Political polarization in politics is a feature of our political system today, but it wasn’t always this way. Conservatives began to dominate the GOP in 1964, and in 1968 the historic Democratic establishment began to be discredited and undermined. These gradual forces came to a head in 1972. The culminating clash has been the source of a half-century of competition and conflict.
Before 1964, there was a broad centrism with liberal and conservative wings. Moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats could find a lot of common ground. Liberal Republicanism was gradually weakening, and the conservative Democrats of the South were steadily losing ground and legitimacy. Moderate Republicans were still a real and vital force; they helped pass civil rights legislation in alliance with northern Democrats. Similarly, there were a lot of northern big-city ethnic politicians, often Catholic, who were culturally conservative but economically liberal (in many ways, Speaker Tip O’Neill was this faction’s last national leader).
READ MORE from Newt Gingrich: America Faces a Republican Revolution
In the election cycles of 1964, 1968, and 1972, this system was gradually destroyed and replaced by two much more polarized political parties. The pattern that has grown and evolved since then is the one in which we operate today.
The culminating event of this decisive change was the takeover of the Democratic Party by activists on the left in 1972. That process led to five major shifts that could not have been predicted when Sen. John F. Kennedy ran for president 12 years earlier.
First, the Left seized control of the Democratic Party and established its ideological dominance, which Theodore White brilliantly described as a theology rather than an ideology.
Second, the American people repudiated the prospect of a genuinely radical Democratic Party by one of the largest election margins in American history. President Richard Nixon was elected with 60.7 percent support over Sen. George McGovern’s 37.5 percent. The Electoral College was an even more one-sided disaster. The Democrats carried only Massachusetts and the District of Colombia for a 96.65 percent to 3.16 percent margin (538 electoral votes to 17).
Third, the left-wing activist movement succeeded in driving many moderates and conservatives out of the Democratic Party. Beginning in 1976, any aspiring Democrat would have to be acceptable to the left, or he/she could not be nominated. This had huge consequences and led to 20 years of Republican presidencies interrupted only by Democrat President Jimmy Carter’s failed four-year term.
Fourth, the Democratic left-wing activists began a process of radicalism. This eventually led to a hemorrhage of moderate and conservative Democrats who left the party to become independents and, eventually, Republicans. The Ronald Reagan Democrats of 1980 and 1984 can be traced directly back to this alienation by the McGovern Left in 1972. The rise of the college intellectual-media-activist Democratic Party still drives people who would have been Democrats under FDR, Truman, and JFK to become Republicans. The old FDR coalition is increasingly the modern Donald Trump coalition. (READ MORE from Newt Gingrich: Leftism Tears Apart the Democrat Party)
Fifth, the hatred between the increasingly radical and partisan news media and the Nixon team — which had been simmering since the late 1940s when Nixon helped prove that Alger Hiss, an establishment darling, was an agent of the Soviet Union — boiled over.
The anti-Nixon hatred intensified when Nixon ran a hard-hitting campaign for the U.S. Senate in 1950 against Democratic Rep. Helen Gahagan Douglas. Douglas was a leftist — her Democratic primary opponent compared her to Vito Marcantonio, a New York congressman who had been accused of being a communist. Nixon was criticized for calling Douglas “the Pink Lady” and distributing flyers in pink. The Left portrayed it as a smear by Nixon (even though it was started by Douglas’s Democratic primary opponent). The term “tricky Dick” came out of this campaign. President Dwight Eisenhower also used Vice President Nixon as his bridge to conservatives and partisan attacker for eight years — allowing Eisenhower to function as a positive centrist almost above politics — and so the Left’s dislike of Nixon grew.
Nixon’s first term as president included a battle with the media. Vice President Spiro Agnew and speechwriter Pat Buchanan developed direct assaults against the leftwing media and would have perfectly understood the “Fake News” battle cry that emerged from Donald Trump 48 years later.
It is impossible to overstate the importance of the transition that took place in the Democratic Party in 1972. A nationwide movement with a wide and loose coalition came together across the country. It was anti-war, pro-gay, feminist, pro–Black Power, sexually permissive, lax on drugs, and anti-American middle-class values and was made up of college students and individuals looking for activist roles. The scale of student and youth involvement was beyond anything seen in American politics before.
Establishment Democrats found themselves outmaneuvered, drowned in primaries and conventions by the sheer energy, enthusiasm, and determination of their younger opponents.
White, in his The Making of the President 1972, asserted that 1972 was merely the second act of a two-step process:
The closed universe of the old convention had cracked first at Atlantic City in 1964, when the blacks of Mississippi’s Freedom Democratic Party forced their way into decision from the streets. It had come entirely apart in Chicago in 1968, when the bloody street confrontation of police and youth had cramped all decisions of power brokers in closed rooms. The reform rules of the McGovern Commission had been the consequence of the Chicago cataclysm—and thus the convention of 1972 was to be an effort to include in the convention process, at one gulp, by untried procedures, all the new claimant groups exerting the pressure of all the new ideas of the 1972 was to be a rupture of this two-step unwritten process of power.
The radical nature of the new movement became clear when the Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection, created by the 1968 Democratic National Convention to appease the left-wing activists, held its key meeting in 1969. McGovern, who had briefly been the stand-in presidential candidate for the Kennedy forces after Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, was named its chair.
In the middle of relatively acceptable internal reforms, the commission stumbled into an issue that White keenly described: “As the Reform Commission moved on, however, to consider quotas, it was to plunge over a political cliff to disaster. It was to misread the culture of America.” (READ MORE from Newt Gingrich: The Destruction of the Family Was Not Inevitable)
The depth and scale of this disastrous decision would alienate much of America and a great part of the Rooseveltian Democratic Party from the emerging social engineering of the Left. Again, White’s perception (and remember, this was 51 years ago) explains much about how the modern hard-left Democratic Party emerged:
No better episode occurs to me in my political memories to illustrate how a liberating idea changes to become an intellectual prison than the story of how ideas came to lock in the quota controversy within the Democratic Party.… The liberating idea in 1964 had been clear: Blacks must not be excluded from the political process, no matter what the pain to tradition. What the Reform Commission was about to do in 1969 was to take this idea and make a prison of it: Certain specific groups must be included, must be guaranteed their mathematical proportion of representation and legally, while all other groups must fend for themselves. Specifically, as the commission interpreted its vague mandate, the party must open itself to blacks, to women and to youth, not by striking at exclusion but by insisting on inclusion. Women, of course, were not a minority group, since they made up 52 percent of the population. Youth was a transitional biological state difficult to define. How were these three groups to be pegged, legally, into the structure of the party with guarantees to which no others were entitled?
As White relates, the coauthor of the original resolution almost immediately realized he had made a mistake:
RANNEY [who had now changed from his earlier insistence on something strong to force the inclusion of blacks]: I have the feeling, with Senator Bayh’s assistance, I opened Pandora’s box here…. I think we ought to recognize [that] if we pass this motion now we’re going to a quota system…. How can we … give proportional representation to political views while making sure that there is adequate representation of blacks, women, youth…?
White continued:
[T]he symbolism of the idea was too overpowering to ignore. It touched the roots of American culture, and the campaign of 1972 was to become one of those events in American history which can be described as cultural watersheds as well as political happenings. For many liberals, the experience was to be heartbreaking. The beautiful Liberal Idea of the previous half-century had grown old and hardened into a Liberal Theology which terrified millions of its old clients. From the founding of the country on, the central instinct and pride of the American liberal has been to keep opportunity for individuals open. Of the sixties these programs had themselves become values. However much the real world might fear liberal programs, it must submit because programs were morality, even after programs had gone wrong in visible practice.
Imposing quotas inevitably created injustices that drove out large parts of the old Democratic majority coalition. The traditional Democratic constituencies (for example, Poles and Italians in Chicago) found themselves ignored, run over, and excluded by the radicals. Meanwhile, there was an overrepresentation of activists of various ethnic backgrounds. In some cases, the quota approach meant that the person who had won the primary was replaced by the person they had defeated. For the movement, this was the cost of progress in breaking up the old order. For most Americans, this was a massive exercise of power forcing injustice and creating new types of discrimination.
The consequences were immediate and vivid. In the California delegation, 89 of 388 delegates and alternates were on welfare. As White reported (in the language of the time): “George Meany, now president of the AFL/CIO, but once a plumber in the Bronx, where his roots still lay. ‘They’ve got six open fags and only three AFL/CIO people on that delegation! Representative?’” (READ MORE from Newt Gingrich: Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society Cripples America)
Mayor John Lindsay, having been rejected for the vice-presidential nomination in 1968, summarized the disaster he was living through: “This party seems to have an instinct for suicide.”
Remember that you are reading this a half-century after it was first initiated. Notice how much it fits the modern Left except that the modern Left has become even more extreme. As White described it in 1972:
[T]he war, the Black Revolution, the prosperity were the main incubators of change in the Liberal Idea. Their effect could be summed up in three cardinal tenets of the Liberal Theology: (a) War Is Bad—and the American military was almost, if not quite, a criminal institution, wasteful and profligate of life and treasure; patriotism was the last refuge of scoundrels, and the adventure in Vietnam “immoral.” (b) Black Is Good—and the demands of blacks on the general society must become, in the revision of priorities that would follow the end of the war, priority number one. And (c) since money comes easily under the modern managed economy, the belief that Money Solves All Problems, as in the rhetoric of hope, “If we can spend the money to reach the moon, we can spend the money to save our cities, solve cancer, purify our streams, cope with drugs, cleanse our ghettoes … etc., etc.” These three tenets of the Theology were, in turn, harnessed to a political doctrine called Participation: If the people could be brought to participate in the political arena, and there freed to express their real needs, then politics would become, as it should be, the instrument of national good. Thus, out of such thinking, there developed in the years between 1968 and 1972 a formless but very powerful action group within the Democratic Party that can only be called the Movement—a movement whose roots lay in the insurgency of 1968, had been strengthened and nursed by the reforms of 1969, and whose future, as one looked forward to 1972, was obscure, yet beckoning.
Of course, what we are seeing today is the metastasizing of this movement into an even more radical system of pro-terrorist, anti-American protests. The focus has shifted from the rights of black people to being outwardly anti-white. There is an absolute refusal to reform any of the failing bureaucracies, policies, and institutions that the Left has imposed on the country starting 90 years ago with FDR’s New Deal.
McGovern accelerated the takeover by the Left when, in his first campaign planning meeting, he asserted: “My one unique position, with reference to the potential competition, is to be to the left of them all.” (According to White.)
The collapse of the FDR-majority Democratic Party was accelerated by the emergence of Alabama Gov. George Wallace as an attractive presidential candidate for ethnic whites and cultural conservatives outside the South. Wallace had won 45 electoral votes in 1968, and one poll showed him with 45 percent of the vote among white steelworkers in Chicago. He was doing remarkably well in the primaries. At the beginning of May, the Harris Poll reported that the American people were divided — Nixon 40 percent, McGovern 35 percent, George Wallace 17 percent. Then Wallace was shot at a rally in Maryland and was out of the race.
Most of Wallace’s vote likely went to Nixon. However, what ultimately compounded the McGovern collapse was a series of political mistakes that put his character and judgment into question.
With a war going on in Vietnam and the continued tension between the United States and the Soviet Union, the reliability and strength of a potential commander-in-chief was an important consideration for many American voters. In addition to allowing his party to move too far to the radical left, McGovern failed the honesty and judgment test.
At the conclusion of the convention that nominated him, McGovern announced that Jean Westwood would become the first woman chair of the Democratic National Convention, passing over Lawrence O’Brien and Pierre Salinger — famous political operatives who had been vital to the Kennedy machines. Both were men of considerable reputation and had huge networks of friends and allies. Both came to believe that McGovern had misled them.
The problem was that both O’Brien and Salinger thought McGovern had promised them the job and then lied to them.
Just as that decision was beginning to undermine McGovern’s credibility, his choice for vice president became a huge liability. Sen. Tom Eagleton was a well-liked and pleasant man, but the campaign discovered too late that Eagleton suffered from depression and had had shock treatments three times to break it. When it came out that he had what was, in that generation, a high-risk and scary-sounding mental illness, his acceptability as a potential commander-in-chief began to collapse.
McGovern then compounded the risk by saying that he was “behind [Eagleton] 1,000 %.” But as pressure built to get Eagleton off the ticket because he threatened to drag down McGovern and other Democrats, that 1,000 percent support vanished and Eagleton left the ticket, leaving McGovern looking even less honest than before. By then it was hard to find a new candidate. After a week of public humiliation, McGovern finally got Kennedy relative Sargent Shriver (married to Eunice Kennedy), but it was too late.
The American people had rendered judgment. McGovern was too radical and too erratic to be trusted as commander-in-chief.
McGovern’s collapsing campaign allowed Nixon to shift the focus. Nixon was ahead of McGovern by 57 percent to 34 percent. The man who had lost narrowly in 1960 and won narrowly in a three-way race in 1968 was now moving toward a real mandate for dramatic change. To develop the momentum for that change, it was not enough to merely defeat a deeply flawed Democrat. Nixon had to reset the cultural majority — what Nixon had called “the silent majority” — so they would support bold and deep change. To do that Nixon thought he had to take on his real opponent: the media.
As White described it at the Republican convention:
Richard Nixon was talking. He was talking, as he had for months, and as he had designed his convention, to the people Out There. Out There, they had watched a series of pre-packaged film unroll across screen like a child’s story of a President’s adventures—Richard Nixon in the White House, Richard Nixon in Peking, Richard Nixon in Moscow. An average of close to 20,000,000 American homes, or 60,000,000 people (29.30 by the Nielsen ratings), had watched these shows, and the press corps on its benches at the convention had watched with them. Richard Clurman, once news director of the Time/Life news services, remembered the hush that fell over the press as the films were shown in the darkened convention hall. Normally, the press babbles and is inattentive at canned presentations. This time, however, Clurman was struck by a difference: “There were 3,000 guys in the press galleries—and they all fell silent watching the Nixon film. It was cornball. But he wasn’t talking to them, he was talking to the people, and they ought to be taking notes on it. There was this recognition that Nixon’s world wasn’t our world—we were out of it.” Whether or not the reporters were out of it, Mr. Nixon did not propose to let them stay out. For his chief adversary in the next three months was not George McGovern and McGovern’s Democratic Party, but the news media of America—and the culture they spoke for, which so contradicted the culture for which he spoke, and on which he was to found his victory.”
No one could have foreseen that Nixon’s massive victory over McGovern, the radical left movement that had nominated him, and the leftwing media that deeply disapproved of the Nixon-Agnew-Buchanan vision of America, would be a temporary blip.
The Left was determined that Nixonism would not dominate and define America’s future.
That set up the first lawyer-news media-engineered coup d’etat in American history. It is toward that complicated, startling development we will turn in the next essay.
This is the 12th installment in a series by Speaker Gingrich on American despotism. Listen to The American Spectator’s exclusive interview with the Speaker here. Find the first in the series here, the second here, the third here, the fourth here, the fifth here, the sixth here, the seventh here, the eighth here, the nineth here, the 10th here, and the 11th here. For more commentary, visit Gingrich360.com.
