The Tribune

With Charlie Harper

As America writhes in agony over the death of George Floyd and its bloody aftermath, politicians, pundits, journalists, observers and just plain citizens are trying to make sense of all the chaos, confusion and heartbreak. One way of doing this is to compare what’s happening today with sometime in the nation’s past. Since the US survived that comparable period, it will survive the current collection of calamities. Or so the thinking goes.

For many, the most accurate point of comparison is America in April 1968. Then, amid the social and cultural pandemic of the Vietnam War and continuing backlash at landmark civil rights legislation pushed through Congress three years earlier by President Lyndon Johnson, the nation was horrified by the assassination in Memphis of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.

As news of this unimaginable tragedy spread through the country, riots erupted in major cities everywhere in America. There were news accounts for weeks of angry, often violent confrontations between demonstrators and police and national guard units. Property damage from looting and arson was extensive in cities, usually in African American neighbourhoods. Most Americans, by then inured to violent protests against the unpopular war in Vietnam, were nevertheless shocked by the intensity and violence of the demonstrations that followed King’s death.

Today, television and print news are still full of reports of the latest developments in the matter of the May 25 death of  African American George Floyd on a Minneapolis street corner at the hands and knee of a city police officer against whom 18 complaints had been filed by citizens in his roughly 19 years of service on the force. Onlookers’ cell phone video recordings of Floyd’s death by asphyxiation quickly guaranteed this case would be sensational and inflammatory.

Peaceful - and sometimes violent - demonstrations against police killings of black Americans now continue more than a week after the death of 46-year-old Floyd, a onetime star high school athlete in Houston who had lived in the Minneapolis area for six years before losing his job as a restaurant security guard after COVID-related layoffs. Floyd had been confronted by police after store owners accused him of passing counterfeit currency to pay for a purchase.

But this is not 1968. Comparisons are mostly, but not entirely, circumstantial.

Today’s events and those of spring 1968 are linked mostly by the appalling murders of two different black men and the resulting unrest, protests and violent confrontations with law enforcement authorities in American cities. The main differences should not be overlooked, but there is one similarity we’ll discuss later.

Dr King is one of the most significant figures in the history of American public life. A Nobel Prize winner whose eloquence and consistent, principled dedication to justice and equality make most Americans proud more than 50 years after his death - he was a truly transformational figure. In death, he was martyred as an individual. The nation’s loss was personal.

George Floyd will take his sad place in the sordid history of police violence against minorities in the US, as one more senseless victim. Yet the deaths of both Floyd and King sparked historic responses from the American people.

Also, America in 1968 was riven by generational social change. President Johnson’s civil rights legislation had inspired both pride and angry resentment, setting in motion a political upheaval which compelled the Democratic Party to cast off their traditional Southern orientation and embrace African Americans and their political influence.

Republican conservatism, meanwhile, began to move from the classical, doctrinaire views of Barry Goldwater to a more subtle, pro-white orientation that persists to this day.

At the same time, the US was mired around the chronological midpoint of its long, costly involvement in a Vietnam War that most historians agree it could never win. Hundreds of thousands of young men were conscripted to fight an elusive, experienced, committed enemy on his own turf.

Although the US today is still nominally committed to a similar losing effort in Afghanistan which is the longest-running war in American history, that fight is waged by volunteers, not conscripts. And with relatively few American forces remaining, the war in Afghanistan is an afterthought for most.

America is instead beset by a public health emergency which has claimed over 110,000 lives. Added to this domestic political divisions have deepened over 25 years of open partisan discord, to a degree that would have been almost inconceivable in 1968.

The cultural and social violence in 2020 has been compared with what happened in 1968. We will see what the eventual toll of today’s confrontations will be. But it is interesting and perhaps instructive to take a look at the political reaction to that violence.

In 1968, the loser in the 1960 presidential election saw an opportunity. As cities burned and the Democratic convention in Chicago turned into the most violent political gathering in modern American history, Richard Nixon became the law and order candidate for President. Promising an end to the summer of civic unrest and disorder that left many Americans profoundly frightened and confused, Nixon won the general election in 1968 and was re-elected four years later.

Now, with his plan to run for re-election on the strength of the American economy having run aground and his attempts to hoodwink the electorate with lies and discredited conspiracy theories having temporarily run out of steam, US President Trump has decided to take advantage of the current situation to try to run on Nixon’s old law and order platform.

It actually suits him. As a would-be strongman deriding “weak” Democratic governors and mayors for insufficient deployment of force in crushing peaceful protesters as well as criminal opportunists who loot and damage private property, Trump is trying to reassert his tough guy persona and regain some re-election momentum.

There is no requirement in such a portrayal for empathy. There is no need to even pretend to care about the underlying causes of the protests. It adds up to the figurative equivalent of not wearing a protective mask in the time of the coronavirus.

Will Trump’s latest gambit be successful? It didn’t help that one of his first moves was to pose at a church across Lafayette Square from the White House. As curfew hour approached Monday evening in Washington, Trump decided to order federal forces to clear out a path among protesters for him to walk to an Episcopal church that has often hosted other presidents and that was damaged in the current civil unrest.

Holding a Bible as though unaccustomed to doing so, Trump stood awkwardly before the church’s boarded-up windows and proclaimed his intention to crush the protests. He said he would use the US military if necessary. Reactions were swift and unflattering.

In an often-cited response, a prominent Jesuit priest said to reporters that “using the Bible as a prop while talking about sending in the military, bragging about how your country is the greatest in the world, and publicly mocking people on a daily basis, is pretty much the opposite of all Jesus stood for.

“Let me be clear. This is revolting. The Bible is not a prop. A church is not a photo op. Religion is not a political tool. And God is not a plaything.”

But religion has in fact become a political tool in the US, and the Republicans have used it to great advantage. Trump’s support among white evangelicals in particular remains strong and his insistence that churches be permitted to defy public stay-at-home orders is clearly what it seems to be – cynical pandering to an important part of his base of support.

Meanwhile, a new poll revealed that only 35 percent of Americans say Trump is honest and trustworthy, compared with 62 percent who say he is not.

And in addition to the worst public health crisis since 1918 and the worst economic crisis since 1933, Trump now faces the worst civil unrest since 1968.

On his record so far, Trump hasn’t handled any of these crises very well. Time might be running low for a dramatic political recovery, tough guy or not. Photo ops and bombastic claims might not be enough.