1964/2004 Election Analogy

[Gary Sisco]

There's been all kinds of talk making analogies with Vietnam and the current war(s) -- most of which to me are meaningless because the historical and concrete conditions couldn't be more different.

Here's an analogy that holds up fairly well, though, at least for someone like myself, with an independent political view that embraces neither party. In 1964, the American left went hysterical about how everyone "had to" vote for LBJ because of Goldwater's hyperbolic talk about "bombing Vietnam back into the Stone Age." So, they did. People who didn't vote at all in the US, normally, went out in the tens of thousands and voted for LBJ because they thought Goldwater to be beyond demonic.

Only to have LBJ, once elected, begin not talking about but actually bombing Vietnam so hard that the US dropped more explosive tonnage on *South* Vietnam alone (never mind North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) than was dropped in all of WW2 combined. And also, only to have LBJ, once elected, invade South Vietnam with hundreds of thousands of American troops, based solely on the authority granted to him by Congress in response to an "incident" that never happened and was invented out of a whole cloth.

Only two people in all of Congress had balls enough to vote no.

Two.

[Dr Dave]

If John Kerry decides to carpet-bomb Iraq, I will cut my own throat on national television.

[Gary Sisco]

Get busy stropping, Doc.

Let's not forget that LBJ acted mainly not out of malice but out of fear of appearing "soft on communism."

How many people in Congress have voted with Bush, now, for fear of looking "soft on terrorism"?

(I mean, apart from Kerry. That's obvious.)

[Darryl G. Thomas]

Substitute '64 with '68. In '64 Vietnam was a blip on the radar screen. By '68 it was as controversial as the Iraq War is today. As a matter of fact, the Iraq War drew world wide protests before it even started good. I don't think anyone was protesting Vietnam in '64.

Kerry reminds me of Nixon more than LBJ because like Nixon he had a "plan" to lessen or end the conflict. Kerry's been more specific than Nixon was But Kerry talks about puting more troops in Iraq and that would probably lead to an increase in violence.

[clinthopson]

I voted for LBJ because I of Barry's aggresive stand.

Boy, oh boy, was I fooled.

We could use somebody like Barry today who would talk straight about things and not obfuscate and blather.

I didn't agree with Barry on a lot of things but he is one of the last pols I've had any respect for.

[crawjo]

This comparison doesn't work for me because Iraq is not Vietnam, Part II. The contexts for each war are very, very different. If the point of the comparison is simply that we shouldn't believe the promises that people make during a campaign, well, duh.

[Darryl G. Thomas]

The major difference between Vietnam and Iraq is the number of casualties. A war is still a war and the US entered both for dubious reasons.

[crawjo]

Yes, a war is a war but beyond that I find little similarity between the two conflicts. The Vietnam War was inextricably linked to Cold War ideology; the war in Iraq is inextricably linked to post 9/11 ideology. The two ideologies require very different strategies, and there are very important differences between the forces opposing the U.S. For one, unlike the North Vietnamese, the insurgents in Iraq are not being backed by a major world power.

Comparing the 2004 election to 1964 makes about as much sense as comparing it to the 1864 election.

[Sergio Zamora]

I think the point Gary is trying to make is that liberals supported LBJ in the mistaken belief he would effectively end the conflict. Liberals saw the alternative as being much worse. In that sense, there is a large contingent of liberals today who belive Kerry will do the same in this situation.

Of course, the conflicts themselves are much different, and the poltical contexts in the US and the World are vastly different. But still, Gary is arguing (and I believe it) that in both instances, many liberals believe Kerry will accomplish an honorable extrication (if not an outright victory) in a relatively short period of time.

[crawjo]

Originally Posted by Sergio Zamora

I think the point Gary is trying to make is that liberals supported LBJ in the mistaken belief he would effectively end the conflict. Liberals saw the alternative as being much worse. In that sense, there is a large contingent of liberals today who belive Kerry will do the same in this situation.

Of course, the conflicts themselves are much different, and the poltical contexts in the US and the World are vastly different. But still, Gary is arguing (and I believe it) that in both instances, many liberals believe Kerry will accomplish an honorable extrication (if not an outright victory) in a relatively short period of time.

Really? I have not seen Kerry make any statement that would lead me to believe that he's going to extricate the U.S. from Iraq.

In 1964, why would liberals believe that Johnson would extricate the U.S. from Vietnam? He was the sitting commander-in-chief, after all, while Kerry is a challenger to an incumbent. Also, how big an issue was Vietnam in the 1964 election? The situation is different now because we are already far more immersed in the Iraq situation than we were at that time in the Vietnam situation. An "honorable extrication" from Vietnam was far more feasible in 1964 than doing that in Iraq now.

Is this what "liberals" are endorsing? Just pull all the troops out of Iraq and let the government we installed crumble to pieces before it ever has the chance to pick itself up off the ground? Do liberals see any benefit to continuing the Iraq war, that is, to defeating the insurgents and stabilizing the Iraqi government?

[Sergio Zamora]

Crawjo,

You may have a point the relative importance of Vietnam to voters in '64. I don't know.

Originally Posted by crawjo

Is this what "liberals" are endorsing? Just pull all the troops out of Iraq and let the government we installed crumble to pieces before it ever has the chance to pick itself up off the ground?

Well, keep in mind that I said liberals would support an honorable extrication if not outright victory. What I mean is liberals believe that Kerry could win the war quickly and relatively bloodlessly, or at least end the conflict without it seeming like the US lost. I think the first part of that coincides with what Kerry has said.

Do liberals see any benefit to continuing the Iraq war, that is, to defeating the insurgents and stabilizing the Iraqi government?

That I don't know.

[clinthopson]

SPeaking from my own experiences, in 1964, Vietnam was a big factor in the election, but even more telling was LBJ's effectiveness in getting some of the most progressive legislation since FDR through congress, like the great society, civil rights and other domestic programs, mostly by utilizing the national dispair at the assasination of JFK. The conservatives were very BOS about that.

Viet Nam became a huge issue in
1968.

I think that if Bobby K hadn't been assasinated, he would have beaten Nixon.

I'll say this for Tricky, in spite of all his shenanigans, he didn't work to destroy the progressive programs like his GOP successors have done.

[Darryl G. Thomas]

Clint,

Hell, Nixon started some of them: Head Start, affirmative action, I bevieve OSHA, and get this, he proposed a form of universal health care that Ted Kennedy BLOCKED because he felt he could get a better deal.

Nixon would damn near be a liberal Democrat these days.

I get Gary's point. In this election Kerry's the sensible candidate (Johnson) while Bush is the wild man (Goldwater). And like Johnson, Kerry is liable to lead an esculation in hostilities making no difference between electing Bush or Kerry concerning Iraq.

I still like my 2004 - 1968 analogy though.

[Gary Sisco]

Vietnam was a huge election issue with the left in 1964, Darryl, and a hugely divisive one. The official peace movement refused to deal with it publicly because they thought all focus should be on nukes. They censored many speakers -- Dave Dellinger, especially -- who thought they were mad and hypocritical to ignore Vietnam because they had -- and they had, in fact -- chosen sides in the Cold War, very consciously. Therefore, they would not take positions that seemed to put them at odds with the US in its hot cold wars. Michael Harrington at the time was one of those.

It was SDS that finally broke with the old coldwarrior left -- from the start, by declaring both sides in the Cold War to be wrong and also to be blamed -- which caused much fury among the older guys, many of whom were anticommunists and already angry at SDS for "allowing" Marxists and Communists to attend its founding convention at Port Huron.

These things were hugely controversial on the left at the time. SDS called the first national demonstration against Vietnam, in 1965, in DC. But that's another story. In any case, Vietnam was a huge issue for American left years before 1968. Hell, MLK had already come out against the war before then, and he took a long time deciding whether or not to do so, publicly. He was assassinated in 1968, let's remember.

In any case, Goldwater's chest-thumping rhetoric scared the bejeezis out of many liberals and leftists -- it coming so close upon the Cuban missile crisis, let's remember, when the world actually was on the very brink of nuclear holocaust. That wasn't a joke. Kennedy really was ready to touch them off if Krushev didn't back off. So, to hear Goldwater talking the way he was talking was not viewed as mere huff and howl for an election. It was viewed in the context of touching off a nuclear confrontation, as, if JFK, a liberal but stone coldwarrior, was willing to use nukes, what in the world would a cowboy like Goldwater do? (I happen to agree with Clint about Goldwater, now, by the way; the repubs today could use a few million guys with half the brains and tolerance that Goldwater had.)

And so, tens of thousands of American leftists, who normally wouldn't have voted in 1964, voted for LBJ out of fear of the consequences of not voting for him. And for little other reason. Let's remember, hard as it may be for some today, that the New Left, along with what was left of the revolutionary Old Left that hadn't gone over to cold warrior status, was *anti-welfare state* and therefore not all excited about LBJ or his New Society program. It wasn't the left at the time that embraced LBJ, but the liberals, who were viewed by the left at the time as being part of the right.

(I joined SDS as a teen still in high school -- an aspect of the New Left and the antiwar movement as well that someone ought to write about someday -- and inherited that anti-welfare state, antiliberalism position from them and still hold it today, and for the same reasons as I did then. It was and is a way of disempowering people to take control of their own destinies and places them at the mercy of state bureaucracies on whom they become dependent and therefore unlikely to oppose.)

[Tom Storer]

On the other hand, it isn't just a question of extricating from Iraq. If Bush hadn't sent in the troops to invade Iraq, he would still be a piss-poor president and I'd still oppose his re-election.

His fiscal policy, according to a large body of opinion that I find persuasive, is irresponsible. His disdain for the rest of the world, even aside from Iraq, is in my opinion counterproductive. His assault on civil liberties with the Patriot Act is a very bad thing. I find his kowtowing to Christian fundamentalist churches on matters of public policy highly objectionable. His willingness to sacrifice the environment to corporate interests is criminally short-sighted. Finally, he's a smug bully whose every smirk makes me want to smack him in the kisser--although this is more a personal than a political matter. Kerry may be a politico weasel who'll betray his supporters' trust, but chances are high, I think, that he won't be as bad as Bush.

[Darryl G. Thomas]

Was the Left a big enough factor to turn an election around back in '64? If they had sat out the election would Goldwater have won?

I was only 8 in '64 and vaguely remember folks being scared that Goldwater planned to blow up the world. I only discovered the concept of liberalism vs. conservatism during the '68 elections and had my ideas reinforced during McGovern's run in '72.

One of the reasons I prefer a 1968 - 2004 analogy is that I feel the political divisions of the two years are very similar. Was it that great in '64? Johnson's victory was a landslide, I don't think we have the conditions for a landslide in either direction this year. I do feel that if Bush wins his margin of victory will be greater than a Kerry win. We're a nation in fear and Bush has a better chance of capitalizing on that fear.

[Darryl G. Thomas]

The whole world is watching
If militants violently disrupt the GOP convention, it could be Chicago 1968 redux -- and Christmas in August for the Bush campaign.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg

printe-mail

Aug. 17, 2004 | John Passacantando, the executive director of Greenpeace USA, believes in confrontation. A protégé of Mike Roselle, co-founder of the radical environmentalist group Earth First, he's led Greenpeace to push the limits of civil disobedience. On his watch, the group has boarded ships involved in illegal logging. He and other activists have chained themselves to the entrance of the Environmental Protection Agency and dumped barrels of contaminated waste at Dow Chemical's headquarters. Last year, he told a reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "I want Greenpeace first and foremost to be a credible threat ... To paraphrase Thoreau, I regret only our good behavior."

So one might expect Passacantando to be thrilled by the prospect of bad behavior, and a lot of it, at the Republican National Convention late this month. Tens if not hundreds of thousands are expected to take to Manhattan's streets in protest, and plans are being hatched for widespread disruption, from shutting down city streets to throwing pies to assaults on the offices of "war profiteers." But Passacantando isn't happy about what's about to happen in New York. In fact, he's terrified. Like a host of intellectuals, '60s veterans and activists desperate for a John Kerry victory in November, Passacantando worries that the delicious, so-close prospect of defeating George Bush in November will be swept away in the citywide chaos that anarchists have promised to bring to New York.

"The potential for violence is worrisome, and the potential to have it boomerang against progressive policies is great," he says. "People watching this convention will be judging the Bush administration on its policies, but they will also be judging the people in the streets."

There's a grim precedent for left-wing protest that empowers the right: the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. The parallels between the convention protests that year and those expected this year are striking. Then, as now, the antiwar movement was coursing with justified rage. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley took an even harder line against protesters than New York's Mayor Michael Bloomberg, refusing to grant any permits at all.

There was a radicalized, street-fighting contingent among the demonstrators who released stink bombs in the delegates' hotel, vandalized a CIA building, and engaged in other mischief, but most of the protesters were peaceful. The violence that erupted, leading to days of running street battles, was by most accounts the fault of the police. Phalanxes of cops charged into crowds, beating protesters bloody, spraying mace, and chanting "kill, kill, kill." A report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence called the debacle a "police riot."

Thus the demonstrators assumed that public sympathy would be with them, the victims. They were wrong. "To our innocent eyes, it defied common sense that people could watch even the sliver of the onslaught that got onto television and side with the cops -- which in fact was precisely what polls showed," writes former antiwar organizer Todd Gitlin in his 1987 book, "The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage." Indeed, many people believe that the fighting in Chicago helped cement the victory of Richard Nixon, who, as Gitlin notes, won the popular vote by a mere two-thirds of 1 percent.

A similarly minuscule margin could determine this year's election, and the possibility of history repeating itself leaves Gitlin aghast. "I think the Republicans will probably do what they did in 1968 and make television commercials of people rioting in the street and then promote their guy as the superintendent of order," he says. "I sure wouldn't want to be explaining to my kid how it turned out that Bush won election by three electoral votes because of some last-minute surge of opinion in West Virginia where that commercial played three times an hour." Gitlin and Passacantando's anxiety led them to coauthor an article in the Nation warning that the RNC 2004 could be Chicago '68 all over again unless progressives exercised restraint during the convention protests.

Milton Glaser, the legendary graphic designer behind the I Love New York logo, has thought about this prospect a lot. He knows the power of images, and he's scared that pictures of rampaging protesters flashing on the nation's TV screens during the Republican National Convention will be a catastrophe.

"A lot of people in this town are very angry," he says. "When you have so many angry people up against the police, without any question violence will occur. If this turns out to be the visual material that the country is looking at, there's just the chance that there will be an incremental turn towards Bush."

For protesters desperate to unleash four years of frustration, though, such warnings are easily dismissed. "Just talking for my own perspective, it would be a stretch to base the expression of one's dissent on the question of whether or not it would energize the right wing," says Jason Flores-Williams, an anti-RNC activist and political writer who recently authored High Times' guide to the convention protests. "First off, you've got to do what you've got to do for yourself. I'm less concerned with how things are going to affect the vote, and more concerned with confronting the systemic problems in this country head on." Just as a previous generation talked of turning New York into Saigon, Flores-Williams says that the goal is "to make New York reflective of the anger that's inside of us."

This kind of thinking exasperates Gitlin. "The meaning of events is sum of all the consequences," he says. "There's a deep divide between those people who are capable of thinking through consequences and those people who are either incapable or resistant to thinking through consequences."

The divide between liberal pragmatists and radical seekers of self-realization is a perennial one, and there's a certain historical irony in the way it's cropping up now. After all, in the 1960s New Left student leaders like Gitlin, convinced they'd entered a new era where old political dynamics were obsolete, were notoriously dismissive of the cautions raised by their progressive elders. Electoral politics seemed to them a joke. "A fierce moralism had brought us into opposition in the first place, and the same moralism didn't brook the politics of lesser evils," Gitlin wrote in "The Sixties." He didn't vote in either 1964 or 1968, and by the end of the decade his cohort had broken with erstwhile liberal allies like Irving Howe.

Three and a half decades later, Gitlin is condemned to play out a similar scenario from the other side, the aging former radical shaking his head at stubborn, volatile militants. The new generation of direct-action aficionados is tired of worrying about what Middle America thinks, especially if it means sublimating their own needs. "I don't see this budding movement being in any kind of dialogue with mainstream America," Flores-Williams says. "Mainstream America is going to work and turning on the TV, and they're going to think what they're going think regardless." A frustrated Gitlin says, "I don't know how to persuade someone who believes in recklessness and is cavalier about consequences to be a responsible person."

The divide between liberals and radicals is starkest on the issue of violence. Many liberals, including Passacantando, repudiate violence of any kind, whether it's against people or property. "One cannot effectively or morally oppose the violence of the Bush administration by acting violently in turn," Passacantando says. "To do so is cowardice. For Greenpeace, it's very simple. Violence is damage to people or property. Period. Throwing something through a window, whether it's a building full of people or a building that's empty, is an act of violence. That's not a new definition. Martin Luther King gave parameters that tight and tighter. Gandhi was the biggest stickler of all on nonviolence."

For the most part, though, anti-RNC organizers aren't Gandhians. Few say they're planning violence, but many refuse to condemn it, especially property destruction. Indeed, in anti-RNC circles the very idea that smashing windows constitutes violence is considered risible.

Recently Bill Millard, an East Village writer, editor and musician, posted a suggestion on an anti-RNC listserve that activists should respond to the media's fear mongering by pledging, "publicly, loudly, with absolute seriousness -- to avoid and repudiate idiotic actions like triggering blackouts, harming horses, etc. That's right-wing provocateur behavior, not principled protest. Karl Rove couldn't think up a better way for this whole event to play right into the Repugniks' hands."

To Millard, the idea seemed like common sense, and he was surprised by the vehemence with which several activists rejected it. "Denouncing violence is the equivalent of attempting to minutely define who makes up a NoRNC coalition that's actually quite diverse and hard to pin down," wrote Eric Laursen, a member the A31 coalition, a group calling for direct action against the RNC on Aug. 31. "It just complicates the story for a corporate media that can't handle much in the way of subtleties."

Rather than repudiate violence, the direct-action faction of the anti-RNC movement is trying to convince the media that violence is solely the fault of the police. "The best way to address this stuff is by working really hard in advance to use a little rhetorical jujitsu, pushing the violence issue back at the cops -- where it belongs," Laursen wrote.

Thus, at an Aug. 4 press conference, the A31 Coalition sought to finesse the issue with anarchist cant. They'd called the conference in the hopes of dispelling some of the hysteria about anarchist mayhem that's been filling the tabloids. Organizers have been outraged by stories about demonstrators who plan to hurl bags of excrement or use gunpowder to trick police dogs and trigger evacuations, insisting that such tales are part of a police disinformation campaign. They wanted to set things straight.

The media packed into the meeting room at the East Village's St. Marks Church, where the conference was held. A Fox News microphone was prominent in the cluster at the podium. The dozen or so people from the A31 coalition sat arrayed before a frieze of the Virgin Mary and an angel, looking overwhelmingly ordinary -- nothing like the black-masked saboteurs the papers have been warning of. Among them were John Shields, the white-haired mayor of Nyack, N.Y.; Naomi Gordon-Loebl, an impish high school girl in baggy shorts and a buzz cut; and Jack Waters, a "filmmaker, artist, writer and urban gardener," who wore a T-shirt of an American flag on which the stars had been replaced by corporate logos. A few of their sympathizers sat in the crowd, including Jamie Moran, whose group, RNC Not Welcome, is devoted to aiding direct action against Republican delegate events.

The A31 coalition distributed a press kit, including a photocopied list of "War Profiteers and Other Corporations That Place Profits Before People" that will be targeted on Aug. 31. One by one, they gave short speeches, and then they all took questions. When a Washington Post journalist asked about "property violence," Waters responded, "As a green-thumb gardener, I've witnessed people who have planted trees, then see these gardens bulldozed. These are living things. It's very difficult for me to see the destruction of property as violence in relation to the destruction of living things."

This kind of rhetoric strikes many in the movement as self-evidently true, but it appalls Passacantando on tactical as well as moral grounds. After all, he expects that there will be provocateurs in the crowds at the RNC, trying to provoke vandalism and spark confrontation. As Gitlin notes in his book, a 1978 CBS broadcast reported that, according to Army sources, as many as one in six protesters at the Chicago '68 protests were really undercover military intelligence agents. There were local police and FBI agents planted throughout the antiwar movement, often urging their cohorts to ever more daring feats of resistance. Richard Nixon's White House relished riots, knowing they only helped the Republicans. On a larger scale, the FBI's COINTELPRO program used its agents to provoke violence in antiwar and civil rights groups throughout the late '60s and early '70s.

Passacantando sees the current administration as capable of similarly dirty tricks. "You don't have to be that much of a strategist to see huge potential for that again. You're dealing with an administration that has seemed to stop at nothing to accomplish its ends," he says. "Certainly you would not assume that the Bush administration is more moral than the Nixon administration." There have already been some incidents of agents posing as activists and trying to ratchet up confrontation. In Denver last year Darren Christensen, an undercover policeman working with the federal Joint Terrorism Task Force, joined an antiwar group planning a peaceful sit-in and shocked them by suggesting that they charge a line of armed policemen.

"In a supercharged emotional situation, provocateurs who mean it and provocateurs who fake it have a natural alliance," says Gitlin. "It's not always easy to know who's who. It doesn't take a lot of sparks to ignite people who hate Bush."

Some believe that's precisely why the Bush team chose New York in the first place. "I think it's a deliberate strategy," Glaser says. "They knew there would be violence in the streets."

The potential for unrest has likely been exacerbated by the city's long delay in granting permits for legal protests, and by its refusal to let demonstrators rally in Central Park, instead relegating them to the West Side Highway, a barren, isolated stretch of concrete. Earlier this summer, Democratic Assemblyman Richard Gottfried, who represents a liberal Manhattan district that includes Chelsea and part of the Upper West Side, released a statement suggesting that Republicans could be deliberately trying to create an explosive situation to help them in the polls. "In Chicago at the 1968 Democratic Convention, and many times in this city, we have seen the disastrous consequences when the city fails to deal reasonably and fairly with people who feel strongly about their views," Gottfried wrote. "There may be some of the Republican Party who think that provoking disruption in our streets will benefit them politically. The Bloomberg Administration should not be playing into their hands and jeopardizing our rights and public security."

To counteract such provocation, Passacantando suggests having monitors patrol the protests with handheld video cameras, which they'd use to record the faces of demonstrators who get violent, hopefully intimidating them into line.

He says he's spoken to United for Peace and Justice, New York's largest antiwar organizing group, about the idea and said they seemed interested. But UFPJ, which is sponsoring a huge march the day before the convention, isn't eager to alienate radicals. In fact, a memo is circulating among various anti-RNC factions, including UFPJ and RNC Not Welcome, in which the groups promise not to criticize each other's tactics.

This dismays Passacantando. "To on the one hand say we are nonviolent and wouldn't harm people or property and then on the other hand say, 'I won't comment on the tactics of others,' I don't think that works," he says.

It's not that Passacantando doesn't understand how angry people are. He's been doing battle with this administration since it came to power. "Post 9/11, we boarded a ship full of illegally logged mahogany coming in from Brazil to the port of Miami, and the Ashcroft Justice Department tried to destroy Greenpeace," he says. "We ultimately beat the Bush administration in the federal District Court, thus preserving everyone's right to engage in peaceful dissent, at least until Ashcroft's next volley."

But rage has to be used strategically, he argues, or it amounts to little more than a tantrum. "We have to take our own discontent about the horrors this administration is foisting on our world and we have to find a way to productively channel that anger into something that speaks to a larger audience, as opposed to just engaging in personal therapy," he says. "When you're doing something in front of the cameras, for the cameras, you have to take into account how will this be perceived."

Such thinking makes sense only to those who are worried about alienating American voters. Liberals are, but many anti-RNC activists defiantly are not. Ironically, despite being motivated by a ferocious hatred of George Bush, some of those planning direct-action protests against the convention have grown so disillusioned with electoral politics that they barely seem to care whether he's defeated in November.

Getting Bush out of the White House "is an aesthetic thing -- I won't have to look at him anymore," says the A31 Coalition's David Graeber, explaining his mild preference for Kerry. A 43-year-old anthropology instructor at Yale, Graeber, who lives in Chelsea, says, "Maybe I'll vote for Kerry, maybe I won't."

With the outcome of the election a source of relative indifference to him, he's less interested in communicating with people in swing states than with people abroad. "I want to send a message to someone in Iraq, in China, in Afghanistan," that there are people in America who oppose Bush's foreign policy, he says.

Many liberals find such sentiments so irrational as to make discussion impossible. "I don't know: How do you convince the potential rioters that they're buying Christmas presents for Karl Rove?" Gitlin says.

No one's come up with any good answers. Instead, a few liberal organizers are hoping to create alternatives that could channel some of the city's anti-Bush energy away from confrontation. Chief among them is Glaser, an urbane, eloquent man who seems to adore New York and despise George Bush with equal fervor.

Since Glaser sees the problem of protest violence as a semiotic one, he's tried to find a design solution. To that end, he's working on a project called Light Up the Sky, which he calls a "manifestation that clearly says we are opposed to Bush's principles and policies. It's a powerful and peaceful response to what the Bush administration has done."

He's made fliers and a Web site describing the idea. "On Aug. 30, from dusk to dawn, all citizens who wish to end the Bush presidency can use light as our metaphor," it says. "We can gather informally all over the city with candles, flashlights and plastic wands to silently express our sorrow over all the innocent deaths the war has caused. We can gather in groups or march in silence. No confrontation and, above all, no violence. Violence will only convince the undecided electorate to vote for Bush. Not a word needs to be spoken. The entire world will understand our message. Those of us who live here in rooms with windows on the street can keep our lights on through the night. Imagine, it's 2 or 3 in the morning and our city is ablaze with a silent and overwhelming rebuke ... Light transforms darkness."

He envisions something far more expansive than a candlelight vigil. "This city is full of invention," he says, and he hopes people will use some of it to make light sculptures, light suits, all kinds of incandescent constructions. Thus illuminated, he images New Yorkers coming together all over the city, in its parks and avenues and promenades.

Light Up the Sky, he knows, is not going to dissuade those determined to wreak havoc. "There's always a factor of people who need violence. They need to overthrow their father. It gets them into the center of attention," he says. But much of the confrontation between police and protesters is built into the current situation. "People can't go to Central Park. They're marginalized at the edge of the city. It's getting to be a mess," he says. "It's pre-scripted. What you have to do is abort the script." Otherwise, he fears, the consequences could be even more calamitous than they were in 1968. "The revolution will not come," he says, wryly dismissing the grandiose hopes of some anarchists. "What they might do is ensure the election of Bush. I don't think the country can survive another four years of Bush. It's been horrible so far. It's taken us far away from my vision of America."

At 75, Glaser fears he'll never see that vision of America again. "I would hate to die," he says, "with Bush in power."

[crawjo]

Yeah, I think the left needs to take a step back during the Republican convention. Protest, sure, but if elements try to cause trouble that could really help Bush.

[crawjo]

I did some fact-checking online, and I don't think I find the analysis that the left's fear of Goldwater caused his defeat to be very persuasive.

Goldwater was trounced in 1964: Johnson got 61.1 percent of the vote; Goldwater, 38.5 percent. 61.7 percent of eligible voters cast ballots in that election; a lower percentage than cast ballots in the 1960 race. Given that Johnson defeated Goldwater so easily, I really doubt that the left's support for Johnson was decisive. And I'd be very surprised if the 2004 election produced as lopsided a result, for either candidate.

That said, there may be a similarity in the reasons why "liberals" are supporting Johnson/Kerry.

[crawjo]

That article posted by Darryl also reinforces my suspicion that some of the anti-Bushists have become pathological in their hatred for the president, to the point that their hatred obscures the actual issues. I mean, this quote is ridiculous:

Getting Bush out of the White House "is an aesthetic thing -- I won't have to look at him anymore," says the A31 Coalition's David Graeber, explaining his mild preference for Kerry. A 43-year-old anthropology instructor at Yale, Graeber, who lives in Chelsea, says, "Maybe I'll vote for Kerry, maybe I won't."

"An aesthetic thing." Wow, that's deep. And this guy teaches at Yale?

[Tom Storer]

Actually, that's not a great example to illustrate your point, craw. Despite the previous paragraph's mention of "ferocious hatred," the quoted man says his opposition is "aesthetic"--in other words he feels distaste, but hardly "pathological hatred" of Bush. You could find much better examples of virulent Bush-hatred right here on this board!

But reading more carefully, we see no evidence that the author has done any more to get to know the more "radical" anti-Bush groups than check out a listserv and go to a press conference by one such group.

What I find more interesting is this:

As Gitlin notes in his book, a 1978 CBS broadcast reported that, according to Army sources, as many as one in six protesters at the Chicago '68 protests were really undercover military intelligence agents. There were local police and FBI agents planted throughout the antiwar movement, often urging their cohorts to ever more daring feats of resistance. Richard Nixon's White House relished riots, knowing they only helped the Republicans. On a larger scale, the FBI's COINTELPRO program used its agents to provoke violence in antiwar and civil rights groups throughout the late '60s and early '70s.

I have little doubt that current law-abiding anti-government protest groups are similarly infiltrated.

[Gary Sisco]

No doubt.

Darryl -- The question isn't whether the left had enough votes to give LBJ victory on its own. Only that tens of thousands of people voted who wouldn't have otherwise, out of concern that Goldwater was beyond demonic. That's all. The irony was that their desperation about assuring Goldwater's defeat was answered by LBJ elevating the level of violence in Vietnam to an extreme that almost no one had considered possible -- coming damned close in fact to "bombing Vietnam back into the Stone Age," without any assistance from the evil Goldwater.

I see similar ironies today, when both Kerry and the entire Dem leadership are in fact and on record as pro-war, yet for reasons unfathomable to me, have been embraced in a deathlock by the millions of people who are antiwar.

On the other hand, by 1968 it's all but certain that the New Left and its sympathizers contributed mightily to Humphrey's defeat, simply by not going to the polls -- 1) because of his idiotic insistence on supporting the war, and 2) out of revenge for the police riot in Chicago. Most of what was left of the New Left in 1972, again, didn't go to the polls, in its continuing rejection of the Dems, to which I still personally cling, and they haven't given me a reason yet to have any regrets about it. I wrote in Shirley Chisolm on my first ever presidential ballot because, though a dem, she was also a real, courageous person, who stood with VVAW when the DC cops pushed them out of Lafayette Park with clubs and tear gas. She earned that (inconsequential, I know) vote.

And by the way, I happen to agree with Tom that the war is not the only issue upon which to oppose the Bushists. Their domestic policies and other foreign policies are equally loathesome to me. I find myself, however, probably differently than Tom, in a situation where I can't say any different about Kerry in his personal political record or the Dem leadership in theirs. The Dems in fact have already proven several times while in power last that they are in practice life-threateningly dangerous to my partner and our ability to live together in our own home. That's something, obviously, I'm unable to forget or forgive. I'm not talking ancient history, here. I'm talking just a few years ago, when we had to spend more than half of Clinton/Gore's eight years in a desperate struggle to keep Bronwyn's Medicare benefits intact -- with zero help or assistance from anyone, dem or repub or even socialist, in Congress or anywhere else. Kerry and the Dem leadership at their convention were explicit in their plan to begin, once again, balancing the budget on the backs of the poor and the politically helpless. They said so themselves. I don't need to speak for them.

Like Clinton before him, I see many people who see in Kerry whatever they want to see in Kerry -- most of whom, when I question them, can't tell me what his actual political positions are. They tell me what they don't like about Bush and what they "hope" Kerry "might" do if elected. Even in letters to the editor, this is the case. They are filled with platitudes about how much better a man Kerry is and so forth but they offer no reasons to anyone to believe it or not. In short, they offer no argument, only assertions of their own hopes. That's not enough for me. I have my own hopes, too, but so what? My hopes and a metrocard get me a ride on the train.

[Darryl G. Thomas]

Gary,

I'm like many, this election is more about Bush than it is Kerry. Simply put, I don't want the Bush Administration rewarded with another 4 years in office.

If you look at this election in a purely logical way and feel that a Kerry Adminstration won't be radically different from a Bush one, what difference does it make?

But I look at it this way:

Why reward Bush for sending 900 + American citizens to their deaths in Iraq (and crippling thousands more) under false pretenses?

Why reward Bush for rolling back environemental standards?

Why reward Bush for nominating conservative judges to the bench?

Why reward Bush for canceling every international agreement he could lay his eyes on?

Why reward Bush for tax cuts that primarily benefit the top 1% of the American population?

Why reward Bush's antipathy towards science in favor of theology?

Why reward Bush for alienating just about every important ally in the world?

Why reward Bush's hubris?

Why reward failure?

[walto]

Well put, Darryl. And I agree: one of my guinea pigs would be preferable to Bush!

[Enforcer]

"They told me if I voted for Goldwater Vietnam would be bombed. I voted for Goldwater and sure enough, they bombed Vietnam."

[crawjo]

Gary,

To illustrate your point and Tom's point, as you know I support the war in Iraq, and still do, but I don't support Bush. His domestic agenda has been a nightmare, in my opinion.

[Gordon B]

Gary, are you secretly Instapundit's dad?

Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit wrote the following today.

My dad's a Kerry supporter, an Iraq war opponent, and a rather devoted Bush critic. But when we were talking the other night, he offered his worries regarding Kerry.

He thinks that Bush will cut and run in Iraq within six months of the election. (I disagree, unless it's via Tehran). But -- though I stress he still supports Kerry -- he says that his big worry about Kerry is that Kerry will be like LBJ, anxious to prove his manhood through greater military involvement rather than risk looking weak by withdrawing.

When we had this conversation a couple of weeks ago, I was skeptical. And I guess I still am. But lately, I've started to wonder if he isn't on to something. (He often is.) People in the pro-war camp worry that Kerry will pull a cut-and-run. And it's true that Kerry has been known for his anti-war sentiments, and actions.

But it's also true that Kerry really wants to be known as one badass mofo. Look at the secret hat. ("He pointed his finger and raised his thumb, creating an imaginary gun. . . . He smiled and aimed his finger: 'Pow.'") The war stories. The combat home movies. The constant photos of Kerry with Harleys, guitars, guns, and soldiers. The military posture of the DNC acceptance speech and salute. If Kerry were a Republican, the bargain-basement Freudians among the punditocracy would be having a field day. (As Joan Vennochi wrote: "Clearly, 'modest hero' will not be his epitaph.")

So what does this mean? Lyndon Baines Johnson was another President with a silver star and a short combat career who seemed to feel that he had a lot to prove. Might Kerry's rather clear desire to be seen as a tough guy make him a surprisingly resilient warrior? Or might it backfire, as it most likely did with LBJ?

I don't know. A tough-guy presidency under Kerry seems unlikely to me, but then so did a major George W. Bush commitment to nation-building four years ago. Should people in the anti-war camp be worrying that a President Kerry won't pull a cut-and-run? I don't really think so, but it's just perverse enough to seem plausible. . . .

[crawjo]

Originally Posted by Tom Storer

I have little doubt that current law-abiding anti-government protest groups are similarly infiltrated.

I agree with you there. I wonder if Democrats have tried the same thing in the past.

[Tom Storer]

Originally Posted by crawjo

I wonder if Democrats have tried the same thing in the past.

[shocked indignation]Democrats? Use the FBI for political advantage? The very idea![/shocked indignation]

(chortle)

[crawjo]

Maybe the Dems have hired a few operatives to bomb abortion clinics.