Response to a friend on supporting Hillary or Bernie

Ben Kreilkamp,

I would like to congratulate you on the grace and forebearance you have displayed in these conversations, even when your views have been characterized by what appears to me to be sheer projection on the part of the critics. I will try to avoid that as I express my own disagreement. I recognize that we want the same thing, and that our disagreement is strategic.

1) It is far from settled historical fact that the anti-war movement prolonged the Vietnam war. Let's remember that this was the first presidential election after LBJ bid goodbye to the South "for a generation" (it has turned out to be longer), upon passage of civil rights legislation. Except for Texas, the entire South voted for Nixon OR for George Wallace. CA was still firmly in R control. (TX and CA have since changed places, but I expect to see TX flip in my lifetime.) If you look at the popular vote totals, the Wallace vote more than makes up the difference between Nixon and Humphrey. Outside the South, that's white, blue-collar men (AND women) who would have ordinarily voted Dem and could not yet bring themselves to vote Rep. Here is the electoral map and statistics. Let's also remember that Humphrey was forbidden by LBJ to promise a policy change, on pain of Presidential denunciation, Meanwhile, Nixon promised a "secret plan" to end the war.

2) The impatient hippies in Grant Park got their heads and bones fractured by the normal political process of Daley's Chicago - the worst kind of lawless bossism that characterized the politics of our largest cities at the time. Credentialed press and McCarthy delegates got similar treatment in the Convention hall itself. The silly, impatient youth were tired of getting drafted to die in Vietnam. The candidate most likely to change that had been murdered a couple of months before. And a month before that MLK, who was by then the other powerful voice against the war. There was no reason to expect the Center to change that any time soon. As John Kerry was later to ask Congress "how do you ask someone to be the last man to die for a mistake?" I find it hard to dismiss Impatience regarding that request as mere naïveté.

3) The counsel of patience - "wait" - may not be so realistic. Consider that great document of American History, "Letter from Birmingham Jail." King had to answer colleagues and even supporters for precisely the kind of impatience that you appear to find foolish and counterproductive. If our history shows us anything, it is that significant change does not come as a result of waiting.

4) You observe that peaceniks do not win presidential elections. As I wipe the dew from my impatient eyes, I cannot help but notice that the same is true of women and African Americans - until they do. To say that something won't happen because it hasn't happened yet strikes me as dogmatic conservativism, not realism. The only kind of dogma I like is theological. (My faith, by the way, teaches me to "put not [my] trust in princes." Francis Bacon, as a skeptical empiricist, may have found hope an unsatisfying supper; the hope that I try to practice refers to ultimate, cosmic matters and not to the political fortunes of dying empires.)

5) I take your point about the Herculean labor of weaning us from the military-industrial complex. I concede that you may be right about this. The question is whether I should trust a Prince not just BECAUSE of what she says, but IN SPITE of what she says. I continue in amazement that someone with your awful experience wants my enthusiastic support for an admirer of Henry Kissinger. If anyone prolonged the war, it was he. I will support her as a matter of necessity, but without any trace of enthusiasm. That is asking too much. I will, however, hope (in the "unsatisfying-supper" and not the theological sense) that you are right about her intentions, secret though they be. I will grasp at any straw available. Might as well. But without enthusiasm or joy.

6) Finally, about reality and political possibility, I find it interesting to notice the constant expression of surprise from sophisticated and knowledgeable realists, typified by "The New York Times" and the "Washington Post," about the Sanders campaign. ["Something is happening here, and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?"] The universe of "mainstream," "insider," or "establishment" political imagination was not prepared for this new reality. When has it ever been? Sanders has forced the expansion of this imagination. So observes Steve Phillips (Brown is the New White), whom you have quoted with approval. I think that you are right about the future significance of this campaign, which I regard as prophetic rather than quixotic.