Please Don't Make This Mistake Today

I Opposed Humphrey in ’68. All I Did Was Help Prolong the Vietnam War. 
Michael Kazin
When I was young, the left I was a part of helped elect Nixon. Please don’t make a similar mistake today.
I remain as committed to the ideals of the left as I was back in 1968. But back then, in my small, disruptive fashion, I may have helped elect a president who ended the era when liberals dominated American politics, enacting policies like the Civil Rights Act and Medicare that benefit tens of millions of people. Under Richard Nixon, the nation began to move rightward, a shift from which we are still struggling to recover. Before the Watergate scandal brought him down, he also took four long years to withdraw U.S. troops from Vietnam, after another 20,000 or so U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians had died.

​Donald Trump may not embroil the nation in a long and bloody foreign conflict. But he’ll hand Ukraine to Putin, and he’ll give Israel a total free hand to kill as many Palestinians as it can. And here at home, Trump has already vowed to wage a war against “the Communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” Such invective most definitely includes young Americans who sympathize with the Palestinian cause. To support the Democrat who runs against him next year should not be shrugged off as voting for a lesser evil. It will be a necessary choice to preserve what, in his final speech, Martin Luther King Jr. called “the right to protest for right” that is so vital to whatever “greatness” our nation possesses. 
Read the entire Piece. 
 
https://newrepublic.com/article/177353/hubert-humphrey-1968-loss-prolong-vietnam-war
 

Michael Kazin’s latest book is What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party. He teaches history at Georgetown University.