Reagan’s doing.
Rather, a show called “Family Ties” was then popular, and they were trying to be Alex P. Keatons, such was MJF’s charisma. I mentioned this one time to my husband of similar age and he had never seen “Family Ties”. I think his cool teen model was on a show named “Growing Pains”, but I never saw that.
It should be observed that Alex P. Keaton often got schooled about his beliefs, over the course of an episode. So this was more a style than substance. Nonetheless.
I also disagree re: the culture war.
The Silent Majority was called that for identical reasons to MAGA disagreeing with elite leftist culture (let alone radical oppressor-oppressed ideology) today.
The difference is that as a freedom-loving person in the mold of the classical liberals who founded our country, I’d have been on the side of the left back then, but I bitterly oppose today’s illiberal cultural-Marxist left, on both social and economic issues.
Do you think there were culture wars of a different sort back then though?
> Jimmy Carter, who defeated Ford, saw inflation soar even higher, so that he was trounced in 1980 by Ronald Reagan.
I was taught that Carter appointed Volker to the Fed, he raised rates hard, and the resulting recession helped elect Reagan
You were taught at least partly wrong. Or at least you are now remembering it wrong.
Volker did NOT “raise rates hard” when Carter was President.
He did that in the first 18 months of Reagan’s presidency
It took a while for that to kick in, and began with much pain, on top of his malaise speech, the Iran fiasco, even his battle with a rabbit while canoeing. In short, he had a lousy public relations record.
I think I'm somewhat younger than Dr. Kling: old enough to remember Watergate, but too young at the time to pay much attention to it.
Dr. Kling asks why the forces brought to bear against Nixon in the 1970s don't work against Donald Trump 50 years later. The first thing that comes to my mind is Trump's devoted fan base, and his willingness to utilize that fan base in Republican primaries against anyone who crosses him in the smallest way. Half a century ago, did Nixon have a comparable cult of personality; and did he involve himself in Republican primaries to the extent that Trump does today?
Nixon’s IQ and good will exceeded Trump’s by substantial margins.
Of course, the road to hell….
Nixon also brought us the EPA and price controls.
Doesn’t contradict either of my comments.
I was in Grad school at UC Berkeley in the 60's. (Ph D High Energy experiment, Bevatron, looking for last particle in Gell-Mann's 8 fold way) when Nixon lost badly to Brown. Such a humiliating loss. I remember "You won't have Nixon to push around any more". No way he could ever recover. How wrong we were. Still amazing when I think back.
Btw, Good news for the students that you'll be teaching. Hope they realize how lucky they'll be.
Have fun.
Like Nixon, Trump confounds the commonly understood left/right divergence on domestic policy. Not as much as Nixon - whose achievements were further left than either Clinton or Obama and on par with LBJ - but Trump's populism is heavily spiced with progressive policies
“Trump's populism is heavily spiced with progressive policies”
Really?
Please name said heavy spice.
I’ll grant you:
- spends almost like a Democrat
- demagogues touching entitlements
- non-free trade tariff policy
What other progressive policies can you cite?
"But so far the attempts to use the Watergate playbook against Mr. Trump have failed."
I can think of two more reasons. Nixon had portrayed himself as the candidate of the "silent majority", the respectable, law-abiding, hard working, moral Americans. When he was seen to be doing illegal things, cursing like a sailor, it felt like a betrayal, a "you were supposed to be like this, but you are actually like that". At least since "grab' em by the pussy", no one has thought of Trump as a goody-goody.
Also, the media--and Democratic--reaction to Clinton and Monica Lewinsky et al., was "no big deal, what matters is how good a job he's doing as president." If that was good enough for Clinton, lots of people think that's good enough for Trump.
It’s important to remember that ex-Democrat, ex-Governor, but still very racist George Wallace ran in ‘68, the last non-Dem & non-Rep to win a state (3 for Wallace) in ‘68, right after RFK & MLK jr were assassinated. Wallace took votes from LBJ’s Dem VP Humphrey, to make Nixon win. much like H Ross Perot took votes from R) Bush 41, to make Bush lose. Many still think the Green Party in 2000 took enough votes from VP Gore so that he lost.
The common enemy, commie USSR, allowed lots of folks to stay loosely united in the superiority of America, capitalist & fairly meritocratic, where most hard working guys could find jobs that could support a mortgage on a house they bought.
The FBI, thru illegal leaking of Nixon’s private, and often shameful, sometimes illegal, behavior, is similar to Obama’s weaponization of the Intel orgs to illegally spy on Trump. Who seems to be much cleaner than Nixon, or Obama, or Bill Clinton. Dem Clinton was impeached for perjury, but Dems supported a Dem who lied, where ‘73 Republicans were ashamed of Nixon. The total lack of shame, by Dems for their otherwise popular, adulterous Pres, has hugely reduced the power of shame.
The Dems, thru culture & media & academia, have long been demonizing every Republican for President: Nixon, ‘64 Goldwater, ‘76 Ford, Reagan, Bush41 & Bush43, McCain (&Palin, far better than Harris), even super nice Romney, & Trump. Since FDR+Truman, only in Reagan+Bush has the same party kept the White House for more than 8 consecutive years.
Despite China’s buildup & minor , but under-reported naval aggressions, the USA isn’t united in fear of China, nor of their cheap products, tho somewhat of the job transfer.
Never has there been fewer conservatives as professors in academia. All the richest colleges lie about being non-partisan, so as to get huge tax benefits. (Reps should require a 30% quota of Rep professors).
Unless more housing is built, so more workers have a good chance at home ownership, support for capitalism, and the current system,, will continue to decrease. And the Party in power will lose power. Tho maybe not in all cities, just some.
Most people did indeed assume that George Wallace was "still very racist". Humphrey had been vocally pro-Civil Rights since 1948. Many people who voted for Wallace because of that would never have voted for Humphrey. Wallace did not take those votes away from him. The great question is how many of those Never Humphrey voters would have gone to Nixon if Wallace hadn't run. If enough of them would have gone to Nixon instead, then Wallace's candidacy hurt Nixon more.
Given how many racist Southern Dems, like KKK Robert Byrd, who did denounce racism later, such Dems wouldn’t have voted for any Republican in 68. Even if this belief would have proven true had Wallace not run, it’s mostly opinion with factoids.
If more local Dems were elected, who had been explicit racist before ‘68, then I’d say that was evidence of continued racism. I’m pretty sure there were more Wallace plus Dems down ballot, than all other types of split ballots. Tho this might be evidence against HHH, in Nixon’s huge reelection wipeout, the split ballots were mostly R) Nixon + Dems rather than anything else. I don’t believe those LBJ Dem racists were ready for any Rep, their political identity was FDR good, Reps bad for the workers. My answer is less than 10%, in ‘68. Tho maybe 90% of those Wallace voters chose Nixon in ‘72.
I’m pretty sure there were more mixed ballots in the past, with individuals more often dominating party.
They weren’t Red vs Blue then, either.
"Given how many racist Southern Dems, like KKK Robert Byrd, who did denounce racism later, such Dems wouldn’t have voted for any Republican in 68."
I'm not at all sure about that.
If Wallace hadn't run, they had four choices:
1) Vote the straight Democratic ticket, as most of them had traditionally done. But I find it hard to believe they would have voted for Humphrey.
2) Vote for no one for president, and for all the down-ballot Democrats.
3) Don't vote at all.
4) Vote for down-ballot Democrats, and hold their nose and vote for Nixon for president, as way preferable to the national Democrat. As you say, this was what many did when McGovern was the Democratic presidential nominee four years later.
Well-described, and I agree with you that some number would have chosen path 4, as was quite clearly the case in 1972.
I'm not sure of any of the details - ie when Wallace jumped in - but any analysis of '68 has to factor in the chaos of the moment. There has never been anything like it since 1860. Here's an interesting what-if: LBJ's FBI had Nixon dead-to-rights on his underlings meddling in the Paris peace talks. (This is well documented; audio of their phone conversation, with LBJ calling him out and telling him to back off, is in the Ken Burns Vietnam doc.) Why didn't LBJ out Nixon? There were still 2+ weeks left in the campaign, and HHR was coming on fast after a slow start. The revelation would likely have swung the election. But LBJ kept mum. Why?
And looking back, who got what right? What did Middle America get right? What did the hippies get right? Together, did they get it right?
“If the parallel with the Nixon era holds, Democrats will win both houses of Congress in 2026. They will then end the filibuster altogether.”
This might be technically true, but the Democrats will not end the filibuster in 2026 even if they take the Senate and the House.
Because Trump (or Vance) will be president. And so it would do them no good.
They would wait until they had control of the White House before they ended the filibuster.
Fascinating parallels. I go back and forth if getting rid of the filibuster would be good because it's already hard to get legislation passed. Yet, it acts as a check on likely bad legislation too. Thoughts?
I would require ALL legislation to pass by 2/3 vote, to force consensus, and one effect of that would be fewer grandiose bills which don't have universal support. I would also allow any individual chamber to repeal laws by 1/2 vote, but that's not as important.
One of the political problems in this country, and probably most representative democracies, is that it doesn't take a huge shift in voter preferences to change legislative whims 180°. The House only needs to flip from 50.5% to 49.5% Republican to block Trump. It should take more than such a small shift to effect such drastic changes.
What I find illogical is the requirement for 60% supermajority can be waived off by a 51% majority. This is an unstable situation and its persistence is a wonder.
This filibuster thing with its unstable feature seems uniquely American.
I'm in favor of a supermajority requirement in both houses; though instead of allowing one chamber to repeal a law by simple majority, I think I'd support automatic sunset provisions, such that every law has to be renewed after a certain span of years.
But I recognize that this wouldn't be an unalloyed benefit to the nation. Among other things, must-pass bills tend to become Christmas trees. The more votes it takes to get a measure through Congress, the more goodies that measure will need to include for states and Congressional districts.
Welll .....
I also support sunsetting all laws after 1.5 years. This allows time to collect and analyze a full seasonal set of data to test whether the law fulfilled expectations and had no unexpected (NOT unintended!) consequences, because if it did, then those who vote to renew are lying; they are voting for a bill which they know does not work.
The Christmas tree effect is something I'd never thought of. You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. But I believe 2/3 would still force gradual incremental steps, because if the Christmas tree effect were that powerful, it would apply now more than it does. Take Obamacare. Memory says it passed with zero Republican votes. If the Democrats couldn't add enough baubles to attract any Republican votes, they wouldn't have been able to do so with a 2/3 vote either. The only way anything would have gotten any Republican votes would have been to water it down so much that when it showed none of its expected consequences and plenty of unexpected consequences, it could not have been renewed.
I don't know about less impactful bills. And unanimous stuff like the Patriot Act would have passed anyway.
Yeah people make a big deal about the fillabuster without realizing that's only in the Senate. The House is a simple majority even now.
That's very interesting. Do you think this would force consensus or just lead to more gridlock?
Neither, it would just lead to more rule via writ, I.e. executive orders. Something both parties actually want.
Yes, and it's not just the parties, it's Congress (because yapping about problems is easier than taking responsibility for fixing them) and the President (because executive orders don't require nearly as much planning and compromise as negotiations).
It would force consensus on more gradual steps which would be easier to roll back because the lock-in was not so drastic.
One thing that a supermajority requirement like the filibuster does is confer some stability on the system. A simple-majority standard means that a shift of just a few seats in both houses, combined with a change in the party holding the Oval Office, could lead to radical changes; and then a shift of the majorities to the other party would lead to their repeal, and an equally radical leap in the other direction.
Worse, at least from the libertarian perspective, is that the elimination of the filibuster would lead to the creation of lots of new entitlements and income-transfer programs when progressives held the majority; and, once created, an entitlement program is effectively immortal—witness the failure of the Republicans to undo the Affordable Care Act. The filibuster thus acts as a check on the expansion of government.
Not at all. The House only has simply majority and the world has not ended. Likewise most of the world is simple majority in Parliaments without even an executive to check it, they so just fine.
Of course, bills have to go through BOTH the House and the Senate.
You are missing the point, the chambers are checks on each other, not the fillabuster which is mentioned nowhere in the Constitution. It's simply unnecessary though I wouldn't be adverse to a Constitutional amendment requiring a super majority in both chambers given our affective two party system.
I misunderstood. I thought your first sentence was saying that a simple majority in both houses would be fine because a simple majority in one house has been fine, or at least "the world has not ended".
I'm probably still confused. The second sentence one seems to say that a one chamber legislature would be fine. It's not necessary to have two chambers where "the chambers are checks on each other". "... most of the world is simple majority in Parliaments without even an executive to check it, they [d]o just fine."
That's a strong argument and one I tend to agree with. Is it a fair counter that if we want to do something like build more housing than getting rid of the filibuster could make it easier to reform a bad system? Interesting tradeoffs though
The bad system survives only because it did not need consensus of 2/3 Congress to implement such sweeping changes. If 2/3 had been required, they most likely would have had to break down their big changes into little steps, one session at a time, which would be a lot easier to undo when the first step failed.
I asked Grok once how much of the New Deal legislation would have passed if it needed 2/3 approval. I forget how much now, half maybe, but worse, a lot of it was approved on voice vote where no one knows what the real approval vote was. That's something else that has to go.