General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: How the extreme left gave us Nixon, Bush and now Trump [View all]Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)The '68 result was due entirely to what went down in Chicago...the bloody-minded arrogance of LBJ, in forcing Hubert Humphrey unquestioningly defend the war and make his delegates vote to keep us in Vietnam forever, despite the overwhelming majority of votes for the peace candidates in the primaries, and the savagery of Mayor Daley's cops in the streets. When Humphrey did finally make slight break from Johnson's position on the war, millions of peace Dems did give their support to Humphrey.
In 1968, Vietnam was what mattered. Compared to that, all other issues were minor. You can't apply "dpn't make the perfect the enemy of the good" to voting to let the bombing of Vietnamese civilians go on indefinitely.
It was never a reasonable expectation that year that progressives would rally to the Humphrey-Muskie ticket BEFORE Humphrey gave some public indication that he was not Johnson's puppet on Vietnam-I recognize that Humphrey was a bit of a dove in private, but no one who didn't know him personally had at reason to suspect that. If Humphrey had been elected and kept the war going as Nixon did-there was no reason to think he would not do just that until his Salt Lake City speech at the end of September-it would have been impossible for him to implement any liberal domestic policies. The funds needed to continue the war at all would have left no resources available for new social programs and barely enough to main the existing Great Society policies.