A Stress-Test Election

By Jeffrey Frank 

 The reservoir of sentimental national hope usually gets replenished with every Presidential race, and for good reason. But is 2016 different?



All happy elections are alike, as Melania Trump might say, and each unhappy election is unhappy in its own way. But no American Presidential election, at least not one that anyone alive has experienced, has been as unhappy as this one. However ugly they got, the nation’s most miserable postwar contests, among them Lyndon B. Johnson vs. Barry Goldwater, in 1964, and Richard Nixon vs. Hubert Humphrey, in 1968, at least met a standard of coherence and rationality that now seems elusive. The Republican candidate, the television performer and businessman Donald J. Trump, is not only the strangest duck to have won a major-party nomination but is so uniquely unfit to hold office that the strongest unwritten plank in the platform of his Democratic opponent, the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is that she offers a sane alternative. She may be unloved in many quarters, but she is no Donald Trump.

The reservoir of sentimental national hope usually gets replenished with every quadrennial election, and for good reason. History has been kind to the United States; there are crises, and serious ones, but things, somehow, often end well. Another seemingly unhappy election, between President Harry Truman and the New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey, in 1948, is now regarded as one of the happiest, in part because the idea of a determined underdog fighting back, and winning, has enduring appeal, but also because Truman is now widely regarded as having had a successful Presidency. By mid-July, 1948, after the Democratic Convention, in Philadelphia, Truman was already written off by pollsters and journalists, among them the influential Walter Lippmann, who lamented that Democrats hadn’t managed to persuade the unifying figure of General Dwight D. Eisenhower to run. Trump might have called Truman, who stood five feet nine inches, Little Harry, or perhaps the Suspender Salesman.

The Democrats who left Philadelphia in 1948 were unusually divided, and echoes of those divisions are still being heard—not only by Democrats. Just as Humphrey, then the mayor of Minneapolis, pushed the Party to the left on civil rights, saying that the time had come “to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights,” the Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders this year pushed the Party to the left on free college tuition and universal heath care. The 1948 platform, which included a call to abolish poll taxes and desegregate the military, was enough for a bloc of Southern states to defect and form the States’ Rights Democratic Party—the “Dixiecrats”—whose eventual nominee, the South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, saw the platform as a call for “a police state in this country.” He also called Truman “an acknowledged loser.” You can hear the echo of Thurmond’s racial bigotry in Trump’s proposed ban on Muslim immigrants, and a tinny, non-racial echo of Thurmond’s intolerance, and his passion for states’ rights, in the views of Trump’s running mate, the Indiana Governor Mike Pence, who last year supported, and signed, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a state law that originally would have allowed discrimination against gay, lesbian, and transgender citizens. The modern Republican Party owes a larger debt to Thurmond than to Lincoln. Other defecting Democrats in 1948 were led by the former Vice-President and Cabinet officer Henry Wallace, who broke with Truman over what he saw as Cold War militarism; Wallace’s Progressive Party was viewed as a bit too sympathetic to the geopolitical goals of the Soviet Union (Wallace, for instance, wanted to abandon the defense of Berlin), but some of his views came to influence Vietnam-era Democrats, and their descendants. In those divisions, one may see the roots, and dissonances, of what’s left of what were once two great political parties.

Exaggerated rhetoric, in itself, is nothing new. In 1948, the thoughtful, conservative Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft could refer to Truman’s “police state” proposals to combat inflation, and say, in all apparent seriousness, that Truman, a moderate politician from Missouri, wanted to “nationalize medicine and generally regiment the life of every family, as well as agriculture, labor and industry.” People from both parties still talk that way. But, for all that, the candidates of 1948 spoke a common language, based on policies they all understood even if they were in wide disagreement. They were intelligent, informed, and rational, if not (in the case of Wallace) entirely sensible or (in the case of the segregationist Thurmond) committed to liberty for all. Truman and Dewey were also the only real choices facing the voters.

The wretched Johnson-Goldwater race took place while the nation was still shocked by the murder, less than a year earlier, of President John F. Kennedy; the Nixon-Humphrey contest reflected the furies of the Vietnam era after Johnson’s virtual abdication and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy. And yet what makes this year’s contest so alarming and so removed from history is not only that Trump hasn’t grasped most issues facing the country, from foreign policy to trade to immigration. (He told George Stephanopoulos that Vladimir Putin is “not going into Ukraine, O.K., just so you understand,” and has said, repeatedly, that we must build a “beautiful wall” along the Mexican border to keep out rapists.) It’s also that, as Khizr Khan, the father of an Muslim-American soldier killed in Iraq, suggested, Trump sounds like he has never read the equal-protection clause of the Constitution.

Perhaps it’s enough to have a rational alternative to Trump, but the stress level endures nonetheless. Worried voters watching the election returns on November 8th may feel as if they’re waiting for millions of customers to choose between two automobiles. One of them, this time, could run off the road and take the world with it.


Jeffrey Frank, a former senior editor of The New Yorker and the author of “Ike and Dick: Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage,” is working on a book about the Truman era.