“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”
― Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
It was an ugly election, marred by a partisanly-divided nation torn by generational divides and broader undercurrents of world politics. Overt appeals to racism were made to play on the insecurities, anxieties, fear, and perhaps hatred of a group of people sensing that their world was crumbling and that a new Weltanschauung was emerging. They were looking for a scapegoat, someone to blame. It was an election where leading up to it demonstrations, often violent, had torn the country, and where violence itself defined the election up to the closing days. It was an election everyone knew or sensed would be significant, and one where no matter what happened the country would remain divided.
Was that election 1968 or 2018? The parallels are powerful and eerie. Much of what is taking place in the 2018 US midterm elections recall parallel conditions found in 1968. While there is no official presidential election this year, in reality the only issue is Trump–it is a referendum on him. Both 1968 and 2018 were or are critical elections that will have lasting impact on US and perhaps world politics, and both represent clashes of generations and ideas at a scale one only sees perhaps at epochal points in history as we see now. But despite the parallels, there are also profound differences.
1968 and 2018 unfold with contrasting esprit du temps. 1968 was a clenched fist by Black athletes, 2018 was a clenched fist by a white president. 1968 was the spirit of the French Revolution played out, a forward-looking revolutionary moment precipitated by what historian Alex de Tocqueville contended in L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution a drive for liberty and equality. 1968 was about global movements for freedom–be in the Paris demonstrations, the Prague Spring, or the civil rights and antiwar demonstrations in the United States. It was a revolutionary moment about rising expectations clamped down, with a dam finally bursting that lead to a violent clash of forces. If part of 1968 was the revolutionary moment, it also had its Thermidor–the crushing of the Paris demonstrations, the Soviet invasion of Yugoslavia, and the election of Richard Nixon.
Contrarily, the esprit of 2018 is not emancipatory but reactionary. It is born not of the rising expectations frustrated, but of ressentiment as social critics Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Scheler. It is a resentment by a white, often rural, older, and Christian cohorts, seeing a world they once controlled pass to others of a different age, skin color, ethnicity, religion (or none) or nationality. Marian Le Pen, Viktor Orban, and Donald Trump are the figure heads for this new reactionary movement that is nativist, racist, and increasingly violent.
For so long I wanted to argue that the current US political climate was no where near as polarized as the 1960s when leading up to the American presidential elections one witnessed in a matter of a few years a president assassinated along with his brother (too a presidential candidate) and a civil rights leader. But Charlottesville last year, the pipebombs mailed to Democrats, the killings at the Tree of Life Synagogue, and two African-Americans killed by in Krogers last week show that the path in the 1960s from partisanship to anger, to hate, and to violence may be repeating itself.
Another parallel is race. Strangely, 1968 was less about gender than race, but 2018 is about both race and gender. 2018 will be decided by women, by MeToo, by Brett Kavanaugh and Susan Ford. But if in 1903 W.E. Du Bois was correct in arguing that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of color line,” the 1960s was ground zero for that line.
The 1960s was the decade of race, the riots of 1966 and the burning of American central cities. But it was also the candidacy of George Wallace for US president, running on a white supremacist platform of “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” that was inspired by a 1962 speech he had given when he resisted the integration of Alabama schools. Wallace ran an overt racist campaign. Trump is doing the same.
Some will say 2018 is the most openly racist election since the 1988 Willie Horton ads, but by comparison the latter was no where near as dominated by race as 1968 or 2018. (2016 was the most sexist since 1984 when in the latter Geraldine Ferraro ran as vice-president). Yes all three juxtaposed race, law and order, and class insecurities, but the degree to which Trump has overtly and explicitly exploited the three eclipses 1988 to rival 1968. Wallace’s overt racial appeals, along with Nixon’s implicit ones, torn America as the Democrat Party divided between the Humphrey and McCarthy (and RFK) people failed to must a majority to win the presidency. Again in 2018 America est omnis divisa in partes tres–with a strong unified Trump base, a fractured Democratic Party unable to articulate a clear response to him, and a torn shell of a former Republican Party unable to resist the president. For the 201 elections, alea iacta est, and cast it is with Trump making it about him, law and order, and race.
2018 is both a repeat and a rejection of 1968. It is the final gasp to fight the battles that one might have thought were won in 1968. 2018 is an election that will have implications perhaps for years much like 1968 did. Depending on what happens, it may not only be a tragedy as we have seen in terms of the violence and racism, but also a farce in terms of its results.
Postscript: Less literary and poetic, the final days of the 2018 election come down to the themes of Trump, race, gender, and law and order and whether the Democrats or the Trump supporters will be more mobilized and show up at the polls. As of now the battle is over mostly moving suburban women in affluent suburbs to vote, with secondarily whether young people and people of color (especially Hispanic) show up. If the latter three do then it will be a good year for Democrats. If I were making a prediction, the Third Congressional District in Minnesota is ground zero for American politics. If Dean Phillips wins then Democrats take the US House, if Paulsen wins, Republicans retain control. That race is nearly a perfect picture of the divides of US party politics now and how and why educated suburban women will control the fate of American politics.
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