Del Beccaro: How The Democrats’ Era of Protests May Usher In A Republican Majority For Years To Come
The story reads, “Around the country it was apparent that the scene on college campuses was not improving. Things were not getting better, but simply escalating.” However similar that is to today, that was a story about the protests of the Left during 1960s.
Those protests helped usher in a series of Republican Presidents for 28 out of 40 years, beginning with Nixon and ending with Bush 43. As the Democrats of today embrace the moniker of the Party of Protests, it may well be fostering a Republican majority nationwide for years to come.
Commentators have referred to the 1960s as the Decade of Protests. Anti-War protests, civil rights, the free speech movement, the women’s liberation movement, gay and lesbian activism, and environmental protests dominated the political landscape.
According to the White House Historical Association, “Protests raged all over the country.” On Aug. 28, 1963, alone, “250,000 people descended on the nation’s capital, to advocate for civil rights .”
Those Civil Rights protests preceded the protests “against the Vietnam War [which] began to gain prominence in 1965 on college campuses and around the United States, eventually garnering national attention.”
The effect of the protests changed the United States irrevocably.
As I discuss in my book, The Lessons of the American Civilization, the once confident people of a unified “United States” had help make the world ‘safe for democracy” by becoming the “arsenal of democracy,” from World War I to World War II through the Korean War. With the 1960s, however, the American civilization entered a long-term period of growing doubt about its purpose, its resolve and even its achievements.
Today, many on the Left loudly proclaim that America is not only not exceptional but, instead, it is a negative actor on the World stage – a concept Democrat Presidents Wilson and FDR would never entertain.
Returning to the 1960’s Decade of Protests, the short term of effect of the protest culture was division within the Democrat Party and its supporters. That split played out in dramatic fashion on national TV with the protests at the 1968 Democrat convention in Chicago.
Richard Nixon was the immediate beneficiary of that split on the Left as he won the presidency despite thoughts that his career was over earlier in the decade. From there, Republicans dominated the White House until 2009.
Within that period, the only two Republican losses included Ford’s close loss after Watergate in favor of the one-term Carter. It also included Bush 41s self-inflicted loss after he famously broke his promise not to raise taxes, which invited Ross Perot into the race and resulted in two Clinton victories despite never winning a majority of voters.
In plain terms, Americans saw the partisan protests and violence of the 1960s as unworthy of the highest office in the land. Indeed, America recoiled from the manner of protests that decade.
For instance, according to Gallup’s 1963 poll, “57%, said such demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience had hurt chances of integration, while barely a quarter, 27%, said they had helped.” In other words, early in the 1960s, the electorate were skeptical of protests. Five more years of protests helped Nixon immeasurably.
If we fast-forward to the present, protests have been on the rise for nearly 15 years – from the racial protests of the Obama presidency to the immigration and the class envy protests staged by Democrats during the Trump Presidencies.
Those protests, which included the BLM and Antifa violence, played out on national TV once again and to a larger degree because Americans now carry news outlets in their hands in the form of smart phones.
The 2024 voters returned Trump to the presidency in part because of their disgust of the lawless immigration policies of the Left under Biden – policies which were themselves a protest against the rule of law.
With Trump in office just a few months, the protests of the Left have turned to calculated violence and attempted murder of government officials – not to mention the Trump assassination attempts. Meanwhile, one Democrat lawmaker stated that “Our own base is telling us that what we’re doing is not good enough … [that] there needs to be blood to grab the attention of the press and the public.”
Democrat Party Leadership does not uniformly condemn that violence and those Democrats with presidential ambitions back many of the protests as Kamla Harris did before she was elevated to Vice President.
Recently, the Democrat Party has a 58.6% unfavorable rating in the Real Clear Politics Average. The most recent Wall Street Journal poll on Democrat unfavorability showed the Democrats at a record low.
The Democrats move to the Left on the issues is, of course, a large part of their unfavorability.
The protests play a significant role as well. Those protests go well beyond the Democrats being against anything Republicans and President Trump, in particular, say or do. They also go much farther than not having a vision acceptable to voters.
The Democrats are in open open division on whether they should fight for social justice as they define it or whether they should return to the political center as they did with Bill Clinton’s victories.
That division is so palpable that an “AP-NORC poll out in May revealed that only 35 percent of surveyed Democrats are optimistic about the party’s future, compared with 57 percent in July 2024.”
Meanwhile, a June “Reuters/Ipsos poll…found that 62 percent of self-identified Democrats said that the party should replace Democrats with new leaders, with only 24 percent disagreeing with that statement.”
Stated plainly, divided parties, historically, do not win elections.
Protests, for their part, do not unify parties let alone Americans. Keep in mind that not even the American Revolution was never thought to have majority support.
In the final analysis, the Democrats are now the Party of Protests. Americans can see that every day and those protests do not solve any economic issues for them. It’s the economy, not the protest.
If the Democrats persist with these protests, along with their Leftward drift, they may well be ushering Republicans presidents for years to come.
