Really, Must it Always be 1968?

Everything old is terrible again: The ’68 Chicago Democratic National Convention.

Dear Wags,

In 1968, my parents lived in a comfortable neighborhood just uphill from a distressed one that burst into flames. This was really before my time, but I suspect it was the beginning of the end of their marriage. Until that that convulsive moment, my father and mother shared a conventional domestic arrangement and Great Society liberalism.

When Hubert Humphrey, that year’s Democratic presidential nominee, came to town, he plopped my eldest sister on his knee, thanked my mother for her tireless committee work, and left my father with an autographed portrait that now sits on my desk. Meanwhile, a great nation toasted itself with Molotov cocktails. Their relationship was incinerated along with it.

By the mid ’70s, my parents had split up. My mom never voted Republican in her life and my dad never ticked a box for another Democrat . She went to grad school, left my father for her professor, and was profiled in the paper as a paragon of liberated womanhood. Along the way, she reinvented herself as a proud Latina and briefly sculpted her hair into something like an Afro (somebody gave her a Black Power pick to style it with). My father also tried a perm, with different results. Then he embraced Reaganomics and right wing talk radio.

Like so many Americans, 1968 was their fork in the road. From there, we all lurched into a grinding culture war.

The interesting and complicated beings who raised me are not here to ride out 2024, a rocky political year that shares too much with the one that divided them. The national attention span is rabbity, but in grand historical terms, 1968’s mayhem was a moment ago. If you came of age in the decades since, you have shivered in its shadow. Arguments that kicked off then simply refuse to die. Listen to the rhetoric of today’s populist right and identitarian left, and hear their echoes.

There are protests at Columbia again, disruptions that have spread to scores of other campuses. As cops drag protestors away, there’s loose talk about revolution, imperialism, fascism, and outside agitators. Radical Chic is back in style, and so is Love it or Leave it. On left and right, there’s rage against The System, which is apparently still firmly welded to the military-industrial complex. In too many places, there’s also a thirst for violence. Provocative brutalities can now be captured on viral video, a bit of a downgrade from Walter Cronkite.

What’s missing? Only the desire to give peace a chance.

What pernicious nostalgia all this is. In so many ways, America is nothing like it was in 1968. This flawed republic is richer, fairer, more diverse, and far less dangerous than it was then. America’s youth are reliably obnoxious, but they are not being drafted to fight in a terrible war. Thankfully, we’ve been spared assassinations. Yet parallels remain for anybody to draw.

A Robert F. Kennedy is running for president. But RFK Jr. is a different animal from his father, who was murdered on June 6, 1968 by a deranged man angered by U.S. support for Israel. Kennedys used to run on optimism; this one has swapped it for a tin foil hat. He’s polling at around 13 percent. That’s the same electoral slice that enabled another third party disruptor, George Wallace, to carry five Southern states. Wallace helped Richard M. Nixon beat Humphrey. Until recently, many Trump backers seemed to think this RFK would do them the same favor.

More history: Humphrey became the Democrats’ nominee after President Lyndon Johnson declined to run again. Johnson, a back-slapping deal maker, was bedeviled by radicals on his left flank and reactionaries on his right. This may ring a bell with the current occupant of the White House—back-slapping deal-maker Joe Biden. Somehow, he’s resisted pressure to follow Johnson’s example and drop out.

Like LBJ, Biden has the bad luck to be an institution man in an anti-establishment age. He’s nipped at by protesters who label him Genocide Joe and MAGA types who call him a doddering marionette of the Deep State. This year’s Democratic National Convention will be held in Chicago, 1968’s notorious DNC venue. Will there be blood in the streets, like in the bad old days of Yippies, Panthers, and the Weather Undergound? The last time we were here, it took the Democrats 30 years to recover.

On the other side of the political menu, we have a Nixon/Wallace combo platter in Donald J. Trump. Trump doesn’t have Nixon’s intellect or managerial capability, but he shares his cunning and sense of grievance. They obviously have criminality in common. Trump wants nothing more than to carve out Nixonian exemptions for himself. Or, as our 37th president put it, When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal! As 45 fends off myriad little Watergates, that old line has become his defense strategy. It might just work.

Nixon lacked Trump’s media savvy and eventually bent to opposition from within his own party. After Watergate, the GOP put his antics behind them. But they may be forever broken by Trump, who totally dominates the party’s power structure.

Trump managed this takeover while drawing inspiration from Nixon’s era of American Carnage. He loves law and order talk, counting enemies, and promising to solve thorny foreign dilemmas lickety-split. Nixon sabotaged the Paris peace talks to to hang Vietnam on Humphrey, while Trump tried to get Republicans to shiv Biden over Ukraine. The Silent Majority is back! he once declared. No wonder he’s constantly compared to Archie Bunker, a TV character many voters don’t even remember.

Like it or not, this election is shaping up to be another Battle of the Boomers. Trump, who is 77, just makes the generational cut, while Biden is only slightly too old at 81. The Democrat was 20 in 1962, and still clings to Camelot. The MAGA candidate reached that age in 1966—no wonder he’s more Burn Baby Burn.

While Trump pours accelerant on civil discord, a new generation of radicals provides more kindling. All that awful jargon, the snaps given to systemic oppression, and the shaking down of nervous elites comes from an old playbook. This movement has already given way to cynicism, guerilla cosplay, antisemitism, and reflexive loathing of the Man. How much it shares with MAGA.

Performance on the extremes is amped up by social media. New rebels of various ideologies hate Biden for putting lipstick on the pig of the Establishment. Like their predecessors, they think splitting the Democrats will hasten The Revolution. The assumptions are almost touchingly naïve. Trump happens to be counting on them.

He may have misread the moment. Nixon won 60.7 percent of the electorate when he ran for a second term in 1972, but by any measure, Trump was a less able president. His approval rating hovered around 41 percent during his term and he lost reelection. He’s been churning in denial ever since. Now he sits in a drab Manhattan courtroom, enduring a trial about whether he paid hush money to a porn star. The public may not be paying much attention, but it’s still a diminishing experience. Wherever Nixon is, he must be thinking amateur hour.

Little cracks appear here and there. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, written off as toady, defied MAGA when it came to Ukraine aid: To put it bluntly, I would rather send bullets to Ukraine than American boys. My son is going to begin in the Naval Academy this fall. This is a live-fire exercise for me as it is so many American families. Maybe, new coalitions are forming. Just maybe, we’re finally weary of reboots.

The Biden administration sticks to its unsexy script. It wants voters to appreciate legislative accomplishments and reminds voters that Trump’s policy priority is himself. It also believes there is a Silent Majority—for normality and a government that can be safely ignored. In the end, a few thousand people in a handful of swing states will decide if they are right.

If Biden were a Churchillian orator, he might make the case that this moment is closer to 1938 than 1968— a time not for petty culture clashes but more profound choosing. Do want to stick with a world order that has mostly served us well, or smash it up to the delight of bomb-throwers? The usual suspects are locked in six decades worth of dead-end arguments. They don’t just want to keep fighting the culture wars of ’68, they can’t survive without them.

It could all go on forever. Or perhaps this is the final time aging warriors will grapple over the same blasted patch. The past lingers, but it need not define us. And what a glorious relief it would be, to have 1968 dead and buried at last.

Yours ever,

M.V. Fenwick

The Age of Grievance by Frank Bruni

Bruni is the latest smarty to take a searching look at our hopelessly polarized era. Whatever we believe, why must we sound so bitter and victimized? Why has public discourse devolved into a list of trifling slights? The Times columnist and Duke professor is as exhausted by tribalism as anybody, but he’s also hopeful. Whatever our algorithms gin up, Bruni believes Americans remain generous at heart. We need only put down on our phones to remember. — Maudie Atkinson

Fervor by Toby Lloyd

The Rosenthals are North London Jews who believe in the literal truth of the Bible. Hannah is writing a book about her father-in-law, Yosef, a Holocaust survivor. But it turns out he’s hidden terrible secrets about his time in the camps. Meanwhile, something strange is happening to Hannah’s daughter Elsie, who may have delved too deeply into ancient Jewish mysticism. Has the clan been afflicted by something satanic? Elsie’s brother Tovyah, a brilliant Oxford student, thinks what really plagues his loved ones is their fixation with ritual and past trauma. It makes for a brilliant tale of faith and family dysfunction. — Esther Shapiro

The Haunty Boys

Dead Boy Detectives (Neflix). Wag Supremo Neil Gaiman dreamed up a lovable DC comic starring two ghostly sleuths. Charles (Jayden Revri), expired in the 1980s, while Edwin (George Rexstrew) shuffled off his mortal coil in 1916. Rather than just wafting around going boo, the pair set up an agency to liberate souls trapped in limbo. This Netflix adaptation zips along, with the lads freeing wayward wraiths and pissing off evil spirits. They’re joined by a clairvoyant named Crystal Palace (Kassius Nelson), who proves the medium isn’t just the message, she gets the best lines. — Lydia Deetz

Running on Empty

The New York Times Presents: Broken Horses (FX). A nonstop parade of tragedies afflicts horse racing. Journalists Joe Drape and Melissa Hoppert have long reported on abuses at the track. Now they’ve co-produced a doc on why so many thoroughbreds are injured and euthanized. What’s exposed is a sport that breeds animals for the impossible. Racing officials promise reforms, but they can’t fix the fundamentals of an ancient, ruthlessly competitive game. — Mi Taylor

International Woman of Mystery

The Veil (FX/Hulu). Imogen (Wonderful Elisabeth Moss) is an MI6 agent with a million identities and nearly as many ways of slaughtering her enemies. She’s been tasked to find out as much as she can about mysterious Adilah (Yumna Marwan) who may be able to prevent a massive terrorist attack. From there, we roar around the world, crossing and double-crossing. This race against the clock is elevated by Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, who arms a great cast (Josh Charles, Dali Benssalah, and James Purefoy, among others) with a lethal script. — Alicia Huberman

There is no shortage of poor souls willing to humiliate themselves on reality television. Back in 2013, a group of American women signed up to participate in a show called I Wanna Marry "Harry.” Contestants somehow believed they were competing for the affections of the real ginger prince. In reality, he was an actor with a dye job named Matt Hicks. How could anybody fall for that? In The Bachelor of Buckingham Palace, Scott Bryan talks to former contestants who fess up to being duped. When it comes to love and fame, we’re all patsies. —Lily Moscovitz

Let’s make it two weeks of Taylor Swift releases. Yanks have a weird block when comes to using the shorthand for 14 days. Fortnight, her shiny little number about a brief affair, comes with a smooth backup from Post Malone. What happens when it’s all over? Run into you sometimes, ask about the weather/Now you’re in my backyard/Turned into good neighbors/Your wife waters flowers/I wanna killer her. Cheaters never prosper! —Noah Solloway

Nothing is certain, everything changes/We’re spirit and bone marching to the grave/
There are no answers, there are only/Questions, chaos, and faith. Singer-songwriter Joy Oladokun delivers a stirring anthem about the meaning of everything in Questions, Chaos & Faith. If you’re feeling rudderless, her voice will guide you gently back to shore. — Rose Arbuthnot

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