Are Republicans in the position of the Whig Party? (op-ed)

In 1960 Republican Vice President Richard Nixon lost the Presidency to John F. Kennedy. It was the closest election in American history. Kennedy won the popular vote by one tenth of one percentage point. (49.7% to 49.6%).

Those numbers suggested a Republican reversal was attainable in 1964, but by the next presidential primary, Kennedy was dead and Nixon was out of politics. Still party loyalist and idealist should have made 1964 just as competitive, right? Wrong, it was the opposite of 1960, there was a proverbial parting of the waters and the Democratic Party secured the largest landslide victory in American history.

What happened to the Republicans?

In 1960 Nixon, a moderate, was able to unite the factions of the party, but in 1964 the Goldwater/conservative wing and liberal/Rockefeller wing were engaged in an ideological struggle over party direction. Goldwater won the nomination after a remarriage/adultery scandal alienated Rockefeller from social conservatives and women voters, but Goldwater couldn’t unify the party because of his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Many prominent Republican governors refused to support Goldwater and the remaining Black republicans left the party. Ever since the Great Depression Blacks began to convert from the Party of Lincoln to the Party of Roosevelt/ New Deal. This trend continued when Democratic President Harry Truman desegregated the military with an executive order in 1948. Over the next decade, Republicans still had considerable Black support. In 1956 Dwight Eisenhower received 39 percent of the black vote, in 1960 Nixon received 32 percent, but in 1964 Goldwater gave Democratic candidate Lyndon Johnson 94 percent of the black vote. (A record that stood until Obama received 96 percent in 2008.)

Dissension ruined republican chances in 1964, but the Republican Party rebounded. Richard Nixon returned and won the presidency in 1968. Nixon didn’t restore Republican unity he seized on the reversal of dissension.

The Democrats were split over Vietnam.

This time Democratic president Lyndon Johnson didn’t seek reelection and was unexpectedly out of politics and the popular anti-war candidate Robert Kennedy was dead.

The 1968 Democratic convention was a violent affair 10,000 anti-war demonstrators clashed with 23,000 police and national guardsmen on the streets of Chicago. The democratic vice president Hubert Humphrey emerged as the nominee, but Humphrey supported Johnson’s Vietnam initiatives, and opposed the Democratic Convention’s Policy Committee that called for an end of the bombing campaign in North Vietnam, a withdrawal of troops, and arranging talks for a coalition government with the Viet Cong.

Therefore Nixon pledged an honorable end to the Vietnam War and recruited southern Democrats sympathetic to Goldwater in 1964 to replace the black vote that was lost and Nixon won 32 states.

That decade could be considered America’s second civil war.

Dissension damaged both parties, but they weren’t destroyed like the Whig Party before the first civil war.

The Whig Party formed in 1834 and over a twenty year span nominated several presidential candidates and two was elected president. Abraham Lincoln was a Whig Party leader, but temporarily quit politics because the Whig Party’s inability to come together concerning the great issue of their time, the expansion of slavery. Eventually, Northern Whigs joined with other anti-slavery groups and formed the Republican Party and the Southern Whigs became extinct.

According to historians the Whig Party died not because it no longer appealed to voters, but because it couldn’t cope with the greatest issue of their time. In the 1960’s the two major parties were divided, but their official nominees had clear stances on the greatest issues of the time. Their positions just conflicted with the national consensus and they were defeated, but the parties were not destroyed.

In 2016 the Republican Party nominated a candidate that wants to “make America great again” but doesn’t have a clear grasp on any of the great issues. The Republican Party isn’t just headed for a major defeat this could be the first in a series of detonations

First published in New Pittsburgh Courier 8/17/16