By Newt Gingrich
2020 and 1972: The Amazing Parallels
If you want to get a feel for the probable shape of 2020, there is no single book that will help more than Theodore H. White’s The Making of the President 1972.
You might be surprised that an election that happened nearly a half century ago could be the best forerunner for next year’s historic collision between the news media and Left on one side and President Trump and his grassroots enthusiasm on the other.
Yet, the more I have watched and analyzed what is going on, the more convinced I am that 2020 is becoming a referendum almost exactly like 1972 was.
To better understand this, it is essential to read White’s book. White was the greatest chronicler of American presidential campaigns (and before that a brilliant reporter about China). He puts the 1972 campaign into a context which is eerily parallel to today.
Remember, White is writing some 47 years ago. Yet, across that nearly half century the basic stories are the same.
What makes The Making of the President 1972 so remarkable is the degree to which it is a cultural and historical book rather than a political book – and the degree to which America has been caught in patterns and conflicts that clearly have their roots in over a half-century of struggle.
Rereading White’s book reminded me that the background for virtually every fight we are now in can be found in the late 1960s. The modern Left has simply metastasized and grown more aggressive, intolerant, and totalitarian. The elite media has grown further apart from the average American, and the reporting standards of an earlier generation have been replaced by advocacy standards.
Amazingly, many of our worst problems can be found described in the politics of 1972 including quotas, the destruction of the cities, dramatic increases in crime and violence, anti-American attitudes, and new cultural standards on abortion, sexual redefinition, and the rise of identity politics as an unchallengeable force on the Left.
White puts in context the great changes which were reshaping America and American politics. His analysis is so profound – and his language relates so much to today – that I am going to continually refer to it while outlining 2020 and beyond.
The radicalism of George McGovern ultimately cost him one of the worst defeats in Presidential history. President Nixon won in a landslide with 61 percent of the vote.
White points out that the elite media and the Left did everything they could to undermine and isolate Nixon, but he kept reaching beyond them to the American people. White contrasts the New York-Boston-Washington-Los Angeles crowd with “out there.” He argues Nixon knew he could never break through with the establishment, so he simply ignored them and reached beyond them.
When the election results came in, it was clear that Nixon understood America better than his left-wing opponents.
The big difference between 1972 and 2020 is that McGovern was an outlier. He was the lone radical in a party that still had deep roots in traditional America.
McGovern was ultimately repudiated by most Democrats – and in the end the Democratic Congress survived because they could all say, “I am not as radical as George McGovern.”
What is fascinating about the current campaign is the degree to which all the Democratic presidential candidates who are going to survive are to the left of McGovern. Every moderate Democratic candidate is going to be squeezed out of the race.
The pictures of all the presidential candidates raising their hands in support of radical positions indicates the danger for the Democrats. Their entire party will have left the American people behind by the time of the convention next summer.
The fate of McGovern in 1972 may well be the fate of the entire Democratic Party in 2020.
The parallels between 1972 and 2020 are real. White described 1972 in terms of:
1. The power of the media;
2. The rise of the movement of hard-Left true believers who crowded out the traditional liberals – he characterizes it as the liberal theology replacing the liberal idea;
3. The stunning and decisive failures of the Great Society, which were vividly obvious by 1972 but still trap us in terrible policies with devastating human consequences.
I will write more on each of these key, half-century-old patterns. Despite White writing about them in 1972, they still define our times.
2020 and 1972 Part Two: The Power of the Media
The most amazing thing about Theodore White’s The Making of the President 1972 is his explanation of the emerging hostility of the elite news media and its evolution into an adversarial anti-president propaganda system for left-wing values.
Everything we are used to seeing in what President Trump calls “Fake News” existed by 1972. The parallels are amazing – and are part of why I decided to spend so much time analyzing 1972 and 2020 as similar patterns of conflict.
The current New York Times overt shift from smearing President Trump with Russian collusion (which collapsed) to smearing President Trump with allegations of racism were all foreshadowed by the universal elite media hostility to President Nixon a half century ago. The lockstep hostility of the Times, The Washington Post, and the left-wing TV systems were simply proof that in President Trump they had encountered a leader bent on changing their world and confronting their values.
White combines his extraordinary analysis of the New York Times-Boston Globe-Washington Post system (and the three networks they shaped) with an explanation of the mutation from what he calls “the liberal idea” into “the liberal theology” – and the “movement” which grew out of it. (I will deal with the movement in my next column and its devastatingly destructive impact on cities in part four of this series.) This piece focuses on the adversarial news media and its impact on 1972 and on 2020.
The real opposition to Nixon was not the Democratic Party nor its nominee Senator George McGovern. In White’s analysis, the real opposition to Nixon was the elite news media.
The elite news media hated Nixon more than any major politician before Trump. Despite the rise of talk radio, Twitter, Facebook, and cable news, nothing in White’s core analysis has changed. He draws a sharp distinction between the lesser news media, many of which were for Nixon, and the elite media – which was monolithically, bitterly hostile to President Nixon.
White emphasizes that it was the culture of the New York literati which defined The New York Times and the three networks. It was a generational change from reporters of facts to advocates of ideology which compounded the bitterness and hostility.
Here is White’s analysis:
“The power of the press in America is a primordial one. It sets the agenda of public discussion; and this sweeping political power is unrestrained by any law. It determines what people will talk and think about—an authority that in other nations is reserved for tyrants, priests, parties and mandarins. No major act of the American Congress, no foreign adventure, no act of diplomacy, no great social reform can succeed in the United States unless the press prepares the public mind. And when the press seizes a great issue to thrust onto the agenda of talk, it moves action on its own—the cause of the environment, the cause of civil rights, the liquidation of the war in Vietnam, and, as climax, the Watergate affair were all set on the agenda, in first instance, by the press.”
The power of the Left grows from the media. Since Nixon, the media has sought to attack presidents it did not deem worthy. As White explained:
“These were the adversary press. Its luminaries not only questioned his exercise of power, as all great American journalists have done when examining a President. They questioned his own understanding of America; they questioned not only his actions but the quality of his mind, and his honor as a man. It was a question of who was closest in contact with the mood of the American people—the President or his adversary press? Neither would yield anything of respect to the other—and in Richard Nixon’s first term the traditional bitterness on both sides approached paranoia.”
Much like President Trump a generation later Nixon was not intimidated and did not flinch from the fight. Nixon understood that his primary adversary was the press – not his Democratic opponent.
It is vital to understand that the news media and its academic and Hollywood allies are the defenders and imposers of an alternative culture which hates conservatism and particularly hates effective conservatives.
The elite media had its final victory over President Nixon in the Watergate scandal, which drove him from office. The elite media tried this with President Trump in the “Russian collusion” lie and failed.
The Left wants to forget that when the American people weighed the values of President Nixon and the values of The New York Times, Nixon got 61 percent of the vote. The same would happen 12 years later when President Reagan won with 58 percent of the vote.
Do not be shocked if in the 2020 result, President Trump wins by a margin unimaginable today (no one in September 1971 or September 1983 would have predicted gigantic landslides against the Left).
