WARNING: Very long post ahead. Is this the beginning of re-emergence of political violence in the epitome of democracy?



By Todd Gitlin March 18
Todd Gitlin is a professor of
journalism and sociology and
chair of the Ph.D. program in
communications at Columbia
University.
On Oct. 24, 1968 , at Manhattan’s Madison
Square Garden, in the very heartland of the
“intellectual morons,” as the third-party
presidential candidate George Wallace was
given to say, Wallace told a cheering
overflow crowd of 20,000 about a protester
who had laid down in front of Lyndon B.
Johnson’s limousine. His take was this:
“When November comes, the first time they
lie down in front of my limousine, it’ll be the
last one they ever lay down in front of.”
Protesters shouted in the arena. “After
November 5, you anarchists are through in
this country,” he told the demonstrators.
“You’d better have your say now.” Outside
the hall, Wallace supporters and
adversaries clashed with each other and
with the police, while inside, officers
rescued a group of black protesters
surrounded by Wallaceites who chanted:
“Kill ’em! Kill ’em!”
Richard Strout, a longtime New Republic
columnist not given to overstatement, heard
the crowd from the balcony and wrote,
“There is menace in the blood shout of the
crowds.” That year, political violence
flourished. In April alone, police bloodied
peaceful antiwar demonstrators in Chicago;
a shootout between cops and Black
Panthers in Oakland, Calif., left one Panther
dead; police beat many students occupying
Columbia University buildings and arrested
more than 700; scores of cities exploded in
riots, including assaults on police and
firefighters, after Martin Luther King Jr.
was assassinated. August brought more
assaults on demonstrators, almost all of
them nonviolent, at the Democratic National
Convention in Chicago. America was a
tinderbox. Wallace knew he was playing
with fire.
Blood shouts are back, and some of them
come from Donald Trump’s stage. In Las
Vegas last month, Trump said of one
protester, “I’d like to punch him in the
face,” waxing nostalgic for an era when
protesters would be “carried out on
stretchers.” “We’re not allowed to push
back anymore,” Trump rued. The day after
an enthusiast threw a sucker punch at a
demonstrator being led out of a Fayetville,
N.C. event, Trump said: “The audience hit
back. That’s what we need a little more of.”
This mood ripples outward from Trump’s
rallies. The billionaire canceled a Chicago
appearance last week amid tussles between
his supporters and demonstrators who had
gathered for the event. In Kansas that day,
a white motorcyclist assaulted a
Bangladeshi student (Wichita State’s
student-body vice president) and his
Hispanic friend, shouting: “Trump will take
our country from you guys!”
Wallace roused his crowds against left-
wingers in the same way Trump turns his
followers’ rage against Muslims and
immigrants. Like Wallace, the game Trump
plays is, “Make my day.” Disruptors in his
audiences are props for his performances,
rallying his supporters more fervently and
defensively around him. The result, as in
1968, is a growing climate of violence. It
feels as if, somewhere, fuses are lit.
The menace of the late 1960s eventually
subsided as Richard M. Nixon harnessed his
“silent majority” to calm the political climate
early in his presidency as the ultra-radicals
burned through whatever base of
sympathy they had started with. But today’s
chaos won’t be so easy to stop. The splenetic
fury Trump taps may be immutable, and no
Nixon is on the horizon to focus it.
When Trump says that “the police are the
most mistreated people in this country,” he
channels Wallace, who argued that the
Supreme Court had “handcuffed” the cops
with Miranda v. Arizona and other
decisions. “I’m going to give the total
support of the presidency to the policemen
and the firemen in this country,” Wallace
said. “. . . My election as president is going to
put some backbone in the backs of some
mayors and governors.” It was his coded
invitation to mayhem. Wallace’s America
was already raw, inflamed by years of
confrontations between an insurgent civil
rights movement and the violent backlash
against it, riots, assassinations, and turmoil
over an unpopular and unwinnable
Vietnam War.
Wallace’s third-party movement couldn’t
last, and Nixon was the reason. The
Republican candidate was the shrewd and
ostensibly more civilized alternative to the
flagrantly racist and demagogic Wallace.
The former vice president had only
narrowly lost the 1960 election to John F.
Kennedy, and in the interim, befriending
Republicans of all stripes, he had
rebranded himself “new.” He projected
reasonable manners.
Nixon wore this cloak of respectability to
outflank Wallace. Denying that his call for
law and order was racist code, he
campaigned in an approximately
presidential manner because he knew
where to turn the silent majority’s
animosity: against the left. Wallace hated
hippies as much as radicals. Nixon was
more subtle in mobilizing reactions against
the cultural changes of the ’60s — civil
rights, feminism, gay rights, revolts against
authority overall. (Working-class rage didn’t
have a dollars-and-cents dimension then
because the country was floating on a lively,
growing economy.) Convincing his voters
that he could put down such unnatural
weirdness without so many snarls, Nixon
was able to confine Wallace’s electoral
college victories to five Deep South states,
the least-reconstructed zone of the
Confederacy.
As a result, Nixon rode a largely unified
Republican Party into the White House.
Democrats, unable to break with the
unpopular war they were responsible for,
and unable to fend off anti-black backlash,
were helpless. Nixon picked off working-
class white Democrats and added them to
the Republican base. Having presented
himself as a law-and-order man, he could
turn on a dime and adroitly declare in his
1968 victory speech that he would “bring
the American people together.”
Nixon and Wallace together won 64 percent
of the white working-class vote. Once in
power, Nixon finished off Wallace as a
political force by doing what his silent
majority wanted: With the help of a
compliant press, he pushed Vietnam off the
TV screen by claiming he was phasing out
the war and by bringing home some
American troops even as the bombing
increased and casualties mounted. He
mobilized the FBI against the increasingly
confrontational Black Panthers and other
left-wing groups. He sent signals that he was
in sync with the backlash: In 1970, he
proudly accepted a hard hat from
construction workers who had assaulted
nonviolent demonstrators near Wall Street
after the Kent State killings; in his second
term, he appointed the hard hats’ leader as
secretary of labor. His message to a fed-up
public was: You can trust your duly
constituted authorities to beat back
subversives. The nation was becalmed,
episodes of riotous violence fell off and
Nixon was reelected in 1972 almost by
acclamation, winning 70 percent of the
white working-class vote.
Today’s nativist animus — and the violence
it has spurred — will not be so handily co-
opted. First, there are stickier economic
problems. In the past few decades,
plutocracy, globalization and compliant
governments have betrayed workers, most
of whom are white. Their decline began
long before NAFTA, with the rise of low-
wage foreign economies and a crushing,
decades-long assault on the unions that had
kept their wages up and their jobs in place.
If Trump enters the White House, he cannot
solve these problems. However often he
fulminates against trade deals, he cannot
conjure secure jobs for his fans. His
“beautiful wall,” whether built or unbuilt,
offers symbolic pleasures, but it would not
make them walk taller or elevate their
paychecks. Neither would tariffs, for which
the price would be high.
Then there are the cultural furies that fuel
the Trump campaign: As a hefty share of
white Americans see it, they’ve been forced
to suffer the depredations of a black
president whose middle name is Hussein —
at this late date, 43 percent of Republicans
still think he is a Muslim. What Trump holds
out to his thwarted followers are the joys of
instant, long-deferred gratification. When
his supporters say “he says what he thinks,”
they mean what they think and, even more,
feel. How thrilling that, at last, a big shot, a
winner, stands up for them, promises to
wall off the bad guys, or punch them in the
face, or both.
Most of all, though, there’s no respectable
version of Trump — no Nixon — waiting in
the wings to deliver on promises and
contain the free-floating hatred. There’s no
one to placate the enraged white working
class, especially the men, and it’s hard to
imagine policies that would make a re-
greatened America “take the country away
from you guys.”
Neither Trump nor his GOP rivals can
create that America — not soon, at any rate.
Merely having a white president again is
unlikely to mollify the angriest white voters.
They want more than walls and nastiness;
they want a viable, reliable economic life.
They want a world where whites have
secure, dignified jobs (better jobs, by the
way, than immigrants and other upstarts
who used to know their place). There’s
every reason to believe that they’ll continue
to feel victimized by malevolent interlopers:
Barack Obama, China, immigrants, Muslims.
Their frustration will have no outlet; no
deliverance is in sight.
Even if Trump retired from politics
tomorrow, the political mainstream has
little or nothing to offer these voters: not
Ted Cruz, not Paul Ryan, not tea party tax
and welfare cuts, not Hillary Clinton or
Bernie Sanders (who would face a
Republican Congress determined to block
their proposals anyway). Cultural backlash
is hard to roll back with policies; it takes on
a life of its own and prompts belligerent
paranoia against “you guys.” This American
trend is not exceptional: Support for the
same kind of nativism and authoritarianism
has been growing for four decades in
Europe.
Because this rage has no easy fix, spatters of
nativist violence are likely into the next
administration. If that is Trump’s, he could
always try the Nixonian mix of centrism and
brute force to contain some of the anger,
but remedial policies alone cannot stop the
backlash he has furthered. It is deep and
unforgiving — so much so that some of
Trump’s legions might be available for
freelance violence. In fact, if Trump loses,
he might decide it would be fun to serve as
a figurehead for that movement. White
police officers, feeling crowded by the Black
Lives Matter movement, might feel the call
to contribute to the backlash, as they did
across the country during the Wallace era.
The difference is that, as a national
candidate, Wallace was an outsider; Trump,
by contrast, is on the verge of conquering
the Republican Party.
In fact, Trump’s bludgeoning rhetoric may
be even more dangerous than Wallace’s.
Defeat could prove to be Trump’s victory,
just as Barry Goldwater’s 1964 rout paved
the way for Ronald Reagan’s ascent. Trump
has opened the gates for imitators in the
years to come — not only mainstream
politicians (he has already won the support
of right-wing Florida Gov. Rick Scott) but
nativist outliers all over. Riotous actions are
seeping out of the campaign and into
ordinary civic life: Basketball fans at a
largely white Indiana high school, for
instance, taunted the players from a heavily
Latino school last month with a poster of
Trump and chants of “Build a wall!”
If Trump arrives at the GOP convention a
few votes shy of a majority and has the
nomination wrested from him, he said
Wednesday, “I think you’d have riots.”
Tossing lit matches into dry straw, he’s
probably right. The future is bright with the
flames of chaos.
Twitter: @toddgitlin


https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/after-1968-nixon-helped-end-political-violence-this-time-trump-cant/2016/03/18/78a47cdc-ebd9-11e5-a6f3-21ccdbc5f74e_story.html?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-a%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

God can

God shall. For those panicking on d possibilities of world war 3, its not gonna happen on earth because the atomic and nuclear weapons will be too much for the earth. Or we fight it with sticks and matchetS.