"Heed lessons of '72"

Religious studies professor Ira Chernus writes in "Heed lessons of '72," an op-ed piece in today's Baltimore Sun, that the Democratic Party of 2008 must avoid making the same mistake it did in 1972. In that year Democrats nominated the antiwar candidate George McGovern as their presidential standardbearer. Most Americans were by that time against the Vietnam War, but instead of backing McGovern, they reelected Richard Nixon in a landslide.

Republicans tarred McGovern as the candidate of "acid, amnesty, and abortion." LSD, known as "acid," was the drug of choice in the ostentatious counterculture of the day. The political radicals of the era were calling for amnesty for draft resisters. The following year, 1973, would find a liberal Supreme Court upholding a woman's constitutional "right to choose" in Roe v. Wade.

Chernus writes that the main reason McGovern lost was the insistence of insiders in the Democratic Party power structure that the platform McGovern would run on should contain a strong antiwar plank. Meanwhile, Nixon ran on a pledge to wind the war down gradually, while preserving America's "honor" — a code word, Chernus points out, for "keeping the nation's moorings in familiar cultural traditions of the past."

Chernus thinks this year's presidential contest parallels that one. Most voters actually oppose the Iraq War, but there is great danger that the skin color or unusual name and family background of Barack Obama will trigger a victory for war hero John McCain nevertheless, particularly if McCain is handed strong antiwar language in the Democratic platform on which he can embroider code words to draw votes from those who fear too much "change" in America too soon.

This analysis interests your blogger oldstyleliberal greatly, in part because he thinks it's correct, and in part because it reveals something profound about human nature. Most people want peace, preferring it in the abstract to war hands down. What's more, most people think this war is a mistake. Yet such sentiments take a back seat to an inchoate fear that coming out strongly against the war is the sign of a candidate who is more of a "goody goody" than America is ready for.

So people want to keep the "better angels of our nature" on a short leash. The "liberal" politics that promises to fulfill our human longing for peace (or justice, or equality, or unfettered liberty) needs to be restrained, lest America grow flabby and weak. We do not dare be more "goody goody" than our enemies, or they will have us for breakfast.

When push comes to shove, fear trumps our "better angels" every time.