1968/2024
By 
This piece draws in some ways rather strained analogies between campus protests against the Vietnam war in the 1960s and campus protests about the Israel/Gaza war today. (The radical differences between the two situations are too obvious to belabor). It does end on a more interesting analogical note however:
Larry P. Gross, an expert on media and culture at the University of Southern California, said Israeli leaders had not adapted their message, much less policies, to a generation that views Israel not as a besieged Jewish homeland, but as the arbiter of freedom in the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza.
“The Israelis and their P.R. arm fundamentally didn’t understand the degree to which they were losing young people,” he said. “They reflexively played the Holocaust card over and over again,” he added, even as “we went from seeing pictures of Russians bombing Ukraine as a war crime to pictures of Israel bombing Gaza.” [ETA: Commenter Gator90 points out that the phrase “Holocaust card” is offensive. I should have noted this in the OP]
Support for Palestinians among the young, he said, “is going to last. I think it’s one of those generational shifts.”
The last time an antiwar movement faced a generational divide, many young people sat out the 1968 presidential election between Mr. Nixon and Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Mr. Nixon won the Electoral College by capturing four states by fewer than 88,000 total votes.
Professor Kazin recently published an article in the liberal journal The New Republic wondering whether history could repeat itself there, too.
“People like me were opposed to Humphrey, and were happy, in a sense, to see him lose,” he said. “Now, a lot of people are saying they’ll never go for Biden. And it’s not clear who they vote for, if they vote at all.”
The parallels between Biden and Humphrey on the one hand, and Trump and Nixon on the other, are worth considering. In particular, Biden, like Humphrey in his time, represents the liberal establishment, with the emphasis on both “liberal,”: i.e., not at all conservative but definitely not left either, and “establishment,” with everything that word conveys to the dissatisfied youth of the nation.
Nixon and Trump are the two most crooked men to ever be president, although Trump’s criminality is far more diverse and capacious than Nixon’s. (The biggest shift in American politics in the last half century is that in 1974 most members of the Republican establishment was ultimately not OK with having a criminal in the White House while today their successors are somewhere between tolerant of and wildly enthusiastic regarding that circumstance).
Biden won the youth vote by a huge margin — 24 points — in 2020, and he’s going to have to maintain something at least close to that margin in order to get re-elected. The notion that young people in particular won’t vote for Biden because of his handling of Israel’s retaliatory invasion of Gaza is even more perverse, if that’s possible, than the decision of a probably decisive cohort of young people not to vote for Hubert Humphrey over Richard Nixon 55 years ago because of Lyndon Johnson’s handling of Vietnam. But we’re in obvious danger of heading down down that road again.
Here’s a gift link to help celebrate the Christmas season: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/24/us/gaza-vietnam-student-protest.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Ik0.7U1d.ZYVKTcDlekDP&hpgrp=ar-abar&smid=url-share