"The Protest Vote That Still Haunts Me 50 Years Later"

[Nevilledog]

https://newrepublic.com/article/181660/protest-vote-still-haunts-50-years-later

No paywall link
https://archive.li/wXbO4

Most of us, I suspect, have occasionally found ourselves lying wide awake at 4 o’ clock in the morning as a festival of regrets flashes before the inward eye. I am comparatively lucky since in my predawn melancholy I am not mourning a lost love, a foolish refusal to study podiatry, or an ill-considered major investment in a chinchilla farm.

Instead, what haunts me with surprising frequency these days was my jejune refusal to back Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1968 out of misplaced antiwar passions. That year, I instead squandered my vote on Eldridge Cleaver who was running as the candidate of the Peace and Freedom Party. As I wrote in my campus newspaper, The Michigan Daily, on the eve of the election, “I cannot endorse the underlying premises of an American foreign policy that places national prestige before human lives. And I cannot vote to support the chief cheerleader of the war in Vietnam.” As a University of Michigan senior casting my first presidential vote, I pulled out all the stops as I melodramatically framed my refusal to vote for Humphrey as “a simple moral act.”

With more than a half-century’s perspective, I realize there was nothing simple or particularly moral about my self-righteous decision to opt out of the two-party system. It was rather the product of my stacking flawed premises on top of each other in the hopes that the entire edifice didn’t topple from the weight of its own illogic. The reason for revisiting my long-ago electoral folly is because I fear that, in similar fashion, a significant number of young, idealistic voters will wrongly conclude that it is more important to bear personal moral witness over Gaza than to prevent Donald Trump from returning to the White House.

In the context of 1968, I performed more mental contortions than a circus acrobat to convince myself that Humphrey and Richard Nixon were interchangeable cogs in the war machine. True, I had to gloss over the reality that Nixon had been excoriated by all right-thinking liberals since Washington Post cartoonist Herblock had depicted him emerging from a sewer in the early 1950s. Humphrey, in contrast, was a liberal Senate icon who had morphed into Lyndon Johnson’s spineless vice president.

*snip*

[TygrBright]

1. A classic in the "'Question Authority!' 'If Authority answers, will you listen?'" genre. n/t

[Xavier Breath]

2. Looking at that electoral map

it shows that Humphrey won Michigan, so it would appear neither Mr. Shapiro's column nor his vote had any effect. I'd argue he can let the guilt go after 56 years, but that's his call.

It's interesting to see how the map has changed since then. Humphrey won Texas (the LBJ effect?) and lost California and Oregon.

[Voltaire2]

3. Nixon won by racist pandering.

He and Wallace gobbled up the white southern racists alienated by LBJ signing the civil rights act.

[Kennah]

4. Democratic Party was split into at least four distinct factions who did not wanna work together

[Mme. Defarge]

5. The protest vote that still haunts me

is voting for John Anderson instead of Jimmy Carter when he ran against Reagan. I was a registered Republican at the time but couldn’t bring myself to vote for a “B” actor. After that I became a Democrat and have never looked back.

[betsuni]

6. K&R