Louis Menand is really good.  His insights are sensible and often counterintuitive or at least counter-the-received-wisdom.

In the January 8, 2018, issue of The New Yorker Menand wrote “Been There: The Presidential Election of 1968”.  He writes:

Americans tend to overread Presidential elections. It’s not that the results aren’t consequential. It matters which party, and which person in which party, is in the White House. The mistake is to interpret the election as an index of public opinion (itself something of a Platonic abstraction).

In close elections, such as those of 1960, 1968, and 1976, the vote is essentially the equivalent of flipping a coin. If the voting had happened a week earlier or a week later or on a rainy day, the outcome might have been reversed. But we interpret the result as though it reflected the national intention, a collective decision by the people to rally behind R., and repudiate D. Even when the winner receives fewer votes than the loser, as in 2000 and 2016, we talk about the national mood and direction almost entirely in terms of the winning candidate, and as though the person more voters preferred had vanished, his or her positions barely worth reporting on.

Millions more Americans voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and in 2012 and for Hillary Clinton in 2016 than voted for Donald Trump, but the Trump voter is now the protagonist of the national narrative. People talk about how Americans want to roll back globalization—even though most Americans who voted appear to want no such thing. The United States is one of the few democracies that does not have a coalition government, and a winner-take-all electoral system breeds a winner-take-all punditry.

Menand is a man of the left, but he does not hesitate to puncture the contempt and self-righteousness of some on the left (including his own parents). He recounts the absurd scene of his father standing with his back to the TV screen when President Johnson addressed the nation.

Johnson was seen by critics on the left as corrupt and dishonest.  They were right about that.  Particularly on the war in Vietnam.

Bobby Kennedy, an ardent cold warrior, was seen, by people who should have known better, in messianic terms as a man of principle, because he opposed the war in Vietnam.  Kennedy was an infighter with a deep mean streak who went into the gutter in 1960 and bought the West Virginia Democratic Presidential primary when that’s what it took to obtain the nomination for his brother, Jack.

When they were in power, Jack and Bobby concerned themselves with tax cuts and the space race.  They supported civil rights in principle, but in practice tended to temporize and seek accommodation when Dr. King encountered “massive resistance” from segregationist Democrats in the South. The Kennedys’ civil rights legislation had made little progress when Jack was shot down in Dallas.

Johnson, by contrast, seized the moment when he came to power and rammed through civil rights legislation with real teeth and followed it up with Great Society legislation that has made a lasting difference for those with few advantages.

It was Johnson who put in place the system of grants and loans that opened the opportunity for higher education to everyone in our society.  It was Johnson who passed single-payer Medicare legislation ensuring that the elderly could see a doctor and Johnson who passed single-payer Medicaid legislation that ensured that those on the bottom rung of society could also see a doctor.

Johnson was very generous to the educated and cultural elites.  He set up the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.  He created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

It was for naught.  Notwithstanding his very real and concrete achievements, Johnson was dismissed and the educated liberals went wild for Eugene McCarthy.  When Bobby Kennedy, who had the inside track for the nomination, was shot down in California, Hubert H. Humphrey, Johnson’s Vice-President and formerly a liberal darling, entered the race and attempted to unite the party.  It did not work and, although Humphrey won the nomination, McCarthy refused to endorse him until very late in the campaign and only then tepidly and grudgingly.  Apparently, McCarthy preferred to see Nixon assume power than endorse a candidate whose renunciation of the Vietnam War was likewise too late and too tepid.

Nor was the cause of party unity advanced by the likes of Mayor Daley shouting at Senator Ribicoff, during a speech in support of adding a peace plank to the platform, “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch, you lousy motherfucker, go home.”  Or the sight of Chicago police smashing their nightsticks against the skulls of young protestors handcuffed and motionless on the pavement.  Or the sight of young people waving North Vietnamese flags at war protests.

Nixon himself could not have better scripted the Democratic Convention to turn the American people toward him and his promise to restore “law and order.”  The end result of the efforts of the antiwar left was the ascension to the Presidency of a man who would continue the war for seven more years while expanding the war to Cambodia and Laos.

I will have more to say on this later when I discuss Lynn Novick and Ken Burns’ series on Vietnam, but there are several central facts that we cannot forget.  First, the peace movement was right.  Both morally and factually.  The Vietnam War was a horrible enterprise in which literally millions of people were slaughtered with little regard for the people that we were allegedly there to defend.  It was unwinnable.  Objectively, it was the peace movement that was on the side of the American soldiers who were being sent there to die so that powerful men could avoid acknowledging their mistakes.  It was the handcuffed kids clubbed in Grant Park who were defending the lives and honor of the men fighting in Vietnam, not those swinging the clubs.

Second, the war movement was right.  Soviet and Chinese communism was evil. They did murder tens of millions of their own citizens and engage in gross violations of human rights.  Their extension into Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia was an evil which decent people had an obligation to resist. For opponents of the war to flaunt NVA and Vietcong flags as they marched was immoral and stupid.  It did nothing but persuade voters that the only way forward was install Nixon in the White House.

As the country divided into a left that refused to acknowledge the very real evil represented by Leninism and Maoism and a right that refused to acknowledge the futility and immorality of slaughtering millions of Vietnamese to prop up a corrupt and dictatorial regime whose sole redeeming quality was that they answered to Washington instead of Moscow, tens of thousands of Americans and millions of Vietnamese died.

It happened because Americans allowed themselves to be manipulated into choosing leaders who cultivated contempt and hatred instead of reason and moderation.  In Menand’s memorable formulation: “Most people don’t like righteousness in others.  They can be quite righteous about it.”

They should have done better then.  We must do better now.