It’s reported that some student activists on college campuses are shunning Kamala Harris’ presidential candidacy and intend to either sit out the election or vote for a third-party candidate.
The Boston Globe reports that the disaffected students come from both sides of the campus divide: Pro-Palestinian activists who abhor the Biden administration’s support for Israel in the destruction of Gaza; and Jewish students who believe that Harris has not been forceful enough in condemning pro-Palestinian demonstrations and resurgent antisemitism.
“The lesser of two evils is still evil,” a Harvard student told the Globe.
No one can be sure how widespread such sentiments are. Young people are hardly monolithic in their thinking, any more than is any other demographic group. But in any case, we have two words of warning for young people, as well as older but not wiser voters, who are thinking of sitting out this presidential election or casting a protest vote against Harris: Richard. Nixon.
Yes, we know, it seems like ancient history. But as somebody correctly observed, while history may not repeat itself, it does rhyme. And 1968 is a reasonable, though not perfect, analogue for this year.
President Lyndon Johnson ended his re-election bid in that turbulent year amid growing opposition to his unwise and unpopular prosecution of the war in Vietnam. Vice President Hubert Humphrey secured the Democratic nomination without the benefit of primary victories and faced off against the Republican nominee, Nixon, in the general election.
Anti-war activists, of which there were many, found Humphrey’s complicity in the Johnson administration’s Vietnam policy abhorrent and declared a “plague on both your houses” in withholding their votes. For them, the fact that America during the Johnson administration had made big strides in civil rights legislation and in combating poverty was overshadowed by Vietnam, the only issue that mattered.
Humphrey trailed badly in the polls for most of the summer, but his campaign caught fire at the end of September when he gave a nationally televised speech calling for a unilateral halt to U.S. bombing of North Vietnam. In the end, Humphrey got 42.7 % of the popular vote to Nixon’s 43.4%, a narrow enough margin that it conceivably might have been overcome by the support of anti-war voters who refused to participate.
As one of the most prominent of those activists, Michael Ansara, reflected in a 2016 article, this was a profound failure of political and moral imagination. The anti-war movement incorrectly assumed that the war in Vietnam would simply drag on in its current course whichever candidate won.
To the contrary, Nixon soon unleashed unholy terror by carpet bombing large parts neutral, neighboring Cambodia that were supposed to be sanctuaries for communist insurgents. This campaign cost of the lives of thousands of civilians and had terrible lasting consequences; many historians believe it set the stage for Pol Pot and the Cambodian genocide.
Domestically, the horror shop of Nixon dirty tricks is by now legend, from the enemies list to Watergate. Add to this his cynical war on drugs and dog-whistle race-baiting and you have part of the ugly picture.
Youth perhaps is particularly susceptible to imagining that things can’t get worse and to assigning a high value to moral purity. But things can and do get worse, and morality in the political realm cannot exist outside its application in exigent circumstances. If pro-Palestinian activists think that things could not possibly get worse in Gaza or elsewhere in the Middle East no matter who is elected, why would Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu be doing all in his manipulative power to ensure that Donald Trump wins? Harris has called for a cease-fire in Gaza as well as expressing her support for Israel. Which do you think is more likely to rein in the ongoing carnage?
And if students distressed by anti-Semitic expressions on campus think that there is not a dime’s worth of difference between Harris and Trump, consider that he draws support from white nationalists such as those who chanted “Jews will not replace us” at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017.
Retired Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during parts of the Trump and Biden administrations, has warned that Trump is “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous man in America,” according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward. If the polls are correct, the Harris-Trump race is on the razor’s edge. If that is not sufficient reason to overcome your scruples and vote for Harris, then welcome to the world that Trump remakes.