Newt continues his series with a focus on the movement:
The 2020 election is a continuation of a conflict about the nature of America which began in the 1960s. The first clear and vivid political collision of that conflict was in 1972.
Because Theodore White’s Making of the President 1972 is such a compelling analysis of the conflict in which we still remain, I am using it as an outline for four consecutive columns. The first was on the general parallel between 1972 and 2020. The second was on the power of the elite media. The fourth will be on the tragic consequences of the failed ideology of the Left and the human costs of bureaucratic inertia and ideological fanaticism.
This column explores what White called “the movement” and the mutation of ideas, which led to the movement and defined its ruthlessness and willingness to break all the rules.
The liberalism which had dominated the Democratic Party from President Franklin D. Roosevelt through President John F. Kennedy began to be replaced in the 1960s. As White described it, the “Liberal Idea… hardened into the Liberal Theology.”
In the 1960s, there was a swirling together of the Free Speech Movement, the Civil Rights movement, the Women’s Rights movement, the breakdown of sexual inhibition, the rise of Black Power as an ideology, the Gay Rights movement, the anti-war movement (with a radical wing willing to bomb professors and innocent citizens), and the collapse of the idea of law and order — leading to a dramatic rise in crime and violence in virtually all of our major cities. People understood that when the United States Army had to be sent into Detroit to put down a riot, something had gone terribly wrong.
By 1968, Richard Nixon could campaign on “law and order” as a central theme, and it resonated with millions of Americans.
After the 1968 election, the two parties began moving in diametrically opposed directions. Southern whites, in general, and Northern blue-collar voters (often of Catholic background) were being driven toward the Republicans by the threat of a radically changed America. On the other hand, the Democrats were increasingly dominated by the demands of the Left.
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