I. To The Memory of a Great Man

    I have no secret plan for peace.  I have a public plan. And as one whose heart has ached for the past ten years over the agony of Vietnam, I will halt a senseless bombing of Indochina on Inaugural Day.

    There will be no more Asian children running ablaze from bombed-out schools. There will be no more talk of bombing the dikes or the cities of the North.

    - George McGovern, accepting the presidential nomination

It has been 52 years since Nixon kicked George McGovern’s teeth in, but the Democratic Party has not forgotten, and it will not forgive. Oh, they sang some pretty words when he left this vale of tears - the father of the party, a statesman of great conscience - but when it’s time to beat the left back down again (and the “left” they beat is a vast and shapeless thing), make no mistake: the spectre of “McGovernism” will be summoned up once more.

Nixon, though - Nixon “made mistakes”. Nixon “knew controversy”. He has become the beneficiary of that shallowed moral sense which imagines that to be good we must be gentle. “Remember,” it says, “that even Richard Nixon has got soul” - but his soul is not in question here. We must not judge the man, they say, “on anything less than his entire life and career”. By all means, judge him in full. Weigh the good with the bad. But people died.

Richard Nixon made a phone call, and four days later Bach Mai Hospital was a smoking ruin. Richard Nixon gave the word, and sixteen hundred voices were shut up for good. More than one million people died in the war in Vietnam, and Richard Nixon helped kill them. Of all Americans, only Lyndon Johnson bears more blame. Whether or not that fact is outweighed, you must weigh it. And if you would rather speak of character than consequence - well, I will let the madman speak for himself:

    President: …I still think we ought to take the dikes out now. Will that drown people?
    Kissinger: About two hundred thousand people.
    President: No, no, no, I'd rather use the nuclear bomb. Have you got that, Henry?
    Kissinger: That, I think, would just be too much.
    President: The nuclear bomb, does that bother you?...I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christsakes. The only place where you and I disagree is with regard to the bombing. You’re so goddamned concerned about civilians, and I don’t give a damn. I don’t care.

Nixon was a human being: like all of us the fruit of forty thousand years, and not alone upon this earth. Those who speak of only statesmanship and virtue, tragedy and vice, rip him raw and bloody from the war in Vietnam. Those who emphasize the drama of it, the pathos, who detach the actor from his actions and make a manifest metaphor of the man - they have dehumanized him more thoroughly than any condemnation ever could.

Thus diminished, thus redeemed, Nixon has already begun to worm his way into the unbegotten past. He is a character, in the oldest sense: the stamp, the seal, the thing that does the deed. He could have been a Theban tyrant; he could have been James Gatz; he could have been any power not quite right, and still time would find him out. Instead he was here, wronged us - wronged others through and for us. “Cowards die many times before their deaths”; Nixon tasted death but once. Flinch from judgement, and find yourself a little less like him.

Nixon could have inflicted himself on any age. But George McGovern was something possible nowhere else, at no other time: a true believer in the last best hope of Earth, in the final years when decent men could still believe it was. This is to his credit; this, I fear, is what condemned us. Nixon’s fall was always in him; McGovern’s faults are ours. McGovern is a mirror: tell me what went wrong with him, and I’ll tell you who you are.

Here am I:

There are two stories here: McGovern lost, because he could not do what Roosevelt did: he could not stand astride the course of history and tell it how to turn. “Great men are almost always bad men”: McGovern was the better man by far. But he nonetheless called something up which to this day we can’t put down. They did not take him where he wished to go. In this very limited sense, George McGovern is a Great Man: a human face for larger forces.
II. Thermidor

Here are the facts: More than a third of registered Democrats voted for Nixon. He was the first modern Republican to win a majority of Catholics, the first to win a majority of blue-collar workers, and very nearly the first to win the union vote. Nixon won Minnesota. Only Massachusetts kept the faith. 1972 was an unmitigated disaster.
County-level results in the 1972 Presidential Election

But I have heard more than enough about who we ought to blame. Blame McGovern, for picking Eagleton as his vice-presidential nominee. Blame Eagleton, for not disclosing his medical history. Blame George Meany, for turning the AFL-CIO into his own personal pro-war pressure group. Blame Walter Reuther, the last president of the CIO, for letting him. Blame Frank Fitzsimmons, for making a deal with the devil. Blame Ted Kennedy, who could have started the Watergate hearings earlier. Blame LBJ, who could have had Nixon tarred and feathered as a traitor four years before. Blame “Nixon’s dirty tricks”. And of course, blame the “Democrats for Nixon”.

They’re not wrong, exactly. Meany really was a traitor to his class, and Fitzsimmons really was a mobster. Kennedy really did drag his feet, Nixon really did violate the Logan act, and LBJ really did let him get away with it. Nixon really was “a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship”. I don’t care. Everyone involved is dead; the villains unpunished, their victims unrecompensed. They always will be. There will be no reckoning.

Nor, for that matter, do we need one: those who might have once are largely now beyond our help. All we can still make use of is the why. Blame who you will - but explain. Offer an account how things came to pass, if that serves your purposes - but real explanatory value lies in telling us how, in light of what was knowable but not known, doable but not done, we might have averted the catastrophe. It fixes an agent and seeks an act. This is at cross-purposes with the urge to blame, which once it gets its hands on the who knows everything it cares to know about the what. If they “should have”, we have no obligation to consider whether we “could have”; if they brought about some bad outcome by “breaking the rules”, then we need not change the rules to prevent it; “when they go low, we go high”.

I do not want to go low and I do not want to go high: the only way I want to go is forward, hard and fast. I want to know what made McGovern who he was - and why it was that he was not enough. I want to know what would have been; I want to know what would have done the job; I want to know what could, should we have this chance again. Mourn, if you would, the mind that has passed; but I would be ready, should it pass this way again.

The traditional explanation is that McGovern was just too much a liberal softie for America to accept. But I don’t buy it. This was the year the New Deal coalition died, but it had long been dying; McGovern tried, and failed, to replace it. Maybe that was an error; maybe he should have tried to eke out four more years from the old girl: he might have lost less badly that way. With Wallace shot, maybe he even could have won. Maybe he should have acted sooner; maybe we were doomed to botch the coming crisis the moment Johnson stepped down. Maybe Truman did us in. But we don’t get to know these things, and neither did they.
III. Terror

The McGovern campaign had few friends among the hawks. John Connally, Secretary of the Treasury and founder of the “Democrats for Nixon”, denounced McGovern as an advocate of “appeasement and surrender”. Henry Jackson, the Democratic Senator from Boeing and chosen frontman of the “Anybody But McGovern” faction at the 1972 convention, remarked that “we might as well sign a quit-claim deal to the rest of Asia and grant Soviet entry into the United States.” Even Averell Harriman, a moderate dove who had led the failed peace negotiations four years before, said McGovern “would not bring about a responsible withdrawal of troops or a responsible settlement of the war”.

And his dovishness did little to win back the “intellectual godfathers” of the neoconservative movement (though some had always been creatures of the right). Leo Strauss, Irving Kristol, and Gertrude Himmelfarb, among others, emphasized Nixon’s “superior capacity for prudent and responsible leadership” in an endorsement in the New York Times. This is because they, too, were prudent and responsible, seeking to “lead qualified citizens, or rather their qualified sons, from the political life to the philosophic life”. Their heirs, luminaries like Wolfowitz and William Kristol, Perle and Feith - the architects of our most recent effort to blow the cradle of civilization back to the stone age - were not quite ready to abandon the Democratic party, and flocked instead to Jackson’s camp. But the day was coming fast when they would be madmen, as their fathers were.

Pat Moynihan, Nixon’s second Counselor to the President and future Democratic Senator from New York, would later claim that “these goddamn elitist liberals almost succeeded in running the workingman out of the Democratic party”. And “labor’s voice” himself, eternal president George Meany of the AFL-CIO, would say after McGovern’s defeat that:

    [Voters] have shown that they want peace in Vietnam, but not surrender and not dishonor … they have said that they are not prepared to hand over power to those who would make social progress at home conditional on an American retreat before the enemies of freedom throughout the world.

Clockwise, from the upper left: Connally, Harriman, Moynihan, Jackson, and Meany

Labor, once the coalition’s very core, was now drifting right and in decline under Meany’s leadership. He publicly doubted whether McGovern was “a reliable labor man” (meaning that he posed a threat to the good old fashioned Meany-McCarthyite political machine), and declined, for the first time in the merged union’s history, to endorse either candidate. (The AFL, always the more conservative of the two, and Meany’s place of origin, had done the same to Roosevelt and Truman.) The Teamsters felt “the blue collar workers, which comprise the backbone of America, seemed to be of little concern to the McGovern ticket”: meaning simply that their president Frank Fitzsimmons had debts to pay, now that Nixon had taken Hoffa off the board.
Frank Fitzsimmons and Richard Nixon

Of the great mid-20th century union men, only Leonard Woodcock of the UAW and Jerry Wurf of the AFSCME, Meany’s rivals and proud members of Nixon’s “enemies list”, endorsed McGovern.

The Dixiecrats, of course, hated him too. This was unavoidable: the South had not yet beat its final retreat from the party of Roosevelt and Civil Rights, but their war against the future was in full flower by ‘72. Louisiana’s Otto Passman would describe McGovern’s base as “lunatics, liberals, and bloodthirsty haters”. George Wallace, the “most dangerous racist in America”, and probably the man most responsible for Humphrey’s defeat four years before, would make it most of the way to the convention on a campaign meant to “send them a message” - before taking a bullet to the spine.

The platform pulled its punches here. There are, it says, “many ways to desegregate schools”; desegregation is “a means to achieve equal access to quality education”, but not an end. Racism is the “central feature of African politics today”, but not, it seems, central to American politics, even in the deepest depths of Dixie. Nonetheless, McGovern could not retain the Southern vote: the Wallace vote broke for Nixon, and Nixon swept the South.

The saner sort of social conservatives, only just coalescing as a coherent bloc, had their complaints as well. An unnamed “liberal senator” from Missouri by the name of Thomas Eagleton said that McGovern’s support for “amnesty [for draft evaders], abortion, and legalization of pot” had lost “Catholic middle America”, though of the three only the amnesty had any basis in fact. Nonetheless, it stuck: the “three A’s”, with acid standing in for marijuana, would make their way into Nixon campaign material before long.

Meany complained that “We heard from the abortionists, and we heard from the people who look like Jacks, acted like Jills, and had the odor of johns about them.” Other stop-McGovern-ites “grumble[d] about long hair and short loyalties, and they pine[d] for the days when smoke from tobacco, not marijuana, filled the rooms at Democratic conventions”.

Last and perhaps most importantly, the “Anybody But McGovern” clique in the party apparatus itself framed the post-68 delegate selection reforms as a New Left coup attempt, even as their soft-spoken Georgian ringleader plotted a coup of his own. The New Left proper, of course, what little was left of SDS and the Progressive Labor Party (and it was, make no mistake, next to nothing) had nothing but contempt for the man - but the days when that might have mattered were now four years past. Only the eternal struggle of center-left against center-center remained.
Lieutenant James Earl Carter Jr., America’s first neoliberal president

Their complaints were not completely baseless (except insofar as they ought to have been praise): the 1972 Democratic Party platform called for sanctions against Portugal, South Africa, and Rhodesia; for criminal punishment for “Employers who violate the worker safety and health laws, or manufacturers who knowingly sell unsafe products or drugs”, and rehabilitation for those guilty of merely petty crime; for the end of the draft and the end of poverty; for busting the trusts and rolling back Taft-Hartley; for full employment, end of story.

As for the “A”s - McGovern may as well have borrowed his position on abortion from Nixon, his take on pot from the president’s National Commission on “Marihuana” and Drug Abuse, and his amnesty proposal from the near-future Gerald Ford.

It was, in other words, a relatively normal Democratic platform by the standards of the era, foreign policy excepted. This was the party that had four years earlier committed itself to “total victory in our wars on ignorance, poverty, and the misery of the ghettos”; that had called for “effective, businesslike planning and cooperation between government and all elements of the private economy”. It had promised “a vigorous and sustained campaign against lawlessness in all its forms” - including “white collar crime”, and it had promised to “rehabilitate and supervise convicted offenders, to return offenders to useful, decent lives”. And it reaffirmed its commitment to full employment - as had every Democratic platform since 1940.

The McGovern campaign’s platform was not a conservative one. But neither was it leftist: it was simply liberalism in full flower, convinced that the time had come at last when rational democratic rule might make the world make sense. The 1972 Democratic platform is the platform of a New Dealer, through and through: half national-liberal and half social-democratic, internationalist but not interventionist, great and good and doomed. It is among the last of its kind, as McGovern was the last of his.
IV. Virtue

My intention here is not to exonerate McGovern - Carter hath said he was misguided, and Carter is a honorable man - but simply to situate him in his time and place: a normal liberal Democrat, subject to an abnormal degree of sectarian conflict. But he was ambitious - and this, I think, is where the trouble really begins.

McGovern’s star had risen quickly after the war. In 1947, he began graduate studies at Northwestern; by 1949, he was a professor of history and political science. In 1953, he left the tenure-track to become executive secretary of the South Dakota Democratic Party; an even bolder move than it might seem, as the party had by that point been reduced to a total of two seats in the state legislature. The official duties of the position, if the party’s present constitution is any guide, are essentially nil, but by 1960 McGovern had, as that year’s party platform put it, effected “the restoration of a two-party government to South Dakota”.

“Few could argue”, said one state senator, “that the revival of the Democrats was principally due to the herculean efforts of a certain idealist history professor”. But where he saw revival, others saw replacement:

    “They all say that George McGovern rebuilt the Democratic party in South Dakota,” comments a high party official. “Horseshit. George rebuilt the party all right, but it wasn't the Democratic party, it was the McGovern party.”

McGovern, as much as I hate to say it, should not have been able to win the nomination: I admire the man and I’m glad he did, despite how it all went down, but a candidacy like his - a coup, really, though not along the lines the old guard feared - was the product of a half-asleep party colliding with a half-great man. McGovern was not Roosevelt, nor meant to be - but at times it seems he was the only Democrat left alive with the slightest clue what was really underway. It helps, of course, that he set much of it in motion.

The New Deal, once its wings were clipped in the postwar “reconversion”, was conceived of in terms of the “broker-state”: a neutral mediator between the “countervailing forces” of management and labor. Not a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie, not a proletarian dictatorship, not a night-watchman state, not a single corporate whole - not anything, really, that admits such clean description. It was simply to be a body of sensible men doing the sensible thing.

This was not McGovern’s conception of what politics ought to be. He had come to real political consciousness as delegate to the 1948 Progressive National Convention, in support of Henry Wallace’s doomed moral victory, and cut his academic teeth writing a history of the Great Coalfield War in Colorado, culminating in the massacre of two dozen striking miners and miner’s children at Ludlow. In another life - born a little earlier, perhaps, and further from the frontier - he might have been a radical New Dealer, living out his postwar life in embittered exile.

But instead he came of age with the country, sprung from the Dust Bowl to Capitol Hill by the Democratic Party as Roosevelt remade it. He spoke of politics as a preacher would (as his father might): folksy homilies weaving back and forth in concert with bursts of moral fervor. He was a mild-mannered, plain-spoken man possessed of True Belief, and what he believed was that there was “a terrible cancer eating away at the soul of our nation”.

In 1968, though, his real break with the party leadership was yet to come. He was, that year, simply first among the pallbearers of Robert Kennedy, struck dead at the noon of his expression: he seemed a liberal’s liberal, a prairie populist in the oldest fashion, a trueborn son of Camelot - and nothing else besides. His first candidacy was a symbolic one: a rallying point for the RFK delegates who couldn’t bring themselves to back Eugene McCarthy. McGovern himself was more conciliatory, but he was a good soldier, and it had been a long and bitter spring.

It mattered little, in any case: Humphrey won an overwhelming victory on the first ballot. But it brought him, in the aftermath of Humphrey’s defeat, to the very center of things: he had proved himself acceptable, if marginally, to both Johnson’s establishment center and McCarthy’s antiwar left, and so was selected as one of two chairs of the “Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection”. It had been meant to quell the threat of civil war, in the wake of a catastrophic convention. Instead, it would reshape the face of the Democratic Party.

In principle, they were pursuing two simple aims:

The first was simply to clear out the smoke-filled rooms that had selected Humphrey, who had contested exactly zero primaries, by unpopular fiat. Some of these reforms are the sort of rules you would never think to have if they hadn’t previously been broken. State parties must, first of all, have delegate selection procedures. They must hold meetings at uniform consistent dates and times, and they must hold them in places people can access. The process must take place in the same calendar year as the convention. The only method it really bans is direct selection of delegates by the state party committee - and even that was still permitted for up to 10% of the slate.

The principle of it all was one thing; in practice, he had created the modern primary system. In 1968, 12 state delegations were selected by primary election (though a few others were mixed systems). In 1972, there were 23. In 1980, there were 37. McGovern was one of the first to see the implications: knowing who’s who in the party wasn’t enough anymore - the voters had to know you. His campaign began almost a full year in advance of any other serious entrant, and contested every state while his opponents fought for the traditional grand prizes back east.

The second was a sort of consociationalist project, now so well-established, and so irrelevant, that it passes by unnoticed:

    Overcome the effects of past discrimination by affirmative steps to encourage representation on the National Convention delegation of minority groups, young people and women in reasonable relationship to their presence in the population of the State

McGovern seems to have had mixed feelings about this particular provision, stating that

    [we] as I recall it, unanimously decided after some discussion that it wasn't feasible to go on record for a quota system.

but it nonetheless passed ten to nine. We should be careful, therefore, not to overstate his agency in all of this; McGovern meant to democratize the party, but not, necessarily speaking, according to the lines along which that democratization was in fact carried out.

The reforms had no more made a “McGovern party” than McGovern’s efforts in South Dakota, a decade prior, but he had made something new. It made him new enemies as well. The youth quota, in particular, would prove the source of much resentment, as old party stalwarts like Harriman found themselves displaced from delegations in favor of, in the words of one Senator Ribicoff, who had nominated McGovern in ‘68, “undergraduate coeds”.

This matters little today: in part because the introduction of “superdelegates” in 1984 ensured the party elders would get their seats, come what may; in part because the state delegations themselves have been largely brought to heel. The party rules today dictate that “delegates elected to the national convention pledged to a presidential candidate shall in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them”, and all non-super-delegates are so pledged. But in 1972, just who the delegates were really did matter, and the sudden infusion of newly-minted voters into a process long dominated by elder statesmen served McGovern’s short-term interests well.

Daley’s delegation was purged, on the unambiguously true but perhaps ill-considered grounds that Illinois had failed to make public its delegate selection rules. The California slate, which had been allocated on a winner-take all basis, was in turn purged by the anti-McGovernites in favor of a proportionally representative one - only to find themselves subject to a floor vote counter-coup once the convention began.

This sort of transformation was only possible, and possible for a brief moment only, in the wake of 1968. It was the last year before SDS really tore itself to pieces; the last year in which the Civil Rights Movement was singular; the year of the Prague spring and the French general strike; the start of the Troubles and the beginning of the end for Charles de Gaulle. It was the last forward lurch of liberalism: a harvest-time of nations, to realize now or else leave to rot the hopes we sowed in spring.

But events in the United States, where spring is always early and summer always late, were somewhat less dramatic. One, maybe one and a half world-historic figures murdered, soldiers fixing bayonets on the streets of Baltimore, Daley’s made men Chicago riot police accidentally beating reporters during the Democratic National Convention when they were supposed to be beating antiwar protestors - little things like that. Enough to wake people up, not enough to make them shake their chains to earth like dew, as the New Left might have hoped. On the contrary, public opinion was largely pro-beating.

Nonetheless, it’s a very embarrassing thing for a political party when its delegates start saying things like “with George McGovern as President of the United States we wouldn't have to have Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago” and “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch” on live TV. It’s even more embarrassing to (arguably, but plausibly) lose the election as a result. And so, for a brief window, the Democratic Party was willing to give this democracy thing a try.
V. Germinal

    Richard Nixon was an evil man -- evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. - Hunter S. Thompson

McGovern was born a preacher’s son, raised an evangelical Wesleyan, and ministered, briefly, as a mainline Methodist. What that might imply as to his theological commitments, vis a vis his Adversary, I do not know. But I know that he knew evil. In the course of his thirty-five missions over Germany it is almost certain that he killed. He flew a B-24: a heavy bomber, meant to end. He struck refineries and railyards, tank factories and train stations: strategic targets, but civilian ones. People died. He might have torn them apart with scraps of twisted metal; he might have burnt their bones to ash. They might have been Nazis; they might have been slaves, stolen west in Barbarossa’s wake. They might just have been unfortunate cowards, who would have said they did not know.
Left: What remains of a marshaling yard in Linz, Austria, April 25, 1945. This photo was taken by another bombing wing on McGovern’s last mission. Right: The same site today.

Whatever they might have done, it was easier to bear at 20,000 feet. McGovern would later recount how “I so detested the whole Nazi system that I never really thought about it … I always thought in terms of hitting strategic targets.” “Precision Bombing”, said the air force, “Will Win the War”.

But then there was the farmhouse. “The house, the barn, the chicken house, the water tank” - all just “withered” as McGovern’s crew freed a jammed bomb at just the wrong moment. It had been meant for the marshaling yards at Wiener-Neustadt; now it was bound for a family farm.

    It was just a peaceful farmyard. Had nothing to do with the war. Just a family eating a noon meal. It made me sick to my stomach … It really did make me feel different for the rest of the war.

In 1985, McGovern would discover that he had been bearing an empty home all those years: the family had seen him coming, and no one was hurt. That seems to have brought the man some measure of peace. But forty years of guilt had done their work by then. “If I thought about the war almost invariably”, he would say, many years later, “I would think about that farm.”

It is perhaps this sober sense of consequence which explains one of McGovern’s more puzzling miscalculations: the near total absence of references to his time in the war - his status as a war hero, if we are meant to say the same of Kennedy and Ford - in his political career. This is most apparent in the 1972 election, where in the face of attacks by the party’s hawkish wing he simply returned, again and again, to the bigger picture, but it had played little visible role in his Senate career as well.

He would, in that capacity, have his one-one hundredth part in the full course of the war. He did not always play it well, falling, like most other Senate doves, for Fulbright’s claim that the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, though by all appearances a de-facto declaration of war, was merely cynical electoral maneuvering on Johnson’s part. Appearances, it turned out, did not deceive: 200,000 American ground troops would be in the country by the end of 1965.

McGovern would later recall that vote as his “greatest regret”, and, charitable to a fault, "based on falsehoods” - but he would make no attempt to absolve himself of it. It would be easy, so very easy, to let the guilt slide off towards execution, to say you did not know. But even this last temptation he refused. Speaking in favor of the McGovern-Hatfield Amendment of 1970, which would have required an end to the war by year’s end, he condemned the Senate (and so himself):

    Every senator in this chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave. This chamber reeks of blood. Every Senator here is partly responsible for that human wreckage at Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval and all across our land—young men without legs, or arms, or genitals, or faces or hopes. There are not very many of these blasted and broken boys who think this war is a glorious adventure. Do not talk to them about bugging out, or national honor or courage. It does not take any courage at all for a congressman, or a senator, or a president to wrap himself in the flag and say we are staying in Vietnam, because it is not our blood that is being shed.

McGovern was a preacher’s son, with a preacher’s sensibilities. In his mildly hagiographical Abraham Lincoln, he comments approvingly on Lincoln’s conviction that “right makes might”. There was good, there was evil, and he knew where he stood. McGovern felt much the same:

    All my life I’ve grown up in a religious climate where I was taught that life is a struggle between good and evil, and that’s what it’s all about.

VI. Prairial

McGovern, as he put it, “opened the doors of the Democratic party, and 20 million people walked out”. But a new activist power base walked in, and now, some fifty years later, it’s said that the Democratic Party is “where social movements go to die”. This is exactly backwards: the Democratic Party is where social movements go to feed, where bright-eyed young aspirants go to be devoured.

The Democratic Party has become a coalition not of social strata or ideological factions, but of organized interests - it has become a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole middle class. It is the ACLU and the NOW and the CAP and the AIPAC - and, yes, the AFL-CIO, on those rare occasions when it wakes from sleep - all together and watched over by loyal ministeriales. This is not what McGovern intended - he was a small-d democrat first, a Democrat second, to the very end - but it is what he has wrought; in smashing the party machines and reining in the union bosses, he created a vacuum into which the new social movements might step.

The machines were monstrously corrupt, the post-Taft Hartley unions neutered traitors, and he was right to drive them from the temple, saw correctly that they would bring it down with them if given the chance - but he failed to build something in their place. Perhaps he imagined we could do away with the party apparatus altogether - if so, he was wrong. There is a party; there will always be a party. But it is no longer the party of Roosevelt. It is no longer the party of the working man.

America had loved Roosevelt; really loved him, as a father and a friend. He had been, as McGovern put it, “that magnificent voice of the fireside chat”. And for his sake they had loved his heirs, though they were lesser men. But every election put a little more pressure on a coalition that was never going to last. Every factional struggle, every shift in priorities, every new blanket beneath the big tent - every change formed another crack. McGovern just had the misfortune to strike the final blow.

Thompson had it wrong. Yes, it’s true: Nixon “disgraced and degraded” the Presidency of the United States. He “shit in our nests” as he “shit in his”. He was, indeed, “a hubris-crazed monster from the bowels of the American dream with a heart full of hate”, and he struck it again and again and again. But America had never loved him; it had liked him, as you might like your mailman, so long as the mail comes in, but love? No. America could never love Richard Nixon. It was George McGovern who broke our heart.

    I sang all night
    The moon shone on me through the trees
    No brothers left
    And there'll be no more after me

    - Deuteronomy 2:10, The Mountain Goats

    The Emims dwelt therein in times past, a people great, and many, and tall, as the Anakims.

    - Deuteronomy 2:10