Here’s What Happened the Last Time the Left Got Nasty
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... The decade began with the civil rights movement, whose efforts brought about world-historic change. We sometimes forgetthat many of the acts we now celebrate as valorous instances of civil disobedience—the sit-ins to integrate Woolworths and other lunch counters, Freedom Rides to integrate interstate travel—drew fire at the time for their impertinence or incivility. But those protests don’t provide a proper parallelto the hounding of administration officials in public eateries. They have their analogues, rather, in today’s mass actions at the Capitolor the “nurse-in” at New Jersey‘s Immigration and Customs Enforcement center—forms of confrontation that, I’d wager, none of Trump’s critics find petty or beyond the pale. In truth, the civil rights movement of the 1960s remains a model today precisely because of its Gandhian philosophy, its devotion to taking the high road, which signaled the nobility of the demonstrators’ motives and the justness of their cause and as a result won over public opinion.
Just a few years later, though, America’s political culture had changed dramatically. Despite the movement’s historic achievements—and the success of liberals in securing scores of other major reforms—young radicals grew impatient with the pace of change, especially in Vietnam. Peaceful protests continued, but growing numbers of militants now styled themselves revolutionaries and adopted tactics to match. Groups like the Weather Underground preached and carried out violence, including lethal violence, which was deemed “as American as cherry pie” by H. Rap Brown, rendering ironic the name of the group he’d come to lead, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. (Brown, who now goes by Jamil Al-Amin, is currently serving a life sentence for murder.)
Most activists stopped short of planting bombs and shooting police officers. But many still blew past the boundaries of what nearly everyone considered legitimate protest. Demonstrators not only directed chants of “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” at President Lyndon Johnson; they also accosted officials of his administration when they set out in public. In 1967, when Secretary of State Dean Rusk tried to attend a banquet of the Foreign Policy Association in New York, a radical group called Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers (often called “the Motherfuckers” for short) threw eggs, rocks and bags of cows’ blood, though Rusk slipped into the hotel unscathed. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was spat upon in an airport and called a baby killer; on a visit to Harvard, a hostile mob encircled his car and rocked it back and forth until police spirited him to safety via a tunnel. Antiwar radicals even tried to set fire to McNamara’s Colorado vacation home—twice. A few years later, after he’d left government, someone tried to throw him off the Martha’s Vineyard ferry.
The confrontations continued after Johnson yielded the presidency to Richard Nixon. Since the 1950s, liberals had regarded Nixon—as they see Trump today—as having uniquely trampled on the norms of American political culture. “Certain charges are not made; there are unwritten rules in the game of politics,” wrote Richard Strout, in The New Republicin 1958. “But the lethal young Nixon does not accept these rules. He is out for the kill and the scalp at any cost.” Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., agreed, saying Nixon was “the only major American politician in our history who came to prominence by techniques which, if generally adopted, would destroy the whole fabric of mutual confidence on which democracy rests.” The belief (not unfounded) that Nixon would stop at nothing in pursuit of victory primed his critics to spy danger in his every move. ...