He’s been in office fewer than one hundred days, but President Joe Biden is already getting comparisons to Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 1960’s president who introduced welfare, Head Start and a government-wide war on poverty. Here’s Dylan Matthews, writing for Vox:
Fifty-seven years ago, a Democratic president who had a reputation as a moderate — and who had been a senator and vice president before reaching the highest office in the land — announced his administration would be waging ‘unconditional war on poverty in America.’”
“With Congress’s passage of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, another Democratic president with a reputation as a moderate (and who came through the Senate and the vice presidency) is putting his stamp on American policy. The Covid-19 relief bill, which passed the US House on Wednesday afternoon and is set to be signed into law by President Joe Biden on Friday, is the most far-reaching anti-poverty legislation in more than 50 years.
This got me thinking. If we’re living in some kind a repeat loop of history and Biden is in the role of LBJ, doesn’t that mean that Obama was the new JFK? And what does that make Donald Trump?
Quite obviously, Trump is playing the role of the assassination. He’s not Lee Harvey Oswald, but the assassination itself, with all its attendant horror and cultural consequence. In the moments after it became clear that Trump had won the 2016 presidency, much of the country, and certainly the country’s establishment, was like former First Lady Jackie Kennedy desperately collecting her husband’s splattered brains off the trunk of the presidential limousine.
And what did the right do in response to Kennedy’s death? Didn’t they assert themselves, nominate Barry Goldwater’s proudly extremist candidacy, and initiate a conservative takeover of the Republican Party. They certainly weren’t chastened that their alarmist rhetoric about Kennedy may have had something to do with his death in Dallas. After all, a Russian defector and communist sympathizer was blamed and then murdered on national television before he could tell his side of the story.
Assuming Oswald pulled the trigger, it’s still remarkable that the rhetoric circulating in Dallas in November 1963 is so familiar to our modern ears. Fear of communists became fear of Islamist terrorists and then fear of Antifa. The defense of white supremacy and anger about federal overreach is the same. Of course, Kennedy was betraying Cuba and Portugal while Obama betrayed Israel. The Christian persecution complex is unchanged. Kennedy was lax in enforcing Communist registration laws while Obama was lax on illegal immigration. Meanwhile, Obama was secretly a Kenyan Muslim while JFK had a secret first wife.
JFK’s death was a national trauma but also a crisis for the left. It was a surprise that LBJ pursued such a liberal agenda considering his background as a Southern senator. His decision to do so led to a complete regional realignment of American politics, as the Republicans successfully adopted a Southern Strategy. It also spurred a cultural revolution, as the way the mid-to-late 1960’s unfolded would have been impossible without the assassination.
I suspect the rest of this decade will be impossible explain without reference to the national convulsion represented by Trump’s four-year term in the White House.
I do not expect the right to moderate. I also don’t expect President Biden to behave the way he would have had he succeeded John McCain or Mitt Romney. The enormous and ambitious COVID-19 recovery act is the first indication of this, but we’ll see it again and again, as he goes bigger and bolder and more progressive than his decades-long profile in politics would have suggested.
I also won’t be surprised to see cultural upheavals reminiscent of the 1960’s, driven by teenagers and college students, and perhaps accompanied by a political realignment.
Trump wasn’t so much a president as an event, like Pearl Harbor or 9/11. This is partly because Trump barely did the job of being a president, but it’s mainly because he very nearly destroyed the country. He did his best to assassinate the legacy of President Obama, but it looks like he produced a second LBJ instead.
5
5
What excellent analysis! I had never thought of Trump this way, but I do believe you are right.
I remember the day of the Kennedy assassination – I was in Grade 9, and I will never forget the mystifying sight of an American student in our Canadian high school sobbing her heart out in the bathroom, then walking into class and the history teacher telling us what had happened in Dallas. It was almost impossible to comprehend what had happened
I don’t feel there will be any significant cultural upheavals again in the 2020s like there was in the 1960s – though, of course, one never knows if Biden will get the US embroiled in another stupid war. Vietnam destroyed the Johnson presidency and the ’68 Democratic convention plus the Southern Strategy destroyed the Democratic party It took years before people could appreciate how progressive Johnson really was, because people my age hated him when he couldn’t or wouldn’t get the US out of Vietnam.
People hated LBJ because he wasn’t Kennedy, too. Consider how the press treated him even before Vietnam turned into a clusterfuck.
That’s rather insightful, I think. The culture of the 1960s was fueled by the demographic reality of so many young people congregating in large cities. I’m not quite sure we have that going for us in the same way. We Gen-Xers are squeezed between two larger generations, but really the Millenials are just gentle slope up on the graph in the 1980s. It’s all downhill from there in terms of number of births.
We’re already seeing a huge cultural change because of the emerging power of a younger more diverse population. Today’s immigration policies are yesterday’s lunch counters, at least as far as the right is concerned. And I think the young generations are as restless right now as they were in the 1950’s and early 1960’s in the lead-up to the Summer of Love. But maybe we need some technical advances to complete the picture. For example, something on a par with The Pill.
I think the tense is wrong here Martin. I think we have already seen a huge cultural shift over the course of my lifetime and I was 13 when JFK was assassinated. The hardcore Trump base is primarily motivated because they have lost or are losing every single cultural issue fought over the past 50 years. They have won a few battles here or there but for the most part, they have lost.
The Republicans won on the economic side – all their friends got far richer, and the safety net only improved with patches here or there – by convincing too many people that a government trying to help people was the problem. But the country club Republicans were never the base. The base never cared about tax cuts.
But on the cultural side? The side the real base cared about? The religious right has not achieved a lot and whites have had to move over to include others. They have not even won on guns, given the vast number of Americans want to limit those rights, too. This is why they are so angry and were so easily led by someone who pushes the right buttons.
I get what you’re saying and, for the most part, agree. But I can’t help recall how in 1981, my senior year in high school, my English teacher used to take us to foreign films in which sex and nudity were common. Try doing that today. Heck, she’d get fired today just for hugging a student, which she did quite often.
For the most part, I prefer the way kids are raised and treated today to what it was back then. There’s so much more effort to meet their needs. There’s recognition of learning disabilities and differences that were once repressed. But progress is not linear.
Demographics aren’t decisive but they are influential. Every year roughly 3 million (disproportionately older, whiter, wealthier, conservative) voters die, and roughly 4 million (disproportionately younger, browner, poorer, liberal) citizens become eligible to vote. That inexorable demographic change aids both the cultural and political changes talked about in this post and thread.
I’d be right there with you if we didn’t see younger people so often grow selfish and cynical with age or a large scale defection of minority voters toward Trump.
I think this will depend on how wealthy those sing millennials become. Also, in my opinion the defection of minority voters may be overblown. In his second victory, George W Bush earned about the same number of minority defections as Trump did. That was just incumbency, no?
Thanks for your response. I largely agree with jafnhar: the “large scale defection” of minority voters toward Trump is, imho, overblown. And in any case, that “defection” doesn’t come close to the shift in votes propelled by the demographic changes.
For example: let’s assume that half the electorate votes, and that the dying-off voters lean Republican 60-40, and the new voters lean Democratic 60-40. That means that by 2024 the GOP would have lost 3.6 million votes while Dems lost only 2.4 million (a difference of 1.2 million votes). On the other end, Republicans would gain 3.2 million votes while Democrats gain 4.8 million (a difference of 1.6 million votes). Net gain for the Dems = 2.8 million votes.
Nationally that’s not a huge percentage, but it’s been happening for several years now and it’s going to continue for another decade or more. It’s the kind of inexorable force that will make the GOP change its politics (if we remain a functioning democracy).
I think the problem is the electoral college… if we had a simple majority of all votes nationally, then I would be more hopeful. We need to get rid of the electoral college.
Yes, i think the story of the past few years is largely the story of that generational conflict: the boomers losing their grip on power and as conservatism becomes younger it becomes likewise obsessed with young people issues like identity.
Thanks for your response. Identity is, imho, as much a political issue for the olds as for the youngs.
Great. Next up is Nixon.
Nixon and Carter were way-stations in retrospect. Both more moderate than the parties they led and the direction they were going. Of course, the Dems made a course correction after the 1980’s, but I doubt the right will follow that example.
Your ability to put stuff like this down is what keeps me coming back here. Just how did this analogy come to you? I am genuinely curious. Like so many of us, I think about all this shit every day, but maybe I just lack the imagination, or some kind of in-born mojo, to have these kinds of light bulbs go off in my head and be able to articulate them in such a keen and concise way.
You make me think about things that would never occur to me on my own.
It came to me pretty much the way I described it in this piece. I thought that if Biden is LBJ, then who were Obama and Trump.
This stuff is ancient history to me, but Biden is governing a bit more like Bernie domestically and that’s pretty good. It’s not all good but I’m willing to work to improve where we can.
This point can’t be overemphasized: Biden is a pol who’s always aimed to place himself at the center of the Democratic coalition. When that coalition moved right, so did Biden. As it’s moved left over the past 10-15 years, so has Biden.
One advantage for liberals of having a pol like Biden in the White House is that he provides a certain degree of “cover” for progressive policy change. (As, in his own way, does someone like Manchin when he demands tiny changes to the American Rescue Plan, then both votes for it *and* goes on all the TV networks and praises it to the skies.)
5
I agree that the public has been primed for progressive action by the disaster of the Trump era, similar to the public mood for broad action on the great society after the Kennedy assassination. But one big difference between now and the 60’s was that LBJ could rely on at least some republican support in Congress for his policies. The progressive wing of the republican party is extinct now, thanks to Fox news and the dumbing down of the American right. Dems have to drag every bill through congress themselves, with the R.’s pulling the other way, kicking and screaming. This is why it’s so important that the filibuster be tossed into the trash; otherwise legislation that could have passed with bipartisan support in the 60’s will go nowhere.
True, but don’t forget the Dixiecrats and other conservative Democrats. Plus, there were competing interests on the left. I used to get so pissed at Democrats who supported unions loudly and voted against environmental protection because it might hurt jobs. The parties have sorted and sifted to the point where there’s almost no overlap anymore. There are still differences within the coalition but way less.
5
Great post, Martin, but you are leaving out the biggest issue that loomed over the ’60s: Vietnam. Had LBJ found a way to sidestep that debacle, the ’60s would have turned out quite differently.
At the moment, I just don’t see anything like Vietnam looming on the horizon and for that reason, the 2020s will be quite different from the 1960s.
5
This is the reason why I come here!
One additional thought: Trump helped move the Overton Window of possibilities. Just as Reagan moved the Overton Window to the right, letting a William Jefferson Clinton bring in more middle of the road Democratic principles in government, Trump’s extremism, and the nihilism of MoscowMitch and his current colleagues LeningradLindsey, RussianRon, etc. – started with the serial adulterer Newt; enabled by the choice of the know-nothing VP candidate Palin; the TeaParty’s false flags; and the wholesale abandonment of any moral principles by the Southern Baptists – this has allowed the sky-is-falling Democrats to say we need to stand by our principles, and not always triangulate like the Clintons!