Image Credits: Wikipedia.
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.
Handbill circulated in Dallas on November 21, 1963.
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.
