Will Gaza be to Biden what Vietnam was to LBJ?

In March 1968, President Lyndon Baines Johnson (aka LBJ), declined to run for re-election after a near loss in the New Hampshire primary to antiwar candidate, Eugene McCarthy. Johnson was a strong supporter of the increasingly unpopular conflict in Vietnam.. The nomination contest that followed was waged among McCarthy and Hubert Humphrey, the Vice President, and Robert F. Kennedy, brother of the recently assassinated JFK. After RFK himself was assassinated, Humphrey won the Democratic nomination handily, and lost the election to Nixon. It wasn’t a clean win; Nixon secretly sent Henry Kissinger to talk to the Viet Cong, urging them not to make a peace deal with the Johnson administration because they’d get a better deal from Nixon. This turned out badly for everyone all around.

Fast forward to 2024, and we have an increasingly unpopular war in Gaza that is enthusiastically supported by the current Democratic president, Joe Biden. The Democratic party apparatus is striving to avoid any embarrassing near losses in the primaries by downplaying the contests and refusing to hold debates with other candidates. It’s arguably the least democratic process the party has held since 1968 (which had ended up leading to reform).

It’s impossible to know what would have happened in 1968 if LBJ had reversed his position on Vietnam. He still would’ve had to deal with the Southern backlash against his Civil Rights legislation and white resentment of the urban race riots. If RFK had not been killed, he would faced the same challenges. But if Nixon had been denied, it’s a fair wager that the Vietnam War would have ended sooner, and certainly would not have included the secret bombing of Laos and Cambodia that Nixon and Kissinger orchestrated, which was one of the most heinous war crimes of the century (in a century full of heinous war crimes).

This year is a similar inflection point.

The ongoing genocide in Gaza is horrifying many, especially younger people, because it’s essentially being broadcast live on the internet by social media and alternative outlets (including non-US media). But older people who still rely on legacy media, like cable news, the NYT, WaPo and NPR, are mostly unaware of the brutality of the situation, because these institutions are strongly biased in favor of Israel (see here | here | here & here), and in some cases are allowing their coverage to be steered by Israel to one degree or another. (“CNN Runs Gaza Coverage Past Jerusalem Team Operating Under Shadow of IDF Censor.”)

Support for Biden among youth, which was never strong, is falling, and also among Arab Americans, who are key demographic in some of the swing states that Biden won in 2020 but Hillary Clinton lost in 2016. In terms of name recognition and popularity, there’s no RFK in this year’s Democratic race. Ironically, RFK Jr., who was initially in the Democratic contest and is now running as an independent, trumpets even stauncher support for Israel and its worst right-wing elements than Biden. Marianne Williamson  is calling for a Department of Peace, bless her heart, but her numbers are low. Her ideas enjoy mainstream popularity—universal healthcare, affordable housing, student debt forgiveness and free higher education, empowering labor unions, acting on climate—but the media is stubbornly ignoring her. Of course, if she did become a threat to Biden, the Democratic Party apparatus could simply do what they did to Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020, which is exclude her through back room machinations and other underhanded tactics. (Reminder: DNC lawyers told the court they do not owe voters an ‘impartial’ or ‘evenhanded’ primary election.)

At this point, Trump appears to be the likely winner of the presidency in the fall, barring exclusion for legal or health troubles. This might seem inexplicable to many Democratic party supporters but, as one Democratic-supporting labor activist put it: Biden is asking people to “step over a pile of bodies” to vote for him, and that might be too much for some of them to stomach.

As a rallying cry, “But Trump!” only goes so far, and we’ll be measuring that distance this year. Some of us haven’t had the stomach to vote for a Democrat for president this entire century because of the party’s dedication to military spending and bloody foreign misadventures, and so far we’ve been a fringe element, but in 2024 the scales could be tipped by opposition to war, as stirred up by the genocide in Gaza.

Yes, Trump is also a war monger and his support for Israel is no less than Biden’s, but that’s not the point. This isn’t a zero sum game where all votes go to either one or the other. People can stay home, or just fill out the local parts of their ballot. Biden can’t afford that. Supporters of the Democratic Party, especially the Blue-No-Matter-Who crowd, need to face these facts square on, and if they want to prevent a reinstallation of Trump, they need to either force Biden to make a complete—and believable—U-turn on Gaza, or push him aside for a candidate who is willing to take a different stance. Either choice could fail, of course, given the passion of many Republican voters convinced their man was cheated in 2020, and given the increasing suppression of likely Democratic voters by Republican legislatures in many states (a trend the Democratic Party seems disinterested to oppose).

But the current strategy, of asking people to “step over a pile of bodies” to vote for Biden, is looking more and more like a recipe for electoral failure anyway so in that sense there’s nothing to lose. And what could be gained—(avoiding a moral failure and realigning the party to hold actual principles—would be better in the long run. I’m not holding my breath. The gulf is wide between Democratic voters and Democratic donors, and the donors would rather lose than do the right thing.

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[Note: Pardon me for not linking to the labor activist I quoted. I read it on Substack somewhere but haven’t been able to find the article again.]