MCGOVERNISM.

Rick Perlstein on Nixon and McGovern:

The warnings turned out to be of limited portent; politicians who called for Iraq withdrawal in 2004 now look more like political prophets than harbingers of landslide defeats. But the M-word short-circuits thought. McGovern lost because he was an isolationist? If you had said that in 1972, people might have looked at you funny. Whatever his preference for deep cuts in the defense budget, Republican surrogates who hauled out the isolationist charge were labeled "silly" by no less an honest broker than the New York Times’ Scotty Reston. Over the following six years–according to my ProQuest search–the words "McGovern" and some variant of "isolation" were mentioned in the Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Chicago Tribune a mere six times. If McGovern campaigned as an "isolationist," then Richard Nixon–whose main appeal was that he could better end the war, whose "Nixon doctrine" was a promise to the American people not to send troops to more foreign countries, and who literally blamed America’s financial woes on "international money speculators"–campaigned as one, too, only more effectively.

The evidence against the idea that the McGovern campaign's pot-smoking peacenik-ism ended Democratic hopes amongst all good and decent people is pretty substantial. In part, the impression endures because folks forget what the moment looked like: They forget that Humphrey and Mondale and the AFL-CIO and McGovern's former running mate Eagleton were all working against him. They forget the moment of racial and cultural ferment, the "Silent Majority" that had arisen and was less interested in war than in order. They forget that the Democratic Party didn't seem dead for very long, as it swept the 1974 midterm elections and then elected Jimmy Carter in the subsequent presidential campaign (Nixon, of course, was the prime mover here, but it was only because Democrats were a credible alternative that they could take advantage of Watergate).Even so, you have this idea floating about that running against war -- as Nixon also did that year, remember "peace with honor?" -- is somehow an electoral anathema. The opposite would seem to be true. Moreover, for reasons a bit beyond my understanding, the Iraq War hasn't been judged an ideological failing, and the historic defeat Republicans endured in 2006 is being seen largely as an unexpected phenomena, rather than the obvious consequence of an ideology that led them to advocate for a useless and doomed conflict. It's seen, somehow, as a bad event, rather than a bad idea. So few seem to be taking broader political lessons from the issue. But though the reaction against Iraq came a few years after the war had begun, it's been far more direct, and far more ferocious, than anything the Democrats suffered as a clear result of (eventually) opposing Vietnam.