REFLECTIONS ON THE VIETNAM WAR ANNIVERSARY AND TODAY’S POLITICAL DIVIDE
Dr. Common Good
This 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War is a reminder of at least two streams of social sentiment that form what must be seen as key to the retrograde animus fueling MAGA politics.
First, since it is the anniversary, let’s look at the Vietnam War and its aftermath, still reverberating in the national consciousness. Most historical accounts are consistent in documenting the bipolar, Cold War worldview, and all the fears and hubris that implies, as underlying the initial framing of the Vietnam conflict as primarily another case of the Communist world pursuing its aim of global domination wherever a weak spot appeared. This was the raison d’ȇtre for George Kennan’s doctrine of containment. After the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe, the Greek civil war in the late 1940s, the rise of communist parties in Italy and France, the Korean War, a series of anti-colonialist wars in Algeria and elsewhere in Africa, and the McCarthy era in the U.S, then came France’s defeat in Vietnam and the perceived likelihood that Vietnam was next on the target list. Without France there, the political leadership in the U.S. largely agreed that it was up to us in our assumed position as leader of the free world to stop that advance. But as U.S. involvement increased, along with the use of heavy bombing and more traditional heavy-force tactics, so did frustration that the North Vietnamese and Vietcong were not knuckling under. Casualties mounted. Political opposition grew, infused with an increasing belief that we were in the wrong, that we were bludgeoning the Vietnamese for just wanting to free themselves from Western colonial domination. The aims of U.S. involvement became muddled, resulting in a patchwork of policies and constraints on how the U.S. should prosecute the war – constraints that were often violated, as in the secret bombing of Cambodia and Laos. The political divide erupted in riots and protests, sometimes met with violence. The right chafed and fumed at the constraints imposed on U.S. power, while the left railed against the abuses of U.S. power and human rights. And in 1975, the U.S. pulled out in what many on the right have viewed ever since as a humiliation caused or at least exacerbated by liberal/leftist politics.
Second is the reaction among conservatives against government involvement in the basic support and protection of individual rights and well-being that began with the New Deal, then continued through Johnson’s Great Society programs, the Civil Rights movement, the anti-war movement, the environmental movements, and Supreme Court rulings on desegregation (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954, and many others), right to counsel (Gideon v. Wainright, 1963), reproductive rights (Griswold v. Connecticut,1965, Roe V. Wade, 1973) and the separation of church and state (Engel v. Vitale, 1962), among others, all of which questioned and contested assumptions about racial and gender hierarchies, the unfettered exploitation of natural resources, family composition and life, the dominance of Protestant Christianity as the sole moral and social determinant of values, and even what a good life should look like. To some on the right, these represented doubts about America itself and about its core values. And to some of the most extreme among the right, these constituted a continuation of attacks against a romanticized, ante-bellum (pre–Civil War) pattern of life.
Put these two together, and you have two powerful sources of resentment and revanchism – against the restraints imposed on the exercise of U.S. power in the world as something akin to a divine right or manifest destiny, and against the political forces that disrupted an idyllic picture of American life in the 1950s and early 1960s that was (and still is) essentialized as white, Christian, and typically suburban or rural. This idyllic picture, of course, was never valid for African Americans and other peoples of color who were subjugated to Jim Crow laws and countless other brutalities and constraints. It was never valid for poor whites in the Appalachians, and never truly valid for most American women, among others. Anyone driving across the country in the early 1960s could have seen that. But if you look at the “culture-war” today, these same beliefs drive the anti-DEI, anti-woke, pro American power aims of MAGA, and the longstanding resentment against those – vaguely portrayed as woke, liberal, Eastern, elite, etc. – who have kept “real America” down and bastardized its raw essence. Globalism and internationalism are seen the same way, as constraints imposed by “weak” or elitist European political structures on the free exercise of Americanness. Trump and his cronies (yes, that is what they are) pull on, twist and provoke that well of resentment every day, no matter the damage it does to the country and our relations with the world, no matter how ridiculous and ignorant are the labels used (e.g., “communist” judges). Worse, the most vociferous MAGA devotees are clearly willing to shred the Constitution to regain that imagined America, even if it requires an authoritarian dictator to do so.
This is a divide that will not be mitigated by a recourse to standard political shibboleths. The question is how to meet, resist, and/or defuse this pernicious wave and preserve that which is in fact unique and admirable about the American experiment.