The 1968 Election and the Demise of Liberalism

The Pinnacle of Liberalism in America was 1965 and that was a result of the 1964 election, Democrat Lyndon Baines Johnson versus Republican Barry Goldwater. LBJ won in a landslide, over 61 percent of the vote, the highest percentage in American history, 44 states; Goldwater only mustered 38 percent, his own state and some Deep South states whose citizens opposed Johnson’s 1964 Civil Rights Act. The Democrats also overwhelmed the Republicans in the battle over Congress, holding two-thirds of the seats in both the House and the Senate.

With this majority LBJ quickly moved America toward liberalism by enacting his War on Poverty, Great Society, and additional Civil Rights legislation. In January 1965 he flooded Congress with his proposals and they responded with significant legislation: Medicare and Medicaid, Food Stamps, Model Cities concerning urban renewal, the 1965 Voting Rights and Immigration Acts, and the Primary and Secondary Education acts that increased federal spending for public schools by some 250 percent. He attacked pollution with his various clean air and water acts, and then Congress enacted his college student loans, the National Endowments for the Humanities and the Arts, along with massive new funding to conquer the three deadly killers of the time—heart disease, stroke and cancer.

LBJ proved masterful at getting Congress to pass his proposals. In January 1965, he asked Congress to pass 85 bills, and in 9 months 83 had been passed. This incredible success went to the Texan’s head. When the German Chancellor asked him if he was “born in a log cabin,” LBJ quipped, “No, that was Lincoln. I was born in a manger.” And LBJ joked to his aides, “When I die, don’t bury me too deep. I’ll be up in three days.”

But then it all began to unravel. First was the Watts race riot in August 1965. Passing legislation did not change the racial situation on that Los Angeles slum’s streets, nor deliver jobs. Changing racial stereotypes and slurs, gaining employment, would take time. Next summer Cleveland exploded, and in 1967 Newark and Detroit. Fires in the streets, and a frustrated LBJ lamented: “What do they want? I’ve given them more than anyone. What do they want?”

By 1968 the moderate Civil Rights movement had all but disintegrated—young militant African Americans were marching in the streets, fists clenched, yelling for Black Power! That shouting threatened white Americans.

Meanwhile, on college campuses across the nation, baby boomer students crowded into classrooms and dormitories, and when they settled in they realized that they—unlike other people their age who did not attend college—were faced with a series of university regulations, In Loco Parentis. Those numerous rules restricted their freedoms, even speech, made them dress in a certain manner and be in dorms at curfews. They protested for their freedom, and the Governor of California, Ronald Reagan, declared, “Obey the rules, or get out!” Some campus protests turned bloody.

And at the same time President Johnson escalated the war in Vietnam. In the summer of 1965 he announced a troop build-up, and by the end of the year he had sent 200,000 troops to South Vietnam—and changed their role from advising the South Vietnamese Army to combat, fighting the Vietcong and North Vietnamese Army. The war intensified, and by 1968 the commander-in-chief had about 500,000 American troops in Southeast Asia.

The war dragged on, casualties mounted, and by 1967 that created dissent. Americans began to ask, “Why aren’t we winning?” Vietnam also stimulated an anti-war movement, which by 1967 shocked everyone by mobilizing hundreds of thousands for the March on the Pentagon.

The war became the engine of social activism of the 1960s, for it also stimulated the rise of the counter-culture, hippies. To them the culture represented war, racism, materialism, sexual oppression, and they began to build an alternative culture. They grew their hair long, smoked dope, engaged in free love, declared and exhibited different values from the mainstream, and after the button down 1950s the hippies...