Biden Doesn’t Face A 1968 Moment

The country is no longer the same

The campus protests against Israel are a conundrum for Joe Biden. While the president has condemned them, he knows he needs those who sympathize with the demonstrations to vote for him. Like with the Gaza War itself, Biden tries to stake a middle ground that ends up pleasing no one. 

A number of pundits think the campus turmoil over Israel resembles the chaos of 1968. In that election year, college students across the nation took over campuses, held deans hostages, and engaged in general mayhem. This all culminated in the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The youth upheaval coincided with the Vietnam war, devastating race riots, skyrocketing crime, and a general unease with the country’s changing culture. The “silent majority” responded by making Richard Nixon president. 

Journalist James Traub is one of those who sees similarities between our moment and ‘68. He casts Biden as the Hubert Humphrey figure. The popular consensus is that Humphrey lost the election because he failed to appease the Left and promise to immediately get America out of Vietnam. Traub says that consensus is wrong and that Humphrey lost for not doing enough to win over the silent majority who thought America was going to hell in a handbasket. The Wall Street Journal contributor believes this holds a lesson for Biden and that the president should tack to the right rather than to the left to secure victory. While Traub is right about Humphrey’s defeat, his analysis of the current moment is off. 2024 America is too dissimilar from 1968 America for this historical analogy to hold weight. Biden’s path to victory is not the same.

The protests the nation is experiencing right now are nothing compared to what America faced in the 60s. The current demonstrations aren’t that violent. There’s been some pushing and shoving. A few campus buildings have been occupied. But these aren’t rising to the insurrectionary-level of violence that characterized 1968. Dozens died in the race riots, and entire cities were destroyed that year. Campus radicals bombed ROTC buildings and traded blows with cops. They eventually turned to full-on terrorism. Neither race riots nor bombings are going to come out of the current protests.

For one, these protests are overwhelmingly female. UCLA’s encampment leadership is all-female. The ‘68 protests were largely young men. They were capable of brawling with police. The black militants among them included many hardened street thugs. The radicals back then had plenty of capacity for violence. The current protesters do not. In fact, counter-protestors are the ones who have engaged in the most violence. Those who denounce pro-Palestinian violence can only point to one Jewish student  who was accidentally poked in the face with a small flag handle.

There will likely be protesters at this year’s DNC in Chicago, but don’t expect a repeat of ‘68. Mayor Brandon Johnson won’t deploy the police to crack skulls, and the predominantly female demonstrators won’t really do anything besides march around and chant slogans. 

The 2024 protesters’ cause célèbre matters less to voters than what galvanized the sixties’ radicals. The 1968 election was dominated by the Vietnam war and domestic turmoil, both of which were connected to the student protests. Meanwhile, Israel is not a high priority for modern-day voters. Most polls find it at the bottom of voter concerns. 

Traub doesn’t seem to imply that Biden needs to use military force against the protesters. He just says he needs to signal he’s against them as part of his push to the Right. But this would likely cost Biden the election.

Traub still believes there’s a right-leaning silent majority out there for Biden to win over. It’s a curious demographic the writer imagines. Instead of the working-class whites Nixon and George Wallace won over in the sixties, it’s now working-class blacks and Hispanics:

Yet the lesson of 1968 is that while the fireworks are on the left, the votes are on the right. Biden has made extraordinary gains since 2020 among college graduates, but there aren’t nearly enough of them to make him president in 2024. He must halt the losses he is suffering among working-class voters, very much including Blacks and Hispanics, who recoil at much of the progressive agenda—or at least at what they perceive as the progressive agenda—on policing, migration, gender and the environment. That means ignoring advisers who tell him to tack left.

This is quite the claim. While some Hispanics do recoil at the progressive agenda, blacks don’t. Their lack of enthusiasm owes more to the lack of reparations and Biden being an old white guy than anything to do with policing or the environment. Blacks still overwhelmingly vote for soft-on-crime politicians like Brandon Johnson. Many of their religious leaders are raising a fuss over Palestine and threatening to tell their flocks to stay home. It doesn’t appear a rightward shift will help Biden here.

This is really where Traub’s historical analogy comes crashing down. This is a completely different country from what it was over 50 years ago. There was still a large, moderate center for both Democrats and Republicans to fight over back then. It’s how Democrats could win in a landslide in ‘64, then get less than 43 percent of the vote in ‘68 and be obliterated in ‘72. Those wild swings no longer happen. It’s now a battle over the smaller center that decides a handful of states. It’s a much more polarized electorate. This in part due to America being very demographically different. We were nearly 90 percent white in the 60s and politicians didn’t have to worry about Asian or Hispanic voters. They could just worry about the white center. Demographic change has upended that. 

Contrary to what Traub claims, Democrats still did well in the midterms despite doing poorly among the working-class. The new coalition Barack Obama cobbled together is enough to win elections. Democrats just have to turnout their voters. This is where Biden’s wavering on Israel may doom him.

To win, Biden needs a few things to happen. He needs inflation to ease up. He needs Israel to end its war and not expel all of Gaza. He needs to get immigration off voters' minds. These are tough tasks that he’s probably not capable of. He really can’t do much on inflation since he can’t pass anything through the legislature. He could pressure Israel to withdraw, but he doesn’t have the stomach to do that. All he will do is shake his head at the latest Israeli escalation. We all know he will never do anything on the border besides offer more legal pathways to would-be illegals, so that’s not something he will pursue.

Biden hopes abortion and portraying Trump as a threat to democracy will get him another term. It probably won’t be enough.

But if he had to choose one thing to make his chances better, arguably the best option is to turn the screws on Israel. This will displease a lot of his Jewish donors, but some of them are already going over to the Republicans. This move will help him among the youth and Muslims, two constituencies he will need in November. Gen Z and Muslims are overwhelmingly hostile to the war. This is the most important issue for many Muslim voters, as evinced by the large number of protest votes against Biden in the Michigan primary. Biden’s dithering may cost him the Wolverine State and potentially the election. It also may alienate many of the young volunteers they’ll need to door knock and register voters. Biden is banking on young people to carry him across the finish line. It’s why he’s once again bringing up student loan forgiveness. But the Israel issue may muddle that. The young Palestinian protesters literally join in “Fuck Joe Biden” chants. 

The president’s middle-of-the-road stance makes no one happy. Both sides hate him. It would be much smarter for him to choose a side. Resolutely backing Israel would please donors, but it would ensure he loses Michigan and much of the party’s activist base. Taking a harder line towards Israel will anger those donors, but they’re already teed off. At least with this position he wins over the voters he needs. 

Will Biden do that? Probably not. But as a Trump supporter, I’m fine with that. The president’s idiocy helps our guy win.

Historical analogies can be fun, but they don’t always make sense. We are not living through 1968. There is no silent majority up for grabs. There is no chance Biden will try to reach out to conservative voters. We live in a polarized country where elections are determined by whoever does the best job of turning out their base.

Moderate liberals who wish for a less insane Democratic Party are never going to see their dreams realized. The new Democratic Party doesn’t need the old middle America anymore. They’ve got plenty of new Americans to replace that demographic. 

The chief problem for Democrats is Biden himself. He can’t inspire the base. Believing he can reach out to imaginary middle Americans is pure fantasy.