Dem
51
GOP
49
George Santayana once wrote: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." We may be getting a real-time demo now. In the late 1960s, millions of young people marched against the Vietnam War chanting: "Hey, hey, LBJ. how many kids did you kill today?" This despite Lyndon Johnson being the most progressive and successful president since FDR, what with the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, the War on Poverty, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, consumer protection, and many Great Society programs. All the protests ultimately caused Johnson to drop out of the 1968 election, resulting in Richard Nixon becoming president, the Southern Strategy, and 50 years of predominantly Republican rule (Nixon, Ronald Reagan, the Bushes, and Donald Trump). They carried out policies the protesters abhorred. But they got rid of pointless wars—except for Iraq and Afghanistan.
Salon, a left-wing political website, asks people to fast forward to November 2024 and imagine November 2025. Many young people are now loudly protesting Joe Biden's support for Israel and opposing the war in the Middle East, despite Biden's record of getting out of Afghanistan, ending the pandemic, rescuing the economy, taming inflation, rebuilding the infrastructure, fighting climate change, and bringing chip manufacturing back to America. To quote Yogi Berra, "It's déjà vu all over again."
Will 2024 be 1968 redux, with young people not voting on account of the war and Donald Trump getting another term and ending democracy for good? Like it or not, either Biden or Trump is going to be president in 2025 and we suspect that many of the people attacking Biden now will not like Trump v2.0 very much. You think more choices would be better? Keep reading below.
The bottom line of the article is that getting rid of leaders to get rid of wars doesn't have a great track record. Sometimes looking at the big picture is even more important than some issue that seems monumental at the time, but later proves to be less important than the change in leadership it resulted in. (V)