Something odd about the 1968 presidential election:  Hubert Humphreyalmost won.  With everything working against him — tied to an unpopular president who likely didn’t even vote him anyway (just as, I imagine, Humphrey didn’t vote for McGovern), his party financially bankrupt, his party’s coalition fractured every which way whose public image was that of a riotous convention.
Give the election one more week, and the nation would have been spared President Nixon.  And then what?

American would have left the Vietnam War sooner, which I guess would have thrown Humphrey one historical advantage, and then he would have been defeated in 1972.  By California Governor Ronald Reagan.
A more straight-forward and less messy political re-alignment, I suppose.

Regarding Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”, I never quite realized how much of a necessity it was moreso than an opportunity  Goldwater’s defeat had structually changed the Republican party, in its delegate count to the next convention, apportioned by how well the party did in the previous election — when Goldwater winning those four deep South states and his home state and nowhere else.  Meaning Nixon had to woo the new king-maker, Strom Thurmond, going into his election.

Our national Consensus unravelled under Johnson, moving beyond the congragulatory half-measures on civil rights under Eisenhower, and with Vietnam the fundamentals of Cold War thinking came to a head.  What might be said about the ensuing Apocalypse is that we’re always mired in it and always have been.  The pop cultural signposts represented by the three books atop the best-selling list in 1971 (The Population Bomb, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, The Late Great Planet Earth) is always available to crack our cultural psyches — that remains remarkably unchanged.  Rick Perlstein knows this well enough — his next book taking off with Patty Hearst — and our rampant cultural paranoia of 1976 through 1986 is covered in similarly apocalyptic terms with this book.

A pretty interesting factoid to consider right about now, which has some bearing, with a poll results:  Nearly 80 percent of those surveyed said there is a major schism between the values and mindsets of younger and older Americans. That’s a bigger gap than in turbulent 1969, when 74 percent reported generational culture clashes over Vietnam, civil rights and women’s liberation.

What does that mean?  It’s folly at every juncture to deny “schism” between attitudes of generations, today as with forty years ago, which doesn’t mean it has to be confrontational.  I don’t know what makes the difference with six percentage points today as against then — the absense of “great silent majority” of twenty-somethings who weren’t barricading down Columbia Univeristy and went off to cast their vote for Nixon, which had that margin of the population nodding their head with a “no great difference”?