Numerous internet commenters are asking if we will go through “another summer of 1968.”
Maybe, maybe not – but that era’s worth revisiting, because the radicalization of the left that occurred then has metastasized to overwhelm many major cities (as their poverty and crime rates demonstrate), and has swept nearly all of academia and much of the permanent bureaucracy into its ranks.
I was 22 that summer, an infantry second lieutenant stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the home of the 82nd Airborne Division and the Army’s Special Forces (the famous “Green Berets”).
Anti-Vietnam demonstrations were rife, while dozens of cities saw protests following the April 4 assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
The Civil Rights Act of 1968 (passed April 11 with Republican votes when many Democrats refused to support it) was an effective response. But inner cities still burned, while the well-intentioned but utterly wrongheaded War on Poverty began its decades-long march toward destabilizing the black family.
When things escalated in Washington, D.C., all the combat-qualified troops at Bragg were lined up so that every fourth one could draw combat gear for riot duty.
I missed that cut, but one of the iconic photos of the ’60s shows a black Airborne trooper who didn’t standing beside an M-60 machine gun – on the steps of the U.S. Capitol.
Anti-war street violence contributed greatly to the election of Richard Nixon as president, as TV cameras showed police cracking heads outside the Democrats’ convention in Chicago.
That was where Lyndon Johnson’s vice president, the mainstream liberal Hubert Humphrey (“the bland leading the bland”), was nominated to succeed him.
Humphrey’s defeat led to the party’s evisceration by the left over succeeding decades, so there is now no right wing and very little middle remaining in Democratic ranks.
While the Republican Party remains at least nominally conservative, Democrats this week saw socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders willingly bend his knee to Hillary Clinton. I guess he got what he wanted from her.
Not coincidentally, we have riots again, and the demonization of police in general, and a rush to judgment about all police shootings before any facts are known.
In fact, a study released this month by Harvard economics professor Roland Fryer (who happens to be black) “found no evidence of racial bias in police shootings even though officers were more likely to interact physically with non-whites than whites.”
And Heather Mac Donald of the conservative Manhattan Institute, author of a new book, “The War on Cops,” said in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, “Make no mistake: Assertions about systemic, deadly police racism are false. … But no number of studies debunking this fiction has penetrated the conventional story line.”
She adds, “Police officers face an 18.5 times greater chance of being killed by a black male than an unarmed black male has of being killed by a police officer.”
Meanwhile, black-on-black killings, which comprise the vast majority of black homicides, are virtually ignored by our national media and politicians.
To them, such facts are irrelevant. Guns and Republicans are the real threats. Meanwhile, the small number of truly unjustified police shootings are wildly exaggerated by activists to smear all officers – and put them all in danger.
Thus, any hope of dealing with the true factors behind black homicides is trampled for facile political advantage.
How will violence, especially if it escalates (and the news is full of people taking potshots at cops this week), affect the election? If the Nixon precedent holds, law-and-order voters might show up in greater numbers to support a Republican. Is there even a Ronald Reagan in our future?
Sadly, Reagan’s party instead appears set to nominate a blustering political neophyte.
Still, a Quinnipac poll released Wednesday shows Donald Trump leading in two swing states, Florida and Pennsylvania, and tied with Clinton in Ohio.
And an NBC survey had him cutting her national lead to just 3 points after FBI Director James Comey described her as “extremely careless” with classified information, which he strongly suggested made it vulnerable to hacking by our enemies.
In that same NBC survey, 56 percent of respondents said she should have been indicted. But Comey didn’t endorse that, saying she should get off because she was utterly clueless about her legal obligation to protect such data.
If she really is that stupid, she is unqualified to be president. But she isn’t a dimwit. Instead, she counted on her position to protect her from any accountability for her self-serving venality and corruption.
And it did. Thus, only the voters can judge her now.
So if I were you, I might worry about the summer of 2016 – but not too much.
I’d worry more about the winter of 2017. And the spring, summer, and fall.
And then there’s 2018, and 2019, and 2020 … .
M.D. Harmon, a retired journalist and military officer, is a freelance writer and speaker. He can be contacted at:
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